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BASIC IDEAS IN RELIGION

APOLOGETIC THEISM

BASIC IDEAS IN
^ RELIGION

OR T^

APOLOGETIC THEISM

RICHARD WILDE MICOU, M.A., D.D.

Latb Professor of Theology and apologetics

AT THE Theological Seminary in Virginia and Formerly at

THE Philadelphia Divinity School

EDITED BY

PAUL MICOU, M.A., B. D.

Secretary for Theological Seminaries
International Committee Young Men's Christian Associations

AaHoriatton l^nas

New York : 124 East 28th Street

London : 47 Paternoster Row, E. C.

1916

THE NEW YORK
PUBLIC LIBRARY

ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

1916 Ll

International Committee of Young Men's

Christian Associations

To
MARY DUNNICA MICOU

without whose

Aid and Encouragement

THIS Book would not have been Possible

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

Preface xv

Editor's Preface xvii

I Introduction i

PART I
The Idea of God
II The Witness of History to Universal Religion . i8

III The Witness of the Intellect : The Cosmological

Argument 37

IV The Teleological Argument 50

V Organic Evolution in Relation to Theism ... 69

VI The Anthropological Argument 100

VII The Anthropological Argument (concluded) . . 126
VIII The Witness of the Beautiful and the Sublime . 149
IX The Witness of the Human Spirit to the Infinite

and Perfect Being 167

The Denials of God
X Philosophic Anti-theistic Theories: Pantheism 178
XI Scientific Anti-theistic Theories: The Scientific

Spirit and Method 196

XII Naturalism 207

XIII The New Theory of Matter 230

PART II
The Spiritual Idea of Man

XIV The Universal Belief in the Immortal Soul . . 247
XV Philosophic Analysis of the Sources of the Belief 259

vii

viii Table of Contents

CHAPTER PACK

XVI Witness of Conscience to Personality and Im-
mortality 284

XVII The Witness of the Heart as Seen in the Poets 305

The Denials of the Spiritual Idea of Man

XVIII Denials of Freedom 332

XIX Denials of Conscience : Evolutional Ethics . . 360

XX Denials of Ontology: Agnosticism .... 375

Chief Notes in the Appendix

A Postulates and Intuitions 393

I Criticism of Darwinism 409

K Instinct 419

O The Ontological Argument Analyzed 428

R Christian Science 441

S The A Priori Argument for Miracles 443

X Relation of Scientific Theories to Human Personality 455

Y Brain and Personality 459

Bibliography 475

Index 481

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PREFACE

The importance of a philosophical study of Apologetics
cannot be over-estimated, for doubt, flippant or earnest, is in
the very air, and the student should be made familiar with its
myriad forms ere they arise in practical experience.

The many references and quotations will explain themselves.
The theological professor of today labors under a certain
odium. He is popularly supposed to be biased, incapable of
fairness, and seldom qualified to discuss the scientific and
philosophic problems which arise in modern Apologetics. He
must, therefore, fortify every statement and argument by
recognized authorities. The literature in the vast field of
modern Apologetics is vital and varied, historical, philosophical
and scientific. The Christian leader must study thoroughly
and with sympathy the grounds and manifestation of every
form of doubt in the perplexed believer and the honest sceptic.

The writer trusts his own position will be made plain, that
Christianity is essentially the response of the spirit in faith
and self-surrender to the revelation of God in Christ, and not
the conclusion of any process of intellectual analysis and
reasoning, though such work of the intellect is indispensable
to the religious leader who would sympathize with the sad
questionings of honest doubt and meet the assault of philo-
sophical and scientific unbelief.

The scepticism of today is often courteous in tone and
serious in spirit, but it is deadly in intent and more wide-
spread than ever before. It strikes at the foundation prin-
ciples of all faith in God and man. Its victory would mean
the death of the spirit of religion itself. Spiritual faith does
not spring from nor rest on reasoning, but neither can it
thrive apart from reason.

The wide range of modern Apologetics is due to the vital

xvi Preface

fact, which A. J. Balfour has clearly expressed, that " the
decisive battles of Theology are fought beyond its frontiers.
It is not over purely religious controversies that the cause of
Religion is lost or won. The judgments we shall form upon
its special problems are commonly settled for us by our gen-
eral mode of looking at the Universe; and this again, in so far
as it is determined by arguments at all, is determined by argu-
ments of so wide a scope that they can seldom be claimed as
more nearly concerned with Theology than with the philos-
ophy of Science or of Ethics." {Foundations of Belief, p.

2.)

Richard W, Micou.
Theological Seminary in Virginia.
December, 1907.

EDITOR'S PREFACE

The Rev. Richard Wilde Micou, D.D., was born in New
Orleans, La., June 12, 1848. He was the sixth child of Wil-
liam C. Micou and Anna D. Thompson, the family being of
Huguenot extraction, descended from Paul Micou, a lawyer
of Nantes, France, who settled in Virginia soon after the
revocation of the Edict of Nantes. William C. Micou was a
lawyer of eminence in New Orleans, the partner of Judah P.
Benjamin. Dr. Micou studied for three years at the state
universities of Alabama and Georgia and for one year at the
University of Erlangen, Bavaria, where he was a pupil of the
great conservative scholars, Herzog, Ebrard, Thomasino and
Delitzsch. He spent two years at the University of Edin-
burgh, Scotland, where in 1868 he took the highest honors
in the classics under Professor John Stuart Blackie. Re-
turning to America, he taught Greek for a brief period at the
University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., and then continued
his theological studies at the General Theological Seminary,
New York. On June 12, 1870, he was ordained to the Di-
aconate by Bishop Green of Mississippi, at Sewanee, Tenn.,
and was advanced to the Priesthood by Bishop Wilmer of
Louisiana in his first parish, at Franklin, La., on November
15, 1872. In that year he was married to Miss Mary Dun-
nica of New Orleans. In 1874 he took charge of St. Paul's
Church at Kittanning, Pa., and in July, 1877, accepted the
call to the rectorship of Trinity Church at Waterbury, Conn.,
taking charge of the parish seven weeks after its organiza-
tion. During his residence in Waterbury he was prominently
identified with educational work, serving as a member of the
Board of Education, with the exception of one year, from
1883 to 1891.

The Waterbury American in an editorial at the time of his
death said of him : " Dr. Micou was a man first, a citizen

xvii

xviii Editor's Preface

next, and a clergyman last. Of scholarly mind and of wide
attainments, he was never academic. In his thinking and
conduct he was sincerity itself. . . . Never a sensationalist,
never stirring up doubt for the sake of challenging atten-
tion. Dr. Micou was always frank and open in the pulpit
and out of it, ready to face any problems of our modern life
with the serene confidence of assured faith. Beloved as a
rector, respected as a citizen, admired as a scholar and thinker,
he for a long time held a unique place of influence and re-
gard in Waterbury, and his friends have watched with pride
his widening sphere of influence and recognition."

He was known as one of the most studious clergymen in
the diocese, and took the lead in discussions at clerical gather-
ings. The Rt. Rev. Edwin Stevens Lines, D.D., bore testi-
mony to this. " He belonged in a company of clergymen who
met together regularly through many years for study. . . .
I think we would all say that he was the first among us, the
most widely read in history and theology, and an inspiration
to us all. The books which he read both in number and in
solid character on a great variety of subjects were an aston-
ishment to us all. How he found time to read so much in
connection with well performed church duties, we could not
understand."

When he was suggested for a professorship in the Phila-
delphia Divinity School, Rev. Francis T. Russell, D.D., who
was later a professor in the General Theological Seminary,
wrote of him, " H you can name anything of note that he
might be expected to have read for the last twenty years, he
has read it. He is an intensely active man intellectually, and
squarely abreast of the times, and will keep so." In similar
vein Rev. Charles H, Hall, D.D., of Holy Trinity Church,
Brooklyn, wrote, " He is, and I emphasize this, the best read
man of his age in the church, and has at his tongue's end the
stores of acquisition in theology and literature which have
been gained by years of faithful and unremitting study."

In 1892 he was called to the professorship of Systematic
Theology and Apologetics in the Philadelphia Divinity School,

Editor's Preface xix

where he remained for six years, going thence to take the sim-
ilar chair in the Theological Seminary in Virginia, where he
taught until his death fourteen years later. The degree of
D.D, was conferred on him in 1898 by Kenyon College.

His scholars and friends hoped he could find time to pub-
lish the results of his labors. In 1900 the venerable Professor
John S. Kedney, D.D., wrote to him, " I know of no one, now
in our Church, more likely to carry on a theological advance,
so make use of your mid-age before declining days come."
But it was not until the fall of 191 1 that opportunity was
given him to prepare the books he had in contemplation. A
temporary breakdown in health led the Board of Trustees to
give him an eighteen months' vacation, stating that " in the
opinion of this Board it is eminently desirable that the Rev.
Dr. Micou should embody in literary form for publication
the results of his long and valuable course of teaching in the
Virginia Seminary."

He was not spared to do this. In February, 1912, he sailed
for England and, after some months of leisurely preparation
for the task in the southwestern counties, went to Oxford,
expecting to find there a congenial atmosphere for work.
June 4th he succumbed to sudden heart failure, and was bur-
ied during the Commencement of the Virginia Seminary two
weeks later.

At that time the President of the Seminary, Rt. Rev. Rob-
ert A. Gibson, D.D., Bishop of Virginia, thus described his
work : " Class after class of students have known Dr. Micou
as teacher and friend, and have appreciated him at the high
value which was his due. A man of rare acquirements, of
rapid intuitions, of intellectual courage and of the most pro-
found reverence for the great themes with which he dealt,
many of his pupils will carry his name and his words ever
in their memories, and will think of him in the depth of their
hearts as the person who to them was ' The Master.' "

His former students paid their tribute to him in the fol-
lowing words : " As a scholar his learning was as profound
as it was varied and extensive. The wide range of his in-

XX Editor's Preface

formation did not seem to limit the thoroughness with which
he investigated every problem of philosophy, or obscure his
great critical gift in drawing the nice distinctions so necessary
in theological definition. It was his task to teach Apologetics
at the most difficult period of the century — the period when
Christianity had to fight for its life with materialism. All
his students during the last twenty years know how well and
successfully he defended the spiritual explanation of Life
and the Universe. With the wisdom of a true seer he saw
the triumph of Idealism of the next generation, while most
philosophical teachers were becoming resigned to the fact
that materialism was final, and that the conflict must be waged
along that line until the end. So while Professor Eucken in
Germany is being hailed as a new and inspiring interpreter
of the spiritual view of life, the younger alumni of the Vir-
ginia Seminary would like to acknowledge gratefully the
very similar, though less conspicuous, teaching of their la-
mented professor.

" An able thinker, a thorough student of science, and a
great theologian, he was yet a man of the clearest, simplest
and most childlike faith. Every one who knew him realized
what a deeply pious man he was, and that his was indeed a
life of prayer. His quick and generous impulses, his aflFec-
tionate interest in his neighbors and pupils, and his genuine
sympathy for all in need and trouble, made him a friend who
can never be forgotten by us all,"

It was with the conviction that a book so earnestly antici-
pated should not be lost to the Church, that shortly after my
father's death three years ago I took up the task of editing
the material he left. The fact that he was permitting me to
assist him in the work in England encouraged me to attempt
it alone. For several years he had been arranging his lec-
ture notes and having them typewritten, so that they are clear
in form and arrangement. Approximately twelve hundred
such sheets of notes have been worked over in the prepara-
tion of this volume. In addition I have had as my guides

Editor's Preface xxi

in the development of the arguments the Syllabus of sixty-
four pages issued by him to his students, and the Manual,
a book of one hundred and sixty-four large pages edited by
students from their shorthand class room notes in 1907, and
carefully revised by him before it went to press. Lastly, I
have my own class room notes recording the lectures as I
heard them in 1910-11. I beHeve that this volume reproduces
my father's opinions accurately and the form of his lecturing
adequately. The logical method of treatment of the subject
makes a certain amount of repetition of matter unavoidable,
though the repeated material is always given from a new view-
point and in a different style. All the references which are
given in the footnotes have been looked up and verified. The
remaining quotations are, I am sure from my experience with
the others, substantially accurate and a true statement of the
fact or opinion of the original. A large number are from
magazine clippings pasted in my father's notes without a clue
as to their origin.

A brief statement of my father's courses will make clear
the relation of the subject matter of this book to his teaching
as a whole. To the Junior class he gave an introductory
course on the Creeds, to the Middle class he lectured on the
philosophy of theism or, as he preferred to call it, " funda-
mental theology," and on Christian Apologetics, and with the
Seniors he took up Systematic or Christian Theology. There-
fore this volume represents about two-thirds of the work of
the middle year. One part only has been omitted, a rather
complete review of philosophy, which was generally found
necessary unless the class was especially well prepared. On
the other hand the subject of evolution, on which from two
to three weeks was spent, is given in a complete though neces-
sarily very compact form. The necessity of concise treat-
ment of this subject, and also of the new electro-tonic theory
of matter, has led me in those chapters greatly to condense
what I found in my sources.

It remains only to express my gratitude to those friends
who have helped and encouraged me by their valuable criti-

xxii Editor's Preface

cisms. A committee of the Faculty of the Virginia Semi-
nary, Doctors W. C. Bell, Berryman Green, and Paca Ken-
nedy, have helped at every stage of the work. The late
Dean W. M. Groton, D.D., of the Philadelphia Divinity
School was very helpful in his review and criticism of much
of the manuscript, as was also Rev. James Bishop Thomas,
Ph.D., Professor of Theology in the Theological Department
of the University of the South, who has criticized the entire
manuscript. I am indebted for valuable criticisms on certain
portions of the book to Rev. Dickinson Sergeant Miller, Ph.D.,
Sc.D., Professor of Christian Apologetics at the General
Theological Seminary, to William Allison Kepner, Ph.D., As-
sociate Professor of Biology at the University of Virginia, and
to my classmate, Rev. Edwin Anderson Penick, Jr., A.M., of
Columbia, S. C.

Paul Micou.

Bryn Mawr, Pa.
July, 1915.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

History and Spirit of Apologetics

Apologetics is the defense of Religion against misrepre-
sentation and denial. It is as old as the preaching of the
Gospel, for Christianity, however aggressive, has from the
ifirst had to defend itself. As the science of defense it can-
not choose its weapons, but must meet the assault wherever and
however made. The apologia of each generation must have
regard to the knowledge and ruling ideas of its own age. It
must always be " a reasoning together," never an appeal to
mere authority, either of the Bible or of the Church.

A difference between our own and any former period is the
vast increase in the number of readers. The newspaper is
called " the people's university." It gives prominence to scep-
tical views when they meet with sufficient opposition to at-
tract attention, and in the " lay sermons " of the Sunday edi-
tions it discusses religious topics. The novels and magazines
are full of references to religion. The most extravagant re-
ligious systems flourish in our midst. Wherever one goes
today, even in the smallest and most remote places, he finds
sceptical theories advanced. Much of this is mere ignorant
repetition of the ideas of a past generation which have filtered
down to the common people, but at the same time new lines
of attack are developing in higher quarters. The apologist
must both know the past, and be well abreast of the present.

The modern preacher's position is very difficult. In an age
of specialists, he is the one professional man who cannot be
master in his own department simply. Though the biologist,
for instance, must know the body, he may be ignorant of the
mind and the wonders it has wrought in art and literature.

2 Basic Ideas in Religion

But it is the peculiar glory of the Christian preacher that he
cannot be of narrow culture and limited sympathy. His mes-
sage is to the whole man and nothing human is foreign to his
theme. He alone has to speak continuously to audiences of
all ages, all capacities and all interests. Each class and call-
ing judges him by his acquaintance with its speciality, which
necessitates the highest and broadest training.

The religious unrest and desire for a defense of the funda-
mentals is world-wide. Missionaries need the best possible
preparation, especially for work in Moslem lands, in India
and in Japan. Every agnostic argument propounded in
Christian countries is turned with telling effect on the Chris-
tian propaganda by keen Moslem or Hindu scholars trained
in the best universities of Britain and Europe. In Japan and
China there is a great demand for lectures of an apologetic
nature, and the translations of good books are eagerly bought.
The Christian missionary least of all men can afford to be
without thorough training in the fundamentals of theology.

The prospect is anything but dark. The leading writers of
the nineteenth century have lifted all thought to a higher and
more spiritual level. It is only necessary to contrast Gray's
Elegy with Tennyson's In Memoriam, to see the lack of ap-
preciation of Christianity which existed in the days of Butler,
the great apologist of the eighteenth century. Matheson draws
the contrast as follows : " It has frequently been asked
whether the scepticism of the nineteenth century is more or
less virulent than the scepticism of the preceding age. We
are disposed to say that in one sense it is less virulent, in an-
other sense, more. The scepticism of the previous century
was louder than that of our own. It was more vehement,
more ribald, more polemical ; it attacked religion for the sake
of attack, and with the desire of obtaining the victory. The
scepticism of the nineteenth is never ribald, and rarely abusive ;
its attack is not generally prompted by the desire of victory,
but oftener by a sad compulsion. . . . To this extent the scepti-
cism of the nineteenth century is more mellowed than the
scepticism of the eighteenth. But from another point of view

History and Spirit of Apologetics 3

it is stronger. Its mode of attack is softer, but its point of at-
tack is more central. The scepticism of the eighteenth century
was only an assault upon outworks : the scepticism of the nine-
teenth has laid siege to the citadel . . . (and) if successful,
must destroy the spirit of religion itself. The question is no
longer whether a book of the Bible is genuine. It is no longer
whether miracles are possible. It is no longer even whether
supernatural Christianity can be recognized as true. It is
whether there be or be not a supernatural at all. It is whether
the conception of God is any longer compatible with that con-
ception of nature at which the scientist has now arrived. . . .
The scepticism of our age ... is concerned mainly with the
question whether religion has a right to exist." ^ The very
possibility of faith, therefore, depends on our world-view, on
a philosophy which shall find place in the cosmos for God as
Lord and for man as spirit.

The twentieth century has dawned with much to encourage
us. The deadening pall of materialism, which left no room
for such a world-view, is being lifted, while on every side is
seen an eager craving for a religion which will both satisfy
the mind and strengthen the soul of man.

Apologetics has returned to the earlier appeal which the
Greek Church Fathers made to the spiritual nature of man,
with the underlying conviction of the adaptability of the soul
for direct religious knowledge. In this they were following
Greek philosophy, which from the earliest times had held that
men had in them a latent divine element. Aristotle taught
that the mind of man depended on the mind and inspiration
of God. Plato believed that there was an eye of the soul open
to revelation, but it could be dimmed or lost by purely worldly
pursuits. In similar strain the Ante-Nicene Father Theophilus
writes to Autolycus: " But if you say, * Show me thy God,' I
would reply, * Show me yourself, and I will show you my God.'
Show, then, that the eyes of your soul are capable of seeing,
and the ears of your heart able to hear. . . . For God is seen
by those who are enabled to see Him when they have the eyes

1 The Psalmist and the Scientist, pp. 315, 6.

4 Basic Ideas in Religion

of their soul opened: for all have eyes; but in some they are
overspread, and do not see the light of the sun. Yet it does
not follow, because the blind do not see, that the light of the
sun does not shine; but let the blind blame themselves and
their own eyes. So also thou, O man, hast the eyes of thy
soul overspread by thy sins and evil deeds. As a burnished
mirror, so ought man to have his soul pure. When there is
rust on the mirror, it is not possible that a man's face be seen
in the mirror; so also when there is sin in a man, such a man
cannot behold God." ^ This is Christ's own teaching, " The
pure in heart shall see God," and " He that hath ears to hear,
let him hear."

Tertullian in his tract De Testimonio Animae summons the
human soul for apologetic testimony against the pagan writers ;
" I summon a new witness, one more widely known than any
book, more widely discussed than any learning, more widely
diffused than any publication, greater than the whole man, be-
ing all that makes him man. Stand forth in the midst, O Soul,
whether thou be divine and eternal, as most think, and there-
fore the less likely to deceive . . . whether thou be received
from heaven or conceived on earth, wheresoever or howsoever
thou makest man to be what he is — a reasonable being, capable
in the highest degree of understanding and knowledge — stand
forth, and give thy witness. But the soul I summon is not
such as hath been formed in the schools, disciplined in libraries,
pampered in the groves and porches of Athens, vaunting her
wisdom ; no ! in all thy simplicity, I invoke thee, unlettered,
unpolished, unlearned, such as they have who have nought but
thee, the soul, the whole soul — from the market pillar, from
the highway, from the weaver's shop. 'Tis thy inexperience I
need, since none puts faith in thy little experience. I demand
of thee such truths as thou bringest with thyself into man,
which thou hast learned either from thyself or from the author
of thy being." ^

The direct appeal which the Reformation made to personal

2 Bk. I, Chap. 2. 3 Chap. i. . .

History and Spirit of Apologetics 5

faith in Christ and the witness of the Spirit in the heart, as
against the mediaeval implicit faith in church authority and
dogmas, naturally threw the emphasis on the internal evidence
for Christianity, the Gospel's witness to itself and the affinity
of the soul to the message. Thus Luther, under the influence
of mystical teachers, wrote : " We might preach the Law
forever to a beast and yet it would not enter into his heart.
But man, as soon as the law of God is proclaimed to him, at
once exclaims, * Yes, it is so ; I cannot deny it.' We could
not convince him of this, were it not beforehand written on
his heart. But since it is written, however dim and faded the
impression may be, it is quickened again by the Word of God,
so that the heart must confess that it is true." And Calvin
claimed a similar appeal for the Scriptures that the testimony
of the Spirit is necessary to confirm the Scripture in order
to completely establish its authority. As God alone is suf-
ficient witness to Himself in His own word, so the word
will never gain credit in the hearts of men till it is confirmed
by the internal witness of the Spirit. This kind of persuasion
requires no logic for its justification, but is supported by the
highest reason.^ On this ground alone does the Westminster
Confession establish the authority of Scripture. " We may
be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to an
high and reverent esteem of the holy Scripture ; and the
heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the
majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of
the whole (which is to give all glory to God), the full dis-
covery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, the many
other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection
'thereof, are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence
itself to be the Word of God ; yet, notwithstanding, our full
persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth, and divine
authority thereof, is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit,
bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts." ^

* Institutes, Bk. I, Chap. 7. Here "highest reason" means common
sense or intuition.
5 Chap. 1 : 5.

6 Basic Ideas in Religion

Though the leading German and English reformers wrote
from the standpoint of the nearness of the Divine to the human
spirit, they had no interest in Apologetics proper. Roman
Catholics and Protestants acted similarly against heretics as
the common enemy, and force, not argument, was relied on to
answer and crush them. So, unfortunately, the spiritual
Apologetic did not continue. With the rapid rise of Protestant
Scholasticism, resting on the authority of sectarian confessions
and the traditional interpretation of the letter of the Bible,
spiritual faith and the recognition of the witness of the reason
and the conscience disappeared, except in individual thinkers,
like Jeremy Taylor, Chillingworth, and Stillingfleet, or groups
like the Cambridge Platonists, Benjamin Whichcote, John
Smith, Henry More, and Ralph Cudworth. In England the
great and sudden change came with Bacon, whose teaching per-
meated all English thought with wonderful swiftness. The
preceding Elizabethan period had been the flowering of Eng-
lish genius in art, literature, faith and all beauty of thought.
Under James, however, it had all withered and faded, as
though a killing frost had fallen on the things of the spirit.
Hooker was the last of the spiritual theologians of that period.
Bacon's influence dominated everything, and the whole tone
and temper changed incredibly in half a century. He was soon
followed by Hobbes, whose teaching was pure materialism.
Locke next denied to man anything but a purely sensational
life. His system left no room for spirit, and had no word for
personality. Ethics, too, felt the utilitarian blight, and it was
taught that good is that which gives pleasure, and evil that
which gives pain. Man does the good because it pays. Paley
was the chief ethical teacher for thirty years, and he wrote
entirely from the standpoint of self-interest.

Under Paley and Pearson, and even Butler, this sensational-
ism ruled English Christian thought. The tendency was in-
tensified by the rise of the scientific spirit, naturally congenial
to the British mind, and Locke's empirical philosophy became
accepted by Christian theologians and apologists. They ap-
pealed only to Natural Theology and external evidences, and

History and Spirit of Apologetics 7

any form of " mysticism " was discouraged. For Pearson
faith did not include any love or trust, it was merely an assent
of the mind, a purely intellectual act.

Bishop Butler really belonged to the school of spiritual
thinkers, but he frankly says that he dared not write on their
lines, lest he prove unintelligible to his readers. In this deistic
period Natural Theology was confined for the most part to the
design argument and Christian Evidences consisted mainly of
an appeal to the letter of the Bible, its authority as a revela-
tion being first proven by the prophecies and miracles it re-
cords. Butler's great work, admirably suited to the scepticism
of his own age, developed the further argument for revela-
tion. The Analogy of Religion, natural and revealed, to the
Constitution and Course of Nature. The book had a great ef-
fect, and deism declined from that time on. Its usefulness has
now passed, for the problem of doubt has completely shifted
since Butler's day.

With the Evangelical Revival, the universal element of which
was the recognition of the direct action of the Spirit of God on
man, and with the corresponding awakening of deeper con-
ceptions of human nature and history in philosophy and litera-
ture, came that return to spiritual Christianity which char-
acterized the nineteenth century. It was a protest of the soul
against the current materialism. It was, however, only a part
of a wider movement of thought and life, as will be seen be-
low.* The Lake Poets in England, and Herder, Lessing,
Goethe and Schiller in Germany reflect it in literature. Car-
lyle introduced these Germans to the English in 1829 in his
Signs of the Times. In Scotland of recent years the move-
ment had its expression in McLeod Campbell. Maurice,
Robertson, Kingsley, Dean Stanley and Archbishop Whately
belonged to this school, as do now the great majority of the
English clergy.

Coleridge was a main factor in introducing this movement,
and clearly indicated the way to the new Apologetic. He wrote
of his belief concerning the true evidences of Christianity:

« See Chap. XVII.

8 Basic Ideas in Religion

" I. Its consistency with right Reason, I consider as the outer
court of the temple — the common area, within which it stands.
2. The miracles, with and through which that Religion was
first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule,
and the portal of the temple. 3. The sense, the inward feel-
ing, in the soul of each believer of its exceeding desirableness
— the experience, that he needs something, joined with the
strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces pro-
pounded to us in Christ are what he needs — this I hold to be
the true foundation of the spiritual edifice. With the strong
a priori probability that flows in from i and 3 on the corre-
spondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect
to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it is the expe-
rience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions
of the Gospel, ... it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ,
with its accompaniments and results, that must form the arched
roof, and the faith itself is the completing key-stone." "^

To every humble hearted man the Bible is its own witness
to the truth of its spiritual message. Its commands come so
much as good tidings that they at once bear evidence to their
origin from above, and the voice in which they are uttered
by its unearthly sweetness awakens an echo in the heart which
only repeated sins can stifle. As Coleridge said, " It is like
one's mother tongue heard by a life-long exile in a distant
land." To suppose the contrary — that the Word of God to
man cannot authenticate itself to the spirit by its own evi-
dence, but must needs have external proofs — is unworthy and
incredible.

The new spirit afifected Christian poetry, art, and preach-
ing before it modified Apologetics, and Paley long continued
to be the one accepted text-book in Christian evidences. Only
within quite recent years have Apologetic works appeared
which are at all adequate to their great theme, and can be con-
vincing to an age of new thoughts, wider knowledge, and more
genuine sympathy with the spirit of Christianity. The appeal
is now made with success to that witness of the heart to the

' Biographia Literaria, p. 592.

History and Spirit of Apologetics g

Gospel, the testimonium animae naturaliter Christianae, on
which St. Paul rehed, " commending himself to every man's
conscience through manifestation of the Truth," ^

There are three attitudes, given by Kant, which the modem
apologist needs to maintain. The first is the enlightened, the
second the enlarged, and the third the logical attitude. More
fully stated, as principles, they are:

1. Think for yourself; understand and be sure of your posi-
tion.

2. Know and have sympathy with the opponent's position,
do justice to his point of view.

3. Think consistently in logical harmony. In any apologetic
work, it is worth while, at the very start, to fortify oneself with
these safeguards to right thinking.

I. Think for yourself; know your own position.

Christ said, " we know what we worship " ; " yet few Chris-
tians could say the same. We inherit rather than acquire
faith. This is ceasing to be sufficient even for the mass of
people. Earnest men require definite thought and knowledge.
The young accept, as they should, the teaching at their mother's
knee, but at college they hear all truths questioned. The trend
of instruction in science and philosophy is often away from
Christianity. The faith which has not a basis in reason is
easily troubled. Arguments seem unanswerable because the
students have no knowledge wherewith to meet the sceptics,
who themselves are utterly ignorant as to what Christian
thinkers of to-day believe and hold essential to the Faith. The
difficulty is the greater because the young commonly will not
seek counsel ; they are not willing to take the time and trouble
to read the often easy answer to attacks on the Gospel.
Thoughtful laymen feel their own weakness and need of guid-
ance. They expect their clergy to be fitted to meet all attacks,
and to go down to the strong foundations of the faith, speak-
ing forcibly, with conviction of head as well as heart, so as to
be able to strengthen the faith and clear away the real per-

* 2 Cor. 4:2. ^ John 4 : 22.

lo Basic Ideas in Religion

plexities of doubters. It is true that men cannot be made be-
lievers by intellectual arguments alone, but to-day many think-
ing men and women find the way to clear faith blocked by
doubts not of their own making. While only fire can kindle
fire, yet if the wood be wet we must first dry it.

2. Know and have sympathy with the opponent's position.

This means patience, courtesy, and fellow-feeling. We need
the knowledge of the other side for our own sake also. No
truth can be rieasonably held unless we know and can answer
objections. As Ferrier says, " The light of any truth is its
contrasting error " ; and as Augustine taught, there is no heresy
without some truth. Christian ministers should know the as-
sumption that weakens or destroys that truth. The underly-
ing truth itself they should faithfully proclaim and teach in
all its relations. Such positive teaching by one who clearly
understands the error will undermine the sceptical teaching
better than a direct attack. We must study all sceptical sys-
tems beforehand that none may take us unawares and seem un-
answerable. Sympathetic study will cure us of the old-fash-
ioned, complacent dogmatism, with its supercilious tone which
is so irritating. No man can outgrow the Gospel, but an indi-
vidual congregation can outgrow a narrow or a lazy preacher.
Self-satisfied assurance in believer and sceptic is generally in
exact proportion to their ignorance. In all public reference
to definite systems of doubt or denial the manner in which
we make such allusions will reveal our knowledge and fairness,
and determine the estimate in which we will be held by the in-
telligent few in the audience on whose judgment the others de-
pend.

There is more need for sympathy and patience today than
ever before, for much of current doubt is reluctant, of the
head, not of the heart. Liddon opens his Elements of Religion
with the remark, " Our age longs to be religious." Many
under the influence of the scientific spirit have grown dull of
hearing, and lack all spiritual vision, for outer things dominate
their whole thinking and the inner world of consciousness is
ignored. The sphere of the senses seems the only reality and,

History and Spirit of Apologetics ii

finding no scientific proof of God and the soul and knowing
no other evidence, they doubt or despair unwillingly and re-
luctantly.^" Many live noble and kindly lives, though nar-
rowed in thought to the world of the senses. Many ethical
scholars honor Christ as a teacher come from God — the
Holiest of men, the Ethical Ideal — but find it hard to accept
Him in the full Christian sense as the Lord, the eternal Son of
God, one with the Father. Of all such we must say that they
are " not far from the Kingdom of God," and must sympathize
with them. When we honestly seek to help perplexed in-
quirers and understand their difficulties, we discover the weak-
ness at certain points of our own faith. As we weigh their
criticisms, scientific and historical, we are led to drop for our-
selves, as well as for them, many traditions of men which
make void the truth of God's real word.

Coleridge says, " There is no true faith which has not
wrestled with doubt." This may be too wide a statement, but
it is certain we cannot help doubters if we have had no doubts
to fight ourselves. An unruffled, placid faith may be the re-
sult of lazy indolence of mind and a selfish, narrow heart, or
the result of ignorant conceit. In this world of sin and woe,
of mystery and seeming confusion, the more real our faith
the greater is our perplexity at the awful mystery of Divine
Providence, and the seeming power of evil to harm. Faith in
serious hearts often proves itself faith by its very doubt.
" Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself," cried the Psalm-
ist. The presence of Job and of Ecclesiastes in the Canon
justifies the most searching questioning of the Divine char-
acter, and of God's purpose in His dealings with men.

I have spoken of honest doubt as earnest seeking of the
light, but it is also true that many loudly expressed doubts and
denials are not honest, and that there is no will to believe.
They may be a pretext for wilful indifference. Intellectual
difficulties may be used to veil dislike of the Gospel itself.
Back of them may lurk the feeling that to accept the Gospel
truth would bind one to live the Gospel life. Scepticism of

1° Cf. Romanes, Thoughts on Religion.

12 Basic Ideas in Religion

the head alone may be unwelcome to a man and his will may
remain true to his duty, but scepticism of the heart roots in
the secret will. Such a man sees no beauty in Christ that
he should desire Him, and even if his soul in its depths recog-
nizes in Christ the embodiment of divine goodness, he steels
himself against the divine call " Follow thou Me." He knows
the promise, " If any man wills to do the will of the Father
he shall know the truth," but he is bent on doing his own will
only. We cannot argue such a man out of his unbelief.
Thought did not produce it and argument cannot change it.
Such a moral sceptic must be approached by the Christian
preacher of righteousness and judgment in the hope that God's
finger will so touch him in pain or grief that divine things will
stand out clearly and bring repentance.

3. Think consistently, logically, and with discrimination.

Logical thinking involves classification, and classification
implies discrimination between vital and unimportant facts or
arguments. It is a serious blunder to put all things on the
same level, for then to doubt one is to doubt all. In religion
no article of faith can be held in isolation. We cannot sepa-
rate our science from our theology, keeping them in different
compartments. A logical nexus pervades all facts that are
real, and each one stands in relation to what goes before and
follows after. The student, therefore, should not grow im-
patient and desire all problems solved at once, but should thor-
oughly consider each argument in its logical connection and
due order. At the same time it is necessary always to think
in wholes, so that the ultimate bearings of the facts will be-
come evident as each passes under review.

We must not exaggerate the intellectual element, but neither
must we depreciate it. Man is a thinking being, not a creature
of feeling alone. Even when we are trying to reach the con-
sciences and the hearts of men, our approach has to be made
through their intelligence. Brain stands sentinel at the door
of the heart, and an appeal that cannot speak the password is
refused admittance. The supreme need is faith and good-
will, but these are not enough if there is no power of thought

History and Spirit of Apologetics 13

as well. We must correlate spiritual truths and facts with the
other contents of our knowledge. We must find analogies
and points of contact to appeal to every side of the complex
being of man if we would win him to the truth.

It is the glory of the Prophets and the Apostles that they
"appeal to the reason as well as to the heart. St. Peter, though
he was not a trained psychologist, distinguished as clearly as
we do between feeling, will, and intellect, and wrote, " Giving
all diligence, add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowl-
edge." ^^ St. Paul places knowledge above mere emotion ; " I
thank my God, I speak with tongues more than you all. Yet
in the church I had rather speak five words with my under-
standing, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten
thousand words in an unknown tongue. Brethren, be not
children in understanding; . . . but in understanding be men.
I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understand-
ing also ; I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the
understanding also." ^^

Theology assumes as its postulates the personality of God
and the personality of man, and further holds that God and
man are in relation with one another. Postulates are as neces-
sary to theology as to any other science, for they are the
basis of all argument. Postulates and intuitions are fully dealt
with in a note in the Appendix.^^ Let it suffice here to say
that fundamental theology or theism, which is the subject of
this book, is the study of these postulates themselves from the
philosophic and scientific standpoint, apart from the revelation
of God in Christ. The analytical outline (page x) will
make clear the relation to one another of the divisions of this
subject. The general plan is simple. We will examine first
the Idea of God, and the efiforts made to deny it, and then the
Spiritual Idea of Man, with the denials of it that have been
attempted.

11 2 Peter i : 5.

12 I Cor, 14 : 18-20 and 15. i3 See Note A.

PART I

THE IDEA OF GOD

The Idea of God is the supreme idea of the Reason. Like
all intuitions it is confirmed, first, by its necessity in thought,
for it arises in all minds, and its contradictory, consistent Athe-
ism, is incredible; secondly, by its rationality, for it is the im-
plied logical basis of all reasoning and the only ground of cer-
titude in belief; and thirdly, by its universality, for religious
faith though varying in degree and expression is a character-
istic of humanity.

The basis of our whole Apologetics is the self -revelation of
God in the heart of man. St. Paul is very clear on this point.
God's everlasting power and divinity, he tells us, are revealed
by nature to man " because that which may be known of God
is manifest in them, for God manifested it unto them." ^ But
he does not say that God's goodness and mercy as attributes
are made clear by studying the things of sense ; they are per-
ceived only as man's conscience attests God's personality.
The revelation of God on the side of character and personality
must come through the ethical and personal nature of man.
As St. Paul puts it, even those who have not had the direct
revelation of " the law," " show the work of the law written
in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness therewith,
and their thoughts one with another accusing or else excusing
them." 2

But we study this revelation first, not as it is known to us
in our own consciousness, but as it appears manifested in the
universality of religion and is confirmed by God's works in
nature and in man, " the invisible things of God being under-
stood through the things that are made." ^

God, the Postulate of Theology, is as incapable of absolute
demonstration as the Self, but the idea grows clearer under

1 Rom. 1 : 19. 2 Rom. 2:15. » Rom. i : 20.

The Idea of God 17

devout study. We know God in relation to history, as the ob-
ject of universal belief ; in relation to nature, as its cause and
ground ; and in relation to man, as Father and Judge. Hence
we have three methods of theistic study ; Observation, the his-
toric and scientific; Reasoning, the philosophical; and Intui-
tion, the spiritual.

CHAPTER II

THE WITNESS OF HISTORY TO
UNIVERSAL RELIGION

The Witness of History, Anthropology, and Comparative
Religion to the universal faith in God is not an argument
from " general consent," as is often stated. From the fact of
universal religion we deduce the certainty of a religious in-
stinct in humanity, and argue that this instinct, like all others,
cannot be self-made, but must be awakened by a corresponding
environment in which alone it finds its satisfaction. The word
" God " in what follows is not used with its full Christian
connotation, but broadly in the sense of a superhuman Power
or Being so related to man that communion is possible.

There are many definitions of religion, but all have certain
points in common. Man is so made that when he comes to
full consciousness he feels that there is some One ruling the
world. All nations say with the Psalmist : " It is He that
hath made us and we are His." ^ Lactantius derived religion
from religare — to bind, i.e., a bond between God and man.
Mere belief in God's existence forms not religion but philos-
ophy. Only when there is communion, some bond of relation,
do faith and religion arise. Reville says, " The last word of
religious history is, that there exists an affinity, a mysterious
relationship, between our spirit and the Spirit of the Uni-
verse." ^ James Martineau emphasizes the moral aspect,
religion is " belief in an everliving God, that is, of a divine
mind and will ruling the Universe and holding moral rela-
tions with mankind." ^

1 Ps. 100 : 3.

^Native Religions of Mexico and Peru, p. 211.

3 A Study of Religion, p. i.

The Witness of History 19

Primitive religion underlay all the customs of the family
and national life. It included all the ideas we associate with
religion, prayer and worship, moral duty, faith in a future
life, and divine judgment. It is true that the gods of sav-
ages have often savage traits. Men must express their
religious ideas in terms of their own experience and moral
standards. This is to be expected. The divine image in their
souls is blurred by their own grossness. " The light shineth in
the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it." *

The evidence for the universality of religion is super-
abundant. Missionaries and anthropologists confirm the con-
clusion of Waitz that a strict investigation has established as
false the assertion that there are peoples among whom there
is not a vestige of religion.^ Tylor has a similar opinion.
" So far as I can judge from the immense mass of accessible
evidence, we have to admit that the belief in spiritual beings
appears among all low races with whom we have attained to
thoroughly intimate acquaintance." ^ Tiele calls religious be-
lief " a universal phenomenon of humanity," ^ and Reville
writes, " To me religion is a natural property and tendency,
and consequently an innate need of the human spirit." ^ Ben-
jamin Constant enunciated the principle constantly verified ever
since, that religion is an indefectible and perfectible attribute
of our species.^

Some travelers do report tribes without religious ideas, but
it will be found in such cases that they never sufficiently
gained the friendship of the savages to be trusted with their
beliefs. As Max Miiller points out, expecting to find human
brutes, they do find them in the superficiality of their observa-
tions or, lacking sympathy with spiritual ideas, they do not
have patience to unravel tangled thoughts of childlike minds.

* John 1 : 5.

^Anthropology, Vol. I, p. 322.

^Primitive Culture, p. 384; see also de la Saussaye, Manual of the
Science of Religion, p. 18.

7 Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions, p. 6.

8 The Native Religions of Mexico and Peru, p. 5.

» Cf. Reville, Prolegomena to History of Religions, pp. 32, 3.

20 Basic Ideas in Religion

or again, being slaves to words, if certain terms are wanting
in any speech, they argue that the corresponding ideas are also
wanting.^" Sproat's experience in Vancouver Islands shows
how slow the natives are to trust a stranger with the most
sacred things of their life, and he testifies, " A traveler
must have lived for years among savages, really as one of
themselves, before his opinion as to their mental and spiritual
condition is of any value at all." ^^

Religious beliefs differ widely, as is natural, yet they have certain
elements in common. All known peoples have religious faith in the
sense that they admit the existence of superhuman powers intervening
in the destiny of man; they all possess in the rudimentary state at
least the essential elements of worship; faith in the future life, prayer,
sacrifice and symbols. These elements are clad with analogous forms
among most diverse races and we see everywhere faiths passing through
phases nearly identical under general laws.

It may be well to examine briefly some of these elements of wor-
ship:

1. There is always a fundamental belief in divine power or powers,
a being or beings akin to man and holding relations with him.

2. There is an accompanying belief in the survival of spirit after
death. This survival may take many different forms, such as simple
existence similar to that on earth, transmigration of souls, re-incarna-
tion, absorption into the world soul, and so forth.

The belief in a future life seems inseparable from the belief in God,
and most anthropologists admit this. The credo implies an ego.
Rialhe writes, " The belief in something inherent in our personality,
which outlives our present existence or continues it in another world,
seems to be universally diffused among mankind, and to be inborn in
the human mind." ^^ In speaking of the skeletons laid out in the cave
of Spey, d'Alviella says, " These contemporaries of the mammoth and
the cave-bear, whose energies one would have thought would have
been wholly absorbed in the struggle for existence, still found time
to attend to their dead, to prepare them for their future life, and to
offer them objects which they might have used for themselves, but
which they preferred to bestow on the dead for their use in another
life.""

1® The Origin and Growth of Religion, pp. 83-93.
1^ Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, p. 205.
^2 Mythologie Comparee, p. 104.
"^^ Hibbert Lectures, 1891, p. 16.

The Witness of History 21

3. The use of prayers is also universal. They vary from childlike
selfishness, through devout confessions of sin and prayers for pardon,
to exalted thanksgiving. They reflect the character of the individual
worshiper.

The most primitive type of prayers may be represented by this
prayer of the Nootka Indian, " Let me live, not be sick ; find the
enemy, not fear him. Let me come on him asleep, and kill a great
many of him " ; or in similiar vein the Osage Indian, " Pity me, O
God of War, I am poor, give me what I need, grant me success against
my enemies that I may avenge the death of my friends." One of the
African tribes has this prayer, " O ye gods, look kindly on this family,
let it prosper and increase, let us all be in health." The Yebus ask in
a higher tone, "O God in heaven, give us wisdom and happiness";
and the Khonds in humility pray, " We are ignorant what to ask for.
You know what is good for us, give us that."

Prayers of praise are found in ancient India, Egypt, Babylon, Peru
and Mexico. They are often ritualistic. The Aztecs show a strong
theocratic idea in their prayer for the King, " Let him be, O Lord,
your own image. Let him not be proud and haughty on your own
throne. Do not let him do harm nor act without reason and degrade
your throne by iniquity." Yet they offered human sacrifices.

4. The idea of sacrifice seems universal, and takes on various forms
according to the symbolism of this most formal type of worship. The
following forms seem the most prominent : the gift to God in self-
surrender ; the peace-oflfering, where God acts as host ; the sin offer-
ing; the covenant sacrifice, a tribal rite; and the national sacrifice in
making a treaty.

5. Lastly, we find among these essential elements a conception of
moral obligation, which is associated with God as the Source of law
and duty. When Darwin was in Tierra del Fuego he thought that
here was a race without any conception of morality and religion. But
he was later convinced of his error by seeing some of the Fuegians,
with every evidence of civilization, at a lecture given in London by the
missionaries at work among them. The missionaries had found moral
ideas current among the Fuegians, which Darwin had thought did not
exist. They believed in a great black man always wandering about
the woods and mountains, who knew every word and action, who could
not be escaped, and who influenced the weather according to men's con-
duct. This god was at least a god of righteousness, who forbade the
slaying of a stranger or even an enemy, and required mercy to the
brute creation. Miss Mary H. Kingsley tells us that on both coasts of
Africa the terms god-palaver and man-palaver are in use, the latter being
a sin against the former. The African tribes and the South Sea Island-

22 Basic Ideas in Religion

ers give their boys instruction in moral duty at the time of puberty, as
did the Romans when the toga was assumed, and the Jews when a boy
was received into the synagogue.

John Stuart Mill treats this argument as of little value,
merely the old consensus gentium, which is an appeal to the
authority of mere opinion — which is no authority at all ! But
Herbert Spencer recognizes the significance of universal re-
ligion and admits it demands a deep and universal cause.
" Should it be asserted that religious ideas are products of the
religious sentiment . . . the problem is not solved ; but only
removed further back . . . there equally arises the question
— whence comes the sentiment?"^* Romanes also replies,
" It is not necessarily true, as J. S. Mill and all other agnostics
think, that even if internal intuition be of divine origin, the
illumination thus furnished can only be of evidential value to
the individual subject thereof. On the contrary, it may be
studied objectively, even if not experienced subjectively; and
ought to be so studied by a pure agnostic desirous of light
from any quarter. Even if he does know it to be a noumenon,
he can investigate it as a phenomenon. And, supposing it to
be of divine origin, as its subjects believe, and he has no reason
to doubt, he may gain much evidence against its being a mere
psychological illusion from identical reports of it in all ages.
Thus, if any large section of the race were to see flames
issuing from magnets, there would be no doubt as to their ob-
jective reality." ^^

A number of writers on religion believe in a primitive
monotheism, and many anthropologists testify that the farther
back we go the purer is the faith and the fewer the gods.
Max Miiller answered Renan's theory that monotheism was
a general Semitic trait by showing that while all Semites do
have the personal or Baal idea of God as opposed to the
pantheistic conception, yet they are all polytheists and grossly
corrupt in their worship. " This primitive intuition of God,
was in itself neither monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it

1* First Principles, § 4. i" Thoughts on Religion, p. 157.

The Witness of History 23

might become either, according to the expression which it took
in the languages of men." ^^ With the Jews it became mono-
theistic.

Atheistic Theories of the Origin of Religion

There are four main atheistic theories of the origin of re-
Hgion, each of which is associated with some great man as its
exponent: i. The Invention of Priests — VoUaire; 2. The
product of fear of the powers of Nature — Lucretius and
Hume ; 3. Fetishism, crude idolatry — Comte ; 4. Ani-
mism, belief in ghosts and the worship of ancestors — Herbert
Spencer.

I. The Invention of Priests

This crude view was advocated by Voltaire in France in the
17th century, but has practically disappeared for thinking
men, as it is obvious that the word priest stands for a whole
group of developed religious ideas. The priest is the product,
not the creator of the feelings and worship and customs of
which he is minister. He may exploit and modify religion
in his own interests, but he does not create it. Herbert
Spencer states this clearly : " Moreover, were it otherwise
tenable, the hypothesis of artificial origin fails to account for
the facts. It does not explain why, under all changes of form,
certain elements of religious belief remain constant. It does
not show us how it happens that while adverse criticism has
from age to age gone on destroying particular theological dog-
mas, it has not destroyed the fundamental conception under-
lying these dogmas. It leaves us without any solution of the
striking circumstance that when, from the absurdities and cor-
ruptions accumulated around them, national creeds have fallen
into general discredit, ending in indifferentism or positive
denial, there has always by and by arisen a re-assertion of
them ; if not the same in form, still the same in essence.
Thus the universality of religious ideas, their independent

1* Chips from a German Workshop, Vol. I, p. 348.

24 Basic Ideas in Religion

evolution among different primitive races, and their great
vitality, unite in showing that their source must be deep-
seated instead of superficial." ^^

2. The Product of Fear

This is tersely expressed by Statius — Primus in orbe deos
fecit timer. It has been taught by Lucretius, Hobbes, Hume,
Strauss, Clodd, and Lubbock. Primitive man, naked and trem-
bling, deified everything that hurt him, fire and earthquake,
storm and tempest, and the fiercer wild beasts. Two diffi-
culties are fatal to this theory.

(i) The fact that the early religions, though we admit that
fear and dread do form obvious elements in them, recognize
benevolent and beneficent deities as well as cruel and
malevolent. This appears in the most common name for God
— the Sky — as in Aryan races and the Chinese. The
heavens through rain and sunshine bless the earth more than
they injure it by occasional storm and lightning.

We have also to explain why religion survived the bar-
barous state of weakness in the presence of nature's evil
forces, and grew clearer and stronger with each advance. The
earliest forms of sacrifice, not only among the Semites but also
in India and Greece, were peace offerings and burnt offerings
expressing ideas of devotion and communion with the gods,
not fear or shrinking. Robertson Smith and F. B. Jevons
have striking paragraphs on this point which it is well to quote.

" From the earliest times, religion, as distinct from magic
or sorcery, addresses itself to kindred and friendly beings, who
may indeed be angry with their people for a time, but are al-
ways placable except to the enemies of their worshipers or to
the renegade members of the community. It is not with a
vague fear of unknown powers, but with a loving reverence
for known gods who are knit to their worshipers by strong
bonds of kinship, that religion in the only true sense of the
word begins." ^®

17 First Principles, § 4. ^^ Religion of the Semites, p. 54.

The Witness of History 25

" Man, being by nature religious, began by a religious ex-
planation of nature. To assume, as is often done, that man
had no religious consciousness to begin with, and that the mis-
fortunes which befell him inspired him with fear, and fear
led him to propitiate the malignant beings whom he imagined
to be the causes of his suffering, fails to account for the very
thing it is intended to explain, namely, the existence of reli-
gion. It might account for superstitious dread of malignant
beings ; it does not account for the grateful worship of be-
nignant beings, nor for the universal satisfaction which man
finds in that worship." ^^

(2) The basis of this theory is that power and might im-
press the childish races more than any other attributes. But
this does not account at all for the sense of sin and deserved
punishment. There are two kinds of fear; first, cowardly
dread, which never has been the basis of religion and, second,
the fear of punishment, which kind of fear is " the beginning
of wisdom." The fear of a guilty conscience ever draws men
back to God, but the terrors of nature never arouse this kind
of fear in man.

3. Fetishism

Auguste Comte, the French Positivist, held that there were
three stages in the development of civilization : the Theologi-
cal, the Metaphysical, and the Positive or Scientific. The
Theological Stage has three phases: Fetish Worship, Poly-
theism, and Monotheism. The earliest Fetishism was in the
savage state when men worshiped in a literal sense natural
objects which they considered capable of harming them.

This whole scheme is a specimen of careless generalization.
Fetish worship cannot be the origin, for it is only one expres-
sion, of the religious sentiment, and is often found in con-
nection with highly developed ideas about God. The history
of the word " fetish " suggests the answer to the theory. It
is not an African term, as some French scholars supposed,

10 Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 410.

26 Basic Ideas in Religion

but a corruption of the Portuguese feitigo from factitius. It
meant any help to devotion, such as crucifixes or beads, and the
early sailors applied it to the negroes' crude carvings. If the
European Romanists had their " fetishes " without actually
worshiping them, why should not the simple blacks use
them in the same way as symbolic helps in worship? Comte
adopted the word as meaning "an object of worship."

Waitz tells us that " several negro races, to whom until now
the influence^ of more highly developed peoples has not
reached, are much further advanced in the perfection of their
religious conceptions than almost all other nature folk ; so far
that if we cannot call them monotheists, yet we can assert of
them that they stand on the brink of monotheism, even if their
religion is mixed with a large amount of coarse superstition." ^°
Max Miiller suggests that fetish worship may be an expression
of reverence. Man may consider God very far off and lower
forces and material things as means whereby we come into
communication with him. Miss Kingsley in her discussion
of Fetishism holds a similar view.^^

This theory holds that the savage races of today may be taken
to represent primeval man. It is a pure assumption, and ig-
nores the fact that the African savage of today is no more
primeval than the European. Whatever may be their present
state, they have not remained stationary. It is a great mistake
to suppose that, because they have no history, they therefore
live only in today. On the contrary, they are very slaves to
ancestral rites and laws, and when we study their customs we
find many which imply a higher religion in earlier ages. The
most degraded races have languages far in excess of their
needs, both in vocabulary, grammar, and mental ideas implied.
Max Miiller says : " In several cases the grammar of so-
called savage dialects bears evidence of a far higher state of
mental culture possessed by these people in former times. , . .
No language has yet been found into which it is not possible

20 Anthropology, Vol. II, p. 167.

21 See West African Studies, p. 129. Cf. also, Halleur, Das Leben der
Neger West Africa's, p. 40.

The Witness of History 27

to translate the Lord's Prayer." ^^ Waitz says that the cutting
off of colonies from the mother tribe and the effect of bar-
barous surroundings are sufficient to cause changes in the
mental and spiritual life of the immediate descendants of na-
tions well advanced in civilization. He gives many instances
of the possibility of rapid degeneration of tribes under evil in-
fluences, and some special examples of West African tribes
which show degeneration from higher races. This has been
clearly proven in the case of the Hottentots and the Tierra
del Fuegians who represent the lowest barbarism. The Hot-
tentot speech, described by the Dutch as mere animal grunts
and clicks, is now known to have a most regular grammatical
structure and a full and varied vocabulary, connected in some
way, as yet undetermined, with the languages of North Africa,
the Coptic, old Egyptian, and Ethiopic. They have also a great
mass of legendary beliefs and folk lore of a very high order.
The evidence seems conclusive that for tribes, as well as for
individuals, facilis descensus Averni}^

The best answer to the Fetish theory, as well as to the
Animistic theory of the origin of religion, the next theory
to be taken up, is that it does not do the very thing it sets out
to do, namely, explain the origin of religion. For it tells
nothing whatever of how the idea of God arose, on which
concept religion is founded. Max Miiller's words on this
point are very apt : " Let us look this theory in the face.
When travelers, ethnologists, and philosophers tell us that
savage tribes look upon stones and bones and trees as their
gods, what is it that startles us ? Not surely the stones, bones,
or trees; not the subjects, but that which is predicated of these
subjects, viz., God. Stones, bones, and trees are ready at hand
everywhere ; but what the student of the growth of the human
mind wishes to know is. Whence their higher predicates ; or,
let us say at once, whence their predicate God? Here lies the
whole problem. If a little child were to bring us his cat and

22 Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 6g.

23 See Herbert Spencer, Sociology, p. io6, who admits the probability
of degradation, though it tells against his ghost theory.

28 Basic Ideas in Religion

say it was a vertebrate animal, the first thing that would strike
us would surely be, How did the child ever hear of such a name
as a vertebrate animal? If the fetish worshiper brings us a
stone and says it is a god, our question is the same, Where
did you ever hear of God, and what do you mean by such a
name? It is curious to observe how little that difficulty seems
to have been felt by writers on ancient religion." ^*

4. Animism

Herbert Spencer claims that we may hold it settled that the
first traceable idea of a supernatural being is the conception
of a ghost.^^ This is questionable. The majority of an-
thropologists do not accept this view. Ancestor worship is
a fact most common, but this explanation of its origin and also
of religion itself will not stand examination. The theory is
simple — too simple. If the idea of gods comes from dreams
of ghosts, whence comes the concept of the ghost? Not from
the savage's own conviction of personality as somehow difiPer-
ent from his body which he controls as he wills, and therefore
thinks — as all races do — that the spirit will survive the body's
death ; for Spencer does not recognize the spirit's witness to
itself. He holds that the true savage derives his idea of self or
personality from these ghost visions, and not zfice versa.
Everything is real to the savage mind, so the theory goes, even
his day fancies and night dreams. He thinks he actually goes
in the night to the scenes of his dreams and acts what his
vision pictures. He interprets these dreams of the dead in the
light of other experiences, such as his shadow in the sun,
echoes from the hills, and his image in the lake. This
" double " he sees in the water, he identifies with his double as
seen in dreams. The doubles of other people also appear in
his dreams. If the persons seen are dead, then the idea of the
ghost is formed.

Most psychologists today recognize the idea of the self as
a spiritual element in the human consciousness without which

^* Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 117.
25 See Ecclesiastical Institutions, Chap. I.

The Witness of History 29

no such experience is possible, for it unifies our multifarious
sense perceptions. To say that man gets the idea of self from
mere shadows or echoes is to invert the whole order of mental
growth. It is because man intuitively recognizes his inner
self as his thinking principle, distinct in kind from his body
and outer things, that he is able to believe in ghosts at all or in
the dream forms, as the spirits of his absent or dead friends.
He interprets life and nature in terms of his own consciousness
of personality, instead of interpreting himself in terms of na-
ture, and so discovering himself.

Animism treats primitive man as having less reasoning power
than a four-year-old child. He had no consciousness of him-
self as a willing and acting agent, or of the principle of
causality, or of contrast between animate and inanimate things,
or of the difference between his dreams and his daylight ex-
periences. But though thus idiotic, he is held to be able by
a complicated process of reasoning to evolve these spiritual
concepts from purely outer sensations, like shadows and echoes,
and to construct the whole body of intuitions, including God,
out of them. The starting point of Spencer's whole theory
is highly improbable. He fails at the outset to give us any
evidence of the commonness of dreams about the dead. They
certainly are not frequent in our experience, and there is no
reason to suppose that the savages have them any more fre-
quently than we. Most dreams fade at our awakening and
are not remembered. Why should the dreams of savages be
any more vivid than ours? Besides, we today do not dream
of our ancestors whom we have never seen, and the savage
would not be more highly developed in this than we are. The
spirit of one recently dead is supposed by the savage to linger
about the house or grave. But not so the spirits of those
long dead.

Moreover, Spencer never gets back to the prehistoric period
when they worshiped only ghosts. Ancestor worship does
go back to the earliest times, but then as now it is found in
connection with the worship of true gods, not merely demi-
gods. His historical arrangement shatters on the single fact

30 Basic Ideas in Religion

that in all the cases he cites the savages already have faith in
God and spirit side by side with the forms of ancestor worship.
This was true of the household gods, the Lares and Penates,
of Rome and Greece. In Homer and all Greek literature we
read of honors paid to the dead in funeral rites and sacrifices,
and of dreams of dead heroes — of which Achilles' dream of
Patroclus is a striking example — but they also believed in
and worshiped higher gods, not their tribal ancestors. In
China today worship still centers around the family altar with
its images and symbols of the dead ancestors, but there is also
the public state worship of " Heaven " by and through the
ruler, and this is older than Confucius. If we do thus find
higher beliefs coincident with honors paid to the dead, why
may it not always have been so? How can we prove that the
higher form is always the product of the lower? There is no
trace of ancestor worship in the Vedas, nor in ancient Egypt,
nor clearly among the Hebrews or Semites, though some
scholars affirm it. Spencer admits we have at present no ex-
amples of any such development, and we cannot possibly
know the ideas of the primitive man who did these wonderful
things. But perhaps his doctrine of evolution will help us
where experience fails ! By the use of the evolutionary imagi-
nation, we can delineate the leading lines of primeval thought.
Having thus inferred a priori the character of such thoughts,
we can realize them as far as possible in our own thought and
thus discern them as actually existing in the past. Where?
we ask. This starting point granted him, his theory proceeds
by regular steps. Rudimentary religion is the propitiation of
dead ancestors, who are supposed to be still living and capable
of working good and ill to their descendants. The next step
is singling out the tribal ancestor as of special honor. His
human personality being lost sight of, he is considered all-
wise and all-powerful and finally is looked upon as god. Thus
we have three stages of progress : The family god ; the tribal
or demi-gods; and at last one god exalted above all others.
But we must account for the impulse which would lead a whole
tribe to elevate such incidents as dreams into gods. The par-

The Witness of History 31

ticular dream would have to be experienced by most of them.
To derive the profound idea of God from the simple fact of
occasional dreams in which dead persons appear, is to stop at
the surface of things, for in order to effect this wondrous
transformation of a dream figure into a god we must ask,
first of all, what mysterious force or impulse, common to so
many minds, caused them to draw such an inference from
so small and unfounded a premise. Spencer overlooked the
obvious fact that the transition from the dream of a dead
man as still living to the thought of a divine Being demands
the previous concept of God. The latent idea must have
been in some way already ingrained in human nature, so
that it only needed, as Plato would say, an awakening
from its hibernation; else why should human dreams pro-
duce a religion, and bestial dreams none?

The transformation from dream to god is the more easy,
according to Spencer, if the ancestor had a name like the sky
or the sun, the latter being due to his coming from the East.
In time this would lead to his being worshiped as the sun-god.
This theory plainly inverts the psychological order. Nothing
is more conspicuous in early races than their tendency to
poetic personification of nature and her forces — a mode of
thought Spencer was too prosaic to understand. They did not
interpret themselves in terms of outside experience, but rather
they brought nature into kinship with themselves by attribut-
ing to her forces such will and power as they had. They
would not have thought the dream-figures ghosts of dead men
if they had not had the certainty of their own spirit as some-
thing different from the body and surviving it.

Theistic Theories of the Origin of Religion

I. The Traditional View

God made Himself known by some external manifestation,
and this revelation to the senses was handed down by tradi-
tion to succeeding generations. The theory holds that we
must get our knowledge of God, as we do all other knowl-

32 Basic Ideas in Religion

edge of things external to us, by the medium of our senses.
But we cannot feel God, nor smell, nor taste Him. There-
fore He must have revealed Himself at first to man through
his eyes and his ears. Man must have seen Him and heard
Him speak. This blunt statement of the theory is its own
sufficient refutation. It treats primitive man as no better
than a brute lacking all spiritual faculty. A psychological
miracle would needs first be wrought to enable primitive man
to understand what the miraculous voice or vision meant, and
it would have to be repeated in his descendants, else they would
not understand the " tradition " verbally handed down. But
grant him a precedent spiritual understanding, which visions
awaken and develop, and you pass out of the traditional theistic
view into the intuitive view.

The earlier anthropomorphic conception of God in the Bible
is condemned by the prophets. The angels are messengers
from God, not beings who come to declare there is a God.
The word of God comes to the prophet as a still small voice
speaking to his heart, not to his ears. God is taken for granted
from the first word. " In the beginning God created the
heavens and the earth."

2. The Intuitive View

Man as spirit is directly, though dimly, conscious of God
within him and without him.^^ This spiritual consciousness
is deepened and confirmed by experience and revelation.

God as Spirit must reveal Himself ; Man as spirit is capable
of receiving such an inner revelation which God Himself makes
manifest within men.-'' If we trace all forms of religion back,
they root in an ineradicable conviction of the soul that it stands
in vital relation to God. This faith must have arisen with
clear self-consciousness and the vision of the world. But sin
has darkened our spiritual vision and " alienated us from the
life of God." ^^ Were it not for sin we would know Him im-
mediately and with the same certainty with which we know

26 Cf. Rom. i: 19, 20. ^^ Ibid. 28 Eph. 4: 18.

The Witness of History 33

ourselves. But though blurred the image is still there. It
underlies the personality and gives rise to the spiritual faith
and conviction which divide men from brutes. Christ sharply
discriminates between man and beast. No matter how low
the Prodigal Son sank, he never considered himself to be
on the same plane with the swine before him. It was not from
their level that he rose when he " came to himself."

This view does not mean that man was born with an " in-
nate idea " of God, for no one is born with any ideas at
all, but that whenever man appeared he possessed an innate
aptitude or capacity to know God, which awoke under due
stimulus. This potentiality of faith, which the older writers
called theologia concreata, corresponds to the outer revelation
in nature. But man has also an inner environment. There
are two factors in the growth of religion: the subjective spirit
of man and the objective factor, the living God acting upon
him and touching his spirit. As God reveals Himself more
and more. He educates the soul to receive Him. But the
development was slow, the work of centuries, often thwarted
or perverted, as we see from Old Testament history.

The crudity and cruelty of the superstitions in which these
profound faiths often found primitive expression, do not de-
tract from the wonder that men should have thought such
thoughts at all, reaching down into the depths of their own
being, rising to the heights of the infinite heavens. The race,
like the individual, has its childhood and childish estimates.
Only slowly do the child and the race grow in power of
spiritual apprehension and begin to form judgments of worth.
We boldly affirm that men in the childhood of the race personi-
fied the powers of nature just because in some dim fashion
they felt that back, of nature there reigned a Personality of
some transcendent sort. The religious self-consciousness is a
reciprocal fellowship, a communion with God, which is pos-
sible only with a Person, for only if God is an " I " can He
be to men a " Thou ", as He always is to His worshipers at this
grade of religious development.

But is not this an admission that men made God in their own

34 Basic Ideas in Religion

image? And if so what value can such gods have for us, the
wise men, who discern their unreaHty in the light of their
origin? But is the matter indeed so simple? If, and the
supposition is not baseless in the light of all the facts, if there
be a living God, who did make man in His own image, theo-
morphic in his spirit, and if we live and move and have our
being in this Source and Spring of all existence, would not
men be conscious of a primal impulse, vague but real, to feel
after Him, as the life-giving winds and the snowy white-
caps of the boundless ocean call to the salmon in the far off
rivers of the uplands? Why should he not dream and see
visions, which are dim symbols of divine realities, shadowy
images in the mirror of his heart of the things unseen which
are eternal?

It is this instinctive sensus numinis which makes man what
the anthropologists call a " religious animal." Accepting the
definition, we argue that if the religious instincts point to no
reality as their source and object, they dififer from all other
instincts which never deceive and are never purposeless. Thus
our social and ethical impulses or instincts have their proper
environment in human society and the moral order. Even
so does this intuitive faith in a divine Power, Source and Lord
and Friend of man, transcending him, yet akin to him, point
to a spiritual environment of the human spirit, God, in whom
we live. ^

This argument from instinct, a deeply seated need of the
soul, to a corresponding spiritual environment has been re-
cently urged by several men of science, such as Romanes,
Pratt, the psychologist, and especially John Fiske, whose elo-
quent and convincing presentation of this thought we quote.
But he is mistaken in supposing that it is new. Homer in the
Odyssey had it in mind wdien he described men as gaping
after the gods as the little nestlings do for the mother and their
food.2«

" We see the nascent Human Soul vaguely reaching forth

29 The author had been using this argument in his lecture-room for
some years prior to its statement by Fiske.

The Witness of History 35

toward something akin to itself not in the realm of fleeting
phenomena but in the Eternal Presence beyond. An internal
adjustment of ideas was achieved in correspondence with an
Unseen World. That the ideas were very crude and child-
like, that they were put together with all manner of grotesque-
ness, is what might be expected. The cardinal fact is that the
crude, childlike mind was groping to put itself into relation
wnth an ethical world not visible to the senses. . . . Now if
the relation thus established in the morning twilight of Man's
existence between the Human Soul and a world invisible and
immaterial is a relation of which only the subjective term is
real and the objective term is non-existent, then, I say, it is
something utterly without precedent in the whole history of
creation. All the analogies of Evolution, so far as we have
yet been able to decipher it, are overwhelming against such a
supposition. To suppose that during countless ages, from the
seaweed up to Man, the progress of life was achieved through
adjustments to eternal realities, but that then the method was
all at once changed and throughout a vast province of evolu-
tion the end was secured through adjustments to external non-
realities, is to do sheer violence to logic and common sense.
... So far as our knowledge of Nature goes, the whole mo-
mentum of it carries us onward to the conclusion that the Un-
seen World, as the objective term in a relation of fundamental
importance that has coexisted with the whole career of Man-
kind, has a real existence ; and it is but following out the
analogy to regard that Unseen World as the theater where
the ethical process is destined to reach its full consummation.
The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary ages
the Human Soul has not been cherishing in Religion a delusive
phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless groping and stum-
bling it has been rising to the recognition of its essential kin-
ship with the ever living God. Of all the implications of the
doctrine of evolution with regard to Man, I believe the very
deepest and strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting
Reality of Religion." ^o

30 Through Nature to God, pp. 18^-191.

36 Basic Ideas in Religion

The historical witness to the universal faith in God is one
of the strongest as well as simplest arguments which we have.
It underlies the intellectual " proofs " which are next to be
discussed, for it furnishes the material for reason to work on,
as the world furnishes material for science. The intellectual
proofs are rather confirmations of a preexisting idea of God
than demonstrations from which we can conclude logically that
there is a God. Our belief in the Author of all that exists,
the Source and the Father of our own spirits, had its deepest
and ever-living root in the universal thought which was not
satisfied by the mere play of appearances in Nature, but
yearned to know what lay behind them, just as it knew that
back of all visible human action is the invisible spirit of man.
This struggle after something higher than we see and know
through the senses, this demand for a real agent for every
act, and a mover for every movement, forms the primitive and
indestructible witness of humanity to its faith in God. The
historic fact of religion is the best proof of religion, just as
the growth of the oak tree is the best proof of the tree. It is
there not by our own will, but of itself, i.e., by a higher will
which gave life to the acorn. There may be dead leaves or
broken branches on the tree ; there may be corruptions and
outgrown forms of worship, but religion itself remains a fact.
You can as little sweep away the oak tree with its millions of
seeds from the face of the earth as you can eradicate religion
from the human heart. The history of religion teaches us the
truth of the one everlasting conviction that God is, the most
certain and the most real of all truths.

CHAPTER III

THE WITNESS OF THE INTELLECT:
THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

THE WITNESS OF THE INTELLECT

The method of theistic study to be taken up in this and the
next four chapters is that of the reason or intellect. It moves
along philosophical lines, and analyses and verifies the belief
in God by the necessary laws of thought. The Witness of the
Intellect falls logically into three divisions, the Cosmological,
the Teleological, and the Anthropological Arguments.

These so-called theistic proofs are not demonstrations of
God's existence, hut rational confirmations of our intuitive
faith. They serve to give clearness to the idea of God in re-
lation to nature and to meet the objections of the materialist
and agnostic. Their efifect is cumulative ; each adds to the con-
clusions of the preceding. They are separable in thought, but
merge into one another in common usage. Cause implies or-
der, and order implies mind, thus suggesting as First Cause
a conscious Being who is personal and has character. So the
average thinker passes over at once into the Ontological Argu-
ment, or the argument from intuition as to the pure being of
God. The conclusion is always something greater than the
premises logically warrant us in making. Life is larger than
logic. A living experience will continue to press on to its
conclusions, even though probability may have to come in to
bridge the gaps left in the constructive work of the reasoning
activity.

We may liken these proofs to working hypotheses in science,
for we can verify them in the same way by experiment. But

38 Basic Ideas in Religion

as matters of faith belong to the world of spirit, we must ex-
periment in the same sphere of ethical and spiritual life. Do
good, follow the light of Christ, live according to the hypothesis
of God, and proof, i.e., conviction, will follow. Scientific hy-
potheses are tested by their agreement with the accepted
principles and facts of science. Even so, we can verify our
faith in God by its accord with all rational thought and with
the demands of ethical and social life.

The depreciation of the intellectual proofs by many theists,
as for instance the Ritschlians, who throw the whole emphasis
on intuitive faith, is most unwise, for Nature herself, awaken-
ing the reason of man, suggests to all minds thoughts about
the power and mind and rule of God. It is true that Nature,
studied in the light of intellect alone, does not reveal the
personality or moral character of God, and therefore " natural
theology " needs to be supplemented by the moral and ontolog-
ical arguments. But the arguments from nature appeal
through their simplicity to the vast majority of men, ancient
and modern, learned and unlearned, alike. All lines of logical
thinking lead to God, the Creator of the world.

As Cousin has said, " There are dififerent proofs of the ex-
istence of God. The consoling result of my studies is, that
these different proofs are more or less strict in form, but they
all have a depth of truth which needs only to be disengaged and
put in a clear light, in order to give incontestable authority.
Everything leads to God. There is no bad way of arriving at
Him, but we go to Him by different paths." ^

These arguments underlie all religious faith, and as they are
the " proofs " most intelligible to ordinary men, though denied
or minimized by sceptics, we must study them faithfully in
order to help both classes. The Christian Apologist should
use such as appeal most strongly to the individual doubter
or the class he has in mind, not following his own pre-posses-
sions, still less relying solely on any form of philosophy foreign
to common thought.

1 See Flint, Theism, p. 350.

The Cosmological Argument 39

THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

The Cosmological Argument, the simplest of the theistic
proofs, is based on the intuition of causality. Whatever hap-
pens or changes must have a cause for its happening or chang-
ing. Its proper name therefore is the Etiological or Cause
Argument. It is also called the Argument from Contingency.^

The truth of the law of causation, which is axiomatic in
science, does not need any demonstration here. Huxley tells
us that the one act of faith in the convert of science is the con-
fession of the universality of order and the absolute validity
of the law of causation under all circumstances. " If there is
anything in the world which I do firmly believe in, it is the
validity of the law of causation." ^

The universe is a vast congeries of phenomena mutually
related. Each series of events and the sum total of the whole
must have a sufficient cause back of them. This cause, being
antecedent to all existing things and their changes, must be the
first and necessary cause. It is " necessary," for the mind
demands a cause which is itself a true beginning.

The argument from contingency is very simple. We know
that we exist and yet we have an innate feeling that we did not
create ourselves. Again the world in which we live could not
create itself. It is not necessary, that is, self-existent, but it
is contingent on some power external to itself. Therefore we
are led to the belief in a God who created both us and the world.
John Locke argues the existence of God along these lines.
" Man knows by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can
no more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two
right angles. ... If, therefore, we know there is some real
being {i.e., man), and that nonentity cannot produce any real

2 This argument does not refer to pure or changeless existence which
could not be an object at all. If nothing happened and there were no
events or phenomena, we would not have the idea of cause. _ The West-
ern mind can hardly grasp the conception of the Buddhist Nirvana
where there is existence but no motion, and rightly considers such a
state as practically equal to total extinction.

3 Essays, Science and Morals, p. 121.

40 Basic Ideas in Religion

being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there
has been something ; since what was not from eternity had a
beginning; and what had a beginning must be produced by
something else." Then he proceeds to show that this eternal
something which produced man is " most powerful, and most
knowing, and therefore God." * Leibnitz uses a similar argu-
ment, and Thomas Aquinas gives it in syllogistic form.

Aristotle gives the argument clearly and concisely. There
cannot be an infinite series of physical causes, each moved by
others. There must be at the last a Final Cause, itself un-
caused, an eternal and necessary Being " upon which hang
heaven and nature." The Being who causes all things must be
eternal ( aiSo^ ) and pure essence ( ouffta ) and thought ( virjai's)
and active energy ( kvipytta ). The essential Being acts
on the ground of its goodness and love of the beautiful.'"* Aris-
totle distinguished four kinds of causes : the Material Cause,
the necessary condition of the action; the Formal Cause, the
form or idea of the action before it takes place ; the Final Cause,
the end or purpose of the action ; and the Efficient Cause, the
force which directly causes the action to take place. These
four causes are most frequently seen all together in the same
operation. Thus all things are made from some material, ac-
cording to some plan or form in the mind, by means of some
force, and for some purpose or end which embodies this " idea."
This is shown in the usual questions which a child asks concern-
ing a new toy. "What is it made of?" "Who made it?"
"How (by what power) is it made?" "What is it made
for?"«

Denials of the Cosmological Argument

I. Hume's Denial of Causality

The principle of causality on which the cosmological argu-
ment depends has not escaped attack. " Hume's sagacity was
true to the scent here, and led him straight, as it were, to the

* Human Understanding, Bk. IV, Chap. X, §§ 2-6.

^Metaphysics, Bk. XI, Chap. 7, § 2.

® For a fuller treatment of Aristotle's four causes see Note B.

The Cosmological Argument 41

linchpin of existence. Were a man minded to establish either
scepticism or nominalism, how could he, more directly or defi-
nitely, accomplish his purpose than by loosening the knot that
bound an effect to its cause? Mathematics apart, it was the
ground, Hume saw, of our theory and practice everywhere.
Above all it was speciaUy the ground of belief. At all times
that we pass from present impression to some different idea
li'ith belief, it is the principle of causality mediates the con-
nection and supports the inference: evidently, then if, in the
interest of either scepticism or nominalism, we would shake be-
lief, it is with that principle we must begin the attack." ^

Hume represents the mind as passive, and all knowledge as
coming through the senses. Sense impressions give us all
our ideas, which differ only in force or vividness. But is there
any sense impression of cause? Events are entirely loose and
separate, we cannot observe any tie between them. Every ef-
fect is a distinct event from its cause and cannot be discovered
in its cause. All we can perceive is that one thing happened
before the other. But we see certain events regularly con-
joined in experience, for instance, fire and heat, or a falling
stone breaking a jar. This relation of antecedent and conse-
quent, or order of succession, being invariable, arouses the idea
of one event causing the other. The idea of causality is due
to the influence of " fixed custom," not to any reality of ex-
istence. Our senses give us no proof whatever of what we call
force, energy, or will, which therefore are words without mean-
ing for the scientific thinker. Our experience is too limited
for us to predict that events will invariably follow certain
others.

Carried into the wider field of a First Cause, the negative
force of Hume's theory is at once apparent. Aside from the
fact that all causality is questioned, we cannot have any idea of
a First Cause without being able to have an impression of it.
As there has never been any experience of Deity through sense
impression, we cannot be sure that there is such a Being.

"^ J. H. Stirling, Essay in Princeton Review, The Philosophy of
Causality.

42 Basic Ideas in Religion

Hume works along the line of rigid determinism, and admits of
no active agency in the will of either Deity or man.

It is a curious fallacy. He says that the causation idea may
be resolved into repetition of experience, contingency, and suc-
cession of time. But every man knows that the idea of force
or power is absolutely distinct from either contingency or suc-
cession of time. The idea could never arise at all from either
of these. The essential element in the causality impulse is not
mere sequence but power, a causal not a casual relation.

There are certain inconsistencies in Hume's scheme which
are discussed in a note, but in addition two things may be urged
against his general position.^

(i) Cause and effect are not really successive in time, but
are simultaneous. The assumption that cause and effect are
only time sequence m- Jts with no support in the scientific state-
ment of the occurrence of phenomena. In every change cause
and effect are not distinct in time but simultaneous, though the
imperfection of our senses or instruments may cause a delay
in our percefjxion of the change ; as in the case of the eclipse
of Jupiter's moons, which led to the discovery of the velocity
of light.- The smoke and the noise of the whistle are simul-
taneoi?:^,' though we hear the latter after we see the former.

(r , Invariability of sequence implies some causal force.
This is'also manifested in the effect being always proportioned
to variation in the cause. Mill's law of concomitant variation
clearly proves causal connection, though Mill will not allow so
obvious a deduction. For instance water may be changed into
steam, or iron into liquid, simply by the application of heat.
The connection here is surely causal.

Mill considers the material cause to be the efficient cause.
He says that nature consists of groups of connected phenom-
ena ; nothing ever happens alone and all the antecedents are
equally important. The popular mind gives the name of cause
to the last condition which brings about the effect, but it has
really no more power than the other causes. The popular
mind is right. The last condition does bring about the re-

8 See Note C.

The Cosmological Argument 43

suit, because it is always some form of energy, the efficient
cause of all changes. A match ignites by heat caused by fric-
tion. Oxygen and hydrogen gases do not unite to form water
until a current of electricity passes through them. He admits
that our natural impulse is to believe that there must be some
peculiar tie or mysterious constraint exercised by the ante-
cedent over the consequent. Sigwart criticises this quiet chang-
ing of the word " cause " from the concept of force to that
of the sum total of all the conditions which precede a given ef-
fect. This change of terminology presupposes a different kind
of cause from that which implies force. The proper meaning
of force or cause is not the ground of the change, but some-
thing which makes it actively possible and whose absence would
prevent the action.^ Thus some peopl have been blinded by
a flash on an electric car. The blindness was due to the dis-
eased condition of the eye plus the dynamic cause, the flash.
People with normal eyes on the car were not hurt. The blind-
ness could not have resulted without the under, ying condition
of the eye, any more than if the flash had never occurred. In
chemical experiments we distinguish carefully between the
necessary conditions of action and the force which cau es the
chemical changes to take place.

Alexander Bain follows Mill, as do also some more recent
logicians who use purely scientific terms. One of the modern
text books on logic has in it : " The popular mind still tends to
regard the cause as an agent which produces the effect, through
some power or efficiency which it possesses. . . . For
Science, the cause is not an agent, but the invariable ante-
cedent of something else which simply follows it." ^^ Bain,
like Hume and Comte, seeks to get rid of the very idea of force.
The cause of the falling down of a fort in a battle is simply
the moving cannon balls ; it is a pleonasm to interpolate a hypo-
thetical something called " force." But the cannon ball does
nothing unless set in motion by the expulsive power of the
powder, and its own striking force is determined exactly by

^ Logic, Vol. II, p. 108.
^° Creighton, Introductory Logic, pp. 311, 2.

44 Basic Ideas in Religion

its momentum, the basis of the science of gunnery. Modern
science makes for the old and common idea of cause and force,
for its essence is dynamic, and it defines all phenomena as
simply changes in modes of motion, molar, molecular, or
atomic. Yet many scientists still affect the style of Hume,
and talk only of antecedent and consequent, ignoring the force
altogether.

Such men as Jevons, Erdmann, Wundt, William James, and
Sigwart defend causality and force. The latter tells us that
we can study cause best in the simplest cases which are in-
telligible to every one. Then we will observe three points:
first, that that which takes effect is originally always a concrete
thing with properties which give it a particular existence ; sec-
ond, efficient action is action which occurs at a definite time, is
instantaneous or persists for a space of time, and is directed
towards some other thing; and third, that which is effected is
a definite change in this second thing, and the action finds its
fulfilment in just this production of change, i.e., in the realiza-
tion of the effect. Thus mere sequence cannot explain
causality, as Hume thought, for mere sequence never did sug-
gest to any one what we all mean by cause, the communication,
change or annihilation of motion. The only explanation open
to us is that of a definite relation in the permanent qualities of
both substances. These relations contain the conditions under
which constant forces can become active, and certain definite
changes follow which are determined by the inmost character
of the substances involved. ^^

2. The Positivist Position

Matter and force are eternal and correlative phenomena.
The world is a continuous process of change without begin-
ning or end.

This is not a solution but an evasion of the problem by fix-
ing attention solely on the phenomena, and ignoring causation,
a thing impossible in practice. It treats the world process as
its own cause ; but a " law of nature " is not a cause in any

11 See Sigwart, Logic, § 73- See also Note D.

The Cosmological Argument 45

sense, it is simply a generalized statement of what always hap-
pens under certain conditions.

Auguste Comte clearly states this theory, and says that we
must stop inquiring into the causes and reasons of things, and
be content to observe and record what we see. We must not
reason beyond phenomena. In the same spirit as Comte, Alex-
ander Bain writes that ** the path of science as exhibited in
modern ages is toward generality, wider and wider, until we
reach the highest, the widest laws of every department of
things ; there explanation is finished, mystery ends, perfect
vision is gained." ^- The uniformity of nature is the last word
of science, and is the sufficient explanation of the world as self-
existent and self -developing. We cannot understand it, but
we must accept it. There are many other scientists who as-
sure us that they can accept such an infinite regress of instru-
mental causes. We must take them at their word, but such a
view is incredible to the average man. His daily experience
with causality and ivill poiver make it impossible for him to
conceive of an infinite series of mere phenomena which had
no beginning.

Spencer treats the uniformity of nature as a simple process
of development. Out of homogeneous matter and homo-
geneous force at the beginning of things, there comes by simple
development the heterogeneous forces and heterogeneous
phenomena which we know and science studies. This theory
may be summed up in the statement that the world process
is the world cause; which sounds as nonsensical as it really
is, if we express it, things happen as they do because they
are what they are. The description of the process is taken
as the explanation of the process. Positivism is a consistent
attempt to check thought — or at least to keep it purely within
the limits of description of phenomena conceived as happen-
ing successively but not causally connected.

The fallacy is obvious. The laws of nature are treated as
somehow the cause of the phenomena which they simply form-
ulate. It is common even in formal treatises to say that the

12 See James, Will to Believe and other Essays, p. 71.

46 Basic Ideas in Religion

laws of nature do this or that, but in fact they do nothing ; not
the laws of nature but her forces are the efficient causes of
changes.

In his searching critique of the scientific method Karl Pear-
son has the following about law. " What are we to say, then,
with regard to scientific law — does it really exist before man
has given expression to it? Has the word any meaning when
unassociated with the mind of man ? I hold that we must defi-
nitely answer ' no.' ... A scientific law is related to the per-
ceptions and conceptions formed by the perceptive and reason-
ing faculties in man ; it is meaningless except in association
with these; it is the resume or brief expression of the rela-
tionships and sequences of certain groups of these perceptions
and conceptions, and exists only when formulated by man. . . .
We are thus to understand by a law in science, i.e., by a * law
of nature,' a resume in mental shorthand, which replaces for
us a lengthy description of the sequences among our sense im-
pressions. Law in the scientific sense is thus essentially a
product of the human mind and has no meaning apart from
man. It owes its existence to the creative power of his in-
tellect. There is more meaning in the statement that man
gives laws to Nature than in its converse that Nature gives
laws to man. . . . Men study a range of facts — in the case
of nature the material contents of their perceptive faculty —
they classify and analyze, they discover relationships and se-
quences, and then they describe in the simplest possible terms
the widest possible range of phenomena. How idle is it, then,
to speak of the law of gravitation, or indeed of any scientific
law, as ruling nature. Such laws simply describe, they never
explain the routine of our perceptions, the sense-impressions
we project into an ' outside world.' " '^

We must question Nature intelligently and coherently. Be-
fore the days of Bacon men worshiped formulae, and modern
science has not escaped the same blunder. Langley wrote :
" The history of the past shows that once most philosophers,
even atheists, regarded the * Laws of Nature,' not as their own

13 The Grammar of Science, pp. 82, 86, 87, and 99.

The Cosmological Argument 47

interpretations of her, but as something external to themselves,
as entities partaking the attributes of Deity — entities which
they deified in print with capital letters — as we sometimes do
still." "

Romanes in the days of his discipleship to Spencer, writing
anonymously as " Physicus " (1876), defended his master's
postulate that " uniformity of law inevitably follows from the
persistence of force." But the scientific law of the Conserva-
tion of Energy explicitly recognizes the certain dissipation of
all forms of force, and even the correct formula does not in
any way explain the multiplication of forces, and the variety,
and yet order of cosmic phenomena. The dissipation of
energy, which Spencer seemed to ignore, is held by scientists
of the rank of Lord Kelvin as involving the fact that the pres-
ent order of things cannot be eternal. Sometime before 1889,
after a correspondence with Charles Darwin, Romanes began
to return to his earlier faith in God and wrote : " As a theory
of causation it (Spencer's formula) has not met with the ap-
proval of mathematicians, physicists, or logicians, leading repre-
sentatives of all these departments having expressly opposed
it, while, so far as I am aware, no representative of them has
spoken in its favor. ... It is, in short, the old story about a
stream not being able to rise above its source. Physical causa-
tion cannot be made to supply its own explanation, and the
mere persistence of force, even if it were conceded to account
for particular cases of physical sequence, can give no account
of the ubiquitous and eternal direction of force in the construc-
tion and maintenance of universal order." ^^

3. // every phenomenon must have a cause, the First Cause
itself cannot be uncaused

The answer is not difficult. A true efficient cause is not a
phenomenon at all, hut an act of will, a spiritual force. Sec-
ondary causes are only instrumental and an infinite succession
of such causes does not satisfy our idea of cause, which

1* Science, June 13, 1902.

15 Thoughts on Religion, pp. 72 and 74.

48 Basic Ideas in Religion

springs from our consciousness of power freely exercised.
Efficient causation by will, though mysterious, is involved in
the very idea of personal beings, divine or human.

But this position is not self-evident to all men for, as we
have seen, some scientists declare they can conceive an infinite
regress of physical causes without a beginning. But the
philosophic and the common mind agree in ruling out this idea
simply because they both recognize that the one source of the
idea of causation is the human will. We must think of the
world in terms of our experience, and the normal mind uses
its whole experience; it does not omit but places first human
relations and postulates of ethical life in which the will plays
a supreme part. Hence it cannot possibly rest in secondary
causes for they could not produce permanent order.

In all human relations and actions we sharply distinguish
between instrumentalities and real cause, or a will acting with
definite purpose. This is a distinction all languages recognize.
Children at play can understand the difference between an in-
tentional blow and accidental contact. Even when very young
the contrast is clear to them between the personal will and the
instrumentality used, as is seen in the case of the little girl
who tried to avoid punishment for cutting off her curls. " I
didn't do it," she explained, " the scissors did." All normal
life is based on this principle. If a man is found dead on the
street with a knife in his heart the question at once asked is,
"Who used the knife?" and then, "What was his motive?"
If there is no motive the murderer is judged insane. The will
does not of course create force, but it does direct and rule
the muscular power of the body for its own ends, and this
activity is ever conscious and intelligent. Such action begins
with a little child moving its hands first aimlessly but later
with a clear purpose. As knowledge increases the child is
able to direct and control his physical forces.

The will both exercises force and feels force. For instance
a twenty pound weight presses my arm down, and I am con-
scious not only of the pressure, but also of active resistance of
my own power to that pressure. Herbert Spencer admits that

The Cosmological Argument 49

all other modes of consciousness are derivable from expe-
riences of force, but experiences of force are not derivable
from anything else; thus the force by which we ourselves
produce changes, and which serves to symbolize the cause of
changes in general, is the final disclosure of analysis.

It is our power to put force in motion which makes us infer
similar power in cases where we are not responsible. James
Martineau tells us that physical force is will-power, from which
in common speech we omit all reference to the living Thought
and Will back of the world which gives it order and per-
manence. It is usually only in cases of unusual events or hap-
penings of moment that we refer to the Divine purpose back
of them.

Professor Brinton in discussing the religions of primitive
peoples writes, " This universal postulate, the psychic origin of
all religious thought, is the recognition, or, if you please, the
assumption, that conscious volition is the ultimate source of all
force. It is the belief that behind the sensuous, phenomenal
world, distinct from it, giving it form, existence, and activity,
lies the ultimate, invisible, immeasurable power of a Mind, of
a conscious Will, of Intelligence, analogous in some way to our
own ; and — mark this essential corollary — that man is in
communication zuith it." ^^ W. R. Grove closed his epoch-
making essay on TJie Correlation of Physical Forces with the
thought that " Causation is the will, and creation the act, of
God."

1^ Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 47.

CHAPTER IV

THE WITNESS OF THE INTELLECT

THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

The fact that phenomena are not isolated and chaotic but
interrelated and orderly, producing and maintaining a Cosmos,
implies that " final " causes are at work, that is to say, causal
forces which finally realize an end or purpose foredetermined
by an intelligent and conscious mind. A final cause is an
efficient cause which begins with a plan that is realized in the
process.

The derivation of the name teleological gives the key note of
the argument. Te'Aos has two meanings, (i) the end pro-
posed. Hence it conveys the ideas of purpose and fulfilment,
or of a plan consistently worked out to its realization. It in-
cludes both the Formal and the Final Causes of Aristotle;^
and (2) consummation, result, completion — but not neces-
sarily cessation — Latin effectus.

Forces acting alone would be as apt to produce chaos as
order, or if chaos existed there would be no power in it to
bring it into order. As we look about us on the interrelated
forces of this stable universe, the conviction arises that the
orderly arrangement of matter and force resulting in harmony
must be the expression of an intelligent Mind. Hence the
universe must have an Ordainer, a Mind back of and control-
ling all the forces at work and imposing on them definite and
fixed methods of working which we call laws of nature. The
Cosmological Argument, being concerned only with the fact
of causation, has nothing to do with the Cosmos as a whole,
but in ordinary thought it is rarely separated from the

1 See Note B.

The Teleological Argument 51

Teleological, which argues directly from the world's order to a
divine Ordainer, adding to the idea of a supreme First Cause
the higher concept of His conscious direction of the world.

Physical causation may be studied in a: single series of phe-
nomena and, as long as we work within these narrow limits,
physical causes seem sufficient, for we are not concerned with
the larger aspects of the universe. But these larger aspects
cannot be ignored without serious loss and danger, as Bacon
warns us : "A little philosophy inclineth Man's mind to
atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about
to religion ; for while the mind of Man looketh upon second
causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no far-
ther; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate, and
linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity." ^
The phrase " causes confederate," which Bacon here coins,
is suggestive and worth remembering as a safeguard against
error. It is really impossible, save by pure abstraction, to
isolate any series of phenomena in the universe.

The Teleological Argument embraces two lines of connected
thought, not always distinguished — the Eutaxiological, start-
ing from the order of nature as a whole, and the Teleological
or Design Argument proper, which studies the general order
in the details of its special adaptations and contrivances, more
particularly in the organic world. The distinction may be
made clear by falling back on Aristotle's Formal (Eutaxio-
logical) and Final (Design) Causes. Both imply mind. In
the Formal Cause we have the idea of an end in itself, perfect
if not realized, as Beethoven's Symphony was complete in his
mind before he wrote it out. When we look upon the harmony
of the universe we realize that the Cosmos was in the Divine
Mind as a whole in all its parts and relations even before He
brought it into existence. The Final Cause is the intent and
purpose of the action, and it commonly relates to something
beyond itself. Final Causes may be seen in the way the
parts of a machine work in relation to the whole and also
have each their special purpose. Better still can final causes

^ Essay XVI, of Atheism.

52 Basic Ideas in Religion

be studied in an organism where all parts work for the com-
mon good. We may think of the formal cause as a vast system
of things forming a Cosmos in which the final causes work
together each in its appointed time and place.

In the Psalms we see the poet grasping the distinction. In
the 19th I'salm we find the Eutaxiological Argument of in-
ferring a mind from the world order as a whole thus ex-
pressed :

" The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firmament
showeth His handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and
night unto night showeth knowledge."

In the 94th Psalm, however, the Psalmist considers the de-
tails of the world order and argues a Divine Mind from the
adaptations there seen, thus using the Design Argument :

" Consider, ye brutish among the people ; and ye fools, when
will ye be wise? He that planted the ear, shall He not hear?
He that formed the eye, shall He not see ? "

Of the two arguments the Eutaxiological is the stronger
proof of God, but the average mind does not readily dis-
tinguish between them.

The Eutaxiological Argument

The Eutaxiological Argument considers the universe as a
whole. Back of the order of the universe and as the cause of
that order, there must be an intelligent Will. The postulate is
that a universe intelligible to mind must be the product of
Mind. A world of order presupposes a world Ordainer.
What reason finds in nature, Reason first placed there. As
we have said, this Order Argument is simply Aristotle's Formal
Cause applied to the Cosmos. In his profound thought the
form of a thing is its essence as it exists in the divine mind,
the ground and source of its qualities and properties when em-
bodied in nature through the divine energy, as a beautiful statue
has form in the artist's vision before he carves it in marble.

It is an old argument, though not so popular as the Design
Argument. It is common in the Bible. Jehovah answers Job
by an appeal to the wonder and greatness of the universe,

The Teleological Argument 53

until the suffering man responds in humility, " I know that
Thou canst do all things, and that no purpose of Thine can
be restrained." ^ It is the instinctive faith of the Psalmists
and the Prophets. In the 104th Psalm the Psalmist sings of
Jehovah's care over all His creation, and cries, " O Jehovah,
how manifold are Thy works ! In wisdom hast Thou made
them all." * Isaiah in his attack on idolatry frequently com-
pares the might of God to the impotence of the idols by refer-
ence to the greatness of the universe. " It is He that sitteth
above the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are
as grasshoppers ; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain,
and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in." ^

Socrates, Plato and Cicero use this argument as self-evident.
Thus Cicero questions : ** Can anything done by chance have
all the marks of design? Four dice may by chance turn up
four aces ; but do you think that four hundred dice, thrown by
chance, will turn up four hundred aces? Colors thrown upon
canvas without design may have some similitude to a human
face ; but do you think they might make as beautiful a picture
as the Coan Venus? A hog, turning up the ground with his
nose, may make something of the form of the letter A ; but do
you think that a hog might describe on the ground the Andro-
mache of Ennius ? " *' Socrates in conversation with Euthy-
demus draws the analogy between the control of the universe
by God and the control of the body by the soul of man.
" And that I speak the truth, you yourself also well know, if
you do not expect to see the bodily forms of the gods, but
will be content, as you behold their works, to worship and
honor them. Reflect, too, that the gods themselves give us
this intimation: . . . and he (the supreme God) that orders
and holds together the whole universe, in which are all things
beautiful and good, and who preserves it always unimpaired,
undisordered, and undecaying, obeying his will swifter than
thought and without irregularity, is Himself manifested only

3 Job 38 to end.

4 Vs. 24.

5 Isa. 40 : 22.

8 De Divinatione.

54 Basic Ideas in Religion

in the performance of his mighty works, but is invisible to us
while he regulates them. . . . The soul of man, moreover,
which partakes of the divine nature if anything else in man
does, rules, it is evident, within us, but is itself unseen. Medi-
tating on these facts, therefore, it behoves you not to despise
the unseen gods, but, estimating their power from what is
done by them, to reverence what is divine." ^

A similar treatment of this argument by Theophilus, Bishop
of Antioch (circa i68), in his writings to Autolycus is
worth quoting because of his apt illustrations. " For as the
soul in man is not seen, being invisible to men, but is perceived
through the motion of the body, so God cannot indeed be seen
by human eyes, but is beheld and perceived through His provi-
dence and works. For, in like manner, as any person, when he
sees a ship on the sea rigged and in sail, and making for the
harbor, will no doubt infer that there is a pilot in her who is
steering her; so we must perceive that God is the governor
(pilot) of the whole universe, though He be not visible to the
eyes of the flesh, since He is incomprehensible. . . . Then
again, an earthly king is believed to exist, even though he be
not seen by all, for he is recognized by his laws and ordinances,
and authorities, and forces, and statues ; and are you unwilling
that God should be recognized by His works and mighty
deeds? "^ Clement of Rome also uses this argument of the
world order,^ and Hilary of Poitiers asks, " Who can look on
nature and not see God ? "

Nature may be likened to a book and its phenomena to words
which are intelligible only to minds familiar with the language
used. The cuneiform characters of the Chaldeans were at
first meaningless and seemed mere scratches to the ignorant.
But their regularity showed them to be the product of mind,
and so in due time other minds deciphered them. Nature's
phenomena arouse in our minds certain intuitive judgments,
and we recognize definite order and relations which do not in-

'^ Mem. IV: 3, 13, 14.

8 Bk. 1 : 5.

^ Corinthians, Epis. I, Chap. XX.

The Teleological Argument 55

here in the sensible things themselves, any more than thoughts
inhere in written words apart from minds. The brutes see Na-
ture's movements and changes, but they see no meaning in
them. TertulHan said, " Man speaks in words, God speaks in
acts." Socrates declared that Anaxagoras spoke Hke a sober
man among drunkards when he taught that vovs was the cause
of the world's order. Aristotle echoes the great teacher's
opinion when he says that mind is the beginning and end of
the Cosmos ('Ap;)^?; kcli riXos KOCTfiov vov<;) .

This argument from the world order was defended by Kant
in his earlier writings, questioned in the Critique of Pure
Reason, and practically accepted in that of the Judgment. In
his early work on a Demonstration of the Existence of God
(1763) and his essay on the General Natural History and
Theory of the Heavens (1754) he tells us that this proof is
as old as the reason of man. It is so natural, so engaging, and
grows so much stronger with the progress of our knowledge
that it must last as long as there is a rational creature who
wishes to enjoy contemplation of God in His works. " Mat-
ter, which is the primary substance of all things, is itself bound
to certain laws according to which it must produce necessarily
beautiful combinations. It has no freedom to deviate from
this plane of perfection. Because it is in this manner sub-
dued to a high and wise design, it must of necessity be ar-
ranged in corresponding proportions by an overruling First
Principle, and there is precisely for this reason a God, because
nature even in chaos can proceed in no other way than in regu-
larity and in order." "

In the moral realm Kant finds the culmination of his proof.
Not only do the universal laws of Nature's order point to a
Supreme Being as the principle of systematic unity, but the
inner moral order expressed in the categorical imperative of
duty points even more clearly to a single, primal Being as its
source.

Herbert Spencer and his school reject Kant's position with

10 Natural History of the Heavens, Preface. For Kant's statement
the teleological proof of God see Note E.

56 Basic Ideas in Religion

the blunt denial that mind is needed anywhere. Evolution is its
own cause, and it does not admit of any preexisting mind. But
in this his fellow scientists do not all agree with him, for as
Huxley said, " The teleologist can always defy the evolutionist
to disprove that the primordial molecular arrangement was not
intended to evolve the universe."

In biological evolution there is actual physical continuity of
life, a link between parents and offspring. But there is not
such continuity in the inorganic world. There we see only a
succession of physical changes. If we apply evolution to the
inorganic world, then the ruling idea in the successive changes
must be without, that is, different from the mechanical succes-
sion of phenomena, for there is no inner life-force causing the
definite movement as in the biological development of species,
one proceeding for the other.

We speak of the evolution of the rifle from the bow and
arrow, but the development is entirely within the minds of
men successively improving their weapons of offense. It is
a curious fact that the mechanical analogy which most material-
ists use to explain the universe involves them in direct con-
tradiction. All machines without exception are the creation
of intelligent and purposive agents, and all machines are the
direct and apparent embodiment of specific purpose. A worse
analogy than that of a machine could scarcely have been de-
vised from the point of view which seeks to treat Nature as
a self-existing, purposeless system. For no machine ever
made itself, nor will any machine really maintain itself in
action without the supervision and assistance of intelligence
of the same kind which originally devised and started it. A
machine is a structure specially devised to perform work of a
given kind. It is the very incarnation of purpose. In short
the vast difference between living things and a machine — even
the world machine — is that the one is controlled by an in-
dwelling, intelligent force, and the other is molded by out-
side forces. There may be knowledge as to the work done
by the machine, but the knowledge is not in the machine;
there may be great skill, but the skill is not in it; great fore-

The Teleological Argument 57

sight, but the foresight is not its own. Whatever it does by
virtue of its construction is done through a mind which creates
it for its own purpose.

Romanes speaks of the value of the argument from world
order as follows : " I think it is perfectly clear that if the
argument from teleology is to be saved at all, it can only be so
by shifting it from the narrow basis of special adaptations, to
the broad area of Nature as a whole. And here I confess
that to my mind the argument does acquire a weight which, if
long and attentively considered, deserves to be regarded as
enormous. For, although this and that particular adjustment
in Nature may be seen to be approximately due to physical
causes, and although we. are prepared on the grounds of the
largest possible analogy to infer that all other such particular
cases are likewise due to physical causes, the more ultimate
question arises. How is it that all physical causes conspire,
by their united action, to the production of a general order of
Nature ? It is against all analogy to suppose that such an end
as this can be accomplished by such means as those, in the
way of mere chance or the fortuitous concourse of atoms. We
are led by the most fundamental dictates of our reason to con-
clude that there must be some cause for this cooperation of
causes. I know that from Lucretius' time this has been de-
nied ; but it has been denied only on grounds of feeling. No
possible reason can be given for the denial which does not
run counter to the law of causation itself." "

Many scientific men who question the design argument ad-
mit the wdder teleology of nature's harmony as a system. The
phrase, the Reign of Law, expresses the whole argument con-
cisely, for universal law implies a universal Law-giver, one as
the universe is one. However, the Reign of Law is an am-
biguous expression. As used by the Duke of Argyll, it means
the faithfulness of all the forces and powers of the universe
to the laws imposed upon them by their Creator through
His own indwelling in the universe. But Grant Allen, the
novelist, makes the very obedience of Nature to order an argu-

1^ Thoughts on Religion, p. 70.

58 Basic Ideas in Religion

ment for the universe as a self-evolved and self-ruling sys-
tem. This line of thought ignores the supreme importance of
the fact which Kant emphasized/^ that it is mind which dis-
covered the laws of nature and comprehends them, as fol-
lows from the obvious fact that we constantly use these forces
in new combinations. Only a conscious Mind working to defi-
nite ends in perfect harmony could impose on the universe
the marvelous interrelation of the infinite forces ever at work
and producing order, never disorder. What mind finds, the
universal Reason must have placed there for minds.

Science assumes the rationality of nature. It asks intelli-
gent questions and receives intelligent answers, for the world'
is constructed on the same mathematical principles on which
our minds work. Pythagoras taught that " number is the
principle of all things," and we find the same thought in
Isaiah 40:12, where the prophet describes Jehovah as the
One " Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His
hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended
the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the moun-
tains in scales, and the hills in a balance." So, too, in Wisdom
1 1 :20, " Thou hast ordered all things in measure and number
and weight." The ancients could not test this by delicate ex-
periments, as we can, for they lacked our instruments and our
wide scientific knowledge, yet all modern science confirms their
view, since all departments of natural physics tend to become
mathematical, and their final conclusions to be summed up in
quantitative formulze. We find that every crystal is built on a
definite plan, each is a piece of " frozen geometry." In the
science of optics, mathematical formulae are indispensable, and
each color has its algebraic symbol expressive of its wave
lengths in the ether. The most decisive proof that the prin-
ciples of our minds and the mathematical relations of the
universe are identical is seen in our power of prevision, as in
the case of the discovery of Neptune, and Mendeleeff's theory
of the periodic law of atomic weights.^^

12 Preface to the 2nd edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.

13 See Note F.

The Teleological Argument 59

If it takes mind to construe the world, how can mind be
absent from the process through which the world has been de-
veloped? The teleological instinct in man cannot be sup-
pressed. Our acceptance of reasonableness in the universe is
as positive as our acceptance of scientific principles. No in-
genuity of philosophical scepticism can bring us to intellectual
confusion. There is in every earnest thinker a craving after de-
sign and purpose, and belief in them can be no more denied him
than belief in the objective world.

Berkeley, the first idealist of Britain, rested his whole proof
of God upon the Eutaxiological Argument. As we infer the
existence of other " spirits " from the words and deeds of men,
so with equal certainty can we infer God's existence from mind-
marks in Nature." But he weakened rather than strengthened
the old belief in God's revelation of Himself in nature by his
denial of the objective reality of matter. All that he meant
to teach — God's intimate relation to the world — is more
simply conceived under the form of objective Idealism, which
considers matter to be external and real, but possessing its
form and qualities, power and activities, and wondrous order
only through the indwelling and informing spirit of the living
God. Professor Fraser, Berkeley's best editor, holds that in
later works he did approximate this view.

The Design Argument

The Design Argument has been the mainstay of Natural
Theology, and is probably the oldest and simplest principle, but
our knowledge of animal forms and functions now enables us
to use a greater variety of illustrations. Aristotle's philosophy
is teleological throughout, and he emphasized the distinction
between inorganic formations and organic growth. Socrates
and Cicero state the argument as clearly as it has ever been
done since. One of the founders of the Royal Society of
London (chartered 1662) was the scientist, Robert Boyle, who
made a study of science with special reference to Natural
Theology. His will (1692) founded the celebrated Boyle Lec-

1* For a statement of Berkeley's views see Note G.

6o Basic Ideas in Religion

tures, which are still maintained, in which the proofs of the
Christian religion are set forth. The Bridgewater Treatises
are a similar foundation. The Eighth Earl of Bridgewater
established them by will (1829) to show "the power, wisdom,
and goodness of God as manifested in the creation." Paley
was the main exponent of this argument at the beginning of
the last century and, though his work, Natural Theology, has
been superseded, it is still useful for its clearness. John Stuart
Mill admits that the design argument is a legitimate and purely
inductive argument.

This argument moves on the line of final cause, not from
design but to design, from the appearance of contrivances in
organic nature to intelligent purpose in their Maker. The ob-
jection has been raised that the final cause is in itself no cause
at all, that only an efficient cause can ever act. This is true
enough, but a real efficient cause is ever a conscious agent,
and as such always acts with a purpose which forms the end
at which he aims.

It is often called the " Argument from Design," but that
begs the question. If we grant there is a design, there is of
course a Designer — but design itself is the point to be proved.
We must start with what seem contrivances in nature, that is,
combinations of matter of different kinds and qualities which
lead to a certain definite result in an organism. Only a mind
working with an end in view could bring together such an as-
semblage of diverse material as a watch or a rifle. No less
true is it that when we observe certain contrivances in the
field of vegetable and animal life made of so many difiFerent
parts, all converging to a common function, our reason compels
us to believe that a certain accord must exist between the
past and the future, an active principle determining the process
of growth from within. Final causation is both the aim and
the final result or end when the process is completed.

We start then with marks of design or contrivance in nature.
But what are marks of contrivance? How may we know
that there has been any contrivance beyond the power of acci-
dental forces? The answer is the same as that to the ques-

The Teleological Argument 6i

tion, How do we know that a thing has been made by a man?
Whenever things, which in nature are never found together, are
conjoined in an artificial way, we conclude at once that they
are due to human action and have a purpose, even if it is not
at once clear to us. For example, brass hemispheres were
found in the ruins of Ninevah which were covered with pe-
culiar marks. Though no one at the time understood them,
they were considered unquestionably the work of man. Later
it was found that they were sun-dials.

Mill puts the argument in its logical form as follows:
" Certain qualities, it is alleged, are found to be characteristic
of such things as are made by an intelligent mind for a pur-
pose. The order of Nature, or some considerable parts of it,
exhibit these qualities in a remarkable degree. We are entitled,
from this great similarity in the effects, to infer similarity in
the cause, and to believe that things which it is beyond the
power of man to make, but which resemble the works of man
in all but power, must also have been made by Intelligence,
armed with a power greater than human." ^^

He discusses the logical method of the argument in detail
by using the eye as an example : " The parts of which the
eye is composed, and the collations which constitute the ar-
rangement of those parts, resemble one another in this very
remarkable property, that they all conduce to enabling the ani-
mal to see. . . . We are therefore warranted by the canons of
induction in concluding that what brought all these elements
together was some cause common to them all ; and inasmuch as
the elements agree in the single circumstance, of conspiring to
produce sight, there must be some connection by way of
causation between the cause which brought those elements to-
gether, and the fact of sight. This I conceive to be a legiti-
mate inductive inference, and the sum and substance of what
Induction can do for Theism. The natural sequel of the argu-
ment would be this. Sight, being a fact not precedent but sub-
sequent to the putting together of the organic structure of the
eye, can only be connected with the production of that struc-

15 Essays on Theism, Part I, Marks of Design in Nature.

62 Basic Ideas in Religion

ture in the character of a final, not an efficient cause; this is,
it is not Sight itself but an antecedent Idea of it, that must be
the efficient cause. But this at once marks the origin as pro-
ceeding from an intelligent will." " Mill does not admit the
conclusion, for he argues that the eye could have originated on
the principle of " the survival of the fittest " without mind be-
ing present in the process. The answer to this claim will be
given in the next chapter.

Spencer admits that a main point of difference between in-
organic objects and living things is that the former belong as
it were to the past, while there is a steady preparation in plants
and animals for their coming environment and even for the
good of the young still unborn. But, like Mill, he will not
admit that this guiding principle, or formative power, springs
from or depends on a Consciousness working intentionally on
the line of final causation, or that there is a prophetic element
in the whole process working in the present for the foreseen
end.

The Design Argument is analytical rather than constructive. It stud-
ies the parts of a given phenomenon which give it its character. Its
special field is the organic world. It has, however, been discredited
because of its misuse along two lines, first, a confusion of the e.Ktrinsic
and the intrinsic uses of an organ, and second, a supposition that every-
thing in nature has been made for man's use and convenience.

1. The intrinsic use of an organ is the function which it performs
in the economy of the animal's life. The extrinsic use is any use to
which it may be put other than the end for which it was originally
designed. For instance, the black fluid of the cuttle fish was not in-
tended for ink, nor was the cow's horn created to hold powder for mus-
kets. We may put anything to any use which does not involve cruelty
to the animal world, but in so doing we must not misunderstand the
purpose for which that organ was originally created.

2. The second fallacy is more subtle and real, since man is prone to
consider himself the end of creation and all things as having been
made for his good. Sometimes this fallacy is at work even when man
is convinced of his insignificance in the universe. Sir G. G. Stokes
tells us that in course of conversation with Sir David Brewster he
asked him what his objection was to the theory of undulations, and he

" Ibid.

The Teleological Argument 63

found he was staggered by the idea of filling space with some sub-
stance merely in order that " that little twinkling star," as he expressed
himself, should be able to send its light to us.^'' This mistake leads
often to ludicrous statements, as when the peasant moralized on the
goodness of Divine Providence which always makes large rivers flow
by great cities.

This fallacious use of the argument has led to much satirical com-
ment from such men as Voltaire, who says that as " noses are made to
bear spectacles, let us wear spectacles." ^^ Pope is unsparing in his ef-
fort to humble presumptuous man:

" Know, Nature's children all divide her care ;
The fur that warms a monarch, warm'd a bear.
While man exclaims, ' See all things for my use! '
' See man for mine ! ' replies a pampered goose :
And just as short of reason he must fall,
Who thinks all made for one, not one for all." ^^

Those who have in this way wrongly used the argument of final
causes have often done so sincerely, for there are some adaptations in
nature of which man has made good use, but which in themselves seem
to have no functional purpose. For example, the gap between the
horse's teeth has appealed to man as made especially for his bit and
bridle. But even if we are ignorant of the real final cause of an organ
we have no right to assume that it was made for our special use.

" If we sum up what is common in all the abuses we have just in-
stanced, we shall see that the error does not consist in admitting final
causes, but in assuming false ones. That there are erroneous and
arbitrary final causes there is no doubt ; that there are none at all is
another question. Men are as often mistaken regarding eflScient as
regarding final causes; they have as often attributed to nature false
properties as false intentions. But as the errors committed regarding
the efficient cause have not prevented scientists from believing that there
are true causes, so the illusions and prejudices of the vulgar with
respect to final causes ought not to determine philosophy to abandon
them altogether." 20

Helmholtz's criticism of the eye has been misquoted as if the
scientist were blaming the Creator for not doing better work. Helm-
holtz simply demonstrated that the eye was not an instrument of pre-
cision, and also that it ought not to be so. One eye corrects the defects
of the other, and both together give us adequate sight. " The appro-
priateness of the eye to its end exists in the most perfect manner, and

"^"^ See Burnett, Lectures on Light, p. 15.

18 Candide.

18 Essay on Man, III, 43-48.

20 Janet, Final Causes, p. 191.

64 Basic Ideas in Religion

it is revealed even in the limit given to its defects. A reasonable man
will not take a razor to cleave blocks ; in like manner, every useless
refinement in the optical use of the eye would have rendered that organ
more delicate and slower in its application." -1

Kant's criticism, that this argument leads only to the idea of an
" architect " and not of an infinite Creator, does not affect its validity,
for he admits that it does reveal a Mind commensurate with the known
universe in all its vastness, which is all we are concerned with at this
stage. The idea of Infinity belongs to the Ontological Argument. We
do not admit that it implies the " deistic-carpenter idea " of God. 22

This argument is fully consistent with theistic faith in the
Divine Immanence and may be expressed in biological as well
as in mechanical terms. It rests on the accepted biological
and anatomical principle, that every organ and structure has, or
did once have, some function useful to the organism in which
it is found. We argue that such complex adaptations cannot
be the result of " accidental," i.e., unguided, forces in the en-
vironment, but must proceed from a divinely directed life force
working within the genn cell to the final realization of its
proper form in the adult animal. Thus stated, it is strongly
reenforced by the wider teleology involved in the theory of
evolution. Despite its abuses the doctrine of final causes is
valid and convincing, and some of the Bridgewater treatises
are today being quoted with approval by scientific writers who
a short while ago rejected the teleological point of view. In
our present state of knowledge the adaptations in nature seem
to afiford a large balance in favor of causation by intelligence.

We may well expect the Teleological Argument to find its
focus and battle-ground in the relation of evolution to Theism.
If the evolutionary process is a purely unguided, mechanical
afifair, then all organic life, which is a vast section of creation,
falls beyond the reach of teleology. God's action in the organic
world must be immanent and directive if the teleological view
is of any value.

The chief ground of popular dislike of Darwinism was

2^ Revue des cours publics scicntifiqucs, i re. serie, t. vi, p. 219.
22 For the criticisms of final causes by Spinoza, Bacon, and Descartes
see Note H.

The Teleological Argument 65

along the lines of teleology. It is true that Darwin did be-
lieve that he had discredited the design argument by showing
that organisms are evolved gradually and not made at once.
But he was a better observer than reasoner, and his friends Asa
Gray and Dana repudiated his shallow conclusion from the
first. Darwin had studied only Paley, who is so deistic that
when the great naturalist came in contact with life and could
get no help from Paley, he took the opposite view and con-
sidered the theistic position overthrown. He writes in his
autobiography, " The old argument from design in Nature, as
given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive,
fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.
We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge
of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being,
like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more
design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of
natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows." -'

Romanes, though he changed later, wrote in his earlier days
that two hypotheses only are in the field; intelligent design
and natural selection, and it would be proof positive of superior
action if it could be shown that living things were suddenly
introduced in perfect form, but if they were slowly evolved
the old idea has been forever destroyed. The absurdity of
this becomes evident if we paraphrase it that, as soon as we
see how God works, that is, by evolution, it follows that He
does not work at all. Huxley made merry over Paley's illus-
tration of the " untutored savage " picking up a watch and
inferring design, saying, " What we want is a watch that can
make itself." He evidently did not know that Paley had an-
ticipated his criticism, stating explicitly that even if the watch
grew from a seed, the design would be no less plain. Huxley
later admitted that the evolutionist who holds the orderly de-
velopment of animal forms cannot deny the possibility of a
divine teleology implanted within the organism.

No wonder Christians took alarm when prominent evolution-
ists were proclaiming that there is no design in nature. But

23 Francis Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I, p. 278.

66 Basic Ideas in Religion

they need not have been so concerned. Asa Gray criticises
Darwin for not being able to refrain from teleological language,
" Intention is the one thing he does not see clearly, and when
he does not see it he searches for it diligently." Again he
writes: " Of course we believers in design make the most of
your frank terms expressing design and intention, and smile
at your attempts to change these contrivances into mechanical
results." The following may be one of the passages that Gray
has in mind, in Darwin's book on orchids. " The strange posi-
tion of the labellum, perched on the summit of the column,
ought to have shown me that here was the place for experi-
ment. I ought to have scorned the notion that the labellum
was thus placed for no good purpose ; I neglected this plain
guide, and for a long time completely failed to understand the
structure of the flower. " ^* John Fiske claims that " the Dar-
winian theory properly understood, replaces as much teleology
as it destroys." -^ The real effect of Darwinism on teleology
is thus given by E. Ray Lankester : " Darwin's theory had as
one of its results the reformation and rehabilitation of teleol-
ogy. According to that theory, every organ, every part,
color, and peculiarity of an organism, must either be of benefit
to that organism itself or have been so to its ancestors : no
peculiarity of structure or general conformation, no habit or
instinct in any organism, can be supposed to exist for the
benefit or amusement of another organism, not even for the
delectation of man himself. Necessarily, according to the
theory of natural selection, structures are either present be-
cause they are selected as useful or because they are still in-
herited from ancestors to whom they were useful, though no
longer useful to the existing representatives of those ancestors.
The conception thus put forward entirely refounded teleology.
Structures previously inexplicable were explained as survivals
from a past age, no longer useful though once of value. Every

2* The Various Contrivances by which British and Foreign Orchids
are Fertilised, Chap. VI.
^^ Destiny of Man, p. 113.

The Teleological Argument 6y

variety of form and color was urgently and absolutely called
upon to produce its title to existence either as an active agent
or as a survival. Darwin himself spent a large part of the
later years of his life in thus extending the new teleology." ^®

Lord Kelvin never swerved from the belief that back of the
universe was God whose work was always immanent. " I
feel convinced," he said, " that the argument of design has
been too much lost sight of in the modern study of biology " ;
and Weismann declares that the main problem which the
organic world offers for our solution is the purposefulness of
all things. Weber puts his conclusions in questions which
the opponent of teleology cannot answer : " Does not the Dar-
winian principle, which materialism invokes with such absolute
confidence, corroborate, rather than overturn the hypothesis of
immanent teleology? Is it really true that the struggle for
existence is a Urst cause and exclusively mechanical? Does
not the struggle for life, in turn, presuppose Schopenhauer's
will-to-live, zvill or effort, without which, according to the
profound remark of Leibnitz, there can he no substance?
Does it not therefore, presuppose an anterior, superior, and
immaterial cause? What can the formula: struggle for ex-
istence, mean, except : struggle in order to exist ? Now, that
carries us right into teleology. Besides, we cannot deny that
the entire Darwinian terminology is derived from the teleo-
logical theory : the terms, selection, choice, evidently introduce
an intellectual element into nature. These are mere images, it
is said, or figures of speech. Very well. But does not the
very impossibility of avoiding them prove the impossibility of
explaining nature by pure mechanism? " -^

Christian thinkers again see that nature's facts are God's
acts. Organic evolution, so far as it is an accurate description
of the development of life, is a revelation of God's method of
creation in the organic world by continuous and progressive
modifications from within, instead of by discontinuous and in-

26 gth edit. Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. XXIV, p. 802.
2T History of Philosophy, pp. 572, 3.

68 Basic Ideas in Religion

stantaneous fiats from without, its analogy being organic
growth, not mechanical action. The whole process reveals an
immanent teleology guiding and determining the end from
the beginning.

(For a criticism of Darwinism see Note I.)

CHAPTER V

THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
(Continued)

ORGANIC EVOLUTION IN RELATION TO THEISM

In any account of the relation of evolution to theism it is
necessary at the outset to define clearly the limits of the dis-
cussion. This is the more necessary because the term " evo-
lution " has obtained the widest possible connotation from
being applied to both inorganic nature and human society,
whereas its original application was simply to the organic
world. Animals are formed out of the substance of their
parents. There is a physiological bond between successive
generations which permits of gradual modifications through an
internal law. On the other hand the material world is modi-
fied, at least on its surface, by physical forces working from
without. If we apply the word evolution to Nature's mechani-
cal processes, we must either give up any actual continuity of
plan, or else locate the developing process, or law, not in the
phenomena, but in some mind controlling the processes to a
definite end. As the continuity is not physiological through
generation, it must, as Kant held, be extrinsic to and distinct
from the physical forces. What trace is there outside of the
organic world of any continuity whatever between phenomena,
except that of time succession, which divides instead of unites
events ? It is not the mere persistence of force, but the pres-
ence and action of Mind guiding by laws the formation of the
Cosmos, which gives us the physical world as we know it.

On the other hand, we have no right to ignore the division
between animal and human life. The idea of man as the only
fitting climax to the long creation is a very old one. Aristotle

70 Basic Ideas in Religion

led the way, but was followed by such men as Herder, Kant,
Coleridge and Herschel. But however much man may owe
his physical body to his being the culmination and highest
product of the process of evolution, no one has a right to
consider his further development as no different in kind from
his physical evolution. It is not hard to point out the funda-
mental differences between man's progress and the brute's
evolution. In the animal it is a necessary process, while in
man instinct yields to conscious intelligence. The brute pro-
gresses physically under material environment with no power
over it, but man is able to change or improve his environment
and be in some degree its master. The phenomena of evolu-
tion under necessity stand in sharp contrast to evolution under
freedom where mind determines the process. Man reasons
in terms of pure thought while the animal feels in terms of
sensation and has no reflective power. Man alone has a
language with abstract terms. In man the struggle for exist-
ence becomes a moral principle, developing the spiritual be-
ing. When man attained full consciousness, conscience took
the place of desire and formed his governing principle. The
will rose into supremacy and man became a person. He was
no longer vmder the physical law of force in nature ; he became
himself a force acting on nature and on his fellow men. Man
alone conceives the infinite and w^orships God. The brute is
but a step in the process; man represents the highest attain-
ment of evolution.

From the above it can be seen that discussion should be ex-
cluded both of the formation of the inorganic world and of
the social and ethical progress of man. In what follows, there-
fore, the term evolution is confined, as it should be, to the pro-
gressive development of organic life.

The fundamental principle in evolution is the unbroken con-
tinuity of life, all organisms being derived from preceding liv-
ing things, till we reach in thought the primeval germ cells.
All scientific thinkers believe in the unbroken continuity of
life, but differ widely as to the cause and method of the varia-
tions in living forms.

Evolution in Relation to Theism yi

There are three contributory sciences which have established the
theory of descent beyond doubt. These are Embryology, Comparative
Morphology, and Palaeontology. Of the first named it will be more
convenient to speak at length below, but the other two can be briefly
treated here.

The evidence afforded by Comparative Morphology is that large
groups of species of widely different habits present the same funda-
mental plan of structure; that parts of the same organism, the func-
tions of which are very different, likewise exhibit modifications of a
common plan, and that structures in a rudimentary and apparently use-
less condition in one species of a group are fully developed and have
definite functions in other species of the same group. Further there
is the fact that species fades into species, and genus into genus, so
that in classification it is possible to construct a tentative genealogical
tree. In dealing with comparative anatomy it is necessary carefully to
distinguish between homologous and analogous structures. The former
term is applied to the deep resemblance in architecture between two or
more structures in different organisms, and also in their manner of
development ; the latter concerns resemblance in use or function only.
Owen has a clear distinction between them: (i) The wing of a bird
and the arm of a man; they are both fore-limbs, with fundamentally
the same structure as regards bones and muscles, nerves and blood-
vessels; they are homologous, but not analogous. (2) The wing of a
bird and the wing of a butterfly; they are both organs of true flight,
but they have no structural or developmental resemblance ; they are
analogous, but not homologous. (3) The wing of a bird and the wing
of a bat; they are fore-limbs of similar structure and development;
they are both organs of true flight; they are at once homologous and
analogous.!

In Comparative Morphology we are concerned only with homologies,
and their evidence seems indisputable as to the evolutionary descent
of the organisms from a common stock. For instance there is the
same fundamental structure and arrangement of bones, muscles, nerves,
and blood vessels in the arm of a frog, the paddle of a turtle, the
wing of a bird, the fore-leg of a horse, the flipper of a whale, the
wing of a bat, and the arm of a man, though they have all been pro-
foundly modified from the common plan. Another interesting instance
is that of the venous system in man. It was long ago established that
the presence of the valves in human veins was for the function of
preventing the blood from flowing back toward the capillaries. But
the irregularities in the system were unintelligible. The veins of the
arms and legs seemed all right, but there were no valves in several of
the spinal, abdominal and liver veins, and above all in the vena cava,

1 As given by Geddes and Thomson, Evolution, p. 43.

'j'Z Basic Ideas in Religion

the largest vein in the body carrying blood upward. To make the
matter more incongruous there were valves in the intercostal veins
in which the blood flows horizontally, and in the neck in which the
blood flows downwards. If the theory of evolution be true, man's
ancestors were quadrupeds, and the time during which he has walked
upright is insignificant compared with the time during which they
walked on all fours. The structures developed in his ancestors and not
yet modified to suit his new posture should be expected to hold
anomalous relations. Thus the general distribution of valves in the
veins is the same in man as in the mammals near him, and when he is
placed on all fours the arrangement of the valves is perfectly intel-
ligible. The veins of the limbs, the jugular and intercostal veins, then
carry blood upward ; and the vena cava and other valveless veins are
horizontal and have no need of valves.

The evidence is just as strong from vestigial structures, minute and
more or less useless representatives of organs which are well developed
and functional in related forms, Drummond calls them " scaffolding "
which have been left behind in the process of building by development
from a common origin. At some time in the animal's life history they
were useful. In human beings certain muscles for moving the scalp and
the ears have atrophied, though in some persons they are still active.
The vermiform appendix on the large intestine sometimes reminds us
very unpleasantly of its presence. Many cases of vestigial structures ap-
pear in the embryo and are lost at birth. The unborn child at one stage
of its growth shows gill clefts. All these disappear save one which
survives as the Eustachian tube. Yet children are sometimes born
with a tiny opening in the neck, an inch or more in length, which is the
remains of a gill cleft. If man is descended from lower forms
there ought to be some explanation for the absence from the human
wrist of the os centrale as an independent bone. As a matter of fact
it appears in this way in the embryo for a time. This discovery was
one of the greatest triumphs the science of Morphology has ever won.
The same verification of the evolution theory is exemplified in the
discovery of abdominal ribs in the human embryo. There are plenty
of examples to be drawn from the animal kingdom. The baleen whale
has teeth which never cut the gum. In the embryo of the calf upper
incisors appear, but they are later absorbed and replaced by a hard
pad which suits the cow's special food. Few people know that whales
have vestigial hind legs with bones, cartilages and even unmoving
muscles, but the whole pelvic structure is buried far beneath the sur-
face. We think of snakes as limbless, yet the python and his rela-
tives have remains of hind legs which are absolutely useless and so
diminutive as to require looking for even on a large specimen.

The comparative anatomist further shows us that new structures

Evolution in Relation to Theism 73

have often been developed by the transformation of the old structures
of a very different function. For instance the poison gland of a snake
is a specialization of the parotid salivary gland, which in man dis-
charges into the mouth opposite the second upper molar. The mamma-
lian chain of ear bones goes back to structures existing long before there
were any mammals.

Palaeontology is the science of extinct species of animals and plants.
It affords evidence of vast epochs with a succession of animal forms,
developing from the simple to the complex, as the theory of evolution
would lead us to expect. The fossil records are far from complete;
there are many gaps and sudden appearances of new forms, but the
fact of a succession of species somehow related is certain, and we
have the actual remains of animals that lived ages ago. Nor is it any
longer possible to put the advent of man at a late period. The evi-
dence of such explorations as that of Kent's Cavern, Devonshire, Eng-
land, show that man was the contemporary of the cave-bear and
hyena, the mammoth, the saber-tooth tiger, the tichorine rhinoceros,
and other extinct animals.

The classical palseontological illustration of evolution is that of the
development of the horse. The museums in New Haven and New
York have the fossil series most admirably and convincingly arranged,
and thus we have direct evidence as to the horse's genealogy. Between
the little Eocene hyracothere and the modern horse we can place a
series of animals by which we can pass by gradual stages from one to
the other. As we come upward there is an increase in stature, in the
complexity of the teeth, and in the size of the brain. At the same
time, the number of toes decreases from five to one, which shows that
the animals were developing more and more speed ; for it is a rule
that the fewer the toes the faster the animal.^

The Palaeontologist tells us that the immediate forms from which
animals were developed were lizard-like reptiles, and we are further
told that the bird is descended from the reptilian stock. Nothing
could be in stronger contrast than the form and habitat and man-
ner of life of the average bird and the average reptile. But the
zoologist is sure of their evolutionary connection because of certain

2 xhe following personal reminiscence in Dr. Micou's lecture notes
is pf interest. " Huxley in his lectures in New York in 1876 (of
which I attended three), claimed that he would demonstrate and prove
the Darwinian theory. He spoke clearly and simply but he really
proved nothing more than a succession of horse forms beginning with
a small animal not much larger than a large fox, with definite changes
in the feet. But he did not show that the process of change was due
to chance variation. He did not, and could not, prove that the soil
was modified in exact correspondence with the new form of foot
Undoubtedly one series, but no ' chance.' "

74 Basic Ideas in Religion

structural resemblances, their similar embryonic development, and the
discovery of certain extinct types which bridge the gap between them.
The most important of these " connecting links " is the arch.neopteryx,
the oldest known bird. It was a bird about the size of a crow, and
had habits which were probably arboreal. While it is very like a bird
in skull, wish-bone and legs, it is in other ways very like a reptile.
It has teeth in both jaws, a long lizard-like tail and a strange well
developed wing which seems unfinished, for its three digits end in
clearly defined claws. It is but the beginner of bird evolution as its
wings and legs prove. Nor does it seem to be in the direct line of
ancestry of the present bird. It was an ofifshoot and was developing in
its own way, but its strange mixture of reptilian and avian characters,
of which the latter predominate, entitle us to consider it very suggestive
of the intermediate forms between the reptile and the bird.

The geologist sees in the facts of the distribution of animals strong
proof of evolution. It has been mentioned how fruitful were Darwin's
observations on this line when he compared the fauna and flora of
the Galapagos Islands with those of the mainland. The most striking
example of the efifect of the separation of land from land before the
evolution of life was complete is in Australia. This separation oc-
curred in the Mesozoic times when there were no mammals higher
than the marsupials. We find this branch from the common stock
evolved into later forms. So there are no higher mammals in Aus-
tralia, except the bat, to which the sea was no barrier, the rabbit
which was introduced by man, and the dingo, the fox-like dog, for
which man was probably also responsible. It does not require a St.
Patrick to explain the absence of snakes from Ireland.

Le Conte gives what he calls the law of cyclical movement in
organic evolution, and his exposition and illustrations of it follow :
" The movement of evolution has ever been onward and upward, it
is true, but not at uniform rate in the whole, and especially in the
parts. On the contrary, it has plainly moved in successive cycles.
The tide of evolution rose ever higher and higher, without ebb, but
it nevertheless came in successive waves, each higher than the pre-
ceding and overborne by the succeeding. These successive cycles are
the dynasties or reigns of Agassiz, and the ages of Dana; the reign
of mollusks, the reign of fishes, of reptiles, of mammals, and finally
of man. During the early Palasozoic times (Cambrian and Silurian)
there were no vertebrates. But never in the history of the earth were
mollusks of greater size, number, and variety of form than then.
They were truly the rulers of these early seas. In the absence of
competition of still higher animals, they had things all their own way,
and therefore grew into a great monopoly of power. In the later
Palaeozoic (Devonian) fishes were introduced. They increased rapidly

Evolution in Relation to Theism 75

in size, number and variety; and being of higher organization they
quickly usurped the empire of the seas, while the molusca dwindled
in size and importance, and sought safety in a less conspicuous posi-
tion. In the Mesozoic times, reptiles, introduced a little earlier, finding
congenial conditions and an unoccupied place above, rapidly increased
in number, variety, and size, until sea and land seem to have swarmed
with them. Never before or since have reptiles existed in such num-
bers, in such variety of form, or assumed such huge proportions; nor
have they ever since been so highly organized as then. They quickly
became rulers in every realm of Nature — rulers of the sea, swim-
ming reptiles ; rulers of the land, walking reptiles ; and rulers of the
air, flying reptiles. In the unequal contest, fashes therefore sought
safety in subordination. Meanwhile mammals were introduced in the
Mesozoic, but small in size, low in type (marsupials), and by no
means able to contest the empire with the great reptiles. But in the
Cenozoic (Tertiary) the conditions apparently becoming favorable for
their development, they rapidly increased in number, size, variety, and
grade of organization, and quickly overpowered the great reptiles,
which almost immediately sank into the subordinate position in which
we now find them, and thus found comparative safety. Finally in the
Quaternary, appeared man, contending doubtfully for a while with
the great mammals, but soon (in Psychozoic) acquiring mastery
through superior intelligence. The huge and dangerous mammals were
destroyed and are still being destroyed ; the useful animals and plants
were preserved and made subservient to his wants ; and all things on
the face of the earth are being readjusted to the requirements of his
rule. In all cases it will be observed that the rulers were such
because, by reason of strength, organization, and intelligence, they
were fittest to rule. But observe, furthermore : when each ruling class
declined in importance, it did not perish, but continued in a subordi-
nate position. Thus, the whole organic kingdom became not only
higher and higher in its highest forms, but also more and more com-
plex in its structure and in the interaction of its correlated parts." ^

While Palaeontology does show conclusively the origin of present
forms by descent from other forms, it does not show that they arose
from one another by imperceptible modifications, as Darwin held.
The fact that there are missing parts in the record does not offset
this difficulty in the Darwinian theory. Rather the geologic testi-
mony is that species rose suddenly by some genetic process of trans-
formation. The Duke of Argyll shows this clearly : " There are
some tracts of time respecting which our records are almost as com-
plete as we could desire. In the Jurassic rocks we have a continuous
and undisturbed series of long and tranquil deposits — containing a

^ Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, pp. 17-19.

y(i Basic Ideas in Religion

complete record of all the new forms of life which were introduced
during these ages of oceanic life. And those ages were, as a fact,
long enough to see not only a thick (1,300 feet) mass of deposit,
but the first appearance of hundreds of new species. No less than
1,850 new species have been counted — all of them suddenly born —
all of them lasting only for a time, and all of them in their turn
superseded by still newer forms. There is no sign of mixture, or of
confusion, or of infinitesimal or indeterminate variations. These
' ATedals of Creation ' are each struck by a new die which never failed
to impress itself on the plastic materials of this truly creative work.
. . . The perfect regularity and beauty of each new pattern of shell,
and the fixity of it so long as it existed at all, are features as striking
as they are obvious." *

Charles A. White writes in similar strain of the rise and decline
of the dinosaurs : " Those strangely peculiar animals were introduced
suddenly, soon existed in multitudes, became dispersed over the earth
with great rapidity and, from their beginning, they were the dominant
animals of all the continents. They varied in size from that of a
rabbit to that which would be equal to several large elephants ; and
the grade of organization for the whole subclass was as high in the
earlier as in the later part of its existence. They were differentiated
into flesh eaters and plant eaters and into denizens of land and water
respectively. We know absolutely nothing of the genetic origin of
those remarkable animals, and no traces of similar animals have been
found in any strata older than those containing their Triassic remains.
Their world-wide decadence was not delayed by the improving earth
conditions which the mammalia, soon to assume faunal dominion,
found abundantly congenial ; and the last of their kind perished so
utterly at, or immediately after, the close of the Cretaceous period that
the earth has since contained no living representative of them." '
He comments after reviewing similar evidence of flora, birds, fishes,
and placental mammals : " If it should ever be possible to trace the
evolution of man from the lower animals it will doubtless be found
that it has been accomplished, not by the slow process of natural
selection, but by a series of sudden mutations." '

Thus pal?eontology shows descent by sudden, not impercep-
tible, modifications, and seems to show definiteness and pur-
pose in the lines of development.

•* Organic Evohition Cross-Examwed, pp. 146, 7.

s The Relation of Phylogenesis to Historical Geology, Science, VoL
XXIT, p. 109.

^Ihid.. p. III. See also his article on The Mutation Theory of
Prof. De Fries, Smithsonian Institution Report, 1901, pp. 631 ff.

Evolution in Relation to Theism yy

Theistic writers on evolution do not contend with material-
istic writers regarding the facts of organic development, but
regarding their interpretation of the facts. The universe has
two sides, the physical, which is visible, and the spiritual, which
is hid from the senses. Evolution is a description of the proc-
ess, but description is not explanation. Explanation takes
us into the invisible side of the universe. On the visible side
we see the process of evolution, the development of one form
out of another until species arise. On the invisible side we
perceive definite progression, which we realize takes place
according to law. The action of God guides and directs the
whole process, or in St. Augustine's pregnant phrase, the uni-
verse is a " continuous creation." The variations are teleolog-
ical, determined from within by a definite law of growth, as
most modem evolutionists hold. Evolution should definitely
suggest purpose, for it implies that the evolving form holds
in itself the possibility of a prearranged series. What is the
seed but the casket of determined future events?

Theistic Evolution looks on the whole process as the con-
tinuous creation of successive animal forms by definite modi-
fications through immanent directive forces, zvhich tvork in
harmony with the environment and gradually embody the type
of the species in final form.

This view has been held by competent evolutionists from
the first. Wallace, the co-discoverer with Darwin of the prin-
ciple of organic evolution, considered it consistent with theism.
He believed that the controlling action of a higher intelligence
lies back of the secondary action of the environment, and that
the laws which govern the physical world are utterly insuffi-
cient for the formation of man's mental and moral being.
Other early evolutionists who held that variations were on
definite lines were Dana, Gray, Lyell, Mivart, Owen, von
Baer, Kolliker, Nageli, the Duke of Argyll and most French
naturalists. Owen held that organisms are evolved in orderly
succession, stage after stage, towards a foreseen goal, and the
broad features of the course show the unmistakable impress
of Divine volition. He called his theory of the origin of

78 Basic Ideas in Religion

species " derivation," and wrote in 1868, " Derivation holds
that every species changes in time, by virtue of inherent tend-
encies thereto. Derivation sees among the effects of the in-
nate tendency to change, irrespective of altered circumstances,
a manifestation of creative power in the variety and beauty of
the results." '' Le Conte held that evolution is by virtue of
inherent forces determining the development on definite lines.
Many other American evolutionists hold this view of immanent
formative forces controlling variation.

Not only do teleological variations appear, but it is extremely
difficult to find haphazard variations anywhere. There are
three analogous cases of fixed and progressive inner develop-
ment, independent of the environment, which support the
theory of immanent forces. These are ( i ) Crystallization,
mechanical force acting on mathematical lines; (2) Mitosis, the
structural propagation of the cell through division; and (3)
Embryological growth along unvarying lines in each species.

I. Crystallization is the result of a purely physical force
which differs widely from life force, but there is this point of
comparison between the crystal and the organism, that each re-
sults from an inner formative force which determines growth.
The same innateness holds of both, and there is no chance varia-
tion. The analogy is, therefore, to that extent legitimate.
Every mineral that is not amorphous has its own law of crys-
tallization, which describes the action of the inherent force.
When matter is free from external influences so as to be able
to crystallize, the peculiarities of internal structure are ex-
pressed in the external form of the mass, and there results a
solid body bounded by plane surfaces intersecting in straight
edges, the directions of which bear an intimate relation to the
internal structure, or if the crystallization takes place in a con-
fined space about several centers, the development of the plane
surfaces may be prevented and an aggregate of differently
orientated crystal individuals results. The scientist produces
crystals at will in his laboratory, but the best and largest occur
in nature where they have formed through long periods of time.

''Anatomy of Vertebrates, Vol. Ill, p.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 79

Du Bois-Reymond used this analogy in an address before the
Berlin Assembly in 1876: "One of the greatest difficulties,"
he says, " presents itself in physiology in the so-called regener-
ative power, and — what is allied to it — the natural power of
healing ; this may now be seen in the healing of wounds, in the
delimitation and compensation of morbid processes, or, at the
farthest end of the series, in the re-formation of an entire fresh-
water polyp out of one of the two halves into which it
had been divided. This artifice could surely not have been
learnt by natural selection, and here it appears impossible to
avoid the assumption of formative laws acting for a purpose.
They do not become more intelligible by the fact that the re-
generation of mutilated crystals, observed by Pasteur and
others, points to similar processes in inanimate nature." ^ We
are strongly reminded of crystallization when we study forami-
niferous shells. Here we have an innate law determining the
different markings, without any change of the environment.
Herbert Spencer recognizes a power of this kind in speaking
of the reproduction by budding of a begonia leaf. " We have
therefore no alternative but to say, that the living particles com-
posing one of these fragments, have an innate tendency to ar-
range themselves into the shape of the organism to which they
belong." 9

2. In the orderly propagation of the cell we see the inner
directive force in full control. The process never varies
whether the cell is an organism living its own free life, or
whether it is part of a larger number merely taking its share
in the life of the complex organism. A description of the
cell and its life history is given in a note in the Appendix, and
its properties are discussed in another chapter.^" Wilson tells
us that " there is at present no biological question of greater
moment than the means by which the individual cell-activities
are co-ordinated, and the organic unity of the body main-
tained." " It would be hard to find a more marvelous in-

^Reden, Vol. I, p. 211.

9 Principles of Biologv, Vol. I, § 65.
10 See Note J. and Chap. XII.
1^- The Cell in Development and Inheritance, p. 41.

8o Basic Ideas in Religion

stance of development controlled by immanent directive forces
than is shown by the cell. Many American evolutionists em-
phasize this inner growth as independent of changes in the
environment. Comparative embryology shows that the or-
ganism dominates cell formation, using for the purpose one or
many cells, massing its material and directing its movements
as if the cell existed only in subordination to its will. Whit-
man, for instance, says : " That organization precedes cell
formation and regulates it, rather than the reverse, is a con-
clusion that forces itself upon us from many sides. . . . The
organization of the egg is carried forward to the adult as an
unbroken physiological unity, or individuality, through all
modifications and transformations." ^^

3. In the last paragraph we have already passed into the
third of our analogies of the action of immanent life forces,
namely, the analogy from embryology. Huxley thus describes
the development of the embr}'o of a salamander:

" The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished
the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations ;
but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection,
perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of
a plant or of an animal from its embryo. Examine the re-
cently laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander
or a newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best micro-
scope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a
glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension. But strange pos-
sibilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moder-
ate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic
matter undergoes changes so rapid and yet so steady and pur-
poselike in their succession, that one can only compare them to
those operated by a skilled modeler upon a formless lump of
clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and sub-
divided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced
to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the
finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if
a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal

^2 Journal of Morphology, Vol. VIII, pp. 649, 657.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 8i

column, and moulded the contour of the body ; pinching up the
head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank
and limb into due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a
way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is al-
most involuntarily possessed by the notion, that some more
subtle aid to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden
artist, with his plan before him, striving with skillful manipu-
lation to perfect his work." ^^

But embryology seems to furnish more than mere analogy.
It has long been supposed to offer direct evidence of evolution,
in that the embryo appears to pass through successive forms
resembling lower species. As early as 1811, Meckel, an em-
bryologist, wrote : " There is no good physiologist who has
not been struck by the observation that the original form of all
organisms is one and the same, and that out of this one form,
all, the lowest as well as the highest, are developed in such a
manner that the latter pass through the permanent forms of
the former as transitory stages." ^* He tells us he is not the
first to observe this. Among the Greeks, Aristotle commented
on it. In speaking of embryology it must be remembered that
larvae are embryonic forms developing in the womb of nature.
Usually they pass through a decided metamorphosis before they
reach adult life, and they are always unable to propagate their
kind.

Von Baer established Meckel's principle more fully and the
" recapitulation theory," as it is called, is known by his name.
He made clear what has always been suggestive of evolution,
the remarkable resemblance between the embryos of different
types of the same group. In the embryo we see, as it were, the
evolutionary process condensed. Or as Haeckel puts it in
what he considers the " fundamental biogenetic law," ontogeny
(the development of the individual) is a shortened recapitula-
tion of phylogeny (the evolution of the race). Milnes Mar-
shall observes epigrammatically that the individual climbs up its
own genealogical tree. Of course such statements can only be

^^ Lay Sermons, pp. 260, i.

1* Quoted by Huxley, Evolution, Enc. Brit., 9th edit., Vol. VIII, p. 750.

82 Basic Ideas in Religion

taken in a general way, but one of the most recent works on
evolution states the case strongly : " There is no doubt that in
many cases the developing embryo pursues a strangely cir-
cuitous path instead of progressing straight towards it's goal,
and the only light that we can throw on many instances of this
circuitousness — when it is not adaptive to the peculiar condi-
tions of development — is the light from the past. The living
hand of the past is upon the embryo, constraining it to follow
the old route of its race, and often reasserting its power in
trivial details, even when a considerable short cut has been
made." ^^

The frog is an example of this embryonic repetition of pre-
sumed racial evolution. It lays its eggs on the surface of the
water and from them tadpoles emerge in due time, which like
fishes have gills and breathe their oxygen from the water.
Their nearest neighbor is the eft. That the tadpole is not a
true fish is shown in its inability to produce its kind. The inner
development continues for a time until lungs are formed.
Meanwhile legs have been growing and the tail is lost. Then
the tiny creature, jumping on the land, becomes a frog, an
air-breathing animal. Thus in the frog life an orderly evolu-
tion is accomplished before our eyes, and we see changes in a
few weeks which seem an epitome of a development lasting
long periods of years. There is no chance in the process, nor
any change in the environment. The whole vast transforma-
tion takes place from within.

As another illustration consider the pleuronectidse, a family of fishes
including the flounders, the halibut, the sole, etc. They rest and swim
on one side, with their eyes on top, as their manner of swintming seems
to require. However, as embryos these fish have their eyes on either
side of the body in normal position. Their body is then symmetrical
and they live near the surface. But at a certain point in development
the body loses its symmetry, a change of equilibrium sets in and they
begin to sink to the bottom where they afterwards live. Meanwhile the
eye on what is to be the lower side travels round the head, or even in
part through it, until both eyes are on the upper surface of the body.
All this seems to point quite plainly to the fact that the ancestors of

1° Geddes and Thomson, Evolution, p. 49.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 83

these fish were symmetrical and had different habits of life. One more
illustration will be sufficient. " A fish has a two-chambered heart, with
an auricle that receives impure blood from the body and a ventricle
that drives it to the gills. In amphibians the auricle is divided length-
wise by a partition, so that the heart becomes three-chambered. In
reptiles the ventricle is partially divided by a similar partition, and this
becomes complete in the case of the crocodile. In birds and mammals
the heart of the adult is four-chambered, with two auricles and two
ventricles. But when we inquire into the development of the heart of
the bird or of the mammal, we find a series of stages which are in a
general way parallel to the historical evolution of the heart as we see
it registered in the successive grades — fish, amphibian and reptile.
The same impression is to be gained from a study of the development
of the brain, the skull, the kidneys, and other organs. It seems to us
impossible to deny that there is in the stages of organogenesis (the
development of organs) some sort of repetition of the stages in the
evolution of organs. The embryo of a higher vertebrate has still in
some measure to recapitulate the steps taken by the developing of a
lower vertebrate ; and though we may say that this is an architectural
necessity, that the end could be reached in no other way, the facts seem
to press us to go further and say that something in the inheritance,
which is due to literal blood-relationship, compels the repetition." i*

Yet discretion is necessary in using this argument from embryology.
The ancestors of all living animals are dead, and the fossil remains are
too imperfect to be of much use. The resemblance is only between
embryonic stages, not between the adult of a lower series and the
embryo of a higher. The recapitulation is general and not exact, and
is seen more in the stages of the development of organs than in the
development of the organism as a whole. The organism has its own
individuality from the start, and never at any point is anything else than
its nature permits.

An interesting suggestion arises from this recapitulation
theory, that the whole process of evolution may be embry-
ological, and each species a continuous line of life, the succes-
sive forms being transient, larval stages in the predetermined
growth. On this view each true species forms, as it were, an
individual organism, whose life is measured by ages, and it
passes through successive forms, corresponding to the larvje of
a frog or butterfly, save that these forms propagate themselves,
decided changes taking place at certain stages through the inner

" Geddes and Thomson, Evolution, pp. 51, 2.

84 Basic Ideas in Religion

genetic force, in relation to the environment but not determined
by it.

This view is a far cry from Darwinism, yet one great school
of evolutionists is today insisting on it. Many men with their
own special theories make up this school, but in general the
following is a summary of their position. To them variation
seems to have taken place by leaps and bounds, with relatively
sudden transformations of the functional and structural equilib-
rium on a large scale. In regard to these transformations the
rule of the struggle for existence must be merely subsidiary.
This saltatory kind of evolution-process is neatly called " ka-
leidoscopic variation," because as the pictures in a kaleidoscope
change not gradually but by a sudden leap to an essentially new
pattern, so also do the forms of life. Such variation includes
a belief in the close connectedness of every part with the whole,
and in the strict correlation of all parts, so that variation in
one part is always simultaneously associated with variation in
many other parts, all being comprised in the " whole," which is
above and before all parts and determines them. Variation
seems predetermined and in a definite direction — an " ortho-
genesis " in fact, which is inherent in the organism, and which
is indifferent to utility or disadvantage, or natural selection, or
anything else, but simply follows its prescribed path in obe-
dience to innate law. Finally, there is a belief in the activity
and spontaneous power of adaptation and transformation in the
organism, and in the relative freedom of all things living,
which leads to a new study of the mysterious controlling force
in evolution — the secret of life itself.^^

It remains now to examine the evidence for this theory, and
'to note the authorities who support it. It depends on what
have been called discontinuous variations, or mutations, rather
than on fluctuating or ordinary variations. Few men are bet-
ter qualified to speak of this than Professor Bateson, who says :
" So far a presumption is created that the Discontinuity of
which Species is an expression has its origin, not in the en-
vironment, nor in any phenomenon of adaptation, but in the

I'' Condensed from Otto's Naturalism and Religion, pp. 143-145.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 85

intrinsic nature of organisms themselves, manifested in the
original Discontinuity of Variation. But this evidence serves
a double purpose. . . . The existence of sudden and discon-
tinuous Variation, the existence, that is to say, of new forms
having from their first beginning more or less of the kind
of perfection that we associate with normality, is a fact that
disposes, once and for all, of the attempt to interpret all per-
fection and definiteness of form as the work of Selection. The
study of Variation leads us into the presence of whole classes
of phenomena that are plainly incapable of such interpreta-
tion. ... It suggests in brief that the Discontinuity of Species
results from the Discontinuity of Variation. This suggestion
is in a word the one clear and positive indication borne on the
face of the facts." ^^

Darwin opposed the origin of species from strongly marked
variations, which he called " sports," on the ground that they
would be swamped by cross breeding. But since his day a
mass of observed facts has been growing to show that these are
the very variations which are most stable and able to establish
themselves. " De Vries brings forward, from his years of ex-
periment and horticultural observation, comprehensive evidence
of the mutational origin of new species from old ones by
leaps, and this not in long-past geological times, but in the
course of a human life and before our very eyes." ^^ The
record of the fossils is equally conclusive. This theory of
an ordained development along definite lines in which at cer-
tain points sudden changes, or leaps, take place, explains some
of the gaps in the ladder of descent. It is not that certain in-
termediate forms are missing because they were not preserved,
but that the animal never passed through those forms at all.
Von Baer held that many of the gaps may be due to the animal
having made leaps at such points. He never accepted the
monistic view that the whole series is a unit. Milnes Marshall
tells us that there are many cases of abrupt metamorphosis or
transitions which instead of being gradual are sudden. Nor

18 Materials for the Study of Variation, p. 567.
18 Otto, Naturalism and Religion, p. 173.

86 Basic Ideas in Religion

are these small jumps, but bounds forward of startling magni-
tude such as is seen in the sluggish caterpillar's change into
a dainty butterfly.-" Huxley said that Darwin hampered him-
self by his axiom, Natura non saltus fecit, for there is every
reason to think that she does sometimes make very considerable
leaps. George Darwin departs from his father's views.
" These considerations lead me to express a doubt whether
biologists have been correct in looking for continuous trans-
formation of species. Judging by analogy we should rather
expect to find slight continuous changes occurring during a long
period of time, followed by a somewhat sudden transformation
into a new species, or by rapid extinction." ^^ Quotations could
be multiplied, but a short list of names of those who hold the
theory of discontinuous variation or heterogenesis (the pro-
duction of forms unlike the parents) may suffice to show how
well supported it is. From Darwin's time on it has been held
by Bateson, von Baer, Dall, George Darwin, Cope, Dawson,
Delage, Eimer, Emery, Galton, Huxley, Hyatt, von Kolliker,
Korschinsky, Le Conte, Marshall, Morgan, and Scott.

Closely bound up with the question of variation is that of
heredity, for if the decided variations are not inheritable they
are manifestly of no use. As Professor Pearson observes,
" variation and inheritance rather precede than follow evolu-
tion ; they are at present one fundamental mystery of the vital
unit." "^ In what has been said above about variation, in-
heritance has been taken for granted, but it is well to examine
briefly the various theories of today. Darwin believed in the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, but in this his great
champion Weismann contradicts him, and so modifies Dar-
win's view that it is a wonder he can still claim to be a Dar-
winian. His theory cannot be more fully dealt with here than
to say that he believes that each one of the physical characters
of an organism, even down to hair, skin spots, etc., is repre-
sented by a tiny particle in groups of particles which make up

^^ Nature, Sept. ii, 1890.

21 Address at Capetown, 1905, to British Association for the Advance-
ment of Science.

22 Grammar of Science, p. 502.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 87

each chromatin grain in the nucleus of the germ cell. When
the parental nuclei coalesce there is a struggle between these
" detemiinants," and the new organism develops according to
the result of the struggle. When the embryo starts growing
a certain group of cells is set aside to form the germ cells of
the future. The rest are soma or body cells. No later changes
in the soma cells by use or disuse or the action of the environ-
ment are inheritable. It is those characteristics which are the
result of the congenital variation on which natural selection
operates in the struggle for existence. Weismann insists upon
the germinal origin of variations which are heritable, but con-
cedes that germinal variation may be given a particular direc-
tion by the environment. These variations may be at first
too slight to have selectional value, but by the persistent action
of the environment will be increased until selectional value is
attained. Further they will make their appearance not in an
occasional individual merely, as we should expect if they are
due to chance, but in so much of the race as is subjected to the
continuous action of the same environment. In taking this
position he attaches much less importance to natural selection
than a faithful Darwinian should do. Weismann's two great
contributions are the continuity of the germ plasm and the non-
inheritance of acquired characteristics. Otherwise his theory
seems too fine spun ever to be verified by observation.

In strong opposition to Weismann stand the Neo-Lamarck-
ians who bring up to date the views advocated in 1809 by La-
marck and in 1830 by St. Hilaire. They reject the slow natural
selection of the best among chance variations in which the
organism is practically passive, in favor of the exertion of the
organism to adjust itself to the environment through the use
and exercise of its various bodily organs and through the in-
creased efficiency of its physical and mental functions. What
one generation achieves as a result of its efforts in the way of
differentiation of structure, and in capacities and habits it
passes on to the next. In due time cumulative inheritance
yields fixed specific characters. Hand in hand with the phys-
ical changes has gone mental modification. The habits con-

88 Basic Ideas in Religion

nected with increased and more efficient use of an organ or
function have been transmitted by inheritance. Instinct is in-
herited habit that has become fixed. The Neo-Lamarckian
theory also calls for the reverse effect of the disuse of an organ.
Non-use leads to degeneration and brings about a change in the
characteristics of an organ. The environment directly affects
the organism by requiring the production of new activities and
groupings, and changes of form, and even of new organs. The
chief modern supporters of this view are Eimer, Kassowitz,
Haacke, Spencer, Packard, Osborn, Cope, Hyatt, Ryder and
Brooks.

The decision between the views of Weismann and other Neo-
Darwinians and the Neo-Lamarckians, between the non-inherit-
ance and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or a co-
ordination of these views, must rest with those who are study-
ing the problem by actual experiment and by the tabulation and
comparison of results. There are two groups studying the
problem from its two sides, the biometricians, who are measur-
ing and tabulating variations, and the Mendelians, who are ex-
perimenting with inheritance by cross breeding.

The great names of the former school are Francis Galton and Karl
Pearson. The habit of biologists has been to use the terms variation,
selection, elimination, correlation, etc., vaguely, but these new workers
ask for exactness of statement as to how much an organism varies, as
to how many are selected and eliminated, as to how much the correla-
tions are, and so forth. Enough has been done to yield some interest-
ing results. It has been shown that organisms tend to vary to a
degree that most biologists had not suspected, but that the normal
variations are grouped around a certain mean in such regularity that
they can be represented by a geometrical curve. If the registration of
similar material be kept up for years and there is a consistent increase
in asymmetry of the curve or tendency to skew out of the first posi-
tion, it must mean that the species is moving in a definite direction as
regards the particular character measured. Similarly if the curve be-
comes pronouncedly double-humped, it is a sign that the species is di-
viding into two species. Further, biometrics shows that variation in
any one character causes a correlated variation in other parts as well.
Thus the organism often changes as a unit in many parts at once.
Lastly evidence is slowly accumulating to show that organic structure
may pass abruptly from one position of equilibrium to another. So

Evolution in Relation to Theism 89

biometrics is supporting the mutational theory of the origin of species
by sudden leaps or discontinuous variations. Francis Galton com-
pared organic structure to a polygonal slab so constructed as to be able
to stand on any one of its sides. " The model and the organic struc-
ture have the cardinal fact in common, that if either is disturbed with-
out transgressing the range of its stability, it will tend to reestablish
itself, but if the range is overpassed it will topple over into a new
position; also that both of them are more likely to topple over towards
the position of primary stability, than away from it." ^s

The other great school of experimentalists is called Mendelian, after
the Austrian monk, Gregor Johann Mendel, who in 1865 published a
report on the experiments in pedigree culture of peas and other plants
in the garden of his cloister. His work passed unnoticed at the time,
but in 1900 his conclusions were reached independently and almost
simultaneously by De Vries in Holland, Correns in Germany, and
Tschermak in Austria. This led to a rediscovery of Mendel's paper,
and due credit was given the departed naturalist. His name will un-
doubtedly live forever in the annals of biological science, for his obser-
vations, experiments, and conclusions on inheritance have taken their
place as matters of fundamental importance in the study of heredity.
In addition to the names given above Bateson, Castle, and Cuenot should
be mentioned as prominent in this connection. Mendel's own experi-
ment may be taken as the example to illustrate the law he established.
He crossed a giant variety of the edible pea with a dwarf variety, and
the offspring were all tall. Evidently the character of tallness was
more powerful than shortness, and Mendel called it the " dominant " ;
and shortness the " recessive " character. This first generation was
allowed to self-fertilize, and the second generation had tails and
dwarfs on the average proportion of 3:1. The dwarfs of this genera-
tion never thereafter produced anything but dwarfs on self-fertiliza-
tion, while fifty per cent of the tails in the future always produced
tails. But the remaining tails were " impure," for the third generation
yielded tails and dwarfs on the proportion of 3:1. When this genera-
tion produced another the same law held good. Part were pure re-
cessives, part were pure dominants, and the remainder yielded tails and
dwarfs in the regular proportion.

Professor Punnett, who is a Mendelian investigator himself, states
the law thus : " Wherever there occurs a pair of differentiating char-
acters, of which one is dominant to the other, three possibilities exist:
there are recessives which always breed true to the recessive character :
there are dominants which breed true to the dominant character, and
are therefore pure : and thirdly, there are dominants which may be
called impure, and which, on self-fertilization (or inbreeding, where

23 Natural Inheritance, p. 27.

Basic Ideas in Religion

the sexes are separate) give both dominant and recessive forms in the
fixed proportion of three of the former to one of the latter." 2*
The law can be represented by a diagram thus :

Tall variety Dwarf variety

(i)

All offspring tall

(2) 25% Tall

(pure)

(3) Tails

50% Tall
(impure)

25% Dwarf
(pure)

(4) Tails

25% Tails 50% Tails 25% Dwarfs Dwarfs
(pure) (impure) (pure)

y 1 1 1 \

Tails 25% 50% 25% Dwarfs Dwarfs
Tails Tails Dwarfs
(pure) (impure) (pure)

These results have been proved many times in a great variety of
animals and plants with characteristics varying from horns in cattle to
the markings on leaves of plants. The theory is built upon the sup-
position that the germ cells carry these characters along with others in
the particles of which they are made up. To go back to the figure
given above, it is supposed that the first generation yields generative
cells or gametes which bear only one or the other of the contrasted or
alternative characters, not both. If the fertilization of these gametes
be fortuitous, cells with the dominant characteristic will conjugate with
others exactly similar and yield 25% of pure dominants, and the same
will be the case with cells having only the recessive character yielding
25% of pure recessives, but the remaining cells will mingle dominant
with recessive characters and yield 50% of impure dominants. The
following scheme will make it clear.

(D) >- (D) (DD) 25% pure dominants.

_(DR))
(DR))
(R) y (R) (RR) 25% pure recessives.

It must be noted that there are characters which blend on crossing,
e.g., mulattoes in whom color is blended, as well as these Mendelian
characters which stay separate, and the task before the Mendelians
is to study the two, and discover what is the criterion of blending
and alternating respectively. But this great fact the school has
established, that if a strong new character appears, it is not necessarily
lost in future breeding ; it cannot be " swamped," as Darwin feared.

■50% impure dominants.

^* Mcndeli-sm, p. 11.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 91

Thus a sound reason is given for the origin of species by discontinuous
variations or mutations, and for the progress of evolution by occasional
leaps rather than by small degrees.

Evidence is accumulating to show that species rise in two
ways, by the accumulation of fluctuations, as the biometricians
claim, or suddenly by mutation, as both the biometricians and
the Mendelians prove.

The environment is not the great factor in evolution that it
was once supposed to be. According to Darwin the environ-
ment changed pari passu with the variations, but his critics have
attacked this theory from the start. When the environment
changes it does so slowly, and the diverse conditions fade into
one another insensibly, whereas the evolving species, supposedly
dependent on its surroundings, forms rather a discontinuous
series, for, as we have seen, the new species often appear with
decided variations without transitional forms. The significance
of this fact is immense. The temperature, depth, salinity, etc.,
of the ocean are nearly stable, and have been for ages, and the
gradations are gradual and continuous, yet fishes differ widely.
Often species which belong to the same family and live under
identical conditions vary greatly. In the fossils we find that
of the Crustacea, one of the oldest forms of life, some have
eves and some have not. Deep sea dredging reveals the same
curious difference in living specimens from the sea bottom.
After millions of years some have developed eyes while others
remained blind, although the environment was the same for
both. Even decided changes in environment do not always
produce modifications to fit the animal to his new surroundings.
It used to be said that the blindness of fish in Mammoth Cave
was due to disuse of the eyes in the darkness, yet reptiles and
rats under the same conditions have fully developed eyes. Up-
land geese have the webbed feet of ducks though they never
swim. The water hen, on the other hand, lives habitually in
the water, but it has not developed webbed feet ; neither has
the water ousel, though it gets its food by diving. Darwin tells
us that many beetles in the Madeira Islands are practically wing-
less, because winds blew out to sea those able to fly, yet he

92 Basic Ideas in Religion

admits that in the same islands are other beetles which have
strong wings. Forms which we might consider unfit to sur-
vive do exist and thrive. But it would be a great mistake to
consider the environment as without effect, for an unfavorable
one will destroy forms rapidly. The problem really depends
on how much adaptation the individual organism can make to
any change. While it is important to remember that the funda-
mental characteristic of a living organism is its power of re-
sponse to surroundings, it must not be forgotten that the or-
ganism also varies while the environment remains the same.
The tendency today is to deprive the environment of most of
the credit it used to have as a factor in evolution.

If evolution were limited to the variation of a single organ
or function, environment might be responsible for more
than it evidently is. But one organ cannot vary with-
out affecting others. The whole is knit together in too
great complexity for the organism to act other than
as a unit. Thus since variation is a problem of corre-
lation, it is the more likely to have been caused by inner di-
rective life forces than by any external factors. Herbert
Spencer gives some striking illustrations of the greatness of
correlation.'^ The anatomical variations by which an animal
accustomed to regular movement over smooth ground is trans-
formed into one adapted to the work of leaping over rough
surfaces is not confined to changes in a single organ, but in-
volves coordinate changes in almost every part of the system.
The ability to leap like a kangaroo involves a striking develop-
ment not only in the length and strength of the bones of
the hind limbs, but in the articulation of the joints, and in the
development of the muscles. A change must take place not
only in one bone and one set of muscles, but in all the bones of
the hinder extremities simultaneously. Not only must the
long bones and their coordinate muscles by which the bones
are suddenly lengthened for a leap be properly modified, but
the bones of the toes which sustain the reaction of the leap and
their coordinate muscles must be correspondingly modified.

'^'^ Principles of Biology, §§ 69, 155, 166.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 93

Otherwise there will be no fulcrum for the increased exertion
to act upon. Thus without counting the changes which would
be required in the pelvis as well as in the nerves and blood
vessels, there are, counting bones, muscles, tendons, and liga-
ments, at least fifty different parts in each hind leg which have
to be enlarged. Moreover, they have to be enlarged in unlike
degrees. The muscles and tendons of the outer toes, for ex-
ample, need not be added to so much as those of the median
toes.

Professor Roux of Switzerland insists that the changes in
structure must have an inner cause. It is impossible that the
innumerable adaptations carried out into the finest detail, which
accompany variations, should all have been of immediate use
to the special variety and hence preserved by natural selection.
Are we seriously asked to believe, is his inquiry, that a slight
alteration in the direction of the fibers of one of the tendons,
or the angle which a small artery makes with the larger one it
springs from, would determine the survival of an individual?

Evolution, then, according to most modern ideas proceeds
steadily by accumulation of variations or by great leaps at inter-
vals, while the environment plays only a secondary part. It
remains to be seen whether it is an orderly development, or
merely a matter of chance. The answer to this question brings
us into ground where many theories are being formed. Dar-
win's natural selection has been proved inadequate as a species-
forming factor, but in its place no one theory has as yet won
recognition. The scientific world must wait until more ob-
servation and experimentation has taken place. There is no
question, however, that the trend of opinion is away from any
idea of haphazard evolution to the conception of development
along definite lines. This conception is necessary if we are to
explain the fluctuating variation which seems to persist in one
direction, until new useful organs arise, or if we are to account
for the steady development along lines plainly disadvantageous.
After a time variations that had resulted in the rapid de-
velopment of a species along a particular line cease, leaving
the newly formed species fixed, unless another period of

94 Basic Ideas in Religion

marked variation were to appear. This alone explains the
striking fact of the survival to our own day of many primitive
forms, unchanged amid a changed environment. Finally, the
need of a theory of rapid development on fixed lines is neces-
sary to bring the evolution of the organic world within the
time during which life has existed on the earth. The physi-
cists have ruthlessly cut down the infinite length of time the
earliest evolutionists complacently assumed they had at their
disposal. As De Vries states the present position in this re-
gard : " The deductions made by Lord Kelvin and others
from the central heat of the earth, from the rate of the pro-
duction of the calcareous deposits, from the increase of the
amount of salt in the water of the seas, and from various other
sources, indicate an age for the inhabitable surface of the
earth of some millions of years only. The most probable esti-
mates lie between twenty and forty millions of years. The
evolutionists of the gradual line, however, have supposed many
thousands of millions of years to be the smallest amount that
would account for the whole range of evolution, from the
very beginning until the appearance of mankind. This large
discrepancy has always been a source of doubt and a weapon
in the hands of opponents of the evolutionary idea. The theory
of descent had to be remoulded." -"

The name orthogenesis is given to this theory of determinate varia-
tion and evolutionary progress along fixed lines. It may be urged that
Natural Selection gives progress along definite lines, but for this the
name orthoselection has been coined. The two views differ radically.
In orthoselection definite lines of progress are fixed by eradication.
Variation may be wholly fortuitous, but selection permits only certain
kinds of variation to persist and accumulate. On the other hand, in
orthogenesis the variations themselves, and hence the lines of modifi-
cation, are predetermined. There are two main theories of ortho-
genesis, representing two radically different points of view. The
men who offer them are Eimer and Nageli. The former considers that
orthogenesis is produced and controlled by the external factors of en-
vironment working directly on the organism, while the latter holds that
orthogenesis is the result of a somewhat mystical inner life-force.

28 The Evidence of Evolution. Science. Vol. XX, pp. 395-401.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 95

Eimer, following the example of the great Darwin, did not propound
his theory until after long years of specific observation and study of the
facts concerning certain lizards and birds, and especially the wing-
patterns of two large groups of butterflies. He finds that the lines of
evolution, or modification of organisms, occur according to control
along a few definite directions. It is the result of the inheritance of
acquired characters which determines these lines of change, and the
acquiring of new characters depends on the effects of external in-
fluences, chniate, nutrition, etc., and on the given constitution of the
organism. But though stimulated and caused by the environment,
variation and evolution only occur according to the laws of organic
growth which differ with each organism. A few general lines of evolu-
tion result, from which occasional branches are given off, like the
familiar genealogical evolution tree. Geographical isolation helps
greatly, and in this case some efficacy might be attributed to natural
selection. But the actual forming of species, he finds, depends on three
chief factors ; one, a standing still or cessation of development,
another, a sudden development by leaps (with which compare the later
heterogenesis theory of De Vries treated above), and third, a hindrance
or difficulty in reproduction (which is the essential factor in the theory
of physiological selection which Romanes later proposed). Of the three
species forming factors he attributes most value to the first. Certain
forms stand still at definite stages in the development line, while others
go on. They are dropped out as it were, and do not develop further.
Thus we can have in the same region a series of distinct forms, all
related chainwise though living simultaneously. But Eimer will not
recognize the " dominant inner factor ever pushing toward advance," as
he characterizes Nageli's view, because of the numerous recessive
structures he sees. He writes : " This tendency to progress based on
the assumption of ' inner growth laws ' contradicts flatly the assumption
of outer influences as causes of change. . . . And it is my belief that it
is precisely these outer influences, and the physiological phenomena de-
pendent on them, which are the determining factors in the phyletic
(race) development just as they are in individual development." 27
Eimer has many followers, though they do not accept his theory in all
its details. The most important are W. Haacke, Reinke, R. Hertwig,
O. Hertwig, Wiesner, Hamann, Dreyer, Wolff, Goette, Kassowitz,
V. Wettstein, and Korschinsky.

Before taking up Nageli's theory let us note that many of the recog-
nized American palseontologists, such as Osborn, Williston, Hyatt,
Smith, and Cope, along with Whitman, the Nestor of American zoolo-
gists, all say they find evidence for orthogenetic variation and descent.^s

27 Quoted by Kellogg, Darwinism To-day, p. 285. 28 /^i^/.^ p, 288.

96 Basic Ideas in Religion

Of these Cope has most definitely worked out a theory, which we may
note in passing. The course of evolution seems to him to imply the
existence of an originative, conscious, and directive force. He recog-
nizes three orthogenetic factors, a growth force, which he calls " bath-
mism," the direct effect of use and disuse of the environment, and the
influence of primitive consciousness. This last is most unique. He
claims that " conscious states have preceded organisms in time and
evolution." " Energy become automatic is no longer conscious, or is
about to become unconscious."

Nageli holds with Weismann to the immortality of the germ plasm,
or "ideo-plasm" as he calls it. In this he finds the continuity neces-
sary for the working out of his vitalistic laws for development. He
writes : " Since ideo-plasm alone is transmitted from one individual
life to the next following, the race development consists solely in the
continual progress of the ideo-plasm, and the whole genealogical tree
from the primordial drop of plasma up to the organism of the present
day (plant or animal) is, strictly speaking, nothing else than an indi-
vidual consisting of ideo-plasm, which at each ontogeny forms a new
individual body, corresponding to its advance." 29 The ideo-plasm of
any one generation is not exactly identical with that of either its pro-
genitors or its progeny, it is always increasing in complexity with the
result that each successive generation marks an advance upon
its predecessor. But unlike Weismann, Nageli does not confine
his germ cells in one place out of all relation to the body
cells, but spreads them throughout the body in a sort of net-
work of primitive protoplasm. The ideo-plasm is formed at first
in scattered bits in the rest of the protoplasmic mass, but as
these bits increase they join and become united in a network
surrounded by and containing in its meshes the body plasm. This
ramifying, stimulus-carrying network contains the essential life prop-
erties, and gives rise to life with all its variety and complexity. His
theory of orthogenesis depends on the assumption of " a principle of
progressive development, a something inherent in the organic world
which makes each organism in itself a force or factor making towards
specialization and adaptation, that is towards progressive evolution. . . .
Nageli believes that animals and plants would have developed about
as they have even had no struggle for existence taken place, and the
climatic and geological conditions and changes been quite different
from what they actually have been." Other writers call this factor
" inner directive force," " inner law of development," " intrinsic tend-
ency towards progress," etc., which is to say that organic evolution has
been and is now ruled by unknown inner forces inherent in organisms,

'^^ Summary of Theory of Organic Evolution, § 16.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 97

and has been independent of the influence of the outer world. The
lines of evolution on this view are immanent, unchangeable, and ever
slowly stretch towards some teleological goal.^o

The belief in some sort of mysterious life force and spon-
taneous activity in organisms is the characteristic of most recent
anti-Darwinian views. In the able hands of the modern
French philosopher, Bergson, w'ho brings to his philosophy a
wealth of scientific information, this life force is the secret of
the whole problem of evolution. The great super-physical
supply of vitality pours itself out in various forms, each ac-
cumulating ever fuller volume of free creative activity. But
they have no goal other than their own self-augmentation, for
teleology is excluded from his system, and the forces, while
they press the forms of life forward in unvarying lines, are
blind and unguided. He looks upon the universe as having a
creation consciousness behind it that is ever struggling with
matter in an evolutionary process. Thus life with its dura-
tional and temporal conditions is " voluntary," and as life
evolves in its struggle with matter, it becomes so more and
more distinctly. No less brilliant in his exposition and
illustration, is Driesch, a great biologist, in his writings on the
life force, or vitalism. He differs radically from Bergson in
this question of purpose. He is, of all modem investigators,
perhaps the one who has most persistently and thoroughly
worked out the problem of causal and teleological interpreta-
tion. The teleological seems to him itself a factor playing a
part in the chain of causes. The keynote of all is to him the
entelechy of Aristotle,

So much for the scientific side of evolution. How then may
the theist view the process? Professor Otto after a careful re-
view of post-Darwinian theories concludes : " All this implies
an admission of evolution and of descent, but a setting aside
of Darwinianism proper as an unsuccessful hypothesis, and a
positive recognition of an endeavor after an aim, internal causes,
and teleology in nature, as against fortuitous and superficial
factors. This opens up a vista into the background of things,

so See Kellogg, Darwinism To-day, pp. 277, 8.

98 Basic Ideas in Religion

and thereby yields to the religious conception all that a study
of nature can yield — namely, an acknowledgment of the possi-
bility and the legitimacy of interpretating the world in a re-
ligious sense, and assistance in so doing. ... A world which
in its evolution is not exposed, for good or ill, to the action
of chance factors — playing with it and forcing it hither and
thither — but which, exposed indeed to the most diverse con-
ditions of existence and their influences, and harmonizing with
them, nevertheless carries implicitly and infallibly within it-
self the laws of its own expression, and especially the necessity
to develop upward into higher and higher forms, is expressly
suited for teleological consideration, and we can understand
how it is that the old physico-teleological evidences of the ex-
istence of God are beginning to hold up their heads again.
They are wrong when they try to demonstrate God, but quite
right when they simply seek to show that nature does not con-
tradict — in fact that it allows room and validity to — belief in
the Highest Wisdom as the cause and guide of all things
natural." ^^

When the majority of the naturalists are coming to see in
evolution a definitely controlled movement wathin regular
lines, what right have they to prohibit the theistic thinker to
see the immanent, indwelling control of Divine Energy guiding
all to a predetermined goal? Needless to say but few biolo-
gists confess to such a belief, for the spirit of science is always
against the assumption of a mystic, divine vital force to explain
things it cannot understand. It always hopes that further ob-
servation and study will yield some new physico-chemical
forces which will explain all naturally. But the scientist cannot
prohibit the theist from having his own interpretation of na-
ture's facts. As was suggested earlier in this discussion, the
universe has two sides, the physical which is visible to the
senses, and the spiritual which is open to those who have eyes
to see the mysteries of God. On this latter side we see the
forces which are back of the laws of nature, and realize that
the Divine Energy is at the heart of things, guiding and over-
si Naturalism and Religion, pp. 184-186.

Evolution in Relation to Theism 99

ruling the whole process of continuous creation by definite
modifications through immanent directive and formative forces
which work in harmony with the environment and gradually
embody the type of species in final form. Later on more will
be said of the meaning of Divine Immanence,^^ but for the
present it will be sufficient to echo the opinion of John Fiske,
frequently expressed in his later years, that the doctrine of evo-
lution makes God our constant refuge and support, and nature
His true revelation ; and when all its religious implications shall
have been set forth, it will be seen to be the most potent ally
that Christianity has ever had in elevating mankind.

We prefer to think that the organic evolution process has
attained its end. As far back as human history goes there
have been no great changes in species, save such as are due to
man's wonderful power of domestication of wild forms of
plant and animal life, showing himself in this to be the lord
of creation, able to bend all organic nature to his use. The
earth in becoming fit for human habitation has reached its
goal. And with this the veteran evolutionist, Alfred Russell
Wallace, agrees in his latest book The World of Life: " In
the present work I recur to the subject after forty years of
further reflection, and I now uphold the doctrine that not man
alone, but the whole World of Life, in almost all its varied mani-
festations, leads us to the same conclusion — that to afford any
rational explanation of its phenomena, we require to postulate
the continuous action and guidance of higher intelligences ;
and further, that these have probably been working toward a
single end, the development of intellectual, moral and spiritual
beings." ^^

(In the Appendix, Note K, is given a discussion of Instinct,
which is one of the most perplexing questions with which the
evolutionist has to deal.)

^- See Chap. X.
33 Pp. 340-1.

CHAPTER VI
THE WITNESS OF THE INTELLECT

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

We turn now from the world of matter to the world of
spirit. The Anthropological Argument, which is the last of
the " proofs " of God by reasoning, or the Witness of the In-
tellect, is founded not on the observation of nature, but on the
contemplation of the inner world of personality. We argue by
direct inference from our own consciousness of self, freedom,
and duty to personality and moral character in our Maker,
attributes which nature does not reveal at all. These affirma-
tions of consciousness are as certain and as valid as the
phenomena of sensation, and offer the highest basis for the
conception of Deity. As He cannot be material, we must
logically think of Him in terms of consciousness, not of sensa-
tion ; under psychical and spiritual, not physical and material
analogies ; as free spirit, not mechanical force.

It is worth while in passing to note how St. Paul separates
this argument from the cosmological. In Rom. i : 19, 20 he
tells us that nature reveals the divinity of God in might and
power, while in 2:14-16 he deals with the witness of con-
science, the divine law written on the heart, to the spirit and
character of God. So Bacon making the same distinction de-
fines Natural Theology to be " that knowledge or rudiment of
knowledge concerning God, which may be obtained by the con-
templation of His creatures," and adds, " no light of nature ex-
tendeth to declare the will and true worship of God." ^ Wil-
liam James comments, " If there be a divine Spirit of the Uni-
verse, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its tdti-

^ Advancement of Knowledge, Bk. II, § 12.

100

The Anthropological Argument loi

mate tvord to man." ^ That this is true is evident from the
fact that we actually dare to judge Nature. We interpret her
in terms of our own highest thought. This conscious
superiority to the material universe cannot be without signifi-
cance.

That man has a higher self than his material being has
always been recognized. The word man itself is derived
from the Indo-Germanic " men-," which means " to think."
Origen (whose views were strongly dualistic) in using the
word man comments, " I mean a soul using a body." ^ This re-
minds one of Hamilton's definition that man is not an organism,
but an intelligence served by organs.* Locke gives the argu-
ment in its old form on the intellectual side, and calls it a
demonstration, because it is so simple and direct that he treats
it as almost self-evident, an intuitive inference. He argues,
I am a thinking being, therefore, the eternal something which
is the source of my being must be a thinking Being also ; for it
is impossible that what is itself wholly void of knowledge and
operates blindly without perception of its own action, could
produce such a being as I am.^

This argument from man's powers to God's is as primitive
and universal as the teleological. Men have ever believed in a
personal God and felt that He could not be less than themselves.
When they began to look within at their own natures they
thought of God as like unto themselves on their higher side
of mind and will and character. This was the prophet's mes-
sage to Israel when she inclined to the pagan idea of God as a
Power, often evil, or at least hard and unfeeling, to be wor-
shiped by vile rites. The God they revealed to the erring
nation was holy, righteous, and loving.

The argument is criticised on two grounds, ( i ) because it is
anthropomorphic, and (2) because it is thought to make an
unwarranted use of the law of efficient causation.

^International Journal of Ethics, Oct., 1895.

^Contra Celsiis 7:38 (avOpwiros , . . Tovreari ^pvxv XP^f^^^V (Tcifiari),

* Lectures on Metaphysics, p. 21.

^ Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk. IV, ch. 10, §§ 1-6.

I02 Basic Ideas in Religion

I. "It is manifest anthropomorphism, a conceiving the Infi-
nite in terms of human experience." But the same objection
appHes to any conception of this Infinite One whatever, since
all our thinking is under human conditions. We can only think
of the Divine Being and His action under three human analo-
gies— physical force, acting mechanically from without; life,
the teleological and immanent but unconscious force in organ-
isms; and self-conscious will-power or personality.*' The last
is undoubtedly the highest and truest, yet it has become the
fashion to sneer at such a conception of God. We are for-
bidden to pass from the external study of nature to the inner
study of man and those elements which lift him above the
brutes. Herbert Spencer is just as anthropomorphic as any
theistic thinker. As the idea of physical force comes from our
consciousness of effort and power, his definition of " the Un-
knowable " in terms of energy is as anthropomorphic as is our
conception of God as personal. In thinking of God we should
use all the elements of our consciousness and not simply those
connected with matter. If we are denied this we might as well
say we cannot think of God at all.

Men have always felt that Deity must possess in perfection
all our highest qualities. The real error is not the thinking of
God in terms of our noblest thought, for we cannot think of
Him in any other way, but the thinking that He is altogether
such an one as ourselves. The Christian point of view is not
so much that God is anthropomorphic, but that man is theo-
morphic, made in God's image, and therefore the best symbol
of God. This was St. Paul's teaching at Athens. He for-
bids our making images of human bodies to represent God, but
bids us think of ourselves as like Him in spirit. " Being then
the off'spring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is
like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and device of
man." '

Xenophanes makes the same distinction in his oft-quoted
words: " If oxen and horses had hands and fingers like ours.

" Abbott, Through Nature to Christ, p. 45.
'Acts 17:27-29.

The Anthropological Argument 103

then would they paint and fashion the forms of their gods and
give them bodies like their own, horse like unto horses, and
oxen to oxen." But he also added the words expressing the
inner likeness to us, which are not so often quoted : " God is
all sight, all ear, all mind, wholly exempt from toil. He sways
all things by thought and will." This reference to " thought
and will " qualifies his broad opening statement : " One God
there is, mightiest among gods and men, who neither in form
nor thought is like to men." ®

Oliver Lodge contends that the method of reasoning em-
ployed in the anthropological argument is legitimate : *' The
inference or deduction of some of the attributes of Deity, from
that which we can recognize as ' the likest God within the soul,'
is a legitimate deduction, if properly carried out; and it is in
correspondence with the methods of physical science. ... To
suppose that the deduction of divine attributes by intensifica-
tion of our own attributes must necessarily result in a ' magni-
fied non-natural man ' is to forget the facts of physical science.
If the reasoning is bad, or the data insufficient, the result is
worthless, but the method is legitimate, though far from
easy. ^

2. The Anthropological Argument is the expression of an
intuitive judgment called by Leibnitz the Law of the Sufficient
Reason, that the cause must potentially contain the effect, and
that both must be alike, i.e., homogenous, on the same plane
of action or existence. Some consistent Empiricists attempt
to discredit the argument by denying its main premise, the
likeness between cause and effect. They put their objection
in terms of apparent humility, and ask whether the ephemeral
experiences of such a petty race of creatures as man furnish
any adequate idea of the Absolute One in whom all the possi-
bilities of being are comprehended. But we do not claim that
our ideas are " adequate," only that they are true by analogy
as far as they go. One thing is certain, God cannot be less
than man.

8 Ritter's History of Ancient Philosophy, Vol. I, pp. 432-4-
° Hibbert Journal, Jan., 1903, pp. 216, 7.

104 Basic Ideas in Religion

Mill boldly affirmed that the Law of the Sufficient Rea-
son is an a priori fallacy, because we constantly imagine
a likeness between a cause and effect which does not exist.
He, however, misstates the law, making it read " that the con-
ditions of a phenomenon must, or at least probably will, re-
semble the phenomenon itself." ^^ He thus produces confusion
by speaking of " resemblances," and blames the law, as con-
ceived by him, for some of the extravagances of the past as,
for instance, the doctrine of signatures of the Middle
Ages when an herb or animal organ was administered
to a patient because some external characteristic of it
resembled the diseased condition or organ. Thus the brilliant
yellow color of tumeric indicated it as a cure for jaundice.
He thinks that the same fallacious way of arguing, more
scientifically phrased, is continued today. But inasmuch as
he has misstated the law, his objections are without weight.
Besides this he does not admit any force but mechanical force.
Biological force, psychical force, and will power all fall under
his ban, hence the inadequacy of his attitude toward cause and
effect.'^

This line of evidence is often called the Moral Argument,
but it is more properly designated the Anthropological, for it
embraces other elements in consciousness besides conscience.
Human personality is three-fold; self-consciousness, I am I ;
self-determination, I will ; and right-determination, I ought.
These are the primary and universal elements in all thought and
action. All language expresses them, all history embodies
them. In reasoning from the personality of man to the person-
ality of God the argument naturally falls into three divisions;
(i) the witness of self-consciousness, (2) the witness of free-
dom of action, and (3) the witness of conscience to the nature
of God.

10 Logic, Bk. V, Chap. 3, § 8.

11 See Note L.

The Anthropological Argument 105

I. Self-Consciousness : Personality

Self-consciousness is the knowledge by the mind of itself as
the permanent and indivisible subject of its own operations.
Even those who deny personality accept the self-knowledge of
it as a fact of consciousness. Spencer tells us that personality
is a fact of which every man is conscious, a fact beyond all
others most certain. Yet he, and others of his school, because
they cannot understand it or express it in terms of sensation,
tell us that it is a delusion and not possible in the nature of
things. But this is no argument against personality. On the
contrary the ineradicable conviction of personal identity in
every man's consciousness is a real fact of the spiritual world,
not something that can be interpreted by the terms of matter.
Personality can be expressed only in spiritual terms. It is the
deepest fact in all experience, and one which we must use in
interpretation of other beings like ourselves. As Carlyle says,
" Believe it thou must, understand it thou canst not."

The chief basal elements of personality are self-conscious-
ness and self-identity. '' I know myself," and " I am I." This
dual consciousness is a mystery beyond our grasp. The ego is
the unifying element of thinker and thing thought. No expe-
rience is possible apart from its unifying power, which brings
all experiences into mutual relation as concerning one subject,
and holds them united in the strange power of memory. Man
thinks, wills, and acts, but the central fact of which all these
are but so many partial aspects is the fact that he is a self and
knows himself. IMansell warns us of the difficulty we expe-
rience in expressing this conception, " This self-personality,
like all other simple and immediate presentations, is indefinable ;
but it is so because it is superior to definition. It can be
analyzed into no simpler elements, for it is the simplest of all ;
it can be made no clearer by description or comparison, for it is
revealed to us in all the clearness of an original intuition, of
which description and comparison can furnish only faint and
partial resemblances." ^-

^^ Prolegomena Logica, p. 123.

io6 Basic Ideas in Religion

Our self-consciousness demands a ground and cause which
cannot be less, but must be more, than we are in consciousness.
No movement of thought is more direct than the affirmation
that the Power back of the world and ourselves must be per-
sonal, i.e., must be self-conscious and know Himself as unity.
He must be able to speak of Himself as " I." God of course
transcends man infinitely ; but this qualification does not destroy
the reality of His being a person, it merely affirms that He is
the transcendent Person. In conceiving God as personal we
do not drag Him down out of His mystery, within reach of
our understanding, for our personality is itself a baffling mys-
tery. We believe profoundly that our personality is finite and
limited ; God's is infinite and perfect. But " infinity " cannot
change a quality into its opposite, e.g., personality into imper-
sonality, which is not a higher but a lower conception. All at-
tempts to make God supra-personal, " higher than conscious-
ness," result in making Him infra-personal, a Being who does
not know that He is Himself. If the Infinite and Eternal
Energy does not know itself, but wills blindly and wildly, not
knowing what it wills, and works unconscious of itself and its
end in working, then it is not a higher being than ourselves, but
a lower. As each man has an inner center of consciousness
hidden from others, which looks on its own motives and
thoughts, so God must be a self-conscious Being, a Mind whose
depths no finite being can penetrate, but of which He can make
known as much as He wills, just as we make our thoughts
known to our fellows. The pantheistic talk about a spirit
higher than personality, is a contradiction in terms. An " im-
personal spirit " is equivalent to an impersonal person. We
might as well talk of a triangle with four sides, or a quadruped
with only two legs. Spirit without personality is simply subli-
mated " force," as the Left Wing of the Hegelians have rightly
insisted.

To the old objection that all this is to make the Infinite One
a mere magnified man, we answer that it is at least a whole

The Anthropological Argument 107

man we magnify, and not some isolated part of a man, like
Spencer's bare Force, or Schopenhauer's Will minus Con-
sciousness, or V"on Hartman's Idea which works to a definite
aim intelligently but in entire unconsciousness, or Matthew
Arnold's Power making for Righteousness, but is not righteous
itself — all barren abstractions drawn from portions of our
experience, which have no counterpart in real life; for man is
a unity, and acts as a person. Romanes says that " to speak of
the Religion of the Unknowable, the Religion of Cosmism, the
Religion of Humanity, and so forth, where the personality of
the First Cause is not recognized, is as unmeaning as it would
be to speak of the love of a triangle, or the rationality of the
equator. . . . Humanity, for example, is an abstract idea of
our own making: it is not an object any more than the equator
is an object. . . . The distinguishing feature of any theory
which can properly be termed a Religion, is that it should refer
to the ultimate source, or sources of things : and that it should
suppose this source to be of an objective, intelligent, and per-
sonal nature. To apply the term Religion to any other theory
is merely to abuse it." ^^

Fiske reminds us of the inadequacy of a vocabulary forged
on the anvil of material experience. '' Words which have
gained their meanings from finite experience of finite objects
of thought must inevitably falter and fail when we seek to apply
them to that which is Infinite. But we do not mend matters
by employing terms taken from the inorganic world rather
than from human personality. To designate the universal
Power by some scientific term, such as Force, does not help us
in the least. All our experience of force is an experience of
finite forces antagonized by other forces. We can frame no
conception whatever of Infinite Force comprising within itself
all the myriad antagonistic attractions and repulsions of which
the dynamic universe consists. We go beyond our knowledge
when we speak of Infinite Force quite as much as we do when
we speak of Infinite Personality. Indeed, no word or phrase

13 Thoughts on Religion, pp. 41-43.

io8 Basic Ideas in Religion

which we seek to apply to Deity can be other than an extremely
inadequate and unsatisfactory symbol. From the very nature
of the case it must always be so, and if we once understand
the reason why, it need not vex or puzzle us." He proceeds
to show that, however inadequate our language, we must con-
vey the idea of personality in God if we are to understand the
spiritual environment in which man's spiritual instinct finds its
source and answer. " Take away from our notion of God the
human element, and the theism instantly vanishes ; it ceases to
be a notion of God. We may retain an abstract symbol to
which we apply some such epithet as Force, or Energy, or
Power, but there is nothing theistic in this. Some ingenious
philosopher may try to persuade us to the contrary, but the
Human Soul knows better; it knows at least what it wants; it
has asked for Theology, not for Dynamics, and it resents all
such attempts to palm off upon it stones for bread." ^*

The denial of God's personality is so common in the popular
mind today that it must be referred to here, though the full
discussion of it belongs to Pantheism and Agnosticism. Such
philosophers as Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Von Hartman, and
Spencer tell us that to think of God in terms of personality,
consciousness, and will, is to limit His infinite Being. It
sounds reverent to tell us to beware of limiting God, but the
law of the excluded middle leaves us no alternative. God is
either personal in the highest sense, or not personal. To
affirm that self-consciousness, identity, freedom, and moral
character are limitations of being, is to affirm on the other
hand that unconsciousness, ignorance of self, absence of will
and power to act are not limitations of being — an idea which
we know to be absurd. We know by contrast of ourselves with
mechanical force and animal life, that these qualities enlarge
and exalt our being. The attributes of personality are not
limitations, but liberations from the fetters of mechanical law
and animal instinctive life. Here centers the conflict of

1* Through Nature to God, pp. 158, 9 and 166.

The Anthropological Argument 109

philosophy with theology. The philosophic deity of pure ab-
straction has no significance whatever for religion. The
anthropomorphic God is the only God whom men can worship
and serve.

It is only the purely physical student, who has forgotten or
lost himself in the study of things, who can seriously entertain
thoughts of God's impersonality. It is a question not of science
or of logic, but the deeper one of our estimate of the
value of mind, of the worth of personality. On the physical
side our insignificance beggars- description; what were Plato
and Kant, Dante and Shakespeare, Caesar and Washington, but
so many pounds of earth organized for a brief space into liv-
ing bodies and then crumbling into dust to fertilize the soil?
Some people are struck dumb by the overwhelming contrast be-
tween such specks of " matter " and the vast globes and in-
finite spaces of the universe. But at what are we appalled?
At our own powers ! The cosmos is our own discovery. The
mind of man has penetrated into its remotest corners and
wrung from it its secrets. Such a discovery is a revelation
of the spiritual greatness of the discoverer. Man invents
the telescope which reveals starry clusters of untold systems,
but none is so great a wonder as the mind's eye at the other
end of the instrument which interprets the specks of light.
To human thought no depths of time or space are obstacles.
It penetrates distances so great that our algebraic symbols can
barely express them, and passes backward or forward over
infinite periods of time, at home in all. Man's body is sub-
ject to the laws of matter, but the fact that he knows those
laws, and can use them for his own ends, shows that he tran-
scends their limitations.

The universe dwarfs us only on one side, and that the
lowest, our body. In every other respect we look down upon
it. Mind has no magnitude, but it has worth and dignity.
Material size and moral excellence are not comparable. The
smallest expression of personality is greater in worth than the
vastest physical aggregation. Isaac Watts wrote long ago:

no Basic Ideas in Religion

" Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul ;
The mind's the standard of the man." ^^

Pascal placed man's greatness precisely in the fact that, while
the powers of nature crush him in a moment, he knows him-
self and the world ; he dies, but he knows that he is dying, and
looks beyond death to a larger life.

It is science which gives us the faith in progress. It shows
a steady movement which culminates in man as its head ; but a
head so peculiar and different from all that goes before it,
that we feel that while man is the end of the development, he
is not wholly of it, but rises, as Le Conte and Wallace and
Fiske hold, above it, though out of it. Most evolutionists
agree that man is the final form — no higher being will appear
on earth " in the flesh." But is he the final form, in the sense
that life not only culminates in him but ends with him, that
in a few millenniums as the earth grows cold the retrograde
devolution will sweep humanity off the globe into nothingness,
as ruthlessly as it has destroyed all preceding dynasties of liv-
ing things ? Man has risen through the brute, from matter to
spirit. Each advance in the process has been an advance in
quality of life, not in mere strength or bodily vigor, but in re-
finement of organization and development of mind. If the
age-long movements end in a being, who knows himself and
knows God, and if, having reached the highest point, man-
kind is hurled back into the dust, till the race disappears utterly,
then the whole process is a bitter and cynical delusion. Even
Omar Khayyam recoiled from the thought of a God who would
so stultify himself :

" Ne'er a peevish Boy

Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy;
And He that with his hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in After Wrath destroy.""

1"* Home Lyricae, Bk. II, True Greatness.
^^Rubdiydt, LXXXV.

The Anthropological Argiiment iii

If, as our reason suggests, the entire upward movement of
evolution is a gradual disclosure of supreme reality, if the
successive stages of the ascending scale of being form a pro-
gressive manifestation, and if in that manifestation the richest
in significance is human life, and if human life finds its full
expression only in personality, then are we driven to the thought
that personality, the consummation of the whole process, must
form our deepest clue to the nature of God. The evolution
which culminates in human personality points beyond itself to
a final revelation of the Divine Personality. Men have always
found God most clearly and deeply by looking within and
not without, by withdrawing " into the temple cave of their
own selves."

In the very deepest truth God and man stand and fall
together, because in the same degree as we appreciate our own
personality do we appreciate God. Wliere personality is weak-
ened or denied the sense of duty is undermined. The strong
men of the world have shown this in their sense of personality.
Csesar said to the men in the skifif, " You carry Julius Caesar ;
do not be afraid, my work is not yet done."

II. Freedom of Action
The human will is not a " faculty " of the mind, as the old
psychology taught. It is rather the immediate expression of
the whole personality. It is the self, deliberating, choosing
and acting on its own motion. Kant makes freedom the dif-
ferentia of man in distinction from things which float help-
less in the fixed sequences of causes and efifects in nature.
He says that will is a kind of causality belonging to rational
beings, and freedom is the property of that causality which
enables them to be efficient agents, independent of determina-
tion by outside forces. On the other hand, necessity is that
property of irrational things which consists in their being de-
termined to movement by outer causes. The essential differ-
ence between persons and things lies in this point of free inner
action.^^ The consciousness of will and the power to produce

^''Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, § III.

112 Basic Ideas in Religion

movement by action is one of the earliest and profoundest ex-
periences of the child, and he soon learns to distinguish the
things he does accidentally from those done purposely, for
which he is morally responsible.

Person, or spirit, stands above the mechanical interaction of
matter and force in nature. In this sense man is " super-
natural." He can make things happen in nature that would
never have taken place without his interference. As to the
question of his action on, as well as in, the world of nature,
our appeal is simply to facts, to what he has actually done,
supplemented by his consciousness that his action is free. Up
to the time of man's appearance on the globe its phenomena
were all under the law of fixed forces, even in the realm of
animal life, where they are purely instinctive. It would have
been possible for a sufficiently gifted being to have predicted
the whole course of the future development and gradual dis-
solution of the existing world under the action of known forces.
But a vast change took place when man appeared, a creature
with plans and purposes of his own, outside of the realm of
chemical and mechanical forces, capable of saying " I intend
to do this " and " I will do that." Possessing a will joined
to an intelligence infinitely higher than any which had yet
appeared, man was able to treat the earth as his own, to subdue
the powers of nature, and fashion the earth's surface after his
pleasure. All material and living things are used and treated
as man's property according as his needs demand.

Here again we say that man and God stand or fall together.
Both must be free, or both are bound by the iron chain of fate.
Balfour reminds us that the difficulties connected with God's
action on the world are not peculiar to theology. " Naturalism
itself has to face them in a yet more embarrassing form. For
they meet us not only in connection with the doctrine of God,
but in connection with the doctrine of man. Not Divinity
alone intervenes in the world of things. . . . Each living soul
which acts on its surroundings raises questions analogous to,
and in some ways more perplexing than, those suggested by the

The Anthropological Argument 113

action of a God immanent in a universe of phenomena." ^^
Hence if man is free to affect the course of nature at all,
if his volition counts for something in producing events, still
more must God, the world's Master and Maker, be free to act
in and on the world of phenomena, though we know not how,
and cannot see Him acting, any more than other men see our
spirits acting, though they see the resulting motion in our
bodies. H all human actions have taken place without pro-
ducing chaos, if the material world is so created that man can
act freely to direct its forces, it is illogical to hold that God
cannot so work. On the other hand, if man is not free, but
only thinks himself so, if he is a conscious automaton, bound
to a fixed order of thought from the cradle to the grave, if he
is a mere puppet acted upon by the forces within and without,
then the only God that is credible is Spinoza's God of Pan-
theism, the sum total of the cosmic forces, entangled in matter,
working all things according to the law of necessity that allows
him no freedom. There is either freedom in God and man, or
freedom in neither. There is no third alternative. The same
arguments which deny design and rational will in nature, are
equally eff'ective against any possibility of human will and
action in the world of human relations. The scientific mate-
rialists do not hesitate to accept that side of the dilemma which
denies freedom. Thus Haeckel affirms that necessity is law,
and is just as binding on the sum total of forces that we call
God, as on the separate centers of force which for a few years
are embodied in man. In reply to this might be quoted the
opinion of the logician Sigwart that : " Our will, with its
conviction of an ' ought ' . . . refuses to acknowledge this
infallible necessity, and opposes to the course of nature ideals
which are only realized by free action. . . . There is nothing
in our treatment of logic to prohibit a view of the universe
according to which the most fundamental fact of self-con-
sciousness is the will." ^^ The denial of human freedom

^^The Foundations of Belief, p. 311.
^^ Logic. Vol. II, pp. 556, 7.

114 Basic Ideas in Religion

will come up for full discussion later,-*' and for the present it
will be sufficient to quote lUingworth's statement as to weight
of philosophic opinion in favor of the freedom of the human
will. " The freedom of the will is the very nerve of person-
ality; and the variety of the terminology used by its different
advocates, in different ages, must not be allowed to obscure the
great philosophic tradition in which they agree. It is a case,
indeed, in which the appeal to ' the authority of philosophy ' is
of especial use. For the freedom of the will is really attacked
on a priori grounds, and defended on grounds of experience ;
i.e., it is attacked as being inconsistent with various natural
analogies, or theoretic presumptions, and defended as being a
fact of which we are directly and immediately aware. Now
many a man, when he finds acute thinkers discrediting a pri-
mary verdict of his consciousness, is apt, with superfluous
humility, to think they must be more clever than they seem,
and therefore to defer to their authority. It is important,
therefore, to draw attention to the fact that the immense weight
of philosophic authority is beyond question on the other
side. " ^^ The modern philosophic movement. Pragmatism,
holds the freedom of the will as one of its chief tenets.

The main ground for the naturalistic denial of freedom of
the divine will is the absolute uniformity of nature. This is
the old fallacy of Positivism, which we have already dis-
cussed,^^ that the discovery of the sequences in any given proc-
ess explains the cause of its regularity. True, there is no
fickleness in nature. The many gods of mythology have dis-
appeared in the light of experience with nature's interrelation
and unity. But the same harmony which proves that there are
not many wills at work in the universe, proves that there is
one supreme Will at the center.

The magic word which is supposed to make all clear is the
word " law." If anything is to be explained, law is the solu-
tion. What is law? In its primary signification law is the

20 See Chao. XVIII.

21 Personality, Human and Divine, pp. 227, 8.

22 See pp. 44-47-

The Anthropological Argument 115

authoritative expression of human will enforced by power.
The instincts of mankind, finding utterance in language, have
not failed to see that the phenomena of nature are only con-
ceivable to us as, in like manner, the expressions of a Will
enforcing itself with power. But, as in other cases, the sec-
ondary or derivative senses of the word have supplanted the
primary signification ; and " law " is now habitually used by
men who deny the analogy on which that use is founded and
to the truth of which it is an abiding witness.

It is true that every law is in its own nature invariable, and
forces if taken singly produce ever the same effects, provided
the conditions remain the same. But if the conditions vary,
the invariability of effect gives place to an infinite capacity of
change. It is by altering the conditions under which a given
force works, or by bringing other forces to operate on the same
object, that our wills act on the world. To this end uniformity
of law is indispensable. Unless the action of forces were
unchanging, they could not be instruments of will. The
notion, then, that uniformity of law is contradictory to the sub-
ordination of forces to our wills, or to God's, is a notion con-
trary to our experience. That which governs the forces of
nature to definite ends is the divine will forming variable com-
binations of invariable forces. There is no ordered series of
facts which is not due to a combination of forces, and there is
no combination of forces which is invariable and not capable
of unlimited change. Therefore we may say that the forces
of nature are not rigid but pliable and ever changing.

The denial of freedom of action in God springs from the
curious idea that freedom means caprice, and therefore is
inconsistent with the constancy of natural laws. But if natural
law be rational order, the product of mind, why should not
mind freely will it? Caprice is no part of the essence of
freedom. A sane mind, in the same degree as it is sane and
wise, holds to the purpose and plan of action which seems
wisest. It may vary, but it does not do so without a reason
which seems good. The wiser and the better a man is, the
more uniform becomes his method of action. Caprice is the

Ti6 Basic Ideas in Religion

result not of freedom, but of our wills being fettered or per-
verted by lack of knowledge as to the best course, or by lack
of power to carry out our plan, or by lack of good will to do
what we ought to do in given cases. God's uniformity is the
result of His infinite knowledge, almighty power, and perfect
goodness. The Old Testament constantly tells us, " He is not
man that He should repent," i.e., change His mind, and the
New Testament more graphically speaks of Him as " the
Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, neither
shadow that is cast by turning." ^^ His will is the expression
of His character, and at the service of both is the knowledge
which knows the universe through and through and the power
which resides at the center, touching the secret source of its
forces. The uniformity of nature, of which many make a
very fetish, is itself an expression of wisdom and love, for with-
out the maintenance of those steady unchanging " habits " of
divine action which we call laws of nature, the world could
not be what it is meant to be, our training school in mind and
character. A lunatic world would make lunatic men.

That the system of nature is hard and unbending to us, does
not prevent its being plastic and fluid to the divine will. Our
bodies are a vast congeries of living cells, each cell an organism
independent of our control, obeying chemical and physiological
laws. No wonder the body seems to the scientist a self-devel-
oped and self-controlled machine, yet we know by our inner
consciousness that it is obedient to our will, though Jwxv the
will can act on it no man knows. Our various modes of action
become more and more uniform and automatic in the same
degree as we know and will and practise them longer. Once
we had to take pains and effort to walk, now we walk without
thinking at all, barely willing the movement. With still more
difficulty did we learn to speak, now our thoughts quickly shape
themselves in words. This is true of every art, writing, read-
ing, playing the piano, batting a baseball, whatever we know
perfectly, we do automatically and unconsciously. Yet the

23 1 Sam, 15:29, and James 1:17.

The Anthropological Argument 117

will is back of the whole complex action, though we are uncon-
scious of it, for we can check it in a moment. Mind and will
are consciously active only on the outer fringe of mental action,
for most actions have become instinctive.

Even so we can and must think of the Divine Will as back
of the marvelous phenomena of Nature. Her perfect and
uniform laws are simply the operations of the perfect Mind,
which knows nature completely and works from within. We
do not marvel at common things, but in truth nothing is more
wonderful and scientifically incomprehensible, than the prompt
obedience of our bodies to our wills. Why should not the
universe be equally obedient to the indwelling Spirit of God?

We are thus led directly up to the thought of the Divine
Immanence in nature, a view to be more fully discussed later,^*
This replaces the older mechanical conception of God as stand-
ing, as it were, outside the universe, and working as we work
on matter. The arguments from cause, order, and design are
consistent with the idea of a deistic or remote God : but this
present line of argument suggests God's working from within,
with a constant outpouring of divine energy acting under
divine laws. Our sense of will-power, the real source of the
idea of cause, requires us to see conscious will back of the
universal causation in nature, i.e., the immanent presence and
action of God. The proper analogy is not energy, or even vital
force, but intelligent, personal will.

Prayers for Temporal Good

If there is any one point where the Christian student is
genuinely troubled today by the controversy between religion
and science it is on the question of the efficacy of prayer. The
wide prevalence of the scientific spirit, affirming as axiomatic
the absolute uniformity of the laws of nature, has given rise to
a common distrust of any prayers which concern our bodies or
the outer world. Sir Oliver Lodge, in an article in the Hibberf
Journal in 1902, put the problem into a clear statement. " This

2* See Chap. X.

Ii8 Basic Ideas in Religion

is the standing controversy, by no means really dead at the
present day. Is the world controlled by a living Person, acces-
sible to prayer, influenced by love, able and willing to foresee,
to intervene, to guide, and wistfully to lead without compulsion
spirits in some sort akin to Himself? Or is the world a self-
generating, self-controlled machine, complete and fully organ-
ized for movement, either up or down, for progress or degen-
eration, according to the chances of heredity and the influence
of environment? "

Prayer is a universal human instinct. Plutarch tells us that
prayer is found wherever man is, for there are no cities with-
out temples where prayers and sacrifices are oflfered. In this
view the modern anthropologists support him. It has ever
seemed natural to man in the hour of need to call upon the
name of the Lord. It is surprising to note that in great calam-
ities the heathen make their appeal not to the lesser deities, but
to the one God felt to be supreme over all. Thus Aulus Gellius
tells us that the ancient Romans when alarmed by an earth-
quake were accustomed to pray not to any one of the gods
individually but to " God " simply. Max Miiller says that at
critical moments when the deepest feelings of the heart were
stirred the ancients dropped the language of mythology, and
fell back on the universal language of true religion. Human
nature in agony is never atheistic. The soul that knows not
where to fly terror-stricken turns to God.

It was suggested above that in man's ability to control the
forces of nature to his own ends we have an a fortiori argu-
ment for God's ability to control the forces of the universe
which He created, and which His divine will sustains. Con-
sider how much of our human life is regulated by the requests
we make of one another. We do not like to say we pray to
one another, because prayer is more than request, but in the
restricted use of the term in our present discussion, it amounts
to that. A man swallows poison, and according to the laws
of nature death is certain. We pray the physician to help, and
he gives an antidote which saves the man's life. True the
thing was done by setting in operation other laws of our physi-

The Anthropological Argument 119

cal nature which counteracted the first chain of circumstances,
but who can deny that God may act in just such a way? No
one has a right to postulate that God's action can only be by
breaking the laws of nature. That would make Him less
powerful and wise than we are.

Much harm has been done to the belief in prayer by the
claim on the part of its well meaning advocates that God
answers prayers in the temporal realm by injecting into nature's
order forces foreign to our experience, and laws which over-
rule those now in operation. Such a supposition is not neces-
sary. As has been shown, if God controls all the conditions
under which forces act, He can bring about any result He
wishes in what to us is a natural way. The scientist in his
laboratory always has to isolate the forces with which he works
in order that he may get the expected result to his experiment.
The will of God acts like the will of man by causing variable
combinations of invariable forces. To give rain to a particular
section of the country ought to be possible to God without
causing any violation of the laws of meteorology, for it merely
involves perfect control of all the conditions governing rain-
fall. Thus there is room for the answer of all wise and true
prayer, even though our limited knowledge and insufficient
powers of observation keep us from understanding all of God's
action.

The assailants of prayer strive eagerly to make it appear
that " special providences," such as we pray for in personal
or national calamities, are the same thing as miracles. But
the efficacy of prayer and the miraculous do not stand and fall
together. It confuses the issue to equate them. A miracle is
a phenomenon unexampled in the course of nature and beyond
the operation of its forces, which attests its divine source by
the character and teaching of its worker."^ Special providences
on the other hand, are not unusual occurrences, except that their
happening coincides with the need they relieve. The answer
to prayer is often so " natural " that we fail to observe God's

25 See Note S on the a priori argument for miracles in connection
with the discussion of Divine Immanence in Chapter X,

120 Basic Ideas in Religion

control of the causes leading on to the desired effect. Dr.
Grenfell of Labrador tells of sending a vessel to establish a
new mission station in Baffin's Land through unusually abun-
dant ice to a coast of which he had no chart, and without any
pilot on board who had ever been there. It was risking the
schooner, for it was not sheathed for ice, and hence could not
be insured. Before and during the voyage they all prayed
earnestly for the success of the venture. They passed success-
fully through more than a hundred miles of ice before they
came to the latitude in which they expected to find their
haven. At this psychological moment an Eskimo hunting seals
in a kayak was observed. He came aboard and told the voy-
agers he knew where they wanted to go, and would pilot them
in. This he proceeded to do promptly and successfully.^"
Many prayers are answered by psychological suggestion to
the persons concerned or to others. In September, 1863, Dr.
Jacob Chamberlain with a large company of native porters
was caught by swollen streams in a dense jungle in India.
Night was rapidly approaching. The marshy ground and the
tigers prevented camping where they were, and the nearest
hill was ten miles away. The chances of reaching it after
nightfall were slight. After he had prayed for help and guid-
ance, he heard a voice saying, " Turn to the left, to the God-
avery, and you will find rescue." The guides protested the
uselessness and madness of leaving the path for the swollen
river, where their plight would be worse, and much valuable
time lost. Again he heard the voice, and again he yielded to
the arguments of the guides. When the voice came a third
time he no longer hesitated, but ordered the party to turn to
the left. At the river they found a large government ferry-
boat which had been torn from its moorings by a sudden
freshet that morning with two ferrymen, and had been carried
many miles down stream. The boatmen had succeeded in
bringing it to shore at the point where Chamberlain and his
party emerged from the jungle. On it they spent the night in

^^ Outlook, Dec. II, 1909.

The Anthropological Argument 121

safety, and the next day used it to transport themselves to
their destination.^^ During the World's Fair in 1893 Dwight
L. Moody called to his help in Chicago a large number of
evangelists and Christian workers, and organized an evangel-
istic campaign throughout the city. The renting of halls, en-
tertaining of workers and other expenses entailed heavy bur-
dens upon him. Toward the end of the campaign he was
especially burdened with the expense and needed ten thousand
dollars. As he was going into a service at the Auditorium,
a lady sent word that she wished to speak to him personally.
He could see her only for a moment, but that, she said, would
be sufficient. She then placed in his hands an envelope, stat-
ing that she was the secretary for a lady in Chicago who had
given her instructions to place that envelope in Mr. Moody's
hands, and to give it to no one else. He opened it and found
a check for half the needed sum. He went to the donor and
expressed bis gratitude, saying that he had been making the
matter a subject of prayer. She replied that she had been im-
pressed that morning to help him. Upon hearing that it was
only half the amount which he needed, she supplemented it
immediately with another check for the remaining amount.-^
The modern world, except in great crises, has to a large
extent lost the habit of prayer, especially in the realm of tem-
poral things. The Church acting as a body must make her
petition for what she especially needs in time of distress, as
well as for the more general blessings of ordinary seasons. St.
Paul's wise counsel was, " In nothing be anxious ; but in every-
thing by prayer and supplication let your requests be made
known unto God." -^ Not to do so would be to become false
to her own faith in God as Lord and Ruler of the universe, not
a mere Force acting unchangeably. National prayers are as
natural as the prayers of the Church which they resemble, for
God is the God of the nations as well as of individuals. The
Old Testament prophets bring God into the closest relation

27 Chamberlain, In the Tiger Jungle, Chap. I.

28 As related in a letter from W. R. Moody to the Editor.

29 Phil. 4 :6.

122 Basic Ideas in Religion

with the great nations and their destinies. When war is
waged with the firm conviction that the cause is just, the nation
certainly may pray for success, but always with the reserva-
tion that God's will with the nation shall be done.

It does not follow that God will answer all prayer, and we
can only expect an answer if we are sure that our prayers are
in the proper spirit, and are really for our best good and for
the good of our fellow men. Again we turn to human aflFairs
for our illustration. Not every request our fellow men make
of us is granted, and especially well is this shown in the rela-
tion of the father to the child. Here we have the father's
wisdom and love determining which of the child's more or less
selfish and ignorant prayers shall be answered. Christ Him-
self endorses this analogy. " If ye then, being evil, know how
to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall
your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask
Him." 30

I. Let us make this filial relation the first of the conditions
of prayer that we must observe if we are reasonably to expect
an answer. The invocation, " Our Father," with which our
Lord began the prayer, which He meant should be the type of
all intercession, gives the ground of all true prayer. The filial
relation alone justifies prayer, and the expression of every wish
which is not sinful. However, no child may set his father
a task and make its fulfilment a test of his love. But the.
relationship of Father and son requires us to make requests
even though God knows what we need. The Father desires
the child to rely on Him and trust His willingness to care for
it. Some things God cannot give without our asking. A hu-
man father may not be able to give his child what he most needs
for spiritual growth and moral life unless he open his heart to
receive it by asking for it. " Ask, and it shall be given unto
you ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, and it shall be opened unto
you." 3^ But when earthly and bodily good is asked, the
Father in love may refuse it. Discipline and pain may be

30 Matt. 7:1 1.

31 Matt. 7 7.

The Anthropological Argument 123

sent for higher good. The earthly father thinks of manhood
to come, and so God trains and develops us for the life eternal.
We cannot judge of the means He uses, for this life is frag-
mentary, a preparation for the larger life to come. Temporal
good and pleasure, even the most lawful are always secondary
to the life of the spirit, which reaches beyond earth's limits.
Another relationship grows out of our relation to God as His
children, and that is that we are brothers one of another. God
alone knows what is best for all in this great human brother-
hood, and many prayers, which it would be perfectly legitimate
for us to make, cannot be granted because others would be
unhappily affected thereby. And again, for our prayer to be
sincere, we must be willing to give to our fellow men the things
we ask of God for ourselves.

2. The second condition of prayer is submission to God's
will. The phrase in the Lord's Prayer, " Thy will be done,"
was strikingly illustrated by Christ's own prayer at Geth-
semane. He prayed there in agony of spirit " Let this cup
pass away, if it he possible. Nevertheless not my will but
Thine be done." The phrase, " if it be possible," shows sub-
mission to God's infinite wisdom. Christ does not pray for the
impossible, for though all things are possible to God, yet He
has a plan for the redemption of the world which is the expres-
sion of His own fundamental loving nature, and this plan must
not be changed though it involved the awful tragedy of the
Crucifixion. God's will may seem severe and terrible, though
at a later time it will be seen to have been for the best. We
know God's will for us in the realm of the spiritual life, but
we do not know it in the realm of temporal affairs. " If
it be possible " forbids prayers when God's will is so plain
that to change events would be to ask for a direct miracle. A
time comes with the mortally sick when we cease to pray that
the patient may recover, but seek to prepare him for his inevit-
able end by prayer for grace to submit and for increase of
faith at the end. Prayers natural in earlier days would be
irreverent now, because our increased knowledge tells us how
necessary is the stability of God's government of the universe

124 Basic Ideas in Religion

for the good of all men. Further, we should work as well as
pray. How otherwise can we understand the clause " Thy
will be done on earth, as it is in Heaven " ? We are called to
be God's fellow-workers in the coming of His Kingdom, and
our first duty after prayer is to use the means He indicates to
bring about the result we long for. The faith-cure and the
prayer-cure crazes ignore the fact that the essential element in
Christian faith is not belief in God's omnipotence as at the
disposal of our wills, but trust in His wisdom and His love,
and glad submission to His ordering of our lives. To say
sincerely, " Thy will be done," implies that we will try to do
it ourselves and hence make use of every adaptation of nature
to our needs which God has ordained, and made known to us
through science.

3. The last of the conditions is that we must look on prayer
as more than mere petition. It is essentially spiritual. It is
communion between God and the spirit of man, and rises above
the world of sense and the body's need. The verification of
prayer lies in the inner sphere of spirit. The truest answer to
some prayers may be the refusal of the specific request, yet
the fulfilment of the deeper thought back of it. For true com-
munion in prayer there must be two wills in correspondence —
the will of him who prays and the will of Him Who hears.
To deny this on God's side is to believe that the whole universe
is a solid block, unbending and unfeeling, which would kill all
prayer in time of need, or at the best turn it into a kind of
spiritual gymnastic for one's own self-training. No man can
really pray who looks on prayer as simply retroactive and purely
subjective. No man can worship a mere heartless process,
however divine some men may profess to think it. Men of
heart under such conditions would cease to pray words of faith,
and to do deeds of love. Then the true believer would be the
Mahometan who sums up his full duty in the one word Kismet,
" it is fated." On the other hand, to deny the will of the man
who prays is equally subversive of faith, for it destroys utterly
man's spiritual nature. If our tears and urgent cries have
always been present to the mind of God as insignificant parts of

The Anthropological Argument 125

His omniscience, but never have the slightest influence on His
predetermined plan, then are we indeed merely His puppets
whom He has called into being, why, no man can tell, and our
lives are but the playing of idle parts in an empty show. Then
fervent supplications will die on our palsied lips, for we merely
imagine that we can act as we please. While we must not lose
the faith of a child in the Heavenly Father's love and care,
we must pray with the mind of a man, and in the spirit of
Christ, Who interpreted our manhood to us.

" Be not afraid to pray — to pray is right.

Pray, if thou canst, with hope ; but ever pray,

Though hope be weak, or sick with long delay;

Pray in the darkness, if there be no light,

Far is the time, remote from human sight,

When war and discord on the earth shall cease ;

Yet every prayer for universal peace

Avails the blessed time to expedite.

Whate'er is good to wish, ask that of Heaven,

Though it may be what thou canst not hope to see :

Pray to be perfect, though material leaven

Forbid the spirit so on earth to be;

But if for any wish thou darest not to pray,

Then pray to God to cast that wish away." ^^

32 Hartley Coleridge.

CHAPTER VII

THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARGUMENT —
(Concluded)

III. The Witness of Conscience to Moral Character in

God

Conscience is the third vital element in personality, and is
distinct from the other forms of consciousness. It is " feeling,"
not intellect. As the inner voice of a higher law, felt to be
supreme over all wills, it witnesses directly to a moral order,
which itself implies a moral Lawgiver, the Father and Lord
of spirits. We enter here on a most convincing line of evi-
dence as to the existence and nature of God, but it demands an
inner eye and heart of feeling to value it. The intellect alone
will not suffice, for there is a decided contrast between the
world of phenomena and intellectual interpretation and the
world of appreciation and moral judgment.

Conscience, the spirit's intuition of ethical distinctions and
the feeling of obligation to do the good and not the evil, is a
universal trait in humanity, and is ever associated with faith in
a divine moral order. The argument founded on this fact is
two- fold: (i) The cause of ethical feelings must be ethical.
If sense-phenomena arouse the conviction of the reality of an
external world of matter, so do moral experiences arouse the
conviction of the existence of a moral order, independent of,
but related to, our wills; (2) Ethical relations exist only
between persons. Duty is something due to a person, never to
a thing or a force. The spontaneous reverence we feel for the
Moral Law as having autliority over us implies a personal Will
as the source, with the right to rule our wills. This supreme
Person must be all He wills man to be. " The Power, not our-
selves, which makes for righteousness," must be a righteous
person.

126

The Anthropological Argument 127

Kant was the first to state clearly the moral argument. In
his Critique of Practical Reason he completed the inquiry
which he began in the Pure Reason. He had there shown that
our speculative reason could not carry us beyond the limits of
our material experience and either prove or disprove the exist-
ence of God, whereas the practical reason, reaching out beyond
phenomenal experience, gives us the strongest and best evidence
of God. As Kuno Fischer emphatically writes : " The doc-
trine of freedom, and the absolute supremacy of the moral
order of the world, or the doctrine of the primacy of prac-
tical reason, rests with Kant upon firm ground. The moral
proof for the existence of God stands or falls with this
doctrine. Regarding the theoretical demonstrability of God's
existence, Kant held different views at different stages of his
philosophical inquiry. . . . But, however differently he may
have thought on this point — namely, the knozvableness of God
— there was not a moment in the course of the development of
his philosophical convictions when he denied, or even only
doubted, the reality of God." ^ Kant assigns the primacy to
practical reason, because its interest for man is supreme.
Ethical life and character are more to man than intellectual
ability or scientific knowledge. His starting point, or prior
postulate, is moral freedom, the ethical will, which he deduces
as an objective certainty from the fact of the moral law. This
carries with it the ethical demand for the chief good as a reality.
This summum bonum is composed of two elements, (i) per-
fect virtue, which implies God, and (2) perfect felicity, which
implies immortality. His three postulates are, therefore, im-
mortality, freedom, and the existence of God. " The first
results from the practically necessary condition of a duration
adequate to the complete fulfilment of the moral law ; the
second from the necessary supposition of the independence of
the sensible world, and of the faculty of determining one's
will according to the law of an intelligible world, that is, of
freedom; the third from the necessary condition of the exist-

1 Critique of Kant, c. ii. § 3.

128 Basic Ideas in Religion

ence of the stimmum boninn in such an intelHgible world, by
the supposition of the supreme independent good, that is, the
existence of God." ^

In this argument we move in an entirely different field of
experience and thought from the intellectual and the material
world, and we realize the striking difference between physical
nature and human nature. We live in two worlds ; the one a
world of perception and observation in which we are conscious
of outer facts over which we have little or no control. The
other, a world of appreciation and moral judgment in human
relations, in which we can control our words and acts under
obligations implied in the peculiar form of consciousness which
we call " conscience." The fact that they are two has been
most strikingly put by Kant : " Two things fill the mind with
ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and
the more steadily we reflect on them : the starry heavens above
and the moral Ian; zvithin. I have not to search for them and
conjecture them as though they were veiled in darkness or
were in the transcendent region beyond my horizon ; I see
them before me and connect them directly with the conscious-
ness of my existence. The former begins from the place I
occupy in the external world of sense, and enlarges my connec-
tion therein to an unbounded extent with worlds upon worlds
and systems of systems, and moreover into limitless times of
their periodic motion, its beginning and continuance. The sec-
ond begins from my invisible self, my personality, and exhibits
me in a world which has true infinity, but which is traceable
only by the understanding, and with which I discern that
I am not in a merely contingent but in a universal and neces-
sary connection, as I am also thereby with all those visible
worlds. The former view of a countless multitude of worlds
annihilates, as it were, my importance as an animal creature,
which after it has been for a short time provided with vital
power, one knows not how, must again give back the matter of
which it was formed to the planet it inhabits (a mere speck

^Practical Reason, Pt. I, Bk. II, Chap. 2, § 6. Abbott's transla-
tion, pp. 229, 30,

The Anthropological Argument 129

in the universe). The second, on the contrary, infinitely
elevates my worth as an intelligence by my personality, in
which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of
animality and even of the whole sensible world — at least so far
as may be inferred from the destination assigned to my exist-
ence by this law, a destination not restricted to conditions and
limits of this life, but reaching into the infinite." ^

Nature is morally indififerent ; not immoral, but simply non-
moral. The ancient Babylonians had two symbols for nature.
One was an empty waste of waters, and the other was a circle
full of intertwined snakes, devouring each other in wild con-
fusion. The animal world has no experience of moral free-
dom and duty. Hence nature cannot bear such witness to
God's character and will as it does to His power and divinity.
Even naturalists of the mechanical school recognize this sharp
contrast between man and the world of which he seems simply
a part. Ray Lankester admits that man's relation to nature
is unique ; he is nature's insurgent son, who has become a power
in her midst and modified her order. Huxley thinks that man's
true life began when he revolted against nature's law of might,
and with a sense of right in his soul struggled against the
cosmic process. He holds there is more in the sentiment " I
ought " than evolution can explain.*

Rousseau was the first sentimentalist to throw all the blame
for man's evil will on laws and government, and to proclaim
that the true ideal of man is the unfettered life of nature
" when wild in woods, the noble savage ran." And it is still
taught by many social reformers that the panacea for all evils,
physical and moral, is a return to Nature, untrammeled by
priest or king. The poets have done much to foster such sen-
timentality. Even so practical a man as Bryant tells us that
" the groves were God's first temples," and reproves us for
leaving " God's ancient sanctuaries " to worship " under roofs
that our frail hands have raised." A glance backward into

3 Practical Reason, Pt. II, beginning of "Conclusion," Abbott's transla-
tion, p. 260.
* See Ethics and Evolution.

130 Basic Ideas in Religion

the actual past would have shown him that if the " calm
shades " taught him that we must " to the beautiful order of
thy works learn to conform the order of our lives," it was
simply because he carried to the contemplation of Nature eyes
open to its higher meaning, and a heart and mind touched by
the spirit of God to feel its perfect order.^ The men who
actually dwelt in the forests in the days when there were no
churches, and apart from the influence of the Law or the
Gospel, had no such high and holy thoughts. The groves were
indeed their temples, but they were the temples of the gods
of lust and cruelty. Their dark recesses were polluted with
foul deeds of unspeakable infamy, and their rocks and stones,
far from preaching " sermons," ® reeked with human blood and
reechoed to the shrieks of human victims. There was no
catechism of moral duty in the brute life about them, no lessons
of purity and self-restraint, no revelation of a Father above
in the flashing lightning and crashing thunderbolt or rushing
flood. The wolves and tigers and crawling snakes who formed
the emblems of their tribes could teach them nothing of the
Ten Commandments ; they learned nothing from them but lust
and cruelty and pitiless selfishness, and came to be more treach-
erous than the serpent and more cruel than the tiger. As
to pity, they knew it not. Useless consumers of bread, super-
fluous babies, the sick and infirm, frail slaves and aged people,
were often coolly put out of the way. This is Nature's method.
She knows but one law, the survival of the fittest, and the
fittest in her vocabulary is simply the strongest, the beast best
able to devour others or snatch food out of their mouths. The
simple fact that what we call " humanity " has risen out of
such a soil, shows that a power higher than Nature, having a
moral quality and aiming at a moral end, has guided evolution.
The working of mere brute power would even now run the
world backward.

^ See A Forest Hymn.

« As You Like It, Act II, Sc. i.

" Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in everything."

The Anthropological Argument 131

When man really degrades himself to the level of nature, he
loses all higher character and becomes like Richard III in
Shakespeare's tremendous words, " the slave of nature, and
the son of hell." ^ Wordsworth is commonly true to ideals,
but he slipped into false sentiment when he wrote,

" One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can." ^

Directly the opposite is the case. Men who, like Words-
worth, have pondered the sages in their study, carry their
own thoughts to nature, and read there a moral message of God
and duty. On the ethical side nature hides God, while man
reveals him. Browning strikes the deeper note in the Pope's
speech in The Ring and The Book :

"Conjecture of the worker by the work;

Is there strength there? — enough: intelligence?

Ample: but goodness in a like degree?

Not to the human eye in the present state,

An isoscele deficient in the base.

What lacks, then, of perfection fit for God,

But just the instance which this tale supplies

Of love without a limit? So is strength,

So is intelligence ; let love be so.

Unlimited in its self-sacrifice.

Then is the tale true and God shows complete.

Beyond the tale, I reach into the dark.

Feel what I cannot see, and still faith stands."

This argument from conscience cannot be too strongly urged,
for Secularism — the deliberate ignoring of religion — not only
dominates our school system today, but rules in our university
teaching as well, where God and duty to God are words stu-
diously neglected. This is right in science, but not in the field
of theoretical and practical ethics. Ethics is commonly treated
under the utilitarian or social aspect, but this teaching will

7 Act I. Sc. 3.

* The Tables Turned.

132 Basic Ideas in Religion

not work well in the long run. It is one thing to say that
honesty is the best policy, and another to get out of that pru-
dential saw the inspiration to be truthful and honest under
temptation. A man with no God, whether he is a savage or a
twentieth century philosopher, recognizes no obligations except
those which will best promote his pleasure or profit his well
being; but he who believes in God inevitably realizes that he
should be holy as God is holy. If there is no ideal higher than
self, then self becomes the end. If, on the other hand, the ideal
is the perfect One, then the man striving for that ideal is
gradually transformed into that likeness.

Locke, Montaigne, and Pascal criticize any universal system
of ethics. To them morals are " nothing else but our own
opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our
actions." ^ Pascal thinks that if there were such a thing as a
universal justice, " we should see it planted in all the states
of the world and in all times, instead of which we see scarcely
anything just or unjust that does not change quality in chang-
ing climate. Three degrees of higher latitude overturn all
jurisprudence. A meridian decides the truth ; fundamental
laws change in a few years: right has its epochs. Pitiable jus-
tice, bounded by a river! Truth this side the Pyrenees, error
that side." ^^ Pascal and others like him deal only with ex-
ternals and not with the inner spirit. They lacked the evolu-
tionary conception which we have today. There is a growth
of moral and ethical ideals, and each age must be judged by its
own standards. It is a fundamental fact that where there is
no law there can be no transgression. We do not judge chil-
dren as morally guilty until they reach the ethical stage where
the law they have broken belongs. Human history on its inner
side is a process of moral training and education, and to be
real and permanent it must not be outer, enforced obedience to
authority under penalty, but inner growth in personal convic-
tions. Each age as it advances has higher ideals in the light of
which it condemns its own beginning and the former ages. In

^ Locke, Essav on the Human Understanding, Bk. I, Ch. 3, § 8.
10 Thoughts. Ch. 4, § 4.

The Anthropological Argument 133

Israel the prophets were the great moral leaders as well as
preachers, and they raised the moral ideal to a higher level
than anywhere else in the ancient world. They were often
bitterly abused, rejected and even slain, but later the lessons
they taught took root in the hearts of the people, and the chil-
dren of those who slew the prophets built their sepulchers.
The fact that there is no universal code of morality does not
deny that there is a universal moral instinct in man. Indeed
there are certain fundamental principles in which this instinct
finds expression. For instance if you go unarmed and share
salt with any tribe you are thereafter their friend by the prin-
ciple of hospitality. Quartrefages goes so far as to say that
" the fundamental identity of human nature is nowhere more
strikingly displayed " than in the moral region. ^^

Customs should be judged by the intention which underlies
them. This Pascal fails to do. Things which seem abhorrent
to us are often done with good moral intention. Paul held the
clothing of the men who stoned Stephen to death, and thought
he was doing God service. On his own words we justify him.
Many of the persecutions of the Middle Ages resulted from
the honest effort on the part of some to save souls. This is,
however, not the same thing as saying that a thing known and
recognized to be evil may be done that good may come. The
gradual growth of ethical ideals may lead a later age to pro-
nounce methods as evil which to the people of the past seemed
perfectly legitimate. South Sea Islanders kill their old folk
because life has become a grievous burden to them, but the
medical profession of the civilized world does not allow the
end to be hastened in relief of pain even when there is no hope
of recovery. A man's conscience never justifies his doing what
he feels to be wrong. Action which is evil in his own eyes
will inevitably be accompanied with self-reproach.

It has been the fashion among certain travelers to deny that
some of the tribes they visited had any sense of conscience;
a statement similar to their denial of a universal religious sense

11 Quoted by Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, p. 109.

134 Basic Ideas in Religion

which has been discussed in a previous chapter. Bishop Cal-
laway describes the difficulty he had among the Zulus of speak-
ing of conscience, for he could find no word in their language
to correspond to it. Yet he did not rashly conclude that they
had no moral sense. By persistent investigation he discovered
an equivalent term which served perfectly to convey his idea.^^

Casalis gives us much information on the moral ideas of
the Basutos before their contact with Christian civilization.
They are expressed in an original and lively fashion in their
proverbs. " Cunning devours its master," " There is blood
in the dregs," " The thief catches himself," " Stolen goods can-
not grow," " Human blood is heavy, it prevents him who has
shed it from running away," " If a man has been killed secretly,
the straws of the fields will tell it," " A good name gives good
sleep." On the occasion of the rite of circumcision, the young
Easuto is addressed thus : " Amend your ways ! Be a man !
Fear theft! Fear adultery! Honor your parents! Obey
your chiefs ! " ^^

Howitt was initiated into the mysteries of the Australian
savages, which are kept a profound secret from the white men.
At the initiation the Australian youth is taught to believe in
Darumulun, the great spirit whose name is never mentioned at
other times, but who is commonly called Master and Father.
Each lad is given by one of the elders advice so kindly,
fatherly, and impressive as often to soften the heart and draw
tears from the youth. Some of the rules given him at that
time are to obey the old, to share with and live peaceably with
all their friends, not to interfere with girls or married women,
and to obey the food restrictions.

Thus, to quote Robertson Smith, " we see that even in its
rudest forms religion was a moral force ; the powers that man
reveres were on the side of social order and tribal law ; and the
fear of the gods was a motive to enforce the laws of society,
which were also the laws of morality." ^* Different races and

^2 See Wordsworth, The One Religion, pp. 354, 5.
^3 The Basutos, pp. 263, 4, 307-311.
^* Religion of the Semites, p. 53.

The Anthropological Argument 135

different ages do vary as to concrete cases of duty according
to their ethical light, but they do not differ in the inner feeling
of oughtness, the obligation to do the thing which to them seems
right.

We have in our own day many examples of a development
of moral opinion. Slavery was at one time universally con-
sidered as sanctioned by God. Even after the movement
against it began many good men argued for it, calling on the
Bible to support their claims, yet years later they admitted
their mistake. The Bible has not changed, but its principles
are every decade being given wider application. The same
gradual growth of moral opinion is seen in the suppression of
lotteries and gambling. Many countries today have yet to
reach this point. The Greek Fathers were wiser than some
of the theologians up to our own day. Gregory of Nazianzus
tells us that God in His progressive revelation dealt with the
Jews as a schoolmaster. Chrysostom thinks that the merit of
the New Testament is that it has taught us to condemn as
wrong much that the Old Testament tolerated, and urges that
we must not look at the bare facts only, but must study also
w^ith care and attention the period in which they happened, the
causes and motives of them, and the difference between the
persons acting. Basil has the suggestive thought that God
deals with us as men reared in darkness, and only gradually
accustoms us to brighter light.

The moral instincts which create and rule society are not
its product, but rather the formative forces within it, growing
with its growth. They do not spring out of the environment
nor from any conscious will of men, they are imposed upon
our deepest nature by a higher Power working within. They
all witness to the spiritual environment in which our finite
spirits live and move, and they are visions of what God would
have us will and do. The social order is the expression of the
underlying moral order of the heart. We may claim history
as testifying to the view that some recognition of God and of
man's spiritual being is indispensable to the survival in the long
run of ethical instincts. Conscience is the peculiar form of

136 Basic Ideas in Religion

consciousness concerned with the relations l^etween persons.
The word is striking in its implication of a certain mutuality
of knowledge between men, and also between God and men in
moral principles. It is the clear intuition of duty which arises
when a man stands face to face with a hard obligation, and
recognizes in the still, small voice an authority which he can-
not gainsay ; for it is the mystery of conscience that it proclaims
a law independent of man's will, even condemning it, yet
which he feels to be not arbitrary, but the expression of his
higher being.

Conscience is hard to define for accurate scientific use be-
cause it is so widely used to signify any or all exercise of mind
concerning the morality of an action. Calderwood says that
" conscience is that power of mind by which moral law is dis-
covered to each individual for the guidance of his conduct," ^^
and Noah K. Davis also speaks of the function of conscience
to discern the moral law. " The intuitive cognition of this
fundamental, catholic, and universal law, is the sole function
of the pure practical reason or conscience. Conscience is pure
reason discerning moral law. This faculty has the moral law
for its exclusive object, and its exercise is the primary, original,
antecedent condition of any moral activity whatever, without
which liberty has no moral restraint, and volition no moral
character." "

Kant and Butler give to conscience the function of passing
judgment as well. Kant tells us that " Conscience is man's
practical reason, which holds before him his law of duty in
every case so as either to acquit or condemn him." ^^ It is
concerned with will and action, whereas the pure reason thinks
and argues, classifies and speculates. Butler similarly holds
it to be " the principle in man, by which he approves or disap-
proves his heart, temper, and actions." ^^ Butler's phrase,
" the supremacy of conscience," is not clear. It should be the

1" Handbook of Moral Philosophy, Pt. I, Div. I, Ch. 4, § i.
"^^ Elements of Ethics, p. yj.

'^''Introduction to Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, XII, (B). See
Note M.
18 Sermon I.

The Anthropological Argument 137

felt supremacy and authority of the law to which moral con-
sciousness bears clear witness. This distinction explains the
common phrases of a good and a bad conscience. If conscience
always reveals the right, how can it ever be bad ? A good con-
science is a consciousness of a plain duty plus the good will
to do it. An evil conscience is a consciousness of duty plus
an evil will refusing to do it. Kant's dictum " There is no
such thing as an erring conscience," ^^ is true in the sense that
every man is bound to do that which his conscience bids him
do. But his moral sense grows by obedience to what seems
right to him, and can be trained to a truer perception of what
is right and wrong, just as the eye, which sees by nature, can
be trained to dehcacy of taste in color and form, or the ear,
which does not need to be shown how to hear, can be educated
to an appreciation of harmony and tone.

A law of duty is a statement not of that which must happen,
but of that which ought to happen. It is a revelation of the
relations which personal beings know ought to prevail between
them as the ideal end of their being. But that ideal is not
realized; it finds imperfect obedience at best, and often open
rebellion. Still no rebellion can shake the deep feeling that
the law ought to be obeyed. Even the sinner knows that the
law is just and holy. There is a half truth in Satan's
words : " Ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil." -° We
do know good by contrast with evil, and sin reveals our power
of independent action against our known duty.

This feeling or recognition of an authority within us that
has the right to rebuke us is absolutely unique. We do not
recognize it in relation to any physical forces, for we may defy
them, or to any physical object, though it may be as great as
the solar system. We may fear such, but we do not reverence
them. We do not feel anything like it in relation to other
human personalities. We resent control by other men, and dis-
like to receive orders from them. But the moral law has a

1° Introduction to Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, XII, (B). Ab-
bott, p. 311.
20 Gen. 3:5.

138 Basic Ideas in Religion

strange authority which commands without constraining, and
ordains without humiliation, and whose noble prerogative it
is that obedience to its law glorifies the will which obeys it.
Cui servirc est regnare, " Whose service is perfect free-
dom " ; ^^ but qui sibi senit servo, who serves himself serves a
slave.

Closely connected with this personal element in justice is the
recognition of and acquiescence in punishment when just — a
feeling so strong that criminals often submit voluntarily to
punishment when not detected, as a means of atoning for the
fault and attaining peace. The very essence of punishment, as
distinct from consequences, is the element of conscious in-
tention in fitting the penalty to the crime. It is an act of per-
sonal will, acting avowedly with a purpose to punish. Justice
is not felt to be done if by some accident, and not by law, a
criminal suffers. A condemned murderer is not " punished "
for his crime, if he should be mistaken for some other man by
a mob, and hung for a crime he did not commit. The same
testimony to the divine origin of conscience is shown in the
peculiar feeling of shame or self-contempt for having offended
against a Person who knows us through and through. Con-
science is always something more than a personal feeling or
wholly private experience. It is always directed to another
Person and connected with universal relations.

Men all the world over have ever recognized standards of
right and wrong as rooting in a supreme Lawgiver, whose law
of duty and life is divine and somehow one with our own. It
is not because we believe in social morals between man and
man, but because we feel that there is an eternal basis of all
duty, that we must believe in a God, who is at once supreme
goodness and supreme justice, both love and law. In Flint's
vigorous words : " Conscience claims to rule my will in virtue
of a law which cannot be the expression of my will, and which
cannot be anything else than the expression of another will ;
one often in antagonism to mine — one always better than mine

2* As translated in the Collect for Peace.

The Anthropological Argument 139

— one which demands from me an unvarying and complete
obedience. It comes to me and speaks to me in defiance of my
will; when my will is set against hearing it, and still more
against obeying it ; when my will is bent on stifling and drown-
ing its voice. It warns, threatens, condemns, and punishes me,
against my will, and with a voice of authority as the delegate
or deputy of a perfectly good and holy will which has an
absolute right to rule over me, to control and sway all my
faculties ; which searches and knows me ; which besets me be-
hind and before. Whose is this perfect, authoritative, supreme
will, to which all consciences, even the most erring, point back ?
Whose, if not God's ?"^- The answer comes in the feeling
which finds expression in the confession of sin in all ages,
" Against Thee ^O Lord), Thee only, have I sinned, and done
that which is evil in Thy sight." -^

Martineau, who bears testimony to the divine authority of
the moral law, unfortunately represents God as wholly trans-
cendent. " The Moral Law," he concludes his discussion, " is
imposed by an authority foreign to our personality, and is open,
not to be canvassed, but only to be obeyed or disobeyed." ^*
This sentence denies the divine immanence by the indwelling
of the Holy Spirit. Rather is the moral law the very ex-
pression of our being, and proclaims our kinship to God.
Moral character belongs to the very essence of human nature
which at its root and center is good, as appears in the fact that
even the sinner recognizes the moral law as good, and assents
to it in his deeper being. " But if what I would not, that I do,
I consent unto the law that it is good." ^^ There is an element
of mystery in the source and aim of man's moral impulses. So
little have they to do with his calculating intellect that Benjamin
Kidd and others call them irrational. We protest that they
are a higher kind of reason which bids a man live for others
and sacrifice self. As we have said, the moral instincts which

22 Theism, p. 2ig.

23 Ps. SI -.4.

2* A Study of Religion, Vol. II, p. 6.
2s Rom. 7:16.

140 Basic Ideas in Religion

rule the world are not the product of social evolution, but
rather the directing forces of it.'^

Some thinkers like Fichte, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold
deny that ethical character depends absolutely on personality.
They believe there is a universal order, making for righteous-
ness, but it need not be personal. We reply that for the normal
mind goodness implies self-consciousness, and moral life is in-
conceivable apart from personality. The personal character
of all moral life is intense. The sense of obligation is as in-
herent a quality in personality as gravitation is in particles of
matter. However, while matter must obey its divine law, man
is free to disobey to his own great loss and the injury of others.
Kant tells us that " the idea of the moral law alone, with the
respect inseparable from it, cannot properly be called a capacity
belonging to personality, it is personality itself (the idea of
humanity) considered altogether intellectually." ^^ In another
place he says that " reverence is due only between persons." ^^
His famous passage on duty makes clear that personality has as
its essence moral character. "Duty! Thou sublime and
mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinu-
ating, but requirest submission, and yet seekest not to move the
will by threatening aught that would arouse natural aversion
or terror, but merely boldest forth a law which of itself finds
entrance into the mind, and yet gains reluctant reverence
(though not always obedience), a law before which all inclina-
tions are dumb, even though they secretly counter-work it ;
what origin is there worthy of thee, and where is to be found
the root of thy noble descent which proudly rejects all kindred
with the inclinations ; a root to be derived from which is the
indispensable condition of the only worth which men can give
themselves?

" It can be nothing less than a power which elevates man
above himself (as a part of the world of sense), a power which

26 See Chap. XIX for fuller treatment.

27 Philosophical Theory of Religion, Pt. I, Ch. I, § 3. Abbott's trans-
lation, p. 334.

28 Practical Reason, Pt. I, Bk. I, Ch. 3, Abbott's translation, p. 169.

The Anthropological Argument 141

connects him with an order of things that only the understand-
ing can conceive, with a world which at the same time com-
mands the whole sensible world. . . . This power is nothing
but personality, that is, freedom and independence of the
mechanism of nature, yet, regarded also as a faculty of a being
which is subject to special laws, namely, pure practical laws
given by its own reason ; so that the person as belonging to
the sensible world is subject to his own personality as be-
longing to the intelligible [super-sensible] world. It is not
to be wondered at that man, as belonging to both worlds, must
regard his own nature in reference to its second and highest
characteristic only with reverence, and its laws with the highest
respect." ^^

To sum up : It is the essence, the central element, in moral
consciousness to believe that goodness, truth, love, and
righteousness are not mere brute instincts or social utilities,
customs and maxims founded in self-interest, public and
private. They must have an external basis in the very nature
of the spiritual, i.e., the personal world. They are reflections
in the mirror of our hearts of an ethical order, which itself
roots and springs out of an Ethical and Infinite Person, the
law of whose Life is somehow the law of our being also, even
though we dare to break it. This is the best argument for our
age, which has noble aspirations and high ethical ideals. It
is the most convincing argument to those to whom it appeals,
but even more than the rational argument, it demands an open
heart, a willingness to listen, and a desire for the truth. It de-
pends for its influence on the conscience being awake, on the
attitude which individual men hold to their known duty, and
on their will to do the right.

The Denial of Divine Benevolence

The doubt of God's goodness in the moral government of
the world, which is caused by the commonness of pain and
misery, needs a few words of discussion. But certain limita-

29 Ibid., Abbott's translation, p. i8o.

142 Basic Ideas in Religion

tions must be set to keep the question within bounds. Two
kinds or classes of pain cannot be here considered. Human
suffering must be treated by itself as being involved by the
solidarity of the race in the consequences, physical and moral,
of sin. This aspect of theodicy belongs to Christian theology.
Again we must rule out all animal suffering due to man, for
which the divine order is not responsible. We have a certain
amount of obligation to animals which has been well expressed
by Davidson : " Treat the animal in such a manner as you
would willingly be treated, were you such an animal." So the
question narrows itself down to animal pain due to the working
of the world order and the relations of the animals to each
other.

It has been objected that if God has the perfect moral char-
acter which the argument just treated shows Him to have, He
would not permit the world to be so full of pain and suffering
as it is. If He is loving and all-powerful and all-knowing,
why did He build the world on cruel lines? These objections
were never more bitter than they are now, but they are as
old as speculative thought. Epicurus stated his view of the
difficulty in the form of a trilemma. (i) God is able, but not
willing to prevent pain — ^then He is not good: (2) He is
willing, but not able — then He is not omnipotent; (3) He is
neither able nor willing — then He is indifferent.

The modern sympathetic spirit of humanity. Christian in
origin, has greatly intensified the difficulty, and extended it to
cover the animal world. Not only poets and philanthropists,
but men of science often make it the ground for questioning
either the divine goodness or omnipotence. J. S. Mill in an
indictment of nature, which is more emotional and imaginative
than a logician and scientist should be guilty of, accepts the
second part of Epicurus' trilemma. God is willing, but not
able, to prevent pain. Thus we have a revival of Manichaean
Gnosticism ; God is limited by the material He works in.

Romanes, in his negative period of thought, was typical of
this group of scientists who impugn divine goodness, and none
have exceeded him in the severity of his attack: " Supposing

The Anthropological Argument 143

the Deity to be, what Professor Flint maintains that he is —
viz., omnipotent, and there can be no inference more trans-
parent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends
desigTied, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of benefi-
cence in the divine character than that which we know in
any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause
for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means.
Some hundreds of millions of years ago some millions of
millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient.
Since that time till the present, there must have been millions
and millions of generations of millions and millions of indi-
viduals. And throughout all this period of incalculable dura-
tion, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in
a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the
outcome, we find that more than one-half of the species which
have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits,
lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and
sentient forms ; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter,
hooks and suckers molded for torture — everywhere a reign
of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering
limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly
close in deaths of cruel torture. ... If we see a rabbit pant-
ing in the iron jaws of a spring trap, and in consequence abhor
the devilish nature of the being who, with full powers of realiz-
ing what pain means, can deliberately employ his whole facul-
ties of invention in contriving a thing so hideously cruel ;
what are we to think of a Being who, with yet higher faculties
of thought and knowledge, and with an unlimited choice of
means to secure His ends, has contrived untold thousands of
mechanisms no less diabolical ? In short, so far as Nature can
teach us, or ' observation can extend,' it does appear that
the scheme, if it is a scheme, is the product of a Mind which
differs from the more highly evolved type of human mind in
that it is immensely more intellectual without being nearly so
moral." ^^

8° Thoughts on Religion, pp. 81-83.

144 Basic Ideas in Religion

There are three ways in which Romanes has erred in his in-
dictment, (i) He ignores the fact that animals are non-
moral, and therefore cannot commit the many " sins " of which
he accuses them, all implying deliberation and intention.
(2) The difficulty is largely of his own making as the result
of his sympathetic imagination. All the phrases he uses de-
scribe men, not animals ; for they are interpretations of ani-
mal life in terms of human experience, as if they had states of
self-consciousness which are beyond their possible knowledge.
We have no words in which to express the semi-conscious life
of animals. We cannot help using terms expressing agony and
terror which it is certain they seldom experience. (3) We
must recognize the fact that multitudes of creatures serve as
food for higher forms — how else should these live? Man is
inconsistent in inveighing against nature's ways as long as he
himself lives on the flesh of animals. Death is indispensable.
If they did not quickly die after vigorous life, the lower forms
would soon fill the earth. The parasites to which Romanes re-
fers are not so terrible as he represents, for they feed on the
fat and avoid the sensitive organs of the creatures to which
they attach themselves. In these and similar ways Mill, Hux-
ley,^^ and others have been wrong in their indictments.

All pain cannot be included in their indictment of nature,
for both in animals and man pain is often a means to good,
nature's danger signal. As Le Conte expresses it, pains are
sentinels on guard. Every animal appetite springs out of a
want, which causes pain if it is not gratified as, for instance,
hunger or thirst. Every sense and faculty is so constituted as
to be in certain circumstances the seat of pain. It is mani-
fest that pain is needed to warn animals not to misuse their
bodies so as possibly to destroy them. Intense pain is abnormal
and results from misuse. No organ was ever made to give
pain, but every organ, being delicate and sensitive, will by pain
quickly protest against neglect and rough treatment. Teeth
were made for eating, not for aching; the pain is an incident,

31 The Nineteenth Century. Feb. 1888.

The Anthropological Argument 145

not an end. Anatomists have never discovered an organ cal-
culated to produce pain and disease. They never tell us that
the function of this particular nerve is to irritate, or that duct
to carry gravel to the kidneys, or that gland to secrete the acid
which causes gout. These are all diseased and abnormal con-
ditions. Man is the only being who has ever constructed
instruments of torture for the very purpose of giving
pain.

The amount of pain felt by wild animals is grossly exagger-
ated. Shakespeare has the fancy that when a beetle is crushed
it " finds a pang as great as when a giant dies." ^^ This is an
honor to his heart, but there is no foundation in nature for
it. The degree of pain each animal suffers is determined by
the grade of its nervous organization. Plants suffer no pain.
Low forms of life, like fishes and insects, have a very simple
nervous system and show no signs of pain. A fish does not
suffer from the hook as much as some suppose. If a bee is
cut in half as it sucks a flower, it will keep on sucking. Rats
will bite their own legs off if caught in traps. It is impossible
to judge of the degree of pain by the contortions of animals,
for it is mostly reflex nervous action, like the motions of an
epileptic fit. We observe the sufferings of our domestic ani-
mals, but they are not as acute as our own. We forget that
animals in the state of nature suffer little, and are free from
some of our painful diseases. When not devoured for prey,
they die painless deaths of old age, or cold, or hunger. Even
in the case of human beings few die in full possession of their
mental faculties. Most seem to be in a sort of stupor at the
last.

Idiots, who live a purely animal life, show at times utter
insensibility to what would seem agonizing pain to us. They
have been known to watch surgical operations performed on
themselves with no more sign of pain than if it were being
done to another.

The present intensity of feeling about the matter is due to

32 Measure for Measure, Act III, Sc. i.

146 Basic Ideas in Religion

the emphasis laid on animal suffering and death by the Dar-
winian theor)' of the struggle for existence. Our sympathetic
imagination pictures the earth as an unceasing field of carnage
and pain. But even on a human battle field the mass of the
wounded sufifer little pain in the excitement of the battle,
until the blood cools and they lie long unattended. The analogy
is a misleading one and fails in this very point, that the animal
seized for prey is not wounded and left unattended, it is
quickly killed and probably suffers little pain.

There is human evidence to show that the victims are al-
most certainly frightened or hypnotized to such a degree that
they may feel no pain at all. Fear inhibits the nerve reactions
which would normally cause pain. David Livingstone has told
how it felt to be seized by a lion. Growling horribly near his
ear, the lion shook him as a terrier dog shakes a rat. The shock
produced a stupor like that which seems to be felt by a mouse
after the first shake by a cat. He was in a sort of dreamy
state in which there was no pain or terror, though he was con-
scious all the time. The strong shake destroyed fear and
any horror at the beast itself. Sir Edward Bradford, an Eng-
lish officer in India, was seized in the jungle by a tiger which
held him down firmly and deliberately devoured the whole
of one arm, beginning at the hand. He was positive that he
felt no fear, and no pain, save when his hand was bitten
through. Rustem Pasha, once Turkish ambassador at Lon-
don, was attacked by a bear which tore ofif his arm and part of
his shoulder. He was not conscious of any sufifering, but was
excessively angry at the bear's satisfaction in eating his arm.
Thus nature seems to provide her own narcotic. Further, ab-
sence of pain seems produced by an accident in which the per-
son is perfectly helpless. Mr. Whymper fell several hundred
feet in the Alps, bounding from rock to rock, yet he neither
lost consciousness nor suffered the slightest pain, though he
was terribly bruised. Severe operations have been performed
on patients under hypnotic influence without their feeling any
pain. If animals eaten as prey are hypnotized through fear
they would probably not feel pain. Thus it can be seen how

The Anthropological Argument 147

much sentimental exaggeration has come into our view of the
struggle for existence.

Naturalists who have lived in the woods among animals
and watched their ways in the natural state, such as Audubon,
Wallace, Maurice Thompson, Burroughs, etc., all believe that
their life predominates with keen enjoyment. Sir John Lub-
bock says that the pleasures of life are greater than its pains.
Darwin writes : " When we reflect on the struggle for exist-
ence, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the
warfare of nature is not incessant, that no fear of pain or death
is felt beforehand, the imagination being absent, that death
is generally prompt and painless, that the vigorous, the healthy
and the happy survive and multiply." Poets and lovers of
nature in the large, who do not lose sight of the whole, as
scientists often do, are not troubled by thoughts of God's in-
difference.

There are evidences that had Romanes lived to write his
Candid Examination of Religion (of which the Notes that
he left testify how great a loss his death has caused
us), he would have largely reversed his earlier indictment of
the benevolence of God. To quote the editor of his sug-
gestive Notes, Bishop Gore : " It is probable that Romanes
felt the difficulty arising from the cruelty of nature less, as he
was led to dwell more on humanity as the most important part
of nature, and perceived the function of sufifering in the
economy of human life : and also as he became more im-
pressed with the positive evidences for Christianity as at once
the religion of sorrow and the revelation of God as Love. The
Christian Faith supplies believers not only with an argument
against pessimism from general results, but also with such an
insight into the Divine character and method as enables them
at least to bear hopefully the awful perplexities which arise
from the spectacle of individuals suffering." ^^

Suffering is involved in the constitution of the world as
a great system under general laws. It is vital for the good of

33 Thoughts on Religion, p. loi.

148 Basic Ideas in Religion

the whole. It is better that the individual should suffer than
that this order should be broken. From the Christian, as dis-
tinct from the naturalistic standpoint, we may look on nature's
demand for sacrifice, and on death as the condition of life,
as a sacrament of the divine law of love revealed on Calvary.

(We consider here only the rational form of Ethical Theism ;
its intuitive aspect will be treated under Ethical Ontology.)

CHAPTER VIII

THE WITNESS OF THE BEAUTIFUL
AND THE SUBLIME

This very recent line of thought would seem at first to be-
long to the Eutaxiological Argument. But the impression
beauty makes on us is a spontaneous feeling rather than a
logical inference, and it suggests at once more than Mind as its
cause. It can readily stand by itself as a fitting transition be-
tween the Witness of the Intellect, which has just been treated,
and the Witness of the Spirit (the Ontological Argument),
which is to follow. As beauty has no other purpose than the
giving of pure pleasure, it raises in devout minds the thought
of the divine goodness as desiring to fill our hearts with glad-
ness.

Kant was the first philosopher who studied this argument
for God. He associated the appreciation of beauty with the
practical, not with the theoretical, reason, for as he pointed
out the logical element is notably absent. The admiration for
beautiful things and the emotions aroused by the manifold
purposes and harmonies of nature have something akin to
religious feeling. By action analogous to moral agencies they
produce in us feelings of joy and gratitude toward the un-
known Cause of all things. He called natural beauty " the
form of the Good."

Nature's beauty and sublimity were fully recognized by the
Jews. The spirit of rejoicing faith in the living God as near
to the world and sustaining it from moment to moment, filled
the heart of psalmist and prophet, inspiring outbursts of ex-
ulting praise to the God of nature, such as the pagan world at
its highest never knew. Of many instances the 104th Psalm
can stand as typical. It is given in Bishop Alexander's para-
phrase.

149

150 Basic Ideas in Religion

Bless the Lord, O my soul!

O Lord, my God !
Very great hast Thou been.

Splendor and majesty
Thou hast put on as a robe.
Thou hast arrayed Thee with light

For Thy lucent vesture of wear,
Outspreading the heavens on heavens

As the tremulous veil of a curtain.

— He who archeth and layeth the beams
Of his lofty chamber of Presence
On the floor of the waters above.

— Who setteth the clouds

Thick-encompassing, dense.
For the battle-car of His march.
— ' Who walketh on wings of the wind.

Who maketh His angels
As swift as the sweep of the storm-winds,

As strong as the flame of the fire.

Thou hast built up the marvelous building
Of earth on foundations that shall not
Be shaken for ever and aye :

Thou didst mantle it once with the deep.
Sheer up o'er the hills stood the waters,

— They recoil'd because Thou didst chide them.
From the crashing voice of Thy thunder

They trembled and hasted away;
Ascended the mountains.
Descended the valleys,
To the place Thou hadst founded for them :

The line of their border Thou settest
Which their proud waves must never pass o'er;
Must never return in their anger.
To mantle the wide earth again.

Thou sendest in freedom away
The bright springs into the river;

In the glens, the mountains between,
They walk for ever and aye . . .
The happy trees of the Lord

Stand satisfied, even the cedars

Lebanonian, planted by Him ;

There the chirping birds build their nests;

The Witness of the Beautiful 151

But the good and home-loving stork —
Her house the cypresses are.

The mountains, earth's high ones, uplifted
Are there for the wild goats to climb,

And the crags are a refuge for conies.

He make the wan yellow moon
To mark the vespers for aye

Of the times as they come in their order.

And the bright sun, that knowest so well

His unfailing succession of sunsets :
Thou settest the darkness. Comes night,

And in it will creep

All the teeming life of the thicket.

The young lions roar for their prey,

And seek for their food from their God.

Breaks forth at his bright birth the sun.

They gather and muster themselves,
And in their lairs they crouch down.

Man goes forth to his work,
To his service until the evening.

How many Thy works — O Jehovah !
In wisdom all of them made.

The earth is full to the utmost
Of an ample possession of Thine. . . .
Hush'd in expectance all these
Look forth and wait upon Thee.
To give them their food in its season;

And ever Thou givest it freely:
Thou openest Divinely Thy Hand —
They are satisfied fully with good !
But when Thou hidest Thy face.

They are troubled, and restlessly shudder.

Their spirits Thou gatherest in,

They breathe out the breath of their life,

And unto their dust will return.

— Thou wilt send forth

In solemn procession Thy Spirit,

And the work of creation will grow.
And Thou wilt make young and renew

The sorrow-worn face of the earth.

His glory shall be through the ages.
The Lord shall be glad in His works.

152 Basic Ideas in Religion

If He do but look on the earth,

It trembles exceedingly sore.
If He touch the mountains, they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord in my life.
I will lift up Psalms to my God
While my soul can call itself /.
My thought shall be sweet in His sight.

I will be glad in the Lord.
From this fair earth the sinner shall cease,
And yet in the space of the 3'ears
The wicked shall not be there.

Bless the Lord, O my soul ! 1

In Greek thought nature and God were interchangeable
terms, and we find no hint of any creation proper. But in
the view of the Old Testament writers God was wholly dis-
tinct from nature. Back of the visible nature process is a
Person who knows and wills the universe. Nature is creatural,
out and out, and her every aspect is in submission to God's
omnipotent will. God is Maker and Master of the whole
physical order, consequently Nature becomes a symbol. Chris-
tianity deepened and clarified self-consciousness and set the
spirit free from the control of the visible world, of which the
Greek thought himself a helpless part. Thus there is a vast
difference between the Greek and the modern Christian, the
former counted himself a mere portion of living nature, while
the latter looking upward feels himself the master and crown
of the world. The point of difference between the Greeks
and ourselves is best expressed by saying that for them Nature
was more a substance than a symbol, while to us it is a sym-
bol rather than a substance. Anything in nature becomes a
symbol when it arouses an intensity of feeling that robs it of
its mere material existence, and transmutes it into a means of
expression and suggestion of holy things. In pre-Socratic
days the problem of mind had not emerged. Self-conscious-
ness was absorbed in nature, and nature was largely its own
maker and self-contained. Later there arose the highest

1 The Witness of the Psalms. Supplement, pp. 376-80.

The Witness of the Beautiful 153

thought the mind of man can form — the discovery of person-
ality, a thought due especially to the Gospel's teaching of the
innate dignity of man as man. With the revelation of spirit
in man arose the kindred faith in the Spirit of God as back of
the physical order, its inner source and support, working within
it, as well as without. In other words, the thought of the di-
vine immanence, so illuminating to us, but utterly foreign to
the old Greek mind, is the real source of the occidental nature
sense.

The Greeks had the deepest sense of physical beauty. It
was a very passion, inborn and almost a religion. Their crea-
tions in architecture, in painting and sculpture have never been
excelled. They appreciated moral beauty, though their moral-
ity itself was low in certain relations. They also anticipated
Kant's thought that beauty is the form of the Good, but the
sentiment of beauty in nature, the sense of the picturesque,
is curiously lacking in classical literature, though occasionally
we do find instances of the appreciation of the sublime. How-
ever, after the advent of Christianity, the Greek theologians
show evidences of our modern nature sense, and their spirit
of devout delight in nature's beauty and harmony as witnessing
to God, found expression in the liturgy and hymns of the
Eastern Church. But until lately this element of praise has
been altogether lacking in our own worship.

Mediaeval thought in the West tended to separate the world
of faith from that of things, which was under the curse of
Adam, and the theological mind in every age has been too in-
tellectual to appreciate the mystical and symbolic side of na-
ture. This line of evidence has been slow to find an entrance
into theological writings. Martineau makes no reference to
arguments from beauty in his Study of Religion, but Armstrong
tells us that in 1897 he asked him with some tremor, whether
we were not justified in building on the foundation of the
sense of beauty, through which man recognizes God as Love.
Martineau's reply was a wonderfully cordial and unqualified
assent. He added that he considered the argument qualified

154 Basic Ideas in Religion

to rank in importance, and to be coordinated with his two
arguments founded on CausaUty and on Conscience.^

The sense of the picturesque as a general trait is modern,
beginning with the Lake Poets in England and the Roman-
ticists on the Continent. But the Puritan mistrust of beauty
still lingers in some quarters, as though beautiful things were
somehow unholy and a snare for the unwary, for was not the
tree that tempted Eve "pleasant to the eyes"? The abuse
of a good gift of God does not take away its right use. If the
Preacher of old could say, " God made everything beautiful in
its time," ^ then certainly there can be no divinely intended an-
tagonism between beauty and faith, nor any ordained con-
nection between ugliness and goodness.

The beautiful and the useful are sharply distinct. There
may be adaptations of nature to our physical needs without any
awareness on our part, but beauty exists only in and for our
own consciousness. We must feel it, or it has no existence at
all. It is, moreover, a purely personal possession. It is an
immediate experience, and not transferable to another. We
can no more convey our delight in a beautiful scene to one who
is indifferent to such impressions than we can give sight to
the sightless. Illingworth points out the spiritual value of
sense impressions : " Atoms and their properties, as revealed
by science, are not more real than the sensible impressions
which they create in all normally constituted persons: while
these impressions which profoundly touch the feelings, and
modify the conduct of innumerable men, may even be called
more real, in the only intelligible sense of the word, than their
mechanical causes, known only to a small minority of the race.
Take the sunset for example — a series of ethereal vibra-
tions, merely mechanical in origin, and, as such, other than
they seem ; whose total effect is to create in us an optical illu-
sion, making the sun, and not the earth, appear to move. Yet,
as men watch its appearance, thoughts and feelings arise in
their hearts, that move their being in unnumbered ways.

2 See Caldecott, Philosophy of Religion, p. 351.
' Ecc. 3:11.

The Witness of the Beautiful 155

Youth is fired with high ideals; age consoled with peaceful
hopes ; saints, as they pray, see heaven opened ; sinners feel
conscience strangely stirred. Mourners are comforted; weary
ones rested ; artists inspired ; lovers united ; worldlings purified
and softened as they gaze. In a short half-hour all is over;
the mechanical process has come to an end ; the gold has melted
into gray. But countless souls, meanwhile, have been soothed,
and solaced, and uplifted by that evening benediction from
the far ofif sky ; and the course of human life today is modified
and molded by the setting of yesterday's sun. In the same
way, a piece of music, a sonata or a symphony, is more real
to its audience than the acoustic laws which cause it, or
the instruments upon which it is performed. The world of
science, in other words, is no more real than the world of feel-
ing; the two being only different aspects of one continuous
whole, of which the human organism is also a part. It fol-
lows that we have no ground whatever for discounting the
religious influence of external nature, as less real than the
mechanical phenomena, on which physically speaking it de-
pends, and of which, in fact, it may be called a manifestation.
The two things impress different faculties in us, but with equal
justification." *

When the materialist has exhausted his ingenuity in ef-
forts to prove that utility, the body's good, is the key to all
nature, its very end and aim, this peculiar sense of beauty
rises up suddenly as a confounding something, utterly out of
place in a purely mechanical world, where man, like all other
animals, should live by bread alone, desiring and expecting
nothing more. The theory of evolution, the modern " open
sesame " of all mysteries, fails us here. Darwin felt this
difficulty and admitted his perplexity as to the " use " of
beauty. He sought to bring it within the utilitarian formula
of evolution by the hypothesis of sexual selection, and the more
certain fertilization by insects of the brightly colored flowers.
But both suggestions concern only a small section of the world

^Divine Immanence, pp. 65-67.

156 Basic Ideas in Religion

of beauty. Wallace is certain that the emotions excited by
colors and forms in nature raise us above the level of a world
developed on purely utilitarian principles.^

The Duke of Argyll writes of the gorgeous coloring of the
humming birds and asks : " Now, what explanation does the
law of Natural Selection give — I will not say of the origin,
but even of the continuance and preservation — of such specific
varieties as these? None whatever. A crest of topaz is no
better in the struggle for existence than a crest of sapphire.
A frill ending in spangles of the emerald is no better in the
battle of life than a frill ending in the spangles of the ruby.
A tail is not afifected for the purposes of flight, whether its
marginal or its central feathers are decorated with white. It
is impossible to bring such varieties into relation with any phys-
ical law known to us. It has relation, however, to a Purpose,
which stands in close analogy with our own knowledge of
Purpose in the works of Man. Mere beauty and mere variety,
for their own sake, are objects which we ourselves seek when
we can make the forces of Nature subordinate to the attain-
ment of them. There seems to be no conceivable reason why
we should doubt or question, that these are ends and aims also
in the forms given to living organisms, when the facts corre-
spond with this view, and with no other.'' Or in the words of
Gould, which Argyll quotes with approval : " My own opin-
ion is, that this gorgeous coloring of the humming birds has
been given for the mere purpose of ornament, and for no other
purpose of special adaptation in their mode of life ; in other
words, that ornament and beauty, merely as such, was the
end proposed." ® Smyth gives the problem its spiritual inter-
pretation thus : " What then is the full and sufficient inter-
pretation of the beautiful in nature? What does natural evolu-
tion signify? We answer: It is from reason and for reason.
It is expression of reason to reason. It is revelation of the In-

5 See The World of Life, pp. 340-49. He holds that colors and
markings on animals and plants are only partially explainable as
" recognition marks."

« Reign of Law, pp. 234, 5 and 231.

The Witness of the Beautiful 157

telligence that thinks it and loves it, to the mind in us
which may perceive it and delight in it. This, and nothing
else, is its message and its meaning. Our sciences may trace
the laws of its unfolding; our biolog}^ to a certain extent may
find the method of its evolution. But beauty is a perpetual
revelation of intelligence to intelligence. The principle of
beauty, wrought into the elements of nature, is one of the
ruling ideas of the world. The tendency of nature every-
where to break forth and to blossom into beauty, is one of the
leading characters of evolution which indicates its rational and
moral direction." ^

The sense of beauty, therefore, witnesses directly to the
loving kindness of the Lord, Who has given to certain combina-
tions of matter in varying form and color the strange power
of evoking pure delight and inspiring uplifting thoughts in
minds at peace with themselves and the world. The law of
the sufficient reason justifies our arguing from the distinctively
human trait of joy to belief in a similar quality in our Maker.
This argument is just as valid as that from contrivance in na-
ture to mind and plan in God. The love of beauty for its
own sake is as real, though not so strong, a trait of mankind
as utilitarian design. The cave-men, who used stone imple-
ments with which to work or fight, engraved the ivory and
bone handles with a true, though undeveloped, sense of art.
Is it likely that so universal a characteristic of the mind of
man should have no counterpart at all in the mind of God?
" He that hath formed the eye, shall He not see? " ® He that
gives to man the joyous sense of beauty, shall He be blind to
it Himself? Is it not logical — if there be any correspondence
between God and man — to cry with the Psalmist, " The Lord
rejoices in His works " " and, therefore, means man to rejoice
in them also? Hugh Miller, even before the days of evolu-
tion, wrote in striking words of the fossil forms. He held that
all the forms and shapes of beauty in early geologic ages, which

7 Through Science to Faith, p. 154.

8 Ps. 94 :9.

• Ps. 104:31.

158 Basic Ideas in Religion

once filled all nature, were not created to satisfy man's love of
the beautiful, for man had not yet appeared. They must have
been called into being by the Creator in harmony with His own
aesthetic taste — to use human terms.

When indeed we think how entirely unconscious Nature
must be of her own beauty — the sea smiling in the sunlight
with its myriad dimples, or the rounded hills, rolled in green,
" asleep at noon in the summer heat," — how even the living
things, the bright-eyed squirrels, graceful in motion, the swift-
winged swallows, flashing in the sunlight, the humming birds,
those " living diadems " of sapphires and rubies, — all know
nothing of the impression which they make on us, then we un-
derstand the Scripture reference of all things to God, and to
man made in God's image. " He made the world, not in vain,
but to be inhabited," ^° said the wise prophet. " All things are
yours," said St. Paul, " and ye are Christ's, and Christ is
God's." "

If massive mountains piercing the clouds, silent in their
majesty, or the mighty swell of the boundless ocean, re-
sistless in power, fill our hearts with awe; if the twilight sky
with its depths of quivering light, glorious gold and tender
rose, palest green and purest white, speak to our hearts of the
peace and beauty of the Land Beyond ; while the patient stars,
undimmed by earth's tears, untouched by time's decay, bear
nightly witness to the Eternal One, Who changes not and
never wearies; if grassy valleys, jeweled with flowers, and the
rustling fields of grain, bending in soft billows to the gentle
breeze, whisper thoughts of the Providence of Him whose
mercy is over all His works — in a word, if certain aspects of
Nature excite in us certain moods, why should we not believe
that this correspondence is divinely ordained? Christ's deep
word, " Consider the lilies of the field," ^^ is a broad command ;
it applies to all fair and beautiful things which the Lord has
made — to the gentle violet and the ox-eyed daisies of our

ioisa. 45:18.
11 1 Cor. 3 :23.
"Matt. 6:28.

The Witness of the Beautiful 159

fields, as well as to the golden amaranths and crimson anemones
of the Galilean hillside ; to the tall pines of Maine, no less
than to the grand cedars of Lebanon. The Voice in the whirl-
wind taught Job : " The Lord hath divided a watercourse
for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of the
thunder, to cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is, on
the wilderness, where there is no man, to satisfy the desolate
and waste ground, and to cause the bud of the tender herb to
spring forth." ^^ His words are as true of the lonely cactus
and its crimson bud in our western deserts as of the tender
herb, growing unseen in the sandy wastes of Arabia, all alike
bear witness to the eternal power and divinity of their Master.
They are all manifestations of His wisdom, embodiments of
His thought. Preachers of righteousness are they, in per-
fect obedience to the laws of beauty, teachers of faith to all
who have minds to see, that a world of order presupposes an
Ordainer, that any process of age-long evolution ending in such
harmony and beauty, demands an intelligent Evolver, fore-
seeing the end from the beginning, and working consciously to-
ward His own good purposes, patient because eternal — all
proclaims to those who have souls to know and hearts to feel
their message, that God is immanent in the Universe, which
awes us by its mystery. It is the Father's House, a world
over which, in its smallest, as in its greatest parts, there watches
the constant care of the living God, Who calls the stars by
their names, and appoints its bounds to the ocean, and yet
forgets not the young ravens when they call upon Him ; and
Who sends the thunderstorms to fill the dry water-courses in
the mountains ; that they may satisfy the desolate thirst of the
wilderness, and cause the tender herb to spring forth and bud !
" Forever, O Lord, Thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faith-
fulness is unto all generations ... all things continue this day
according to Thine ordinances, for all are Thy servants. Un-
less Thy law had been my delight, I should have perished in
my affliction." ^* That is the strength and consolation which

"Job 38:25.
^* Ps. 119:89-92.

i6o Basic Ideas in Religion

the study of Nature's order brought to the writer of the 119th
Psalm, that wonderful meditation on the Law of God ruling
in man and in nature, as the same thoughts did to Job in his
mysterious overwhelming affliction. The calm, unbroken
order manifested in the great world which they could see in-
spired them with power to trust their lives, even in darkness
and trial, to its Maker whom they did not see, Who must
care for the men whom He has created as His children, feel-
ing, thinking, praying souls, crying aloud to the Father of
their spirits for help and light. Even so, only more plainly,
does Christ teach. " Are not two sparrows sold for a far-
thing? yet not one of them shall fall to the ground without your
Father," ^^ that is, not one is forgotten of its Maker. What
an overwhelming saying, when once we take in all it means,
is this, " If God so clothe the grass of the field, which today
is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much
more clothe you, O ye of little faith ? " ^° This is the
divinely revealed ground of intelligent trust in God, our value
in His sight over the things which quickly perish, having their
whole being in this world, made for a day. The Lord,
whose mercy is over all His works, is loving to man. His
child.

Besides the beauty of form and color there is the beauty
of grandeur, the sentiment of the sublime, which is deeper and
more intense. In the presence of vast masses of matter at
rest, as in the silent mountains, or in the fierce turmoil of the
thunder storm, or in the wild gale on the ocean, or when we
yield to the solemn impression of the star-strown depths of
space, we cannot avoid a feeling of awe, passing into the sense
of the sublime. Mere dread of overwhelming force, as in a
tornado or an earthquake, differs radically from sublimity, of
which the ruling spirit is something akin to reverence, and
which moves to worship, not to terror.

Even more than in the case of beauty, the things which we
see arouse faith in the things we cannot see. Those great

15 Matt. 10:29.
"Matt. 6:30.

The Witness of the Beautiful i6i

masses of matter, or manifestations of force, or the sense of
open space unlimited, taken alone could not evoke the feeling
of awe which arises spontaneously in the heart. There must
be some preestablished or inborn correspondence between our
deeper nature and such grand scenes, a radical association be-
tween nature at its highest and our instinctive faith in that
mighty Power, not physical but spiritual, on which we feel
our dependence for very existence. The " something " which
links these two diverse experiences may be expressed in the
one word " infinity," which Kant used of the impression
made upon him by the starry heavens in their vastness, and the
moral law in the depths of his being, also infinite in extent of
obligation.

The beautiful is restful and pleasing. The sublime is dis-
turbing, it humbles us with thoughts too great for words of
things transcendent. But here as elsewhere true humility
brings exaltation. Man's reverent awe before the infinite
brings a feeling of dignity, and elevates humanity in our person
to a higher plane. Kant was the first to analyze this double
experience. Our sense of weakness and awe in the felt real-
ization of the Infinite and the Eternal exalts us, in that this
very sense of almost oppressive sublimity makes the mind
conscious of its own wide scope of knowledge and relations,
of its " supersensible destination " and its superiority to na-
ture as a mechanical system. Kant's analysis strengthens the
view that the genesis of our Occidental nature sense is the
logical expression of our feeling of individuality which the
East lacks. Nor has the savage this sense of the sublime, for
a man whose individuality is still merged in the tribe cannot
possess it. It is solely the prerogative of the man who realizes
his intense and inviolable personality.

A man standing on the edge of an awful gulf may lose his
nerve and grow dizzy in so far as he is a thing of sense, but
when the manhood in him sounds the rally of all his forces,
he stands erect, fearless of the vastness which threatened his
self-masterhood, and then, in truth, he feels the greatness of
his manhood. Man confronts the infinite universe, well aware

1 62 Basic Ideas in Religion

of his physical insignificance, knowing that he is a reed shaken
by the wind, that he can be crushed like a moth by its slight-
est force, but he feels and knows and wills, and therefore holds
himself superior to all the mighty masses of creation.^^ To
illustrate the great by the little, we may recall the anecdote of
the true but mediocre artist who, standing before a masterpiece
of painting, felt his own inferior powers, but yet exclaimed,
" Thank God, I also am an artist." Even so the reverent
thinker in the presence of the glory and grandeur of Nature
embodying God's great thoughts, is moved to thankfulness that
he also is spirit, able to appreciate the majesty of God's works
which strike such deep chords in his nature. That we feel
thus in the presence of Nature's vast spaces and mighty forces,
is itself a proof of our spiritual being. Mere animals crouch
in trembling dread before the convulsions of nature, man
stands upright undismayed, and lifts his psean of worship above
the crashing conflict of the elements. The realization of his
personality lifts him above himself into the felt presence of
God, and he attains ease of heart and peace of mind.

A magnificent sunset after a storm, with dark cloud masses
lurid in red and with pure golden light breaking through the
rifts, combines the beautiful and the sublime. What is the
power that holds the mind enthralled? WTience comes the
sense of awe and of praise? Why is there no sense of soli-
tude in those awful depths; no fear, but only joy in that sub-
lime infinitude? Because of the conscious presence of more
than sight perceives. That glorious sheen of light and color
is but the clothing of a sphere of life into which we pierce
and find no strangeness in it. We are no more alone, a sense
of relationship to all that sphere contains invites us onward ;
it is a spiritual landscape, as it were, reflected in the heart's
mirror within ; it seems no dream, but a conscious reality of
the Eternal World within the spirit.

Those scientists who have only a mechanical conception of
nature feel no awe at the glory of the heavens, but only won-

" Cf. Pascal's Thoughts, Chap. II, § X.

The Witness of the Beautiful 163

der at the complexity of the world machine. No vast system
of mere celestial machinery with gravitation as the one all
sufficient working force, can fill with awe minds once dis-
illusioned of " the pathetic fallacy of a personal God." The
scientist of this type feels no reverence when he gazes on the
multitudinous masses of the stars — he sees through the stage
machinery ! His human mind refuses to bow before any
mere system of things in motion even though it seems infinite.
But alas for the mind which can gaze out on the mighty sum
of things in all their harmony and peace, and feel no whisper
of the all sustaining presence of its Maker. Pure science —
with man's spirit ignored — studying phenomena as simple facts
appearing under mechanical laws, is fatal to the mystical sense.
We understand fully that the physical investigator must work
on this line ; we only ask him at times to break loose from the
tyranny of his special task with microscope or crucible, and
gaze on nature as a whole from the normal human standpoint,
that he may be touched by its glory, and become conscious of
the Cosmos as a translucent veil half -concealing, half -revealing
an eternal realm within and above it.

But the materialistic tendency is not the only nor the main
obstacle to the recognition of God's revelation in the beautiful
and the sublime. Even more urgent is the condition of a pure
heart and a will set on good.

" If peace be in the heart,
The wildest winter storm is full of solemn beauty,
The midnight lightning flash but shows the path of duty,
Each hving creature but tells some new and joyous story,
The very stones and trees all catch a ray of glory,

If peace be in the heart."

The keen sense of beauty does not carry with it a deep feeling
of duty, because beauty belongs to the world of the senses,
while duty roots in personality, out of touch with matter as
such. The ancient Greeks enjoyed beauty purely on the
sensuous side, and a world of art, of which they were the
ideal representatives, has ever been tempted to rest content in
the visible beauty alone and, living and exulting in the life of

164 Basic Ideas in Religion

sense, to worship the creature and forget the Creator. All
experience bears witness how easily in such cases the artistic
sensitiveness to physical beauty leads to physical degeneration.
Great masters in the world of art, like great masters in the
world of physical science, have ever been great personalities.
But the rank and file of those who make the motto " Art for
art's sake " alone their rule of life, are ever perilously near
the precipice of immoral thought and act. The Puritans have
some foundation for their mistrust of art, and St. Paul had
lived in Corinth for two years when he wrote that stern indict-
ment of the sins of those who worshiped the creation rather
than the Creator, and proclaimed the just and self-consistent
punishment of those sins in physical degradation.^^

Men cannot always live by the senses alone, least of all
the poet, whose prophetic vision must include in its wide range
the deep things of man as well as the forms of nature. He
must at times look into his own heart as well as into the
hearts of others. But he does so reluctantly and shrinks from
what it reveals. The inner strife, the strange discord between
the higher and the lower self is an enigma, which he cannot
solve because he does not will to solve it. Sin is a word
which has no place in the vocabulary of pure art. Why can
men not be at one with themselves and the world? The
aesthetic sphere is not the deepest element in us. It docs not
satisfy our whole spiritual need, because it is not fundamental,
it does not touch the roots of life and action. They are in-
wrought with our moral nature, in the sphere of the affections
and the realm of the heart with its impulses to love and to
trust, its craving for righteousness, its strong urgent sense of
duty binding on the will, its feeling of sinfulness, its faith in
God and our own immortality. Physical nature and her
sensuous influences in themselves considered belong solely to
the pre-moral stage, whereas the high and holy experiences of
Christian faith move in the realm of spiritual being, and only
the man who feels them in his heart will ever see them reflected

"Rom. 1:18-32.

The Witness of the Beautiful 165

in the face of Nature. Here Coleridge's words are true to
the letter :

"... we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live." ^^

She reflects faithfully our changing moods of joy and depres-
sion, she can uplift in hours of prayer and devotion, but she
cannot comfort in hours of gloom and sorrow, or of self-re-
proach, if there be no prayer and faith.

Thus all attempts to make a religion out of nature are fore-
doomed to failure, for aesthetics covers only a small part of the
varied experience of man. It does not touch the deeper ethical
life of the spirit and the affections. Nature has no balm for
broken hearts and wasted years, and no sedative for bitter
shame or remorse for guilt. This is the secret of the bitter
pessimism of many philosophic writers, such as Schopenhauer,
von Hartmann, and even Goethe at times.

The clearest expression of the ultimate outcome of a life
content to rest in nature, defiant of duty, careless of God, is
found in the inner discord and the bitter dissatisfaction that
mark the writings of Byron and Shelley. They separated (as
Wordsworth never did) the spirit of nature from the spirit
of God, and lived solely for the beauty without them, never
looking on the moral beauty within the soul. They expected
Nature, herself impersonal, to give them the blessing of peace,
which only a Person can give to persons. After reckless
lives they plunged, as it were, into the fountain of nature's
beauty, hoping to come forth purified and forgiven with the
inner monitor silenced. In the earlier days of life's freshness
they were lifted out of themselves, but later the charm would
not work. Byron and Shelley stand forth in their own per-
sons as the very embodiment of bitter pessimism, reaping what
they have sown. Thus Byron writes :

"Our life is a false nature — 'tis not in
The harmony of things, — this hard decree,
This uneradicable taint of sin,

19 Ode to Dejection.

1 66 Basic Ideas in Religion

... all the woes we see —

And worse, the woes we see not — which throb through

An immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new." -**

And:

" How beautiful is all this visible world !

How glorious in its action and itself!

But we, who name ourselves its sovereigns, we,

. . . with our mix'd essence, make

A conflict of its elements . . .

Till our mortality predominates,

And men are — what they name not to themselves,

And trust not to each other." -^

Shelley early in life tells us that:

" The universe,
In Nature's silent eloquence, declares
That all fulfil the works of love and joy —
All but the outcast man." 22

And later he asks in pain:

" And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse . . .
And self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood? " 23

(The use of the imagination is discussed in the Appendix,
Note N.)

20 Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV ; 126.

21 Manfred, Act I, Sc. 2.

22 Queen Mab, III.

23 Prometheus Unbound, Act II, Sc. 4.

CHAPTER IX

THE WITNESS OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT TO
THE INFINITE AND PERFECT BEING

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

We began with the objective study of the universal faith
of mankind in God, which is the expression of an intuition,
vague but real, of the divine. This religious instinct, which
anthropology considers a characteristic of man, demands, like
all other instincts, a corresponding reality as its source and
end, an environment of spirit. We confirmed this intuition
and distinguished more clearly its contents by means of the
witness of Nature to her Maker, and the testimony of man's
threefold consciousness to similar attributes in God.

Now we proceed to the analysis of this intuition itself, the
so-called Ontological Argument. This line of reasoning is
not properly an argument, being mystical or intuitive rather
than intellectual or logical ; it is the reverent study of the wit-
ness of God to Himself, that to yvojo-rov tov Oeov which God has
revealed in the heart of man. It is common to all devout
minds, but seldom formulated. To the ideas of God, con-
firmed by preceding " proofs," it adds the conception of in-
finity and perfection. It is a priori in that the conception of
the Infinite from which it starts is not the a posteriori result of
experience, but is given in our spiritual nature itself. Many
writers begin Apologetics with this argument, but this is not
the logical order, for religion is clearer if we first study its
own witness to itself in history, and then pass on to its
evidences in nature and man.

This intuitive " feeling " of God results from our own
spiritual being. Spirits cannot but be conscious of the Spirit
in whom they have their being. That this vision is so dim and

167

1 68 Basic Ideas in Religion

wavering in most men is the consequence of sin, dulling the
spiritual vision. Men are " alienated from the life of God,"
because the eye within is partially blinded or wilfully closed,
" Ye do not will to come unto me that ye may have life," ^ said
the loving Christ in sad reproach, and in sterner accents of
warning, " If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great
is the darkness ! " ^ Still, however dim, the consciousness of
the Divine remains, for man cannot lose the image of God.
Man knows God best through self. The universal sensus
nnminis, the feeling of Infinity which God has set in the heart
of man, is the basis of all faith ; it is this which makes religion
possible as devout feeling, not as philosophical speculation.

The world of experience cannot create the intuition, but it
does awaken and develop it. The sight of things transitory
and finite arouses immediately in the heart the feeling of the
Infinite and Eternal, and our recognition of our own imper-
fection brings with it the certainty of a Perfect Being, the
source and realization of all righteousness. In both cases,
there is nothing in the finite experience itself to cause the faith
in the Infinite ; that is the act of the spirit alone.

No element in consciousness so clearly indicates and ex-
presses the spirit in man as the " illogical " deductions of In-
finity and Perfection from finite and imperfect phenomena or
experiences. It is a quick movement of the heart to a certain
and undoubted conviction, which can not be justified by the
intellect, nor proven by any experiments on phenomena. It
rather accompanies them, awakened, but not in any sense
created, by the outer experience. In the presence of innumer-
able, intricate, complex phenomena, seemingly unrelated and
antagonistic, the spirit rises at a bound to the thought that
nevertheless all existing things do form a whole in a perfect
unity. It discerns a divine unity in the multitudinous
" many " of the world. The sight of things limited in number,
fixed in quality, successive in time, ever changing in relations
and appearances somehow arouses faith in a Being who is

1 John 5 :40.

2 Matt. 6 :23.

The Witness of the Human Spirit 169

not limited by time or space, and not conditioned by this
world which exists only through and by His will. Among
things finite, He is infinite; amid things temporal. He is
eternal; amid things changing, He changes not; yesterday,
today, and forever the same.

" Only That which made us, meant us to be mightier by and by,
Set the sphere of all the boundless Heavens within the human eye,
Sent the shadow of Himself, the boundless, through the human soul ;
Boundless inward, in the atom, boundless outward, in the Whole." '

Each of the three modes of human consciousness forms a
starting point for a distinct line of theistic thought. The
intelligence sees in nature the physico-teleological proof ; the
will and moral sense yield the argument from freedom and
conscience; while spirit, the emotional nature on its highest
side, gives the feeling of the Divine which underlies every
form of the ontological argument. Recent philosophical
thinkers have begun to recognize the vital import and worth
of the spiritual nature of man, the inner world of social, ethical,
and religious feelings, which alone creates the outer world of
society and the sentiment of humanity, and finds expression
in the world of literature and art. The purely logical thought,
which Hegel makes the basis of being, has been superseded in
recent philosophy by the will-to-be of Schopenhauer, and that
has been completed by the conscious will-to-the-good of ethical
theists. The mere intellect is no longer the sole arbiter of
truth and reality.

The deep convictions of the heart and the higher needs and
faiths of humanity, as such, are now recognized as valid wit-
nesses to those aspects of the Infinite Reality which are not
sensible and logical. Kant began this movement with much
hesitation in the Critiques of Judgment and of Practical Rea-
son. It has been further developed with finner conviction by
many more recent philosophic thinkers, e.g., Lotze, Secretan,
Kuno Fischer, James, Balfour, Seth, and Baldwin. Professor
James through Pragmatism, brings out the emphasizing of

3 Tennyson, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After.

170 Basic Ideas hi Religion

will and act (pragma), as the leading principle, rather than
perception and intellection. Differing in many points, these
thinkers agree that the clue to the nature of Reality lies not
through logical reasoning and experimentation on physical
facts, though these have their place and use, but through
practical activity with self-conscious purpose under ethical
motives in the great world of human relations. The famous
syllogism of Descartes, " I think, therefore I am," is giving
place to the deeper thought, long ago expressed by Benjamin
Whichcote, but then ignored, "I act, therefore I am."

This quickening breath of a deeper and more human thought
is blowing through the temple of Science itself, awakening its
worshipers to a larger life. Karl Pearson tells us that there
is a manifest restlessness and uncertainty in scientific circles
as to the finality of the method of pure science. The me-
chanical theory is no longer counted the one and all-sufficient
outlook on the universe and human life. Virchow and Du
Bois-Reymond exposed its utter inability to explain the actual
facts of nature and of man, and still more recently Professor
Ostwald of Leipzig assured an association of scientists at
Lubeck that, in his view, scientific materialism, the theory that
matter and force are the sole and ultimate realities, is utterly
untenable. " The mechanical conception of Nature is not
scientific but metaphysical, and must give way to a wider view
which takes in all the facts " ; an opinion which Lord Kelvin
shares.

Even Psychology has helped on the cause of spiritual faith,
for its maxim of the equality of all " facts " in our complex
consciousness has weakened the inveterate tendency to look
on the understanding as the one truth-discovering faculty,
and to regard man solely as " a reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
an intellectual all in all." Many thinkers are returning to the
long discredited view of Jacobi : A reality revealed by the
senses requires no guarantee; so reality, revealed by the inner
sense, the power of intuition, which distinguishes man from
the brutes, is its own competent witness to its own veracity.
Each sphere of consciousness has its own field and its own

The Witness of the Human Spirit 171

kind of certainty.* Very similar is the position of many psy-
chologists, such as Lotze, James Seth, William James, Ward,
Marshall, and Mark Baldwin. The latter writes: "Truth
is the sort of reality which we reach by an equally inexorable
demand of our nature that we recognize what is logical. And
our ethical and religious life in organizing its experience
reaches the reality which we call God." ^ He holds that the
principle on which we should work is that " the final needs of
our nature" must have their justification in reality.

The intensely practical question of William James, If needs
of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a
sign that an invisible universe is there ? ^ receives unexpected
support in the old stronghold of intellectualism through the
recognition of the world of feeling by such masters of modern
Logic as Sigwart, Brentano, and Erdmann. They hold that
judgments ultimately depend on mental assent, assurance, and
personal conviction of truth. Without such " belief " logic
is a mere circle of tautologies, ending nowhere. No logic
as such can prove reality, nor can it disprove any reality
affirmed by the heart or our ethical or spiritual nature. Each
sphere of consciousness, the convictions of conscience as well
as the conclusions of the logical understanding, the inner
certitude of personality no less than the sensational certitude
of externality, bear their own convincing witness to the reality
corresponding to their demand for satisfaction, each according
to its kind. " It is impossible," says A. J. Balfour, " to refuse
to ethical behefs what we have conceded to scientific beliefs.
. . . Both require us to seek behind these phenomenal sources
for some ultimate ground with which they shall be congruous,
and as we have been moved to postulate a rational God in
the interests of science, so we can scarcely decline to postu-
late a moral God in the interests of morality." ^

These convictions, underlying all forms of consciousness.

* See Preface to 2nd Vol. of his works, forming the " Introduction to
the author's collected philosophical writings."

^Fragments in Philosophy and Science, pp. 341, 2.

^Is Life Worth Living?

'^ Foundations of Belief, pp. 332, 3.

172 Basic Ideas in Religion

make men ontologists by nature. No man ever argued him-
self into religious faith. He reasons out his faith only under
the compulsion of doubts in himself or others. The Bible
takes God for granted. Prophets and apostles make their
appeal directly to the spirit of man, commending themselves
to every man's consciousness by the manifestation of the
truth. " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." The
deep saying of the • Preacher of old, God hath set Eternity
(or Infinity) in the heart of man,® affirms the spiritual nature
of man, and St. Paul laid the certain foundation of all spiritual
philosophy in his clear statement, " That which may be known
of God is manifest within men, for God Himself hath made
it manifest to them." ^ The eye could not see the sun were it
not sun-like, fitted to transform the throbbing pulsations of the
ether into the mystery of vision. Or in Goethe's striking ren-
dering of this thought expressed by Philo :

" Were not a sun-like virtue in the eye.
It would not seek the sun that rules the sky;
And, were no God within to stir the brain,
The God without would speak to us in vain." ^°

Christ never argued. He simply spoke the truth, and let
those who willed to do so see and accept it. Arthur Hugh
Clough at last came to feel :

" Ah yet, when all is thought and said,
The heart still overrules the head;
Still what we hope we must believe.
And what is given us receive." ^^

So, too. Browning cries :

" I have one appeal —
I feel, am what I feel, know what I feel;
So much is truth to me." ^2

8 Ecc. 3:11.

^ Rom. I rig.

"^^ Zahme Xenien, III, Blackie's translation.
11 Through a Class Darkly.
^^Sordeilo, Bk. VI.

The Witness of the Human Spirit 173

This instinctive faith in God has been recognized by all
spiritual thinkers. Homer in the Odyssey uses vTr6\r)\j/i<; tov Oeov,
the exact equivalent of the Latin sensus numinis. Plato
and Aristotle both teach that there is a point in man, to Oelov,
where he depends on, literally " hangs from," God. In the
Book of Job we are told that " there is a spirit in man, and the
breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding." ^^ This
is a thought which Philo seems to develop when he tells us
that our knowledge of God is really God dwelling in us. He
has breathed into us something of His own nature, and He
is the Archetype of all that is in us. So, too, Irenseus taught
that all men know that God exists, for the Word that dwells
in the soul reveals Him. Origen writes clearly that Chris-
tians distinguish — and with them the distinction is not an idle
one — between Reality (t6 wv) that which abides, and phe-
nomenon, that which is ever changing and becoming, — between
things apprehended by the vov<;, and things perceived by
the senses, i.e., between the spiritual and the material. He adds
that the disciples of Jesus study phenomenal appearances to
the senses only that they may use them as steps to ascend
to the knowledge of the truths of the soul. For the invisible
things of God, i.e., the truths or intuitions of the soul, are
clearly seen by the reason in the things that are made ; and
when they have attained to the knowledge of the things of
God revealed in created things, they do not stop there but,
having trained their spiritual faculties upon them, they ascend
to the thought of God Himself." Pascal seemed to hear
God saying to him, " Thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou
hadst not (already) found Me." ^° There are two lines of an
old Latin writer, I do not know whom, which express the truth
about personal inspiration :

" Nulla fides si non primum Deus ipse loquitur,
Nullaque verba Dei nisi quae in penetralibus audit
Ipsa fides."

"Job, 32:8.

1* Contra Celsus, Bk. 7, Chap. 46.

15 Thoughts. Chap. XXII.

174 Basic Ideas in Religion

Kant mistrusted the Ontological Argument as an argument
in se, but yet he admits that the other arguments all derive
their undoubted force from ontology, i.e., from our strong
convictions. Martineau in his Study of Religion ignored alto-
gether the ontological " proof," and rested all on natural theol-
ogy and conscience, yet he admitted later that there is all along
a revelation in the mind before any argument is used ; that
there is an immediate, strictly personal knowledge, or faith,
in God, born anew in every mind. The Cambridge Platonists,
Benjamin Whichcote, John Smith, Ralph Cudworth, and Henry
More were never tired of quoting the verse from Proverbs
which says that " the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord," ^"
lighted from God, and lighting us to God. " There is," says
Whichcote, " a natural and indelible sense of Deity in every
rational soul; and this is fundamental to all religion." This
conviction makes all men unconscious ontologists. They accept
the thought while rejecting the term. The strength of this
unconscious ontology appears in the fact that many " intellec-
tualists " like Thomas Aquinas, who criticize " feeling " as
unreliable, yet find they cannot depend on logical reasoning
alone, and fall back on the postulate of their own being, that
existence itself implies a Supreme Cause on which it is based.

The Ontological Argument may be stated under three as-
pects, according to the special class of convictions to which we
appeal.

1. We are conscious of sense-impressions and their unity in
the world. This consciousness is ever accompanied with an
irresistible feeling that there is something external which causes
these impressions, matter or substance, which resists our will
and which, in turn, must have a ground for its existence. This
experience, as we have seen, awakens the thought of the Infinite
as the permanent ground and source of all transitory existences.
This is the oldest and commonest form of Ontology — God as
Real Being.

2. We are conscious of an inner world of thoughts and of

16 Prov. 20 :27.

The Witness of the Human Spirit 175

definite logical relations between them, which we also find em-
bodied in nature. With this experience, we have the feeling of
the universality and certitude of logical and mathematical prin-
ciples, and we think of God as Infinite Truth. This gives
Rational Ontology, God as the ground and source of the
Reason.

3. We are conscious of ethical relations, of distinctions be-
tween good and evil, right and wrong, and with this comes
ever the profound sense of the duty to choose and love the
former as obligatory on all persons or spirits in the universe.
This gives rise immediately to the simplest and most intense
form of Ontolog}^ that which feels and demands God as moral
Perfection, the source and realization of righteousness.

In a note in the Appendix we examine more closely into
the Ontological Argument according to these lines of thought,
showing these distinctions to be not abstract conceptions, but
concrete, strong and clear convictions in the triple life of
men.^^ Though this threefold division has not often been
clearly made, it is not new. Aristotle and Augustine show
these three elements in their thought of the nature of God.
The former tells us that God is pure Being, Thought in itself,
and Goodness in itself ; while the latter writes that we are
created in the image of God, Who is Eternal Being, Eternal
Truth, and Eternal Love. Christ suggests the same threefold
elements of the Divine Being, only with Him they are all
personal, " I am the Life, the Truth, and the Way," i.e., the
revelation of love in action. ^^

The revelation of the life of God in the life of Jesus Christ
has gathered up into brilliant focus (as the carbon points
make visible the unseen electric current), the hopes and aspira-
tions and faiths of humanity, confirming, intensifying, and con-
secrating them beyond the highest reaches of human thought.
We are born into the full light of the Christian day, and
not into the dim twilight of the pre-Christian dawn when the
sun was below the horizon, though heralding its own rising.

17 See Note O.
"John 14:6.

176 Basic Ideas in Religion

Even our sceptical literature and our science have a background
of ethical feeling and of moral ideals, unknown to the pagan
world. Yet Christianity only awakens and wonderfully
extends the old witness of the heart at its best. It does not
teach things new and novel, undreamt of before. It brings
forth out of its divine treasure " things new and old," the new
springing out of the old. This faith rests on no outer authority
of Bible or of Church. It is the instant recognition of the
truth which the Bible and the Church always teach. It is the
response of the soul to the Gospel revelation. We do not be-
lieve that God is love because the Bible says so, we rather be-
lieve and reverence the Bible because its teaching corresponds
to our highest faith.

A century ago ontologists were few and far between, voices
crying aloud as in a lonely wilderness, and even these speakers
hardly reaHzed their far-reaching significance. Among them,
however, Schleiermacher holds a place of unique distinction.
It is the glory of our age and the assurance of our faith that
their thoughts are now common thoughts and their words
resound in living echoes on every side. A noble enthusiasm
for the Right and the True inspires our best literature, and we
have noted the evidence of the rise of a more human spirit in
the specifically human sciences. Logic, Psychology and Sociol-
ogy. The battle between faith and unfaith is not yet won, but
we may confidently hope that this century will witness the
reconciliation of the realms of Feeling and Will with that of
Knowledge, through the inspiration of a science that is human-
ized and a Christianity that is spiritualized, both reverencing
that inner world of nature and character, of deep convictions
and noble affections, of faith and hope and love, to wdiich the
outer world of things is subordinate and wholly instrumental.

"We babble much of proof; let us talk less!
We can but prove the lesser, lower things,
Things farther from us. When God's blessedness
Dwells in us, as the light in dew, it brings
An instant recognition. Does not our need

The Witness of the Human Spirit 177

That clamors for the Unknown, Whom Paul
Declared at Athens, once for ever, plead
That by its strong demand, its tears and cries,
Too near ourselves for proof, God ever lives ? "

CHAPTER X

THE DENIALS OF GOD
PHILOSOPHIC ANTI-THEISTIC THEORIES

Monism is a general name for the philosophic theories which
deny any real distinction between God, the self and the world.
The three, or the two, are held to form a unity, the thinking
subject and the object thought being one in the Absolute.

The ground of this unity may be conceived in two ways,
according to whether consciousness or nature is taken as the
basis :

1. Philosophically, in terms of consciousness, which gives
pantheistic Idealism in philosophy and Pantheism in religion,
and

2. Scientifically, in terms of sensation, which gives Natural-
ism in philosophy and Atheism in religion.

This distinction of the theories which deny the personality
of God will form a natural line of division between chapters.
The theories cross the line, however, for there is a form of Pan-
theism which is naturalistic and, what amounts almost to the
same thing, a form of Naturalism which is pantheistic. These
hybrid forms will be mentioned in the proper places. In the
present chapter we will concern ourselves with the philosophic
antitheistic theories, taking up the leading forms of Pan-
theism. We will then be in a position to comprehend clearly
by way of contrast the Christian doctrine of Divine Immanence.

I PANTHEISM

According to Pantheism, God, mind, and the world are
in some sense identical. Our being is part of the universal
Being of God, which is the cause and ground of all phenomena,

178

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories lyg

and becomes conscious of itself only in man. This is a most
ancient philosophy, and was fully developed in India, where
it holds sway today. But our concern with it lies in its re-
statement in modern times by Spinoza and Hegel, the former
giving us a materialistic and the latter an idealistic pantheism.

Spinosism

Baruch Spinoza was born of Portuguese-Jewish parents at
Amsterdam in 1632. His free philosophical speculations led
to his being excommunicated by the synagogue, and he finally
settled at The Hague, where he lived quietly and obscurely,
much respected by his neighbors for the beauty of his character.
His opinions were hardly more pleasing to the Christians than
to the Jews, though he was offered the chair of Philosophy
at Heidelberg. His love of intellectual independence led him
to decline this high honor. His death occurred in 1677. His
two chief works are A Theologico-Political Treatise, pub-
lished anonymously in 1670, and Ethics Demonstrated
Geometrically, issued with several other treatises after his
death.

Only certain phases of his system can be treated here. His
abstract and scholastic terms, his form of rigid mathematical
demonstration, and his acknowledged inconsistencies would
make even a long treatment difficult. Spinozism is the logical
development of Descartes' philosophy with its postulate of the
absolute distinction between body and soul, which yet form
an inseparable unity, and is the consistent application of the
method of the French philosopher. This form of pantheism
is called materialistic because it regards matter as different,
though inseparable, from mind.

Spinoza holds that the one eternal, self -existing, sui-causa
reality is " substance," with an infinite number of attributes, of
which we, by analogy with our own being, know only two —
thought (mind) and extension (matter). These are abso-
lutely inseparable. As the two streams of experiences, physi-
cal and mental, do not affect each other, God is in no sense
the creator of the world by his will. Matter is as essential to

i8o Basic Ideas in Religion

his being as mind, and the universe is the necessary expression
of his nature.

Men are only transitory modes of substance, necessary ex-
pressions of divine Being. They, too, are composed of body
and mind, two parallel series of modifications eternally answer-
ing to each other. Although body does not cause or affect the
mind's thought, and mind does not control the body, nor cause
its motions, yet the body with all its properties and acts is
the object of the mind's thought; whatever body does, mind
perceives, and the greater the energizing power of the body,
the greater the perceiving power of the mind. This takes
place, not because they are adapted to each other by some pre-
determining power, God, as Leibnitz held, but because mind
and body are una atque eadem res, one absolute being affected
in the same manner, but expressed under two different at-
tributes, as if the same thing were said in two languages.

The importance of this theory lies in its reappearance in
scientific circles today in the widely accepted theory of Psycho-
logical Parallelism. " That which we call soul," says one, " is
the hiner being of the same unity which we outzvardly perceive
as the body belonging to it," or in the words of another, " Per-
ception, memory, reasoning, are the subjective side, whose
objective side is a nerve vibration or a discharge of physical
force. We can state the equation in terms of either." The
entire independence of each series is asserted. Ideas and
volitions do not follow each other causally, but simply attend
the brain processes as shadow's attend substance. They come
and go and combine as the nervous motions determine, and
this physical order works along its own lines mechanically
without any choice, being the product of its own material ante-
cedents. Because the modern parallelists thus throw their em-
phasis on the material side of the double series, it is best to
reserve full discussion of their theory for the chapter on scien-
tific monism or naturalism. The ethical theories of Pantheism
are treated in a note.^

iSee Note P.

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories i8i

Hegelianism

Hegel, the great representative of idealistic pantheism, was
born at Stuttgart, 1770, and died as a professor in the Univer-
sity of Berlin, 1831. As in the case of Spinoza, some of his
chief books were not published until after his death, among
them his well-known and comprehensive work, The Philosophy
of History.

In his mind the Absolute is the Idea or " Spirit " which
objectifies or manifests itself in the world, in which it loses
itself, becoming the unconscious, organizing principle of its own
development according to the logic of pure thought. In man
it emerges into self-consciousness, and knows itself as spirit.
This divine thought, as consciousness, is found in humanity as
a whole, individual men being only transitory foci of its mani-
festation. This is practically Spinoza's " necessity of being,"
only the emphasis is thrown on thought. It includes also
Leibnitz' theory that all possible thoughts and ideas must
find expression, and through conflict gradually realize them-
selves. It cannot be said that God is responsible for or caused
the world process, for the Absolute is the world process. It is
movement, it does not produce movement. It does not exceed
the world, it is wholly in the world, and is fully manifested
in phenomena and history. The logos of the world process
is one with the logos of our own minds, it does not surpass it.

The ancient pantheism of India and that of the Eleatic school
in Greece, which held true being to be changeless, and all
phenomena and movement to be unreal appearances, was pro-
foundly modified by Hegel's conception (unthinkable to non-
Hegelians) of an evolution of the Absolute itself, correlative
with the evolution of the cosmos, and his identification of the
principle of this development with the logic of human thought,
and of its order with the actual process of human history. The
world spirit had the patience to traverse all time and to take
on itself the tremendous labor of the world history, in the
course of which it infused into each form all it was capable of
holding. This theory of history, as an evolution of the Zeit-

1 82 Basic Ideas in Religion

geist, involved the view that each historic movement was good.
Each stage was fully suited to its own period, for each particu-
lar change and movement is divine. He had the courage of
his convictions and declared the Prussian constitution of his
day the best possible, which did not enhance his popularity.
But though Hegel claims to deal with a historic process, he
denies that the separations of time have any reality at all.
They have no existence for God. The " good " is eternally
accomplished in the world. The consummation and the proc-
ess of history that produces it are envisaged together by God
as one great logical drama. His great principle was that de-
velopment is through conflict, the reconciliation of opposites.
Progress has to pass through three stages; first, thesis or
equilibrium, then antithesis, as the result of men questioning
the thesis, and finally, synthesis, which comes from the recon-
ciling of the old and the new. This handy theory was applied
by Strauss and Baur to New Testament history with interest-
ing results.

Hegelianism, by its ruling idea of development through inner
growth, acted as a ferment in the European mind, and exer-
cised a most stimulating influence on ever}^ side of contempor-
ary thought — critical, historical, and theological. In a modi-
fied form it has many followers. The obscurity of Hegel's
thought and expression has given rise to a right and a left
wing among his disciples, who have divided on the vital ques-
tion as to whether the Absolute, the starting point or sub-
ject of the whole world development, was at first conscious
spirit or not. The right wing is conservative and constructive,
theistic and often orthodox in intention, while the left is radi-
cal and destructive, atheistic and often materialistic. There
are two alternatives with regard to the subject of this cosmic
evolution. Either God is conscious spirit (but, then, how
could he " lose " himself, there being nothing in the universe
but himself?) or the Absolute is at first pure Being having no
attributes such as consciousness, then, becoming energy or
force, it evolved upward to man, in whom the Idea becomes
conscious (but, if so, is God not just as much a product as

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories 183

man?). The left wing chose the latter alternative, and led
by Feuerbach, Strauss, and others insisted that the Absolute
existed first in a preconscious state. Thus as unconscious,
impersonal spirit, it is practically identical with potential
energy ; thought is, therefore, only a modification or allotropic
form of physical force. In other words it is merely the cos-
mic force working in matter and in due time bringing forth
man, the only being who can think, and in whom alone the Idea
attains to consciousness, though even his thought is the product
of his body and its environment alone. This is thinly dis-
guised materialism.

The right wing on the other hand finds many principles
which support or illustrate Christian doctrine. Hegel counted
himself a Christian believer, and many of his spiritual fol-
lowers have been helpful theologians, though his system as a
whole is not consistent with historic Christianity.

Difficulties of Idealistic Pantheism
I. Denial of the " suhstantial" reality of matter

The world is held to exist only in consciousness. This
difficulty besets almost every form of idealism. It is summed
up in Berkeley's phrase, esse est percipi.

This philosophy holds that reality is to be sought in the
contents of consciousness alone, yet begins by denying a pri-
mary and intense affirmation of consciousness, the certainty of
an external non-ego, whose distinctness from the self is the
very condition of that self-consciousness which idealism makes
fundamental.

The firmest conviction which we have is that of the external
world and its contents. The distinction between thoughts and
things is radical and universal. The peculiar certainty that
things exist outside the mind attaches to no other conscious ex-
perience. It begins with the first act of a child's mind, which
sharply though unconsciously discriminates between its ideas
and outer real things. All idealism tends to confuse or
weaken personality, and as Reid said " breeds scepticism in

184 Basic Ideas in Religion

every aspect of life." To doubt the truth of the mind's funda-
mental beliefs and laws would be to doubt reason itself —
" which, unless itself reliable, turns all reason to a lie."

2. Denial of the Divine Personality

This brings us to the main argument relied on to prove that
the Infinite One cannot possibly be a person. It is very simple.
Personality plainly implies limitations, for we could not know
ourselves were there not other things by contrast with which
we distinguish ourselves as separate beings. But the Absolute
— its very name proves this — embraces all things and excludes
nothing. Having naught wherewith to contrast Itself, how
can it ever know Itself? There is a childlike simplicity about
this oft-used argument which is refreshing amid the arid plain
of philosophic speculation. Only the glamour of grave and
revered names hides its fallacy from the common mind, for
it obviously confounds the discovery of the self with the
actuality, or even the potentiality, of the self. Finite spirits
do come to self-consciousness only through contrast with the
non-self. But the self is not created, it is only revealed by this
process. To make this condition of our finite consciousness
the differentia of all personality in the universe is wholly un-
warranted. To say that the Eternal Spirit cannot be a person
unless He comes to self-consciousness in the same way the
baby does, what is this but anthropomorphism run mad, such
as no theologian ever dreamed of ? When Aristotle theolo-
gized he felt that before creation the eternal Energy was eternal
Thought. Christian thinkers as early as Tertullian, taught
clearly that in the eternities God would not be alone but would
know Himself through communion with the eternal Logos,
the divine Thought. Is it not in this way that all men realize
their separate being when babyhood is past, distinguishing
the self from the thoughts and memories which possess the
mind?

3. Denial of personality and hope of personal immortality
Men are only transitory " vehicles of the one eternal con-
sciousness."

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories 185

This identification of God and man is fatal to any individ-
uality in man. Most Hegelians deny free-will and give up
ethical duty. The test of the meaning and value of such
theories is the ethical question whether deliberate wickedness
is God's act or man's ? Thus Royce declares Job to be wrong
in his solution of the problem of evil by the presupposition
that God is a being other than the world and himself. He
tells the victim of sorrow or physical pain or moral evil : " God
is not in ultimate essence another being than yourself. He is
the Absolute Being. You truly are one with God, part of his
life. He is the very soul of your soul. When you suffer,
your sufferings are God's sufferings, not his external work, not
his external penalty, not the fruit of his neglect, but identically
his own personal woe. In you God himself suffers, precisely
as you do, and has all your concern in overcoming this grief."
The true question, then, is not why zve suffer, but why God
suffers, and the unsatisfactory answer is, " Because without
suffering, without ill, without woe, evil, tragedy, God's life
could not be perfected. ... It is a logically necessary and
eternal constituent of the divine life. . . . No outer nature
compels him. He chooses this because he chooses his own
perfect selfhood. He is perfect. His world is the best pos-
sible world." ^ He passes almost directly from physical evil
to moral evil, but speaks no clear word. If moral evil is a
" reality," yet something in its very nature " to be eschewed,
expelled, assailed, resisted," how can it be a " self-chosen "
product of the Absolute Self? If it is willed to arise in the
" fragments " as a means to the perfect self-hood of the
Whole ; it outrages the moral consciousness that the " frag-
ments " should be condemned for the doing of it.

The denial of personality carries with it the denial of im-
mortality. Hegel does not write clearly on immortality ; but
Spinoza with noble inconsistency asserts it in a timeless and
curiously abstract form. The goal of all life, according to
Pantheism, is to return to and disappear in God, the world-all.

2 Studies of Good and Evil, p. 14.

i86 Basic Ideas in Religion

This is most logically worked out in India, where according
to the Sufi mystic the soul is absorbed into the ocean of divinity,
according to Hindu philosophy it reenters into the eternal
Brahm and, according to the teaching of Gautama, the Buddha,
it obtains Nirvana.^

4. Necessity is an essential characteristic of all consistent

Pantheism

The simple test of Pantheism, however disguised in a maze
of words, as by Hegel, is whether or not God acts freely by
will. True pantheism denies this, and hence still more em-
phatically it denies man's freedom. Thus we find Seneca writ-
ing that God is nature, is fate, is fortune, is the universe, the
all pervading mind ; he cannot change the substance of the uni-
verse for he is himself under the power of destiny, which is
immutable. Heine seized on necessity as a mark of pantheism :
" On my way," in his search for a God in philosophy, " I came
across the God of the pantheists, but I could make nothing
of him ; the poor visionary creature was so interwoven and
ingrown into the world as to be imprisoned in it. He yawned
at me with imbecile smile without voice or power. To have
will, to have personality, one must have elbow room to act."

5. Denial of ethical distinctions

The existing order within and without our consciousness
is either the necessary expression of the divine nature
(Spinoza), or else the logical form of the self-evolving Idea
(Hegel). Freedom is as impossible to the Creator as to
the creature. Time, the condition and ground of history, is
itself an illusion. Hence, all moral distinctions disappear ;
good and evil are indififerent. Logically this ends in the phrase
of Pope, " Whatever is, is right," which Huxley declared was
" a motto fit for a pig-stye." Hegel denies the distinction
between what ought to be and what is. " The insight to which
philosophy is to lead us is that the real world is as it ought to

3 Interesting illustrations of the pantheistic denial of personal immor-
tality are given in Note Q.

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories 187

be." In another place he declares that philosophy has nothing
to do with the question of what ought to be, but simply of what
is. All acts are equally divine and necessary, the basest as
well as the noblest, the worst as well as the best. Spinoza's
ethics were deprived of all real value through his fatalism,
though he tried hard to reconcile the two. To maintain their
fundamental principle of the absolute unity of the divine and
the human, and yet find room for ethical life with its profound
sense of moral freedom and responsibility, is the vital prob-
lem which the Neo-Hegelians are ever striving anew to
solve. ^

Pantheism starts from and aims at the idea of philosophic
unity, either the unity of being (Spinoza) or unity of thought
(Hegel), and sacrifices everything to that. Theism starts from
the ethical consciousness, our feeling of personality. It sacri-
fices the idea of unity whenever it comes into conflict with
moral distinctions, confusing right and wrong. The idea of
unity was fully worked out in India, in one school in China,
and to some extent in Greece and Rome. The ethical idea, as
followed by Jewish prophets and Christian apostles and think-
ers, makes the world of thought and matter secondary and
concentrates attention on moral and spiritual ideas, on the rela-
tion of God to men as the Father, of man to God as child, and
of men to each other as brothers. Theism must be ethical, if
it is to be religion and not pure metaphysics. Therefore it
depends on the conception of personality in God, and of real
but finite personality of man. Philosophy aims at absolute
unity, but Theism admits the idea of plurality of spirits or
wills.*

* Idealistic philosophy, as distinct from avowed pantheism, divides
today on two lines, according as it follows Hegel's conception of the
Absolute as pure thought, or Kant's later affirmation of ethical reality
and teleology, moral character alone having worth and forming the only
intelligible reason and purpose for the world's existence. The Neo-
Hegelians form a brilliant group, but the ethical idealists or realists
are increasing in number and influence, owing to the tendency in recent
philosophic thought to look on will activity, rather than logical thought,
as central, the basis of being. This is more fully discussed in Chapter
XV.

1 88 Basic Ideas in Religion

II THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF THE DIVINE
IMMANENCE

This is a reaction from the deistic, mechanical idea of God
of the eighteenth century and a return to the older, scriptural
conception of Him as immanent in the world, the immediate,
ever present source and ground of all existence. It differs
radically from pantheism, in that it affirms the divine transcend-
ence as well as immanence. God is a self-conscious and
self-determined Person; before and above nature; Creator and
Providence. Man also is a person, a spirit born of Spirit,
distinct from God, yet in Whom he lives ; morally free and
surviving death in his personal being.

God's immanent presence in the world is a Bible truth. It
is frequent in Amos, Micah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. It is
expressed by Job and the writer of the Book of Wisdom. The
8th Chapter of Proverbs, and the 8th, 104th and 119th Psalms
show the same idea. Although later Judaism, the creation of
the period between the Exile and the Advent, was deistic, con-
ceiving God as far off and acting only through angels, Christ
returns to the older view of God's action in nature, especially
in the familiar passages in the Sermon on the Mount where He
speaks of God as feeding the sparrows, arraying the lilies and
clothing the grass. St. Paul tells the Athenians that in God
" we live, and move, and have our being," ^ and writes to the
Ephesians that there is " one God and Father of all, who is
over all, and through all, and in all." ^

Passages showing a view of the divine immanence in nature
are frequent in the early Fathers. Some of these have been
quoted in the discussion of Ontology,'^ but we might add here
two strikingly similar passages from the Greek Gregory of
Nyssa and the Roman Minucius Felix. The former writes:
" When one takes a survey of the heavens, how can he help

" Acts 17 :28.
« Eph. 4 :6.
7 See Note O.

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories 189

believing that there is a Deity in everything, penetrating, em-
bracing, and abiding in it. For all things depend on Him,
who alone truly exists, nor can there be anything which has
not its being in Him, who is the ground of all things." Minu-
cius Felix asks, " For what can possibly be so manifest, so
confessed, and so evident, when you lift your eyes up to
heaven, and look into the things which are below and around,
than that there is some Deity of most excellent intelligence, by
Whom all nature is inspired, is moved, is nourished, is gov-
erned?"* Tertullian, also a Westerner, held that all things
in nature are prophetic outlines of divine operations; God
not only speaks parables but acts them.

This feeling of the divine indwelling in nature is not absent
from the pages of the Schoolmen, and became very prominent
when men returned to the study of nature in the Renaissance
and Reformation. Luther's love of nature is one of his best
known traits. Calvinism also teaches divine immanence,
Zwingle can be made to speak for the rest of the reformers.
** From God," he says, " as from a fountain, and if I may use
the expression, a first material, all things arise into being. By
God's power all things exist, live, and operate; even in Him
who is everywhere present; and after His pattern who is the
essence, the existence, the life of the universe. Nor is man
alone of divine origin, but all creatures, though some are nobler
and more august than others. Yet all alike are from God and
in God, and in proportion to their nobility they express more
of the divine power and glory. . . , We recognize in things
inanimate, not less than in man, the presence of the divine
power by which they exist, and live, and move. God is in the
stars ; and inasmuch as the stars are from Him and in Him,
they have no essence or power or movement of their own ; it
is all God's, and they are merely the instruments through which
the present power of God acts. For this cause He called crea-
tures into being, that man from the contemplation of their

8 Octavius, XVII.

190 Basic Ideas in Religion

mutual uses, might learn to recognize God's active presence
everywhere, and especially in himself, when he saw it in all
things else around." ^

The doctrine of the divine immanence was first clearly stated
in the spirit of faith by Herder; though Cowper, his contem-
porary, summed up the thought in these pregnant words :

" One spirit — His
Who wore the plaited thorns with bleeding brows,
Rules universal Nature. Not a flower
But shows some touch in freckle, streak, or stain,
Of His unrival'd pencil. He inspires
Their balmy odors, and imparts their hues,
And bathes their eyes with nectar, and includes
In grains as countless as the seaside sands
The forms with which He sprinkles all the earth." i"

How else, he asks, could matter seem as if it were alive

" unless impelled
To ceaseless service by a ceaseless force.
And under pressure of some conscious cause?
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused,
Sustains and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but the name of an eifect
Whose cause is God." ^^

It was the characteristic mark of the nineteenth century on
its highest side, and received literary as well as theological ex-
pression. It runs through the writings of Wordsworth, Cole-
ridge, Tennyson, and the Brownings. Thus Wordsworth
writes of his communings with nature:

" And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts ; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,

^ De Providentia.

10 The Task, VI : lines 228-246.

11 Ibid., VI : lines 218-224.

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories 191

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things." ^^

Divine immanence is a common element in the thought of
today. God is no longer conceived as the first cause prefixed
to the scheme of things, but as the indwelling cause pervading
the world, not excluded by second causes, but working through
them while transcending them, the one ever-living, objective
Agent, the mode of whose omnipresent working must be dis-
covered and interpreted through science in the outer field, and
through conscience in the inner world.

This doctrine affirms both God's presence in nature and his
transcendence above nature. Deism conceived the world as a
system made, indeed, by God Himself, but so made that it might
go on working indefinitely apart from His care, as a watch
does apart from its maker's hand. Thus His transcendence
must not be conceived in terms of space, as though it were
outside the world, but in terms of quality. He works within
the Universe, at the heart of things, but He transcends it in
will, mind, and being, and its laws are only the expression of
His will. The world is not His " clothing," in the sense in
which our bodies clothe our spirits apart from our will or
knowledge. Nor is it, as Hegel taught, the product of a logical
evolution of divine Spirit objectifying itself, as necessary to
God as God is to it. The world is simply His creation, existing
by and through His will, the expression of His wisdom, a
world of material things designed to be the habitation and
training school of created spirits, who are to rule and use it as
they will. There is a partial truth in both Deism and Pan-
theism. With Deism we say that God transcends the world,
otherwise He is not God but only the world-spirit. With Pan-
theism we say God is within nature, otherwise nature would
have no life, and God would not be omnipresent. We grant
what each affirms, but not what each denies. The transcendent

12 Tintern Abbey.

192 Basic Ideas in Religion

God is Creator and Lord, the immanent God is Providence
and Sustainer. But the expression " divine immanence,"
though it cannot be well changed, is misleading. It suggests
at first thought that the world exists, and then that God is
immanent in it. The order should be inverted, first God is,
and then the world exists as called into being by His power
and by the continuous indwelling of His Spirit.

Berkeley was right in denying that matter existed in and for
itself, it exists under divine guidance for man's use and work.
The world was made to be inhabited, and all things were put
under man to be ruled and used. But Berkeley's philosophical
hobby made him guilty of the absurd idea that God Himself
could not make anything objective. The world came into exist-
ence and continues to be not by any necessity of God's nature,
but by the free action of His own will embodying His thoughts
in concrete form, and His divine presence and action are con-
tinuous. This does not mean that things are " in God " in a
spatial sense, but that they express His thoughts objectively.
The divine immanence does deny the scientific concept of
Nature as an independent, self-acting, self-made machine, but
it does not deny the real existence of the objective universe, as
a divinely ordered system of things, to whose laws our bodies
are subject, and which does actively impress itself on our
minds in experiences which we cannot evade. Nor does this
view afifect in the least the actual order and the phenomena of
nature, which we learn through science, and which are the
same for all observers, whatever their theory of the world's
existence and action. Our knowledge of the world as it is is
not weakened but deepened by our faith that it exists in and
through God's will at every moment.

The mode of the working of the immanent divine Will
defies analysis, just as does the working of the human will.
We can only affirm that it acts ever from within outward, from
the center to the circumference, but " God's center is every-
where and His circumference nowhere." We need not sup-
pose that every phenomenon has back of it a separate and con-
scious act of will on the part of God. Our own experience

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories 193

should teach us better. We do not will each separate step
while walking. Having once begun walking we leave its con-
tinuance to the automatic action of the lower nerve centers,
which the will sets to work and keeps at their work without
further attention. So the world without ceasing to be depend-
ent on God may have a relative independence, the divine
power working within through ordained laws or orderly ways
of acting.

Again this faith in the underlying action of God in' no way
alters the accepted scale of the value of things. It simply
affirms that all finite things have no self-existence, but depend
for their whole being on God's will, which does not put them
all on a level in the scale of ethical worth. It leaves our judg-
ments of value untouched. Worms and men alike have their
being in God, but that does not make them of equal worth in
God's sight. A worm is a creature of low degree, man is the
highest of all created beings, even " a child of God." Christ
Himself emphasizes this difference, " Ye are of more value
than many sparrows." ^^ Unless we bear in mind the vital
truth that ethical value belongs solely to the world of per-
sonalities, and that all things, including animals, are only instru-
ments, we shall attach a value which Christ repudiates to the
lower forms of life.

These distinctions save us from falling into the dangers
which beset the careless thinker on divine immanence. One
of these is that we may lapse into the denial of personality in
man, for we may exaggerate his dependence on God to the
denial of moral freedom. Another danger is the obscuring of
the personality and freedom of God, and such pantheistic con-
founding of good and evil as are found in " Christian
Science," ^* and more recently in R. J. Campbell's The New
Theology, which is little more than a half-Christianized stoi-
cism.^^ A third danger is that personal immortality may be

13 Matt. 10:31.

1* See Note R, for discussion of Christian Science.
15 Of late he has given a larger place to the truth of the Divine
Transcendence, and should not be judged by this book.

194 Basic Ideas in Religion

denied, as is done in pantheism. Our sense of personality and
especially the consciousness of duty and freedom make us
refuse to permit monism to force on us the alternative that we
are either nothing, or else parts of God Himself. We do not
grant that the Divine in man means God in man as man. We
simply fall back on our ow^n consciousness of self -identity,
which forbids our being a helpless part of God. On the con-
trary God's own voice in our hearts treats us as persons. The
statement that there is no will that is not God's will seems blas-
phemous, for it implies that the Divine will is also back of all
evil. We must think of God as the environment of spirit in
Whom we live and move and have our being. But we also
believe that God Himself did limit His own freedom of action,
when He created beings or personalities whose very essence
as spirits implies power to resist, if they will. He desires the
service of free beings, not puppets. If we can get rid of the
night-mare fancy of God as the Absolute, the one as includ-
ing the all, we can accept the conception of Browning, who
with all the great poets, affirms personality and will.

" In youth I looked to these very skies

And probing their immensities,

I found God there, his visible power;

Yet felt in my heart, amid all its sense

Of the power, an equal evidence

That his love, there too, was the nobler dower.

For the loving worm within its clod

Were diviner than a loveless god

Amid his worlds, I will dare to say.

You know what I mean : God's all, man's naught :

But also, God, whose pleasure brought

Man into being, stands away.

As it were a handbreadth off, to give

Room for the newly-made to live,

And look at him from a place apart.

And use his gifts of brain and heart.

Given, indeed, but to keep forever.

Who speaks of man, then, must not sever

Man's very elements from man.

Saying, ' But all is God's ' — whose plan

Was to create man and then leave him

Philosophic Anti-Theistic Theories 195

Able, his own word saith, to grieve him,

But able to glorify him, too,

As mere machine could never do." ^^

(See Note S for the a priori argument for miracles.)

^8 Christmas Eve, V.

CHAPTER XI
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT AND METHOD

Before taking up the other great denial of God, Naturalism,
it is well to consider the spirit of science and its method of
procedure, in order that we may estimate aright the funda-
mental assumptions of all materialistic philosophies, and the
validity of their conclusions. Science properly speaking is
simply systematized and verified facts, knowledge seen in due
perspective. Its method is purely that of inductive logic.
When by the study of facts, the framing of an hypothesis to
include them, and experimental verification, we have brought
phenomena under some familiar law, we rest. Throughout we
depend wholly on the principle of analog}', and the result is a
description, but not an explanation of facts. What they are
in themselves science cannot tell us. Most people have the
idea that science makes everything " plain " and speaks the last
word on any subject. But science without mystery is impos-
sible. It can take no step without assumptions, and its con-
clusions leave one face to face with the mysteries of the
Universe.

The vast majority of men treat the inner realm of spirit, of
thought and motive, of desire and affection, of hope and faith,
as unreal in comparison with the " realities " of the outer sphere
of sense impressions. Consequently the idea has arisen that
matter, which is so tangible, is the only real " substance."
This practical, common-sense philosophy has been enormously
strengthened within the last century by the wonderful triumphs
of physical science, and by the advance of scientific theory
and method from the outer field of things into the interior
world of personality, till man in the arcana of his being is inter-
preted in the same mechanical terms as a crystal or a plant.

196

The Scientific Spirit and Method 197

The feelings of the heart and the volitions of the will are
accounted as inevitable as a chemical reaction or the growth
of a plant.

This spirit has infected our whole system of education,
and our colleges and universities tend steadily to the technical
training of the powers of observation through practised eye
and hand to the neglect of the older culture of heart and mind,
in scorn of the old-fashioned idea that the proper study of man-
kind is man on the side of his thought and character and his-
tory. But the nemesis, which follows surely on every depar-
ture from the normal laws of life, takes vengeance in kind on
the contemners of the higher interests of humanity. Science
advances steadily, but at what a cost! Like Cronos, she
devours her own children, demanding that her devotees literally
lose themselves in their narrow fields of special study. The
self-conscious thinker disappears in the mere observer and
classifier of phenomena, who uses his mind simply as a tool,
as an automatic register of facts, even as the eye receives im-
pressions of the world but never sees itself. Charles Darwin's
pathetic confession of the dehumanizing efifect of over-special-
ization holds true of multitudes who do not feel, as he did, the
greatness of their loss. " My mind, in fact, seems to have
become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a
large collection of facts, but why this should have caused the
atrophy of that part of the brain alone on which the higher
tastes depend, I can not conceive. The loss of these tastes is a
loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect,
and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the
emotional part of our nature." ^ ]\Iany great thinkers and
leaders in the field of molecular physics, such as Faraday,
Clerk Maxwell, Helmholtz, and Lord Kelvin, have escaped
injury because they kept their souls open to the winds that
blow from God, but the rank and file lack the power or the will
to do so. Accustomed from the nature of their daily work
to subject everything to outward and palpable tests, they

1 Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 281.

198 Basic Ideas in Religion

are liable to fall under the blight of practical materialism.

Even with regard to mathematics, the " purest " of the
sciences, Goethe warns us : " Mathematics can remove no preju-
dices and soften no obduracy ... in the moral world gen-
erally its action is perfectly null." ^ Mathematics in its abstract
form bears its own witness to the infinite and eternal. It is
the most potent instrument of research in the world of matter.
But in itself it is the most abstract of sciences, the least related
to our highest interests, personal, ethical, and religious, which
move in a sphere higher than the physical life, and the modes
of work by which we sustain that life. Mathematics is a
noble servant, but an ignoble master ; it has its being solely
in the world of quantities, while the heart of man lives in the
conscious realm of qualities, in the world of " meanings." The
historian Gibbon tells us in his memoirs, " As soon as I under-
stood the principles, I relinquished forever the pursuit of the
mathematics ; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind
was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destruc-
tive of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must, how-
ever, determine the actions and opinions of our lives." ^

Tyndall makes a candid avowal of the limitations of science
when he says : " Theologians have found comfort in the
thought that Newton dealt with the question of revelation,
forgetful of the fact that the very devotion of his powers,
through all the best years of his life, to a totally different class
of ideas . . . tended rather to render him less instead of more
competent to deal with theological and historical questions."

The evil results of narrow specialization are easily discovered
in the rank and file of scientific investigators. A speaker
before the American Association of Science once complained,
" While we are seeking to add to the number of workers, some-
thing should also be said about their quality. There is too
much narrowness and too little culture." President David
Starr Jordan avers that much investigation is useless or beside
the point. The primary fault he thinks, is in our conception

2 Natur-Aphorismen, IV.

8 Autobiographic Memoirs, p. 34.

The Scientific Spirit and Method 199

of research, which tends to point in the direction of pedantry
rather than scholarship. Instead of a closer contact with
nature and her problems, the student is side-tracked into some
corner in which numerical exactness is possible, even though
no possible truth can be drawn from the multiplicity of facts
which may be gathered. Such work is in itself absolutely
elementary. It teaches patience and perhaps exactness, al-
though where the student finds that error is just as good as
truth in the final round-up, he is likely to lose some of " the
fanaticism for veracity " which is the central element in the
zealous comradery of the extension of human knowledge.
Some one has well indicated the three chief dangers the scien-
tific worker faces : ( i ) The tendency to despise practical utility
and to praise " pure science " at the expense of applied science ;
(2) over specialization, which makes vision narrow, and (3)
positivism, which is the danger of confining all possible knowl-
edge of reality to sense perception.

We should recognize the authority of science in its own
sphere, and accept without question its ascertained facts and
laws as distinct from its hypotheses — for real science is the
revelation of the method of God's action in the world of mat-
ter. However, in reply to the often supercilious attitude of
the pure scientist we should emphasize the narrow and inevi-
table limitations of all physical investigation. It can only
classify and register empirical facts in their mutual relations ;
it is powerless to explain them, and it is silent and even indif-
ferent to the often profound meaning of the facts to human
hearts and souls. We are told that the scientific method is
" disinterested," that it works for truth's sake alone, and
seeks only the truth, but can it ever arrive by its method at
more than broken fragments of the truth, or reach more than
the lower aspects of infinite reality? The trouble is, Le Bon
tells us, that there are no " simple facts," because no phenom-
enon is entirely isolable. All nature hangs together, and we
can completely answer no question about it without at the same
time being able to solve all its problems at once. This is why
our modern science, while a great doer, is a bad explainer.

200 Basic Ideas in Religion

And Mach states that " assuming that a complete and simple
description — admitting of calculation — is the aim of exact
science, it is evident how much and how little we may expect
from science. We shall not expect to find the ultimate and
final causes, and science will not teach us to understand nature
and life. The search after ultimate causes may perhaps be
given up as hopeless ; that after the meaning and significance
of the things of life will never be abandoned; it is the philo-
sophical or religious problem." *

The simple yet wonderful expression of all phenomena in
terms of matter in motion has strengthened the inveterate
tendency of pure science to apply mathematical methods to the
interpretation of the thought world as well as the material
world. The physicists today hold that our inner experiences,
thoughts, feelings, faiths, and volitions are simply the inner
sides of certain nerve motions in the gray matter of the brain,
which themselves are the product of the multitudinous undula-
tions in the ocean of ether which play upon us unceasingly.
This is the accepted principle in most laboratory investigations,
for their delicate apparatus can only register the nerve motions ;
it can tell us nothing of the psychical facts or thoughts, which
they arouse in consciousness.

Not only is this human element ignored, but other physical
aspects and relations must also be left on one side, while each
particular series of phenomena is being isolated and studied on
one line only, electrical, chemical, or biological. This abstrac-
tion is indispensable with our limited faculties and it yields
true results on the line chosen, but all the other relations re-
main in nature and in fact despite our ignoring them. The
physical student limits his whole investigation to mathematical
relations, abstracting quality after quality till only quantitative
relations remain, which mechanical science can handle. As a
result of this one-sidedness the purely physical observers fre-
quently fall into fallacies due to the misapplication of mathe-
matical axioms. One such fallacy is to think that the axiom

* Merz, European Thought in the XlXth Century, Vol. I, p. 2>^2,.

The Scientific Spirit and Method 201

" the whole is equal to the sum of the parts " is true of every
sphere of experience. A watch ceases to be a watch when you
have all its pieces spread out before you. Unless you are a
watchmaker, you cannot put the pieces together and remake it.
No chance arrangement can produce a mechanism. It is not
the sum total of the parts, but the definite ordering of the
varied pieces which makes the machine. Still less a thousand-
fold does the axiom apply to an organism, whose parts are held
together and coordinated by the mysterious bond of life.

The wise student will work along a single line in scientific re-
search, for there is no other way, but he will at times break
through the narrow limits of such specialization and turn from
the mechanical point of view to the study of the world as a
whole with man as its head. To keep one eye glued to a micro-
scope, or the attention fixed on a crucible is to view things in
a wrong perspective. Famous as Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was
as a nerve specialist, if we measure him merely as a doctor of
medicine, we will have to leave out the scientist, the novelist,
the poet, the lecturer, the historian, the critic, the connoisseur,
the man of afifairs, and the man of the world. Equally foolish
is it to study one part of reality as unrelated to all the rest.
The isolating of a series of phenomena to one particular field
of relations may defeat the very purpose of useful knowledge,
for the aspects ignored are often those which alone make the
subject of interest or value to us. In the preface to his recent
work. Outlines of Psychology, Prof. Royce tells us: " I pre-
suppose, then, a serious reader, but not one trained either in
experimental methods, or in philosophical inquiries. I try to
tell him a few things that seem to me important, regarding the
most fundamental and general processes, laws, and conditions
of mental life. I say nothing whatever about the philosophical
problem of the relations of mind and body, and nothing about
the true place of mind in the universe. Meanwhile, I try to
view the matter here in question in a perspective which is of
my own choosing." But the serious reader, if not a pure
scientist, will probably care most for the problems the author
proposes to omit, and the true place of mind in the universe

202 Basic Ideas in Religion

will seem to him the one problem of supreme and decisive im-
port to thinking men.

The radical defect in this purely quantitative study of na-
ture is that it ignores the inner side of experience which, de-
spite the scientists' claim, is not expressible in terms of quantity.
The very mind which marvelously reasons out great scientific
principles is treated as secondary to sense-impressions. It is
somehow the product of the very processes which it reveals
and explains. But to the thinker, as distinct from the mere
observer and classifier, it is obvious beyond question that mind
and will form the crown and consummation of the whole evolu-
tion, and that we must interpret the process in terms of the
mental reality it ends in, and not in terms of the physical ele-
ments with which it began ; each phenomenon must be classi-
fied and estimated by its outcome, not according to the form-
less germ of its beginning. Professor James emphasizes the
necessary incompleteness of pure physical research by telling
us that the actual world we live in is largely a construction of
our own minds in the interest of heart and will, and in this
many-sided world there are many subordinate worlds of thought
and experience besides the world of science, such as the worlds
of history, literature, art, philosophy and religion, which are
all real to the mind.

Qualitative relations must be neglected, but it is in precisely
such relations that man has his life and being. Pure scientists
are sadly liable to what may be called the fallacy of the half-
truth, and to resting content with it. The tragedy of such a
situation is not merely that the half-truth is substituted for the
whole, but further enquiry is suspended, and that which should
be a transitory stage is complacently regarded as the journey's
end. This is the attitude of the scientific agnostics. A lead-
ing biologist, writes Professor James, once said to him, " that
if such a thing (as telepathy) were true, scientists ought to
band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would
undo the uniformity of Nature, and all sorts of other things
without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits." His
interest in science prejudiced him against anything which

The Scientific Spirit and Method 203

threatened to overthrow its conclusions, even though that some-
thing were truer than his science. He could apperceive as
science only facts of a certain order. But how can a man
know that the truth which he possesses is only a half-truth?
Only through preserving a spirit of open-minded tolerance
which strives to maintain a sympathetic attitude to opposing
opinions. " It must never be forgotten," said Sir William
Crookes, " that theories are only useful so long as they admit
of the harmonious correlation of facts into a reasonable sys-
tem. Directly a fact refuses to be pigeon-holed, and will not
be explained on theoretic grounds, the theory must go, or it
must be revised to admit the new fact."

Another fallacy of scientific reasoning, peculiar to those
trained in biology, is to think that if a thing can be traced back
to its beginnings, we will find in the initial stage its com-
plete explanation. This is the cry of the evolutionists, what-
ever be the subject under discussion, whether it be an animal,
or a religion, or the solar system. The original germ is the
sufficient key to all future developments. But the germ, even
if we isolate it, is never self -illuminating. We are at a loss to
interpret its significance. It is the mark of a real cause to hide
itself. It contains unseen potentialities which come into actu-
ality only through the course of its development. One would
think this would be self-evident. I find a new seed ; no micro-
scope can penetrate its secret. The only way to learn its na-
ture is to plant it in good soil and await its growth. The seed
does not explain the plant, but rather the plant explains the
seed. Still less is man satisfied with that account of his na-
ture which refers him to his beginnings, and traces his line of
descent to certain ape-like ancestors or, to go to the last stage
in this regress, to the primal chemical elements to which his
organism may be reduced. Is man as we know him satis-
factorily explained by such beginnings? It must not be over-
looked that, in that elemental stage, there must have been a
potential factor which is not in any one of the original parts
but pervades them all, which elevates the material whence man
arises, which transforms the beast into the savage, and the

204 Basic Ideas in Religion

savage into the civilized man. This factor will never be re-
vealed to the senses, and yet we know that it is the ultimate
source and cause of man's true being.

The most obvious and fatal defect in purely scientific study
is that it treats a series of phenomena or motions in the ether
as an end in itself, whereas on the human side, it is always a
definite means to a definite end. Science can tell us much
about the speed of the undulations in the ether, and their wave
lengths, but it knows nothing of their meaning to the con-
scious personalities who cause the undulations in order to ex-
press their thoughts. This meaning, then, is the vital thing,
not the etherial motions in themselves. The same trumpet may
peal forth notes not differing much to us, but the effect is vastly
different to those who know the meaning of the calls ; in one
case the cavalry suddenly mount and charge the enemy, in the
other case the call to quarters sends them to their tents and
welcome rest. Think of the wonderfully simple apparatus of
the wireless telegraph which sends forth pulsating circles of
Hertzian waves, repeating S. O. S., and mighty steamers come
from every side to the help of their sinking consort leagues
away. In the presence of such obvious facts we can but won-
der that all psychologists do not agree with Stout that the
central interest of psychology consists in the study of mental
development as the realization of conscious purpose, or with
Bradley who holds that mental development coincides with the
evolution of the meaning of things.

The actual universe, described in terms of evolution, is a
universe which manifests purpose and which ends in a multi-
plicity of natural goods with consciousness as the apex. No
account of the evolution of the cosmos merely in terms of the
redistribution of matter in motion tells the whole story, if it
ignores the cardinal fact that the process culminates in con-
sciousness and produces the world of moral values in and by
which we live and act as men. History is the record of the
wonderful life and action of humanity, including the sub-
jection of the forces of nature to the use of man. It is this
marvelous fact of consciousness in personal relations with

The Scientific Spirit and Method 205

other persons which alone justifies the existence of the vast
mass of rock and water and air which we call the earth.

The final end must be the creation of spiritual beings, able
to know and love their Creator, Otherwise God becomes
merely the Infinite Power, creating great masses of matter,
and whirling celestial fireworks, all to no purpose. Reason
itself rejects such a waste of orderly system. From this
point of view the final cause could never be the world of
quantity but only of quality, which belongs not to matter but
to personality; the whole physical universe exists only for
spirits ; it is subordinate and secondary, a means to a divine end.
Physical science magnifies the universe of matter, and tends to
dwarf man into nothingness, but a moment's thought should
show us that the mind which analyzes the starry universe, stud-
ies its order, reads its laws, predicts its motions, and reveals its
very material, is the greater ; a part of God's own knowledge.

"Yet what availed, alas, these glorious forms of all creation?

None to behold and none to enjoy and none to interpret.

What could reflect, though dimly and faint the ineffable purpose,

Which from chaotic powers order and harmony drew?

What but the reasoning Spirit, the Thought and the Faith and the

Feeling?
What but the grateful Sense, conscious of Love and Design?
Man sprang forth at the final behest — Nature at length had a Soul."

But the darkest hour is past and the dawn of a saner and
wider outlook on life is plainly at hand. On every side scien-
tific as well as philosophic thinkers are plucking up courage to
revolt against the sacred idol of the academic cave, the blood-
less abstraction of the Pure Reason, which, whether conceived
in the terms of Hegel or of Spencer, " grinds out good and
grinds out ill, and has no purpose, heart or will."

William James in The Will to Believe emphasizes the neces-
sary one-sidedness of pure science. Ostwald of Leipzic in
his address on Scientific Materialism protests against the me-
chanical conception of Nature, that all things consist of mov-
ing atoms, that matter and motion are ultimate conceptions,
and there is nothing beyond them. " It must," he says, " be

2o6 Basic Ideas in Religion

noted that it has proven impossible to express all the relations
involved in nature by a corresponding mechanical system so
that nothing has been left unaccounted for." Professor Boltz-
man could write even some time ago : " An almost exaggerated
criticism of the methods of scientific investigation is indeed
characteristic of the present day. . . . The mechanical theory,
in fact, is no longer the sole possible outlook, reached once
and for all ; it is no longer held absurd to speculate about its
replacement by a better." Pearson tells us, " The obscurity
which envelopes the principia of science is not only due to an
historical evolution marked by the authority of great names,
but to the fact that science, as long as it had to carry on a
difficult warfare with metaphysics and dogma, like a skilful
general conceived it best to hide its own deficient organiza-
tion. There can be small doubt, however, that this deficient
organization will not only in time be perceived by the enemy,
but that it has already had a very discouraging influence both
on scientific recruits and on intelligent laymen." ^ Karl Heine
in 1903 stated that many scientific investigators have under-
gone changes in their fundamental views through the growing
conviction that we are confronted with the complete breakdown
of the naturalistic world-view.

Among others we might name as constructive critics such
Germans as Mach, Oscar Hertwig, Reinke, Driesch, Fr. Lud-
wig, Hoffding, and von Hartmann, while in France there is a
movement toward the philosophic criticism of science headed
by Poincare. In philosophy Eucken and Bergson have com-
pletely rejected materialism.

' Grammar of Science, p. x.

CHAPTER XII
NATURALISM

Naturalism holds that nature, the world of phenomena, of
things sensible, is the one and only reality. It claims that we
know nothing beyond Nature. God, therefore, is an illusive
fancy, or a synonym for the sum total of all mechanical forces.
Thought is a mere product or accompaniment of certain forms
of motion in nervous matter, from which it is inseparable.
Psychology is a branch of physiology, and that is a form of
mechanics. Man, therefore, is a helpless automaton.

These are the main propositions of naturalism. They are
most repulsive to normal minds, but they seem self-evident to
those who live solely in the realm of the senses. In its older
form. Materialism, this philosophy was a blunt denial of all
the higher aspects of life and thought, and had many out-
spoken advocates in Germany and England, who showed a
brutal contempt for man. Thus Carl Vogt wrote in his Lec-
tures on Man: " We shall give weight to the anatomical char-
acters above everything else. At philosophical and religious
arguments, by which even naturalists sometimes endeavor to
support their systems, we shall only cast occasional glances." ^
In other words, to him and his school man is an animal.
Haeckel tries to disguise the harsh features of his system by
calling it " monism," and using vague spiritualistic terms. His
Riddle of the Universe has had an enormous circulation in
cheap editions throughout England and America. He is more
dangerous than Herbert Spencer, for he is clearer, and in this
one volume he covers the whole field of thought. He deals
not merely with biological evolution but with the nature, em-
bryology, and philogeny of the soul ; with the evolution of the

^P. 133.

207

2o8 Basic Ideas in Religion

world ; with religion and ethics. He furnishes a good example
of how some scientists waive away laymen from their bailiwick
but yet do not hesitate to dogmatize in the fields of ethics,
philosophy, and religion, about which they know little or noth-
ing. The conclusion of the book gives his views in summary.
" From the gloomy problem of substance we have evolved the
clear lazv of substance. The monism of the cosmos which we
establish thereon proclaims the absolute dominion of ' the great
eternal iron laws ' throughout the universe. It thus shatters,
at the same time, the three central dogmas of the dualistic
philosophy — the personality of God, the immortality of the
soul, and the freedom of the will. . . . The advance towards
the solution of the fundamental riddle of the universe, is
brought nearer to us every year in the ever increasing growth
of our knowledge of nature. We may, therefore, express a
hope that the twentieth century will complete the task of re-
solving the antitheses, and, by the construction of a system of
pure monism, spread far and wide the long-desired unity of
world-conception." In this he is doomed to disappointment,
for the real thinkers of today are turning rapidly toward ideal-
ism, Haeckel himself admits that many German scientists
have deserted him, such as du Bois-Reymond, Wundt, Hertwig,
and Driesch. Sir Oliver Lodge gives his present standing
graphically : " He is, as it were, a surviving voice from the
middle of the nineteenth century; he represents, in clear and
eloquent fashion, opinions which then were prevalent among
many leaders of thought — opinions which they themselves
in many cases, and their successors still more, lived to outgrow ;
so that by this time Professor Haeckel's voice is as the voice of
one crying in the wilderness, not as the pioneer or vanguard of
an advancing army, but as the despairing shout of a standard
bearer, still bold and unflinching, but abandoned by the re-
treating ranks of his comrades, as they march to new orders
in a fresh and more idealistic direction." ^
Though the older materialism is on the rapid decline among

'^Life and Matter, p. 51.

Naturalism 209

men of science, and they refuse to commit themselves, pre-
ferring to remain agnostics, yet the presuppositions of phys-
ical science, which confines certain knowledge to the world of
the senses, tend to create doubt of other aspects of truth and
faith. Eucken warns us plainly that " the power that has con-
quered Nature, by understanding her and harnessing her
powers to its own ends, may find itself vanquished in its most
inward selfhood by the very Nature it has conquered. The
natural, brought to self-expression by man's spiritual effort,
brings its own systematized power to bear upon the mind that
called it forth, and unless adequately resisted and controlled,
asserts its real independence by invading, possessing, and
naturalizing the spiritual life." ^

The fundamental thesis of empiricism remains as strongly
entrenched today ^s ever, or rather more so because of the
wonderful triumphs of physical science. This thesis is that
we can know nothing which is not revealed by the senses or,
if imagined as an hypothesis, cannot be scientifically proven.
It is not hard to see how this threatens all the higher interests
of life, if the followers of Naturalism are consistent. They
are not, however, for they claim the right to search for a mean-
ing to things revealed by the senses, and thus pass over into
the idealistic position. This is a thoroughly inexcusable pro-
ceeding, for no mere sense data ever conveyed any meanings,
and all cosmic systems constructed by Naturalism are as me-
chanical as the material elements which went into them.
Spiritual facts are not tangible to the senses, so that when the
generalizations of Naturalism are finished, it is no wonder that
all spirit, either God's or man's, is left out of the resulting
" whole."

" Law is God, say some : no God at all, says the fool ;
For all we have power to see is a straight stafif bent in a pool." *

There are really two forms of naturalism which are usually
hopelessly tangled in the average mind. One form comprises

3 W. R. Gibson, Rudolph Eucken's Philosophy of Life, p. 136.
* Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism.

210 Basic Ideas in Religion

a large number of ideas which are in themselves poetical or
even mystical. This type does not by any means set itself
against religion, rather does it apotheosize and worship nature.
It almost invariably develops into pantheism. This union of
religious emotion with naturalistic principles may even become
quite devout and claim that it denies only the transcendent and
not the immanent God. It is well expressed in Goethe's lines :

" What God would outwardly alone control,
And on His finger whirl the mighty Whole?
He loves the ifiner world to move, to view
Nature in Him, Himself in nature too,
So that what in Him works, and is, and lives.
The measure of His strength, His spirit gives."

The true naturalism, however, scouts all these naive and re-
ligious sentiments, and deals only in exact science and mathe-
matical-mechanical calculations. The supernatural is elimi-
nated from nature so that all its phenomena may be traced back
to simple, unequivocal, and easily understood processes, and
the conclusion is reached that everything happens " by natural
means." Naturalism of this type is sharply antagonistic to
and works against the very motives which are most vital to
the poetic and religious form.

Otto shows how difficult it is to separate these forms from
one another : " Much as they differ from one another in
reality, they are very readily confused and mixed up with one
another. And the chief peculiarity of what masquerades as
naturalism among our educated or half-educated classes today
lies in the fact that it is a mingling of the two kinds. Unwit-
tingly, people combine the moods of the one with the reasons
and methods of the other; and having done so they appear to
themselves particularly consistent and harmonious in their
thought, and are happy that they have been able thus to satisfy
at once the needs of the intellect and those of the heart. On
the one hand they stretch the mathematical-mechanical view as
far as possible from below upwards, and even attempt to ex-
plain the activities of life and consciousness as the results of
complex reflex mechanisms. And on the other hand they bring

Naturalism 211

down will, soul, and instincts into the lowest stages of ex-
istence, and become quite animistic. They wish to be nothing
if not ' exact,' and yet they reckon Goethe and Bruno among
the greatest apostles of their faith, and set their verses and
sayings as a credo and motto over their own opinions. In this
way there arises a ' world conception ' so india rubber-like and
Protean that it is as difficult as it is unsatisfactory to attempt
to come to an understanding with it. If we attempt to get hold
of it by the fringe of poetry and idealism it has assumed, it
promptly retires into its ' exact ' half. And if we try to limit
ourselves to this, in order to find a basis for discussion, it
spreads out before us all the splendors of a great nature pan-
theism, including even the ideas of the good, the true, and the
beautiful. One thing only it neglects, and that is, to show
where its two very different halves meet, and what inner bond
unites them. Thus if we are to discuss it at all, we must first
of all pick out and arrange all the foreign and mutually con-
tradictory constituents it has incorporated, then deal with
Pantheism and Animism, and with the problem of the possi-
bility of ' the true, the good, the beautiful ' on the naturalistic-
empiric basis, and finally there would remain a readily grasped
residue of naturalism of the second form, to come to some un-
derstanding with which is both necessary and instructive." ^

This residue has crystallized into certain definite theories
which can be dealt with separately. By finding the difficulties
which vitiate and destroy these theories we may the more
readily see the falsity of the naturalistic position.

Difficulties of Naturalism
I. Assumptions of matter and energy

The first difficulty is the most fundamental, for it inheres in
the question of origins, namely the assumptions the naturalist
has to make to get started on his reasoning. Du Bois-Reymond
denies that such men as Haeckel can so easily prove their posi-
tion, because they have to posit something at the start and then
argue from their assumptions. They do not start at the be-

^ Naturalism and Religion, pp. 28, 9.

212 Basic Ideas in Religion

ginning of things where the trouble really lies. He proposes
" seven world-riddles," which have yet to be solved, showing
that the mechanical world-view breaks down at as many points.
The appearance of the new planes and classes of phenomena
are inexplicable on purely mechanical principles. These
enigmas are the existence of matter and force, the origin of
motion, the appearance of design in nature, the beginning of
life, the existence of consciousness as simple feeling, the ap-
pearance of self-consciousness as intelligent thought and the
origin of speech, and finally the freedom of the will. He ad-
mits that neither he nor any one else can explain how these
breaks were bridged, and says that thinkers have no right to
posit their own views as proven facts from which they can then
argue.

Without going into all the assumptions necessary at each of
these breaks in the process of cosmic development, let us con-
fine our attention to the two primary ones which all material-
ists have had to make from the days of Democritus and Epi-
curus to the present. These are matter and motion, or to com-
bine them, as is necessary, matter in motion. Naturalism holds
that since all particles of matter are now in a state of incessant
motion, we must assume, by the law of inertia, the eternal ex-
istence of infinite energy. But such a primal force cannot be
proved. H it is gravitation, as some hold, how can we ex-
plain the rise of the present manifold forms of energy? Thus
if we start with matter in motion, the question still remains,
whence came the motion?

Further, whence came the matter? It does not help to have
Naturalism declare, " Matter has existed from all eternity, and
is the mother of all things. Out of it the world has formed
itself. From the inherent qualities of matter have emanated
the changeless laws by which the world is maintained." We
ask, if primitive matter was discrete, how did atoms arise of
themselves? If not discrete, but absolutely homogeneous,
what caused the present definite varieties? If the atoms, at
their first appearance, had " inherent qualities " they must have
received them from some source not mechanical.

Naturalism 213

The new theories of matter propounded in the light of the
discoveries of radio-activity make strongly against naturalism,
and will receive full treatment in the next chapter. It is suf-
ficient here to comment that as atoms are compounds composed
of a multitude of electrons or electric charges, infinitesimal in
size and " cosmic " in velocity, which revolve in complex orbital
motions, we have yet to account for their origin. The Divine
Will (for will is force) must impress upon them the combina-
tions in number, form, and motion which determine the proper-
ties peculiar to each kind of atom. Helmholtz accepted the
earlier dynamic theory of matter and explained mechanical
action on the vortex theory. Asked after a lecture, " Who
made the vortices ? " he replied, " God."

2. Effect greater than cause

The second difficulty is the naturalistic theory of the develop-
ment of the heterogeneous out of the homogeneous. Its best
exponent is Herbert Spencer. His First Principles is an am-
bitious attempt to explain the Universe under mechanical
formulae, such as the Persistence of Force, the Instability of
the Homogeneous, the Multiplication of Efi^ects, etc. — which
themselves need to be justified, and are a begging of the ques-
tion. Despite his affirmation of the Infinite and Eternal En-
ergy, forever unknowable, he wrote on purely materialistic
lines. He applied the idea of evolution to the inorganic world
and defined cosmic evolution as a continuous change from an
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent
heterogeneity by continuous differentiations and integrations.

To the natural question of what began the transformation of
the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, Spencer returns the
surprising answer that it is a fundamental law that the homo-
geneous is instable. But if there is anything settled by expe-
rience and theory it is that a perfectly homogeneous body of
matter, e.g., a gas of even temperature and density, would re-
main absolutely stable, unless disturbed by some outside force.
However, in his scheme the force is all within ; the homogeneity
is absolute; the mass is incoherent, dissociated, each portion

214 Basic Ideas in Religion

exactly like all the others; and the force is evenly distributed
and at rest. All thinkers know that out of such matter nothing
could arise except by the action of some force, which we can
only call creative. Spencer feels the difficulty, and begins at
once to qualify his first statement, for he tells us that the
homogeneous mass is in a condition of instable equilibrium, and
that some rearrangement must result. But why, if the mass is
really homogeneous? Again, mere persistence of force of any
kind or quality guarantees no order or progress. In itself it
would be as likely to wreck a world as develop one. To ac-
complish anything, forces must be directed to a definite end
which determines the results of their action.

Spencer holds that in the conflict of matter and force both
are at first uniform. We have a multiplicity of effects from the
one force, and the force itself is correspondingly differentiated
into a group of dissimilar forces. This principle of the multi-
plication of effects brought him into conflict with the logical
principle of " like causes like effects," i.e., that cause and effect
are on the same plane, quantitative force equals quantitative ef-
fect, chemical equals chemical, life springs out of life, mind
acts on mind, etc. But in any scheme of unbroken evolution
you have to slur over these differences and glide from one class
or order of things to another, by imagining them to approach
each other, till the difference is imperceptible.

We are coming to see with Sigwart that " the thought of
development has sometimes been treated like a logical charm
by means of which we may explain without difficulty hitherto
inexplicable phenomena," ^ and are no longer easily subject to
its subtle influence.

3. Problem of Life

The weakness of naturalism appears most plainly when w^e
study its attempts to explain life and consciousness in purely
mechanical terms. The problem of life is the crux of natural-
ism. Biogenesis, the hypothesis that living matter always
arises from living matter, is a scientific axiom ; yet some writers

•» Logic, Vol. II, p. 475.

Naturalism 215

today try to persuade us otherwise. Statements like this are
current in magazine articles : " Every scientist with a wide
grasp of facts, who can think clearly and without prejudice
over the field of what is known of cosmic evolution, must be
driven to believe that the alleged wide gap between vital and
non-vital matter is largely a figment of prejudiced human un-
derstanding."

How little true this is of the views of the best scientists is
shown in the case of Professor Haldane, who draws the con-
clusion that not by any possibility can the mechanistic concep-
tion of life be true: "The physical and chemical conception
of the world breaks down absolutely and hopelessly in connec-
tion with the phenomena of life, however useful it actually is
in connection with inorganic phenomena. It is, therefore, noth-
ing but a working hypothesis of limited useful application." ^
Bergson points out clearly that physical science can deal only
with spacial relations, while the study of life demands the
consideration of temporal relations as well. Lord Kelvin
writes in the same vein, " The properties of living matter dis-
tinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and the
present state of our knowledge furnishes no link between the
living and the non-living." And Professor Burdon Sander-
son tells us that " the mystery is the more profound the more
it is brought into contrast with the exact knowledge we possess
of surrounding conditions." ®

The attempt is constantly made to bridge over the chasm by
the " fallacy of the imperceptible." Yet the tiniest drop of
protoplasm with the potentiality of growth is as much a new
thing as the grown animal would be. As Professor Carl
Hauptmann puts it, " The most primitive life, from which alone
the living world on this earth can have sprung, can only be as-
sumed to be a species, the members of which varied in manifold
ways and propagated themselves. Here we have to do already
with an eminently complex interaction of elementary processes.
. . . The origin of the simplest living substance is mechanically

'' Mechanism, Life and Personality, p. 135.
6 Brit. Assoc. Report, 1889, p. 614.

2i6 Basic Ideas in Religion

quite unknown and uncomprehended." ^ " It may be broadly
said," Oscar Hertwig stated to the congress of scientists at
Aachen in 1900, " that, in spite of all the progress of science,
the chasm between living and lifeless nature, instead of grad-
ually closing up, has, on the contrary, become deeper and
wider." ^^

It is a recognized fact today that there is no such thing as a
physical basis of life, a kind of unorganized matter out of
which life arises de novo. The simplest form of life which we
know, the cell, is itself organized matter. It is not structure-
less, as used to be said, but has its definite parts present and
packed away so to speak, waiting to develop, like the pupa in
the chrysalis. The cell is an organism from the first accord-
ing to its own inherent law. Professor Wilson writes, " The
study of the cell has on the whole seemed to widen rather than
to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest
forms of life from the inorganic world." ^^

" In all cases whether the cell-unit lives freely as a unicel-
lular organism, or forms an integral part of a multicellular in-
dividual, it exhibits in itself all the phenomena characteristic
of living things. Each cell assimilates food material, whether
this is obtained by its own activity, as in the majority of the
protozoa, or is brought, as it were, to its own door by the blood-
stream, as in the higher metazoa, and builds this food material
into its own substance, a process accompanied by respiration
and excretion and resulting in growth. Each cell exhibits in
greater or less degree ' irritability,' or the power of responding
to stimuli ; and finally each cell, at some time in its life, is
capable of reproduction. It is evident therefore that in the
multicellular forms all the complex manifestations of life are
but the outcome of the coordinated activities of the constituent
cells. The latter are indeed, as Virchow has termed them,
' vital units.' In writing on physiology Verworn tells us, ' It
is to the cell that the study of every bodily function sooner or

8 Die Metaphysik in dcr Modernen Physiologic, p. 386.
'^^ Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1900, p. 465.
11 The Cell in Development and Inheritance, p. 330.

Naturalism 217

later drives us. In the muscle cell lies the problem of the heart
beat and that of muscular contraction ; in the gland cell reside
the causes of secretion ; in the epithelial cell, in the white cor-
puscle, lies the problem of the absorption of food, and the
secrets of mind are hidden in the ganglion cell.' So also the
problems of development and inheritance have shown them-
selves to be cell problems, while the study of disease has pro-
duced a ' cellular pathology.' The most important problems
awaiting solution in biology are cell problems." ^-

Peculiar Properties of Living Things

1. Living substance is composed of cells organized with nuclei and
ready to develop at once on fertilization. The marvelous regularity of
cell division in all its parts according to the nature of the particular or-
ganism has already been sufficiently described, and does not need repeti-
tion here.^^ This apparently shows that living substance is dominated
by an inner directive force which determines its whole development
from the very first.

2. Living substance has the power of self motion, and responds
to external stimuli, but in varying ways, adjusting itself to the environ-
ment and ignoring the law of mechanics that action and reaction are
equal. The most obvious distinction between the organic and inorganic
lies in the fact that the organic is not passive under the impact of
external force, but responds with the play of counter forces which are
essentially its own. Organic bodies are not simply moved ; they move
themselves. They are so constituted that even when an external force
acts as an excitement or a stimulus, the organic forces which emerge
and act are more complex and important. Plants react, though reaction
is naturally more decided in the case of animals. The sundew catches
flies, and its tentacles will even reach out half an inch to seize a fly fixed
at that distance from it, but not touching it. The tendrils of climbing
plants, such as the pea, show that they can feel things at a distance
and move toward them. A trailing cactus on a galvanized iron roof
has been observed to drop its roots through a hole to the ground twelve
feet below. Among unicellular organisms the behavior is not a set,
forced method of reacting to each particular agent, but takes place in a
much more flexible, less directly machine-like way, by the method of
trial and error. There is also the response to stimulus within the
organism; e.g., medicine will be absorbed by the particular tissue or
organ injured, and other tissues will reject it. Living substance con-

^^Ency. Brit, nth Edit, Vol. VII, p. 710.
13 See Note J.

2i8 Basic Ideas in Religion

tains energies which, without contradicting the general laws of physics
and chemistry, nevertheless give a special expression to its reactions.

3. Living substance assimilates food from without, and grows. Be-
cause we can produce in the laboratory some of the products of plant
life, such as indigo, some chemists claim that the plant also uses only
chemical forces, and some day we will succeed in making life. But
Professor Bunge reminds us that, " All our artificial syntheses can only
be achieved by the application of forces and agents which can never
play a part in vital processes, such as extreme pressure, high tempera-
ture, concentrated mineral acids, free chlorine — factors which are im-
mediately fatal to the living cell. ... It follows that the animal body
has command of ways and means of a totally different character, by
which the same object is gained." 1* Claude Bernard similarly com-
ments that " The chemistry of the laboratory is carried on by means of
reagents and apparatus which the chemist has prepared, and the chem-
istry of the living being is carried on by means of reagents and
apparatus which the organism has prepared." ^^ Thus it would seem
that no outside force could ever manufacture living things.

4. The power of reproduction of living substance implies a continuous
relation to the future. The whole embryonic development is prophetic
of future conditions not yet in existence. This is more evident the
higher up in the scale of life we go. Grown animals make definite
provision for their young. Reproduction is itself a profound mystery.
How heredity acts in transmitting qualities baffles our thought, for it is
" the greatest marvel of biological science." ^^ Every effort to dis-
cover an intelligible bond connecting the marvelous diversity of living
forms and their development, leaves the investigator facing a meta-
physical fogbank, impenetrable to thought. A multitude of biologists
offer theories of all kinds, but they remain only so many words, because
in the nature of the case they can report only the changes they see
taking place under the microscope; the forces at work escape them.

5. Each organism is a perfect unity in which the whole dominates the
part, and uses it for its own good. Some organizing force must coexist
with all living organisms from the cell onward. This force must
precede the coordination of the organism — life, therefore, is the cause
of the special growth which it develops. Each kind of life has its own
definite form, and has not only a power of growth, but also a power of
recovery, of healing wounds and fighting disease. Nothing could be
more remarkable than the restorative powers of a body by means of
which many organs are reproduced and cells are put to a different use
from that previously subserved. Multicellular structure is not essential

1* Physiological Chemistry, p. 313.

15 Rapport, p. 133.

i« Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, p. 295.

Naturalism 219

for complex regional diflferentiation. In fact this differentiation may be
foreshadowed in the egg before cleavage begins. The mode of cleavage
may be artificially altered, as Driesch has shown, without affecting the
ultimate organization of the embryo. These and many similar observa-
tions tend to emphasize the importance of the " organism " itself in
contradistinction to the cell. The increasing frequency with which
protoplasmic continuity is being demonstrated between all kinds of
cells is a fact tending in the same direction. " As far as the plants
are concerned, however, it has been conclusively shown by Hofmeister,
De Bary, and Sachs that the growth of the mass is the primary factor;
for the characteristic mode of growth is often shown by the growing
mass before it splits up into cells, and the form of cell division adapts
itself to that of the mass : ' Plants build cells, cells do not build
plants' (De Bary)."i^ The living organism can use and direct the
action of natural forces within itself for its own benefit, as certainly as
it does use the processes of nature for its own purposes as food.
Sandeman has published a strong protest against the tendency to treat
the organism as only a complex case of the inorganic, a mere aggre-
gate of parts, ignoring the unity, the individual wholeness, which is
characteristic of life, whether or not we can comprehend it.^^

From these peculiar properties of living things, and others
which could be mentioned, it is evident that life is dis-
tinct in its working and effects from physico-chemical force.
The easy identification of the principle of life with an " allo-
tropic form " of physical force customary in the days of Tyn-
dall and Huxley, has been discarded, even by Herbert
Spencer.^^

During the latter half of the nineteenth century theories
of the mechanist type prevailed almost without question among
biologists. Recently, however, they have been questioned by a
considerable group, to whom the name of neo-vitalists has been
given. Among them are such men as Professors Driesch of
Heidelberg, Wolff of Basle, Reinke of Kiel, Neumeister of
Jena, and Schneider of Vienna. These men hold that al-
though we have succeeded in determining the physical or
chemical factors that enter into many of the phenomena of life,
and in analyzing the conditions necessary or useful in the

!'■ Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance, p. 293.

18 Problems of Biology.

1® For Spencer's views see Note T.

220 Basic Ideas in Religion

accomplishment of certain functions, we have not yet accounted
for a single vital phenomenon solely by the combination of in-
organic activities, considering it as a whole and taking into ac-
count the characteristics that distinguish the organic from the
mineral kingdom. Such phenomena, for example, are the
elaboration of chlorophyl in the green leaf and the division of
the nucleus in cell-growth. These authors therefore regard the
whole mechanist attitude as unauthorized, and assert that we
must either admit the hypothesis of a vital principle or at least
grant that the vitalist interpretation is as likely to be true as the
other.

Thus, while life has processes that are distinctly physico-
chemical, it is not itself such a process, or even the sum of such
processes. It is an idea — a tendency — something higher than
and apart from physics and chemistry. Claude Bernard recog-
nized and well described this characteristic of life. " Life," he
said, " is an idea: it is the idea of the common result for which
all the anatomical elements are associated and disciplined ; the
idea of the harmony that results from their concert, of the
order that reigns in their action. The living machine is char-
acterized, not by the nature of its physico-chemical properties,
but by the creation of the machine according to a definite idea.
This grouping takes place according to the laws that govern
the physico-chemical properties of matter, but what is essential
to life's domain, which belongs neither to physics nor to chemis-
try, is the directing idea of this vital evolution." Bergson
brings this out clearly in showing that each living thing is an
individual : " The living body has been separated and closed
off by nature herself. It is composed of unlike parts that
complete each other. It performs diverse functions that in-
volve each other. It is an individual; and of no other object,
not even of the crystal, can this be said, for a crystal has
neither difference of parts nor diversity of function." ^° His
view of life is that it is creative evolution, ever causing new
forms.

20 Creative Evolution, p. 12.

Naturalism 221

There is a tendency among biologists to agree in the view
that, although vital force itself is not a form of physical energy,
it does direct or possibly transform energy to its own use. A
few quotations will show this. Professor F. R. Japp de-
clares, " I see no escape from the conclusion that, at the mo-
ment when life first arose a directive force came into play." ^^
Professor Kerner von Marilaun writes, " This force in na-
ture is not identical with any other natural force, for it mani-
fests a series of characteristic effects which differ from those
of all other forms of energy. Therefore I do not hesitate
again to designate as vital force this natural agency, . . .
whose immediate instrument is the protoplasm, and whose
peculiar effect we call life." -- Professor Virchow writes
similarly, " We cannot see how the phenomena of life can be
understood simply as an assemblage of the natural forces in-
herent in those substances ; rather do I consider it necessary
to distinguish as an essential factor of life an impressed de-
rived force in addition to the molecular forces. I see no ob-
jection to designating this force by the old name of vital
force." ^^ Sir Oliver Lodge considers it a fact that life itself
is a guiding principle, a controlling agency using existing
forces, i.e., that a plant can guide and influence the elements
of inorganic matter and build them up into definite forms which
live as aggregates, until they are abandoned by this controll-
ing power, when they fall quickly into decay.

The whole fallacy of the naturalist lies in the assumption
that purely physical science, descriptive and mathematical,
covers the whole universe. We admit that in biological science
the development depends on the environment for successful
movement ; we will even admit that nothing neza is added to
the environment, the sum of energy and matter remain con-
stant. But we must agree, before we go any further, as to
what the environment contains and embraces. We decline to
believe that modern science has sounded the depths of the

21 Brit. Assoc. Report, 1898, p. 818.

22 The Natural History of Plants, Vol. I, p. 52.

23 Old and New Vitalism.

222 Basic Ideas in Religion

universe and translated all its contents into mechanics. It
cannot even explain the acorn which grows into an oak, which
is said to be " higher " than manure and soil by the properties
of which it is raised up. The acorn does not contain the
matter which goes to form the oak tree. It simply forms the
cradle of a germ-cell of a certain definite kind of living thing.
It does not create that vast bulk of matter. It takes it in and
transforms it. There is a marriage between that lowly life-cell
and the whole universe of force and matter, and the oak tree
is the product, whose form and qualities are all laid down in
the tiny active germ in the acorn.

But whence comes this marvelous life force? Certainly not
from the manure and soil. If we admit that the material tree
grew by drafts on the material environment, matter being al-
ways present, why not say also that the center of life in the
germ draws its existence and continuance from the ever pres-
ent environment of unseen life — from the Spirit — the Lord
and the Life-giver? If life-force suddenly arises out of mat-
ter hitherto controlled by purely physical forces, or if intelli-
gence and will — very intense forms of consciousness — arise
out of dull sensations in animals, this means that a great addi-
tion of power of a higher grade is made to the total power in
the universe. This increase must be either self-caused —
which the law of energy forbids — or it must be drawn out of a
greater environment than the sensible air or heat or soil — from
a reservoir of Life and Mind, encompassing and permeating
the earth. No one can explain it in the face of all the evi-
dence by declaring that the higher comes out of the lower by
simple development. The absolutely new force demands a new
and corresponding force as cause and environment.

4. Problem of Consciousness

The last difficulty of materialism of which we shall treat is
the problem of consciousness. Modern materialism, philo-
sophic or scientific, postulates the impossibility of thought with-
out the brain, and divides into four schools concerning the
relation between the two.

Naturalism 223

1. Crude materialism. Thought is a secretion of the brain;
in Carl Vogt's words, " as contraction is the function of
muscles, and as the kidneys secrete urine, so, and in the same
way, does the brain generate thoughts, movements, and feel-
ings." No lengthy discussion is necessary, for this theory has
no support from modern psychologists of established rank. It
is sufficient to comment that thought and feeling are not objects
or movements in space and cannot be so pictured. We know
them not by external intuition, as this theory would demand,
but by self -perception and self-consciousness. That which has
not the properties of the material cannot be the form of activity
of something which is material. Activity of consciousness and
cerebral function always come to be known through different
sources of experience. The fallacy of this form of materialism
consists in the fact that it effaces this essential distinction.

2, Another theory is that thought is a transformation of
physical force, resulting from a peculiar mode of motion of the
particles of the brain. Consciousness is not a product of the
same kind as the matter which produces it ; it is a transforma-
tion of the physical forces liberated in the brain by the inter-
action of its parts. We have in it simply a more striking in-
stance of that transmutative process by which a current of
electricity, passing through a carbon filament is changed into
light. Few psychologists accept this view, as they incline to
deny any interrelation between mental and bodily experiences.

Spencer took this position in his Psychology, holding that
nervous shocks are primordial and irreducible elements of con-
sciousness. In his First Principles he had previously written :
" That no idea or feeling arises, save as a result of some phys-
ical force expended in producing it, is fast becoming a common-
place of science; and whoever duly weighs the evidence will
see, that nothing but an overwhelming bias in favor of a pre-
conceived theory, can explain its non-acceptance." ^* He bases
this on the law of transformation and equivalence of forces,
that the thought or consciousness itself, as distinct from motion

2* § 71.

224 Basic Ideas in Religion

in brain or nerves, must be a form of physical energy, passing
on what it has absorbed, for no energy can disappear or cease
to be. To take a concrete illustration. The same current of
force which was a vibration of the ear drum when the door
bell rang, passes on as a mode of motion in the auditory nerve,
then takes on a mental form and becomes a thought, after
which it changes back into a physical force, passing down the
motor nerves and setting the body in motion to go to the
door. Consciousness is a link in this chain, receiving its energy
at the expense of the auditory nerve, and in turn liberating to
its successor the energy it held for a brief moment.

" Does a given quantity of motion disappear to be replaced
by an equivalent quantity of feeling?" asks John Fiske, and
answers, " By no means. The nerve motion in disappearing
is simply distributed into other nerve motions in various parts
of the body. Nowhere is there such a thing as the meta-
morphosis of motion into feeling, or of feeling into motion." ^^
And Hoffding has a similar comment. " If, then, there is a
transition from physiological function to psychological activity,
from body to mind, physiology, at any rate, working with its
present method, can not discover it. . . . So far as we can
speak of final results in the physiology of the brain, this repre-
sents the brain as a republic of nerve centers, each with its
function and all in interaction ; but there is nothing to indicate
the possibility of the physiological process breaking off at any
point to pass into a process of a wholly different kind." ^^

The assumption that every mental state has its equivalent in
a corresponding physical force previously expended, though
taken as a postulate in laboratory work, is incapable of verifica-
tion, for that work is concerned purely with the measure-
ment of nerve motion, whereas thought does not move and
cannot be measured. Mind responds to stimulus, but it re-
sponds in the most varied and often unexpected ways ; action
and reaction are not identical in this field as they are in nature.
Laboratory experiments are useful only for giving us the in-

25 Essay on Darwinisvt, p. 73.

8' Outlines of Psychology, pp. 57, 8.

Naturalism 225

tensity and force and time of nerve movements, but the
thoughts in the subject are not revealed at all. The fact, on
the contrary, is that physical stimuli, sounds, touch, words,
etc., affect various persons differently according to their mental
state and attitude, whereas forces acting on matter must have
definite reactions. That which determines the strength of the
mental impression is not the amount of incident physical force,
but its intellectual significance for us, A passing shadow or a
mere whisper of vital news may frighten some people into
convulsions, while on the other hand a crash of thunder may
not disturb the student engrossed in his studies, or the roar
of cannon a soldier full of the excitement of battle.

3. Pan-psychism. All matter is " ensouled " by diflferent
forms and degrees of energy, e.g., atomic motion, chemical
affinities, vital forces. Out of these by simple development
springs the higher soul activity in the brain, which we call con-
sciousness. Professor Clififord states it without disguise:
" Molecules of matter are devoid of mind, but they possess
small portions of mind-stuff, and when these particles get com-
bined in a certain way thought and consciousness arise." ^^
That is to say, the profoundest element in all experience arises
out of material particles which themselves have no conscious-
ness. Other leading supporters of this view are Haeckel and
Paul Cams. Professor William James exposes the theory in
all its naked absurdity, and to his chapter on " The Mind-Stuff
Theory " in his Principles of Psychology the reader is referred.

4. The fourth theory of materialism is the prevalent one
today. It is called scientific monism or parallelism, the absolute
unity of two parallel series of physical processes in the brain
and of psychical changes in consciousness. Each series is in-
dependent of the other, the relation between the two being
purely one of concomitance. Thought in this theory becomes
simply a parallel current, a mere passive attendant on the
atomic motions of the brain cells. This is the working hy-
pothesis of many leading philosophers and psychologists, such

27 Lectures and Essays, p. 284.

226 Basic Ideas in Religion

as Wundt, Taine, Hoffding, Fechner, Titchener, Witmer,
Hodgson, Royce, and Paulsen. The real starting point of this
theory (not always recognized) is the Cartesian dogma of the
absolute independence of body and soul, neither affecting the
other, and the absolute unlikeness of mental and physical ex-
periences, so that one set could not be the product or cause
of the other.

But this assumed dogma is purely theoretic. Modern medi-
cine affords evidence in the localization of brain function, in
nervous disorders, and in hypnotic " suggestion," that mind and
body do act on each other. There is ample evidence that
thoughts and feelings do affect the body. A mother saw a
window sash fall and crush three fingers on her child's hand;
within twenty-four hours the corresponding three fingers on
her hand became sore and festered. Mantegazza relates that
during a certain period of his life he had only to concentrate
his thoughts upon this or that part of his skin to make it purple
little by little. The stigmata of St. Francis seem to have been
genuine, as well as many of the other ninety cases which are
on record, induced by intense agonizing over the wounds of
Christ.2«

The parallelism theory demands an absolute fatalism, de-
termining every thought and feeling in every man in perfect
correspondence with nerve motions and outer phenomena.
Each man must be adjusted beforehand to all the events which
shall happen in his whole life. Lange illustrated this by his
hypothesis of two worlds and two world histories absolutely
identical, although in the one men are conscious and in the
other are mere automata. Although the two series are con-
sidered coordinate, neither acting on the other, yet the attention
is concentrated in the physical alone and consciousness is treated
as subordinate, a mere by-product, or accompaniment of nerv-
ous shocks and brain action. All thought and action are purely
reflex, and consciousness becomes the enigma of the

28 See Public Opinion, Vol. XIX, Noi 14. Discussion of an article by
Dr. Karl von Prel, who gives some of the above and many other striking
instances of stigmatization.

Naturalism 227

universe, a mere useless epi-phenomenon of the nervous organ-
ism, like the escaping steam which shows that work is being
done, but not by itself. As Sigwart puts it, " Everything which
goes on in the external world stands in a closed causal con-
nection, and proceeds from physical causes ; we stand in no
other relation to our bodies than to the motion of the fixed
stars."^^ And as Professor James comments, " If pleasures
and pains have no efficacy, one does not see (without some
such a priori rational harmony as would be scouted by the
' scientific' champions of the automaton-theory) why the most
noxious acts, such as burning, might not give thrills of de-
light, and the most necessary ones, such as breathing, cause
agony." ^°

A homely illustration may serve as a reductio ad absurdiim
of the parallelist theory. Just after the publication of the first
edition of the Metaphysics a noted professor of physics wrote
to Dr. B. P. Bowne protesting against the emphasis on the
reality of mind. The physicist declared that there could be
nothing in the universe except matter and its forces, that
thought was a powerless accompaniment of the physical proc-
esses. To this Dr. Bowne replied that, according to the
theory of the letter-writer, in this particular instance the letter
itself could only be looked upon as so many marks upon a
piece of paper, that certain physical forces had brought about
certain nervous states resulting in the scratches on the paper,
and that thought had nowhere appeared as an effective factor.
Dr. Bowne went on to declare that while he could not accept
such a theory as an explanation of the entire universe, he was
altogether willing to accept it as an explanation of the particular
letter which he had received from the physicist. The physicist
made no direct reply, but revealed to a friend that while the
Bowne sarcasm irritated and stung, the Bowne criticism was
exceedingly hard for a materialist to meet.

But if consciousness is useless, how can we explain its age-
long development pari passu with the complexity of brain

29 Logic, Vol. II, p. 391.

30 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 144.

228 Basic Ideas in Religion

structure under the evolution process, whose one test of the
development of any function is its usefulness to the organism?
Romanes asks, " Can we suppose that the highest function in
the highest creature on the globe is f unctionless ? " and James
comments, " It is to my mind quite inconceivable that con-
sciousness should have nothing to do with a business which
it so faithfully attends." ^^

In spite of the great names associated with it, the theory is
inherently weak and logically incredible, at best a mere verbal
simplification. It joins together in an inseparable unity the
most diverse experiences we know and yet affirms their abso-
lute independence. But if they have nothing to do with each
other, who or what joined them together? Spinoza answered,
" God." Materialistic psychology gives no answer at all, for
God is not recognized in this philosophy of " substance." But
the causation impulse demands some answer. Dr. James
Ward insists that invariable coexistence and causal independ-
ence are impossible. This absolute conformity of the two
series without any mutual interaction is contrary to all ex-
perience.

It is impossible to preserve this even balance ; we feel that
one series must dominate the other. The majority of those
who hold this theory give the upper hand to the physical series
which alone is open to experimentation. Man thus becomes
a conscious automaton, a mere action and reaction machine,
receiving and transmitting cosmic forces. The prevalence of
this disguised materialism in much college teaching and in
many text books on psychology and even on ethics is a matter
of grave concern. It may not make students open material-
ists, but it does make them agnostics as to the higher ethical
and spiritual aspects of human life and thought.

An eflfort to solve the problem of consciousness in a man-
ner which recognizes personality, and is satisfactory to theism,
has been made by Dr. W. Hanna Thomson. His views are
summarized in a note in the Appendix.^-

31 Principles of Psychology, p. 136.
82 See Note Y.

Naturalism 229

Pessimism and Atheism

Naturalism has no place for personality, morality, immor-
tality or God, therefore its natural and consistent outcome is
Pessimism and Atheism. It holds that it is necessary that
every form of dualism be rejected. Only by having unity
can we have a reasonable philosophy. There can be no alter-
native between Theism and Atheism. This we willingly grant,
though we do not agree with Naturalism in choosing the latter.
The logical extreme of all this is found in the views of a
Russian writer : " Man like all living nature is an entirely
material being. The mind is mere property of the body.
Science has brought in a new gospel ; its practical conclusion
is simple — the old world must be destroyed, and we must
begin with the two lies which have ground the world into
slavery — the first is God, and the second, duty. When you
have freed your mind from the fear of a God, and from
childish respect for the fiction of ' right,' then the remaining
chains which bind you and which are called civilization, prop-
erty, marriage, morality, and justice, will snap like threads."
In France many scientists and public men are avowed atheists.
So too are most anarchists. In Germany philosophic material-
ism with an inconsistent tendency to idealism is represented
by Strauss, F. A. Lange, and Eugen Diiring. Its atheistical,
anti-ethical, and anti-human extremes are exposed in all their
nakedness in the pagan individualism of Friedrich Nietzsche,

CHAPTER XIII
THE NEW THEORY OF MATTER

The problem of what matter is in its ultimate analysis is a
vital one for the theistic thinker, for if matter is distinct from
the energy which moves it, if it is something inert and passive,
then we have an irreconcilable dualism. The universal Spirit
cannot be infinite, since it is confronted by a passive load or
burden which it must move. The theist desires unity just as
much as other metaphysicians, but he can never be satisfied
with the unity obtained by the denial of spirit. Now, however,
the discoveries of chemists and physicists during the last twenty
years in X-rays, ionization, radio-activity, etc., have shown that
all our thinking about matter must be in terms of energy, and
that the mechanical, chemical and other qualities of matter
are but the manifestations of energ}\ As the atom is a center
of energy, we no longer have the old problem of the irreducible
dualism of inert matter and animating energy. The new
theories of matter should be reviewed here, even though the
subject is still in its infancy, and astonishing discoveries are
constantly being made.

Let us begin our search for the ultimate constitution of matter by a
consideration of the ability of gases to conduct electricity. This power
is very slight in the normal state, but can be increased in various
ways, such as heating by an electric arc or glowing metals, by passing
electric or X-ray discharges through the gas, or by letting ultra-violet
light fall on metals over which the gas is passing. The conductivity of
gases is due to the generation of ions or gaseous particles carrying
either positive or negative electricity according to the conditions under
which the ionization took place. Under ordinary atmospherical pres-
sure and low temperature positive ions are produced, but under low
pressure and at high temperature negative ions.

These last, because of their importance, have been given a special

230

The New Theory of Matter 2^1

name, corpuscles. They are all alike in nature and size, and constitute
actual parts of the forms of matter from which they fly. Their velocity
is between 10,000 and 90,000 miles a second, or about half the velocity of
light. They are almost inconceivably small, being about one thousandth
of a hydrogen atom, which has heretofore been considered the smallest
particle of matter. They can be deflected from their path by a magnetic
force. They serve as nuclei about which atoms and molecules collect.
When this happens with water vapor in the air clouds result. The
charge of negative electricity which they carry is about the same elec-
trical charge as a hydrogen atom can have. They discharge electrified
bodies by rendering the air about them conductive, and they give rise to
X-rays in the bodies which they strike. They cause substances to
phosphoresce. Their contact gives rise to heat in, and communicates
mechanical motion to, the bodies they strike. Finally they are absorbed
by all bodies in direct proportion to the density of those bodies, thus
penetrating the lighter metals with ease. The cathode rays in an
excited Crookes tube are a beam of corpuscles.

Not so much can be said of the positively charged ions, for as yet
positive electricity is an enigma. This little is determined, however,
that their velocities are much less than those of corpuscles, and their
mass about a thousand times greater, about equal to that of an atom
of ordinary matter. They can be deflected to only a slight extent even
by an immensely strong magnetic field.

It was suggested above that X-rays are emitted by the bodies which
have been caused to phosphoresce by cathode rays or corpuscles in a
Crookes' tube. It was a matter of speculation as to whether the power
of emitting penetrating rays might not be a property of phosphorescent
bodies in general. Niewenglowski proved this by photographs taken by
rays from certain compounds exposed to the sunlight which penetrated a
sheet of aluminum before reaching the photographic plate. Becquerel
took a more important step, and found that rays were emitted by
uranium which had not been exposed to the ultra violet rays of sunlight,
but had been completely sheltered from any previous exposure to the
light. The tremendous significance of this discovery lies in the fact that
here was a substance which produced the penetrating rays spontane-
ously, as a natural property, and not because of special conditions.
Schmidt shortly afterwards discovered that thorium possessed similar
properties. Then M. and Mme. Curie, after a most difficult and
laborious investigation, discovered two new substances, radium and
polonium and, in conjunction with Debierne, actinium. These three
substances possessed the properties we have been describing to a far
greater degree than uranium or thorium. It has been found by Ruther-
ford, Thomson, and others that there are many other " radio-active "
substances not heretofore known. But radium compounds have this

232 Basic Ideas in Religion

power of radio-activity so much more vigorously developed than the
others that it is receiving the primary attention in the research.

Radio-activity is due to the emission of three types of rays, known
as alpha, beta, and gamma. The alpha rays have been shown by
Rutherford to be positively electrified atoms of helium, moving with
speeds which reach up to about one-tenth of the velocity of light.
They are thus about twice the size of a hydrogen atom. The beta
rays are negatively electrified ions or corpuscles, similar to those we
discussed above save in velocity, for these move with very nearly the
velocity of light. The gamma rays are unelectrified and, though very
real, are not material, but merely a kind of pulsation in the ether, travel-
ing with the speed of light. These are analogous to, if not identical
with. X-rays. Their most amazing trait is the way in which they
penetrate the densest matter. The alpha rays are stopped at once by a
sheet of paper, the beta rays cannot go through a thin sheet of copper or
tinfoil, but the gamma rays will penetrate tlirough a foot of iron and
several inches of lead. It is the gamma rays which kill cancerous
tissue, yet pass through healthy flesh without affecting it. The beta
rays, however, seem to stimulate organic growth. The proportion of
the rays is one gamma to nine beta and ninety alpha.

Radium itself has been isolated by Mme. Curie in collaboration with
Professor Debierne, but its ordinary use is in one of its salts. It has
the appearance of a white metal, but it oxidizes rapidly on exposure to
the air and becomes black. It adheres firmly to iron, burns paper, and
quickly decomposes water. In its richest deposits it occurs only to the
one-millionth of one per cent. It has the heaviest atomic weight (225)
of all the elements, except those of its own series, thorium and uranium.
The reduction of a ton of pitchblende, yields about one-fourth of a tea-
spoonful of a radium salt. Its effects are most remarkable. It gives a
steady glow, which in the spinthariscope looks like a miniature milky
way in motion, as the flying alpha particles are seen striking the zinc
sulphide screen. It has an electric action which indicates its presence
by ionization. It heats itself, maintaining a temperature 1.5 degrees
above its surroundings, even if embedded in frozen air. It gives out
enough heat to raise an amount of water equal to itself from the freez-
ing to the boiling point every hour. It breaks up water into hydrogen
and oxygen and causes certain other chemical changes. It lights up
precious stones and causes objects to phosphoresce. It never comes into
exact equilibrium like other substances, but is constantly giving out
energy, without receiving the same amount from any other source.
Until radium came into the field it was not thought that there could
be such a continuous expenditure of energy, but in radium we have, as
it were, a dynamo which throws off currents of high-power electricity
without any engine or heavy machinery to turn it. Steamships could

The New Theory of Matter 233

be made to cross the ocean by using the energy of a stick of radium and
great cities could be lighted forever, as far as human lives are concerned,
with a pound of it. The mystery of a continuous dynamic expenditure
of force strikes us as a novelty, even though we have become accus-
tomed to the fact that a magnet exercises its attractive force indefinitely,
and the sun holds the earth by an enduring static force operating across
millions of miles of space.

Radium breaks down into a gas known as radium emanation. It
belongs to the family of rare gases in the air discovered by Lord Ray-
leigh and Sir William Ramsay, i.e., helium, neon, argon, krypton, and
xenon. These elements are curious in the fact that, except at white
heat, they appear to be incapable of existing in chemical combination
with any substance whatever. The connection of radium emanation
with this family is shown in that it is impossible to destroy or alter it,
yet, unlike the other gases, it is decomposing of itself. ' During its short
life it evolves nearly three million times as much heat proportionately
as arises from any chemical action known to man. If a thimbleful of it
could be obtained it would probably melt the glass tube holding it.
This tremendous store of energy is given out through its decay. That
into which it decays is helium, the gas formed in profusion in the
atmosphere of the sun. The emanation gives off only alpha particles,
and these, it was stated above, are helium atoms. This was proved by a
simple experiment. A mass of radium was heated in a sealed tube, con-
nected by a stopcock with an exhausted tube, and on opening the stop-
cock the delicate gas flowed into the other tube. This was sealed off
and examined. After a time it was found that its spectrum was that
of helium. If anything were needed to reenforce the conclusions drawn
from this experiment, it could be found in the fact that helium when
found in the earth at all, is always associated with radium, or some
similarly radio-active mineral. It bubbles up, for instance, through
springs whose waters are radio-active.

This discovery that radium emanation breaks down into helium was
epoch making. It was a demonstration that one element could be
transmuted into another, and that the dream of the old alchemists was
coming true. The possession by the radium emanation of such enor-
mous energy — fully 400,000 times that of dynamite — led Sir William
Ramsay to try its effect on other kinds of matter. He placed it in water,
and not only did it decompose the water into hydrogen and oxygen, as
radium itself does, but instead of decaying into helium, as when in
contact with air, it changed into neon ! Still more surprising, if into the
water containing the radium emanation some copper sulphate is intro-
duced the result is not neon, but argon.

Two other remarkable things resulted from these experiments. In
the decomposition of the water into hydrogen and oxygen there was

234 Basic Ideas in Religion

found resulting too much hydrogen, some ten to twenty per cent, too
much. Again when the experiment with the copper sulphate was
finished there was found to be present both sodium and lithium. The
sodium might possibly have come from the glass of the vessel, but the
lithium could not have come from any source save the copper. It was
apparently a product of the decay of the copper. Here then was a well-
known metal, one of the oldest and most familiar in human use, turned
at the magic touch of a mysterious emanation into another metal entirely
different in appearance, color, weight and utility. Lithium is the light,
white, soft metal whose volatile compounds produce the magnificent
crimson flame so well known in pyrotechny. And turning again to the
laboratory of earth for verification, it is interesting to note that some of
the uranium copper ores of Colorado contain minute traces of lithium.
This leads to the suggestion that the radium emanation merely acceler-
ated in the copper a natural decomposition, a process always and every-
where in operation, the continuous disintegration of all matter; for
copper is by no means a peculiar element, and what happens to it may
be taking place with lead, carbon, sulphur, and every other element
known to man.

Let us return for a moment to the radio-active substances. Crookes
discovered that uranium could be separated into two portions, one of
which was radio-active and the other not. Becquerel, investigating
further, found that after several months the part that was not radio-
active to begin with regained radio-activity, while the part which had
been radio-active had now lost that power. These and other peculiar
effects of radio-activity received a satisfactory explanation in a theory
proposed by Rutherford and Soddy, according to which the radio-active
elements are not permanent, but are gradually breaking up into elements
of lower atomic weight. Uranium, for example, is slowly breaking up,
one of the products being radium, while radium breaks up into its
radij-active emanation, this emanation into another radio-active sub-
stance, and so on. The radiations are given off by the atoms as they
pass from one to another, i.e., the rays constituting the radio-activity
are produced when a radium atom breaks up and an atom of emanation
appears. Thus the atoms of radio-active elements are not immortal, but
live for periods varying from a few seconds as in the case of the gaseous
emanation from actinium to thousands of millions of years, as in the
case of uranium. What we call chemical elements are merely residues
left after ages of disintegration similar to that which radium and like
bodies are now undergoing.

It is a matter of importance whether a constituent common to all
radio-active elements can be found. Recent investigations lead us to
suppose that there is such a constituent, for it appears that the little
particles shot out by radio-active elements differ solely in velocity.

The New Theory of Matter 235

" If now we could prove that these same particles, which are the evi-
dence of elemental decay, occur as well in ordinary substance, our
suspicion of a universal decay would be just so much enforced. The
interest thus deepens and becomes highly significant when the fact is
associated with the results of a research recently published by Professor
J. J. Thomson. He has shown that in the intense electrical field gener-
ated in a Crookes tube substances give off particles charged with posi-
tive electricity, that these particles are independent of the nature of the
gas from which they originate, and that they are of two kinds : one
apparently identical with the hydrogen atom, and the other with these
very alpha particles that are projected normally from radio-substances."
This confirms Ramsay's finding that pure water in contact with radium
emanation yielded an excess of hydrogen. Professor Thomson " means
us to infer that all the elements with which he experimented broke
down, or were decomposed, in part, into the well-known element hydro-
gen. , . . But Thomson's research has a wider scope. He shows us
that the ordinary forms of matter can emit, in addition, the very same
particles (alpha rays) that were thought to be a constituent peculiar to
radio-active substances. So far, then, as the possession of alpha
particles is concerned there is nothing peculiar in radio-active sub-
stances ; they are contained potentially in matter of every kind. But
if they are the product and evidence of elemental decay, then, since
they occur in ordinary matter, we should be justified surely in suspect-
ing that this decay is universal. If, now, we could prove that matter
of every kind not only contains them, but emits them, we should, in
accordance with our present ideas, no longer suspect, but knom, the
universal degradation of matter. This today can be done only pre-
sumptively, but the presumption is strong." i

As they lose their velocity these alpha rays become invisible. When
they have traveled a certain distance, varying with the density of the
matter through which they are traveling, it becomes impossible to detect
them by a photographic plate, or a phosphorescent screen, or the elec-
troscope. It is very significant that at the moment when they vanish
beyond our power to pursue them they still possess sixty-four per cent,
of their initial velocity and forty-one per cent, of their initial kinetic
energy. Further we have been unable to detect the emission of alpha
rays by some of the stages in the decay of radio-active elements, when
by all analogy the emanation at that stage should be emitting them.
This is probably due to their traveling at a velocity too low to enable
us to detect them. " The critical velocity below which they cannot be
detected is some fifteen billion centimeters a second — a very consider-
able pace. Now for conclusions : Were these particles not possessed
of an initial velocity a trifle greater than tliis value we should not have

^ R. K. Duncan, Some Chemical Problems of Today, pp. S4-6.

236 Basic Ideas in Religion

been able to find them ; and today we should not only be ignorant of
their existence, but ignorant as well of radio-activity. Furthermore,
were ordinary substances, matter of every kind, emitting these particles
at any velocity below this very considerable pace, they would be wholly
beyond the power of present-day apparatus to detect. Now for infer-
ences : We know that ordinary matter potentially contains these
particles ; we know that they are detected flying off from radio-active
substances solely through this slight excess of velocity ; and we know
that, with the exception of their ray emissions, radio-active substances
are chemical elements in no wise peculiarly different from ordinary
matter. There is, therefore, a strong presumption that ordinary matter
is continuously emitting these particles, that, in consequence, it is under-
going degradation, and that we are in ignorance of it only through the
limitations of our apparatus. Finally, it leads us also to think that the
only essential difference between radio-substances and ordinary sub-
stances lies in the velocity of the particles they eject." 2

It has been recently found that all matter when struck by radiations
of any sort, alpha, beta, gamma rays, X-rays or even light rays, emits
rays of its own, called delta rays. They appear to be slow-moving
corpuscles (beta rays) proceeding out at practically the same speed quite
independent of the character and energy of the impinging particles that
cause them. They are not, however, created by the bombardment of
the other rays, for Professor J. J. Thomson has shown that they are
emitted by common substances, such as the alkali metals, even in the
dark and, in certain cases, in a vacuum. The effect of the bombard-
ment by other rays seems to be the hastening of this form of decom-
position of matter. It can perhaps be illustrated by an analogy. Paper
may be slowly smoldering into decomposition, but if a lighted match
be brought near it, the paper is destroyed by a sudden whiff of flame.
Thus the delta rays may be the " flame " of the smoldering of the
ordinary atom, which bursts into greater activity when the internal
store of the atom's energy is liberated by the impinging of other rays.
The lithium obtained from copper by the action of radium emanation
may be merely the " ashes " of the copper, to carry our figure further.

" So," concludes Professor R. K. Duncan, the eminent
student of industrial chemistry, whom we have been following
in this part of our discussion, " it appears that Ramsay's
announced achievement in degrading copper into lithium need
not be received with incredulity, need hardly excite surprise,
for it is supported by many diverse facts of modern knowledge.

2 Ibid., pp. 57, 8.

The New Theory of Matter 27,7

It appears that the elements of matter, that we have taken for
granted were so immutable and enduring, are transmutable into
simpler fonns. That the elements are not only transmutable
but transmuting is not so plain, but there is much to be said
for it. Those rare gases, helium and its congeners, that we
have found to be the by-products of this elemental decay, are
found in the air to the extent of nearly one per cent. ; they
have been found, likewise, in all the places in the earth where
gas collects. They are found in the gases collected from min-
eral springs and from volcanoes ; the very rocks of the world
on being heated expel them ; they may be extracted from the
pores of the soil, and recently they have been discovered as a
general constituent of natural gas. It is reasonable to suppose
that they appear in all these diverse places as a by-product
of the earth's decay. We are additionally ready to accept this
when we find that the gases so collected, together with the
earth itself, are radio-active, for radio-activity is the very sign
and seal of disintegration. Finally, when we find that, /through
the radio-activity of the materials of the earth, there is contin-
uously being evolved an amount of heat far, far in excess of
that required to maintain the earth's loss of heat by radiation,
and to keep its temperature constant,' we perceive not only the
disintegrating dissolution of matter, but we begin to suspect as
well a fatally determined acceleration of it to some one time,
* in the which,' to use the words of the apostle Peter, ' the heav-
ens shall pass away with a great noise, and (o-roixcia Se Kavaov-
fjL£va Av^^crerat) the elements intensely heated shall be broken
up, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be
burned up.' " ^

So far we have found that the heavier elements are decom-
posing into the lightest, so that hydrogen and helium seem to
be the final products. Is there any evidence that the heavy ele-
ments are ever evolved out of lighter? Modern astronomy
gives the answer conclusively. The hottest stars consist almost
exclusively of the very light gases, predominantly hydrogen,

3 Ibid., pp. 60-62.

238 Basic Ideas in Religion

and more faintly helium, and a gas called " asterium," which
is so far unknown on earth. In stars of somewhat lower
temperature there begin to appear some of the heavier elements,
like calcium and iron, and in the coldest stars we find nearly
all the elements which exist on the earth. These metallic ele-
ments appear first in the hotter stars in disassociated condition,
and afterwards in the cooler stars in their normal forms. Fur-
ther as the temperature decreases the elements put in their
appearance, approximately at least, in the order of their atomic
weights. Thus the evidence of celestial evolution is as strong
as the evidence of modem chemistry that the heavier elements
have evolved in nature's laboratory from the lighter, in other
words that the elements are indeed transmutable.

But we have not yet discussed the ultimate particles of mat-
ter out of which hydrogen and all other atoms are built. Can
it be that the negative ion or corpuscle, whose properties we
examined at the beginning of this chapter, is the ultimate
unit? and that out of combinations of these corpuscles, all the
elements are formed? Let us recall what we have learned
of them. We found that they existed in flames and glowing
metals, within an arc-lamp, in the neighborhood of dynamos,
in the presence of X-rays, on bubbling gas through water, and
are given ofif when the ultra-violet rays of the sun fall on
metals. Radio-active bodies in their natural normal condition
give them off spontaneously. The soil and water of the earth
emit them and the air we breathe contains them. From what-
ever source they arise these corpuscles are similar in all respects
with the exception of mere velocity. We know, too, that they
are one thousand, or some say seven hundred, times smaller
than the hydrogen atom.

Proceeding on the theory that the atoms of the chemical elements
are actually built up of corpuscles, we at once have an explanation of
the fact that resistance, which substances interpose to the passage of
corpuscles, depends solely upon the density of the substance. The cor-
puscles in the substance must be extremely minute compared to the
atom as a whole, and the vacant spaces between them must be enor-
mous. Sir Oliver Lodge puts it thus : if we imagine an ordinary sized

The Nezv Theory of Matter 239

church to be an atom of hydrogen, the corpuscles constituting it will
be represented by about seven hundred grains of sand, each the size of
an ordinary period in print, rotating, with inconceivable rapidity.
Crookes puts it still more graphically : The sun's diameter is about one
and a half million kilometers, and that of the smallest planetoid about
twenty-four kilometers. If an atom of hydrogen be magnified to the
size of the sun, a corpuscle will be about two-thirds the diameter of a
planetoid. An oxygen atom would contain i6 X /OO or 11,200 corpuscles,
and a mercury atom 200 X 700 or 140,000. Thus the denser the matter
the less chance a wandering corpuscle would have of penetrating it,
even though it might go far in the vacant spaces without colliding with
another corpuscle. A whole beam of corpuscles would finally be ab-
sorbed by a dense material. However the atom, being a closed system,
would be impervious to all other atoms, and would act exactly as the
older atomic theory, which considered it an ultimate indivisible mass of
matter, declared that it did act.

This is explainable on the corpuscular theory of matter. A
negative charge of electricity has always associated with it an
equal positive charge, and so in all probability the corpuscles
are similarly accompanied by positive electricity. We, there-
fore, assume the atom to be a sphere of positive electrification
enclosing a thousand or more corpuscles, the negative elec-
tricity of the corpuscles exactly balancing the positive electricity
of the enclosing sphere.

This theory of the atom has been established both mathematically and
experimentally. Professor Thomson calculates mathematically that the
corpuscles would arrange themselves on concentric spheres, the outer
shell of positive electrification surrounding and balancing them all.
Professor Mayer proved experimentally all these mathematical calcula-
tions about the relative number of corpuscles on each concentric sphere.
He floated numbers of tiny negatively charged needles thrust through
discs of cork on the surface of water, and over them he suspended a
pole of positive electricity. The needles, which represented the cor-
puscles, mutually repelled each other, while the attractive force of the
positive electricity caused them to assume positions on concentric circles
in numbers and configurations which agreed with the calculations of
Professor Thomson. Of course the magnets move only on the plane of
the water, while the corpuscles move in any direction in the space of
the atoms. Further they are at rest, but if they were in a state of
steady motion describing in their successive rings circular orbits about
the center of the sphere it would not destroy the character of their

240 Basic Ideas in Religion

configurations. The tremendous velocity of corpuscles is such that they
must revolve in their orbits either in concentric rings or concentric
shells. The mathematical difficulties in the latter case are greater than
the former, but not insuperable.

On the basis of revolution in concentric circles enough has been
worked out for different numbers of corpuscles to show that this electric
theory of the atom explains all the properties possessed by the atoms of
the chemical elements. The periodic law, that the properties of an
element are a periodic function of its atomic weight, which has been
the great mystery of chemistry, now receives its explanation, but to
show this would involve a complicated discussion of Professor Thom-
son's mathematical calculations. Enough to say that the periodic re-
currence of properties turns out to be, in fact, a necessity if the atoms
are built up of corpuscles. We can also explain valency or the power
possessed by an atom to unite with others, for the valency of an atom
is now seen to be a measure of the number of corpuscles which it will
lose in the presence of other atoms, i.e., a univalent positive atom is one
which attains stability under the conditions of chemical action by losing
one corpuscle, or a divalent negative atom attains its stability only by
acquiring two corpuscles. Chemical action is thus electric and cor-
puscular in its nature. Positive atoms of sodium attract the negative
atoms of chlorine, because the sodium atom has one corpuscle which
can escape into and find a home in the chlorine atom, which needs one
more corpuscle to maintain its stability under the condition of electric
attraction set up by the proximity of the atoms. Thus sodium chloride
or common salt is the result.

Radio-activity is explained by this theory of matter. Professor
Thomson has demonstrated that some atoms are unstable, and if the
velocity of their corpuscles falls below a certain value they will
rearrange themselves suddenly in a new configuration. If the num-
ber of corpuscles is very great, as in radium, the kinetic energy in-
volved would be sufficient to shoot some off in a system of their
own as a separate atom with a high velocity. " This all agrees with
the facts of radio-activity. The radio-activity of radium, for ex-
ample, is thus an atomic cataclysm. When the point of instability
is reached the explosion occurs with the projection of two kinds
of particles, which are sub-atoms inside the group but free atoms
outside. One of these is the alpha particle consisting of two or
three thousand corpuscles and the other is the atom of the emana-
tion which contains probably about 150,000. The atom of the emanation
is of the same type as the atom of radium. Its configuration for steady
motion depends on its kinetic energy. Consequently the process is re-
peated for the emanation, but in a very much shorter time, and we
again have the evolution of alpha particles, which seems as a matter of

The New Theory of Matter 241

fact to be the atom of helium, together with the formation of another
atomic system, called emanation X. This, too, breaks down but this
time with a perfect conflagration of decomposition in which the alpha
particles, the stray corpuscles, or beta-rays, and the gamma-rays all
appear together. We may, therefore, define a radio-active substance
as one whose atom consists of a complex group of corpuscles the con-
figuration of which depends for its maintenance upon a certain velocity
of movement of the corpuscles comprising it and beneath which velocity
the corpuscles rearrange themselves with the evolution of an amount
of energy which breaks down the atom." *

The enormous heat emitted continuously by radium receives an
explanation on the principle of interatomic energy. The phenomenon
is as remarkable as if a stove should keep red hot without any fuel to
maintain it. This heat emission has been found to be due to the alpha-
rays which are absorbed in the radium itself. The radium is, as it were,
bombarded by its own particles and those of its disintegration products,
so that it is no wonder that it is intensely heated. Thus the energy of
radium is interatomic. Yet only a very minute number of atoms of a
mass of radium are disintegrating at any one time, not more than
thirteen trillionths of it a second. Calculating from this it is estimated
that the average life of a radium atom is at least 2,450 years. Since
only the elements of heaviest atomic weight have this property of
radio-activity, in which alone they differ from other elements, it is
proper for us to conclude that similar enormous stores of energy are
locked up and lie latent in all other forms of matter. Professor Thom-
son states that a grain of hydrogen has within it energy sufficient to
lift a million tons through a height considerably exceeding one hun-
dred yards, and that since the amount of energy is proportional to the
number of corpuscles comprising the atom of the element, the energy of
other elements such as sulphur, iron or lead must enormously exceed
this amount. If our knowledge of the infinitely small and the infinitely
powerful continues to increase with the same strides that it has made
in the last few years we may some day be able to control this stored-up
energy.

There is yet one final step to take in this discussion, which
is the most significant of all if we endeavor to reach an ex-
planation of matter. Instead of assuming that corpuscles are
particles of matter possessing the properties of negative elec-
tricity, let us assume, instead, that corpuscles are particles of
negative electricity possessing the properties of matter. We
have been trying for more than two generations to explain

* R. K. Duncan, The New Knowledge, pp. 170, 1.

242 Basic Ideas in Religion

electricity as a mechanical process, and apparently we have
failed. Now we are succeeding better by explaining mechanics
as an electrical process. We are coming to believe that matter
is made up of electricity and nothing but electricity. That
which matter and electricity have in common is the property
of inertia. It requires an effort to put matter in motion when
it is already at rest, and to stop it when once in motion ; in fact
it would never stop unless opposed by some resistance. Elec-
tricity has this same characteristic. In each case the phenome-
non is due to simple inertia, and it can be shown that inertia
is purely electrical in its nature.

Faraday, the prophet of science, first suggested that every
moving particle carries with it an electric charge, " if it be
anything else than an electric charge." In 1881 Professor
Thomson showed that an electric charge concentrated on a
moving sphere, must possess inertia due to the electro-magnetic
field of force which it creates by its motion in the surrounding
ether. This means that it will tend to resist change of matter,
i.e., has inertia, and will thus behave as though its mass were
increased. But in order that this inertia, or increase of mass,
should be perceptible, it is necessary that the sphere should be
very small and that its speed should approach that of light.
Sir Oliver Lodge has shown by mathematical calculations that
as the speed of light is approached the apparent mass would
increase enormously. When corpuscles were discovered the
interest in Professor Thomson's hitherto academical discussion
was stimulated, for here were infinitely small particles moving
with velocities approaching that of light. Kaufmann per-
formed experiments with corpuscles proving that the mass
increases with the velocity. Professor Thomson then pro-
ceeded to show that the whole of the mass is due to the elec-
trical charge upon it. Since the corpuscle is the constituent of
the atom, and the atom of the molecule, and the molecule of a
mass of matter, then it follows that the inertia of any material
body, and the mass of it as measured by the inertia, is due
simply to the electrical charges in motion.

Why this should be so Professor Duncan tells us. " By

The New Theory of Matter 243

mass is meant quantity of matter, and the idea that the quantity
of matter in a body depends on the speed with which an electric
charge moves, is difficult to grasp concretely ; for we are
accustomed to think that the quantity of any given object is
invariable. We may, however, obtain a concrete representation
of the idea by considering the analogical case of a sphere
moving through a frictionless liquid. In such a case, when
the sphere moves, it sets the liquid around it moving with a
velocity proportioned to its own, so that the sphere is accom-
panied by a definite volume of the liquid. This volume is one-
half the volume of the sphere and the sphere, therefore, behaves
as though its mass were increased by that amount. In the
case of a cylinder moving at right angles to its length, the mass
of the cylinder is increased by the mass of an equal volume of
the liquid. Now the cylinder in our case is the electric charge
and the frictionless liquid is the ether. The electric charge
possesses no mass at all, and the total mass, therefore, is due
to the bound ether carried along by the charge in its motion,
the total amount of the bound ether depending on the velocity
of the charge. On this view of * the electrotonic theory of
matter,' all mass is the mass of the ether, all momentum,
whether electrical or mechanical, the momentum of the ether,
and all kinetic energy the kinetic energy of the ether." ^

We have seen how the electrotonic theory accounts for
inertia, chemical action, the atoms of matter and their peculiar
properties as exemplified in the periodic law, and the phenomena
of radio-activity. It also accounts for static and current elec-
tricity, for magnetism, for radiations of light, X-rays, etc., but
we cannot here enter into such extensive applications of the
theory. But there are some phenomena not yet explained
by it. For instance, what is positive electricity, as distin-
guished from negative, which consists of corpuscles? We
must answer that we do not know. " If it is made up of par-
ticles, these particles must either have no mass at all, or very
little, for the mass of the whole atom seems to be simply the

6 Ibid., pp. 184, 5.

244 Basic Ideas in Religion

sum of the masses of its negative corpuscles. Positive elec-
tricity as apart from an atom does not seem to exist. It never
seems to fly free as the corpuscle does. Its nature is today a
mystery." '^ Again we have not explained gravitation, which
any universal theory of matter cannot overlook. Nor have we
learned what the ether is, though it remains as necessary a
concept as ever for logical, scientific thinking.

Yet despite these unexplained facts, the theist stands on sure
enough ground to fear no longer the dualism of mind and mat-
ter, for on a dynamic basis they are reconciled. The electro-
tonic theory of matter gives us an analogy for the study of
Creation. All matter in the last analysis is force, and the
points at which force acts to a center become manifest as mat-
ter. Some have called these centers of energy " vortices " or
" whirlpools," but such names add nothing to what we have
learned from modern science about the atom. God is the
source of all energy. On the divine force of the universe He
impresses the " dance of harmony." Before His word goes
forth, we call the energy nothing, for to us it would be nothing
if unordered. God conducts the process, but God is not the
process. God's immanent presence sustains the force in or-
derly, harmonious ways of working. As a great musician plans
an entire sonata in his mind and then gives life and body to
it by playing it, even so, but without any instrument, is the
marvelous universe embodying through Will the thought of
the Divine Mind.

'Ibid, p. i88.

PART II

THE SPIRITUAL IDEA OF MAN

The personality of man is the correlative of the personality
of God; the two together form the indispensable basis of re-
ligion. Ahdiiis in microcosmo spirit us, nullus in macrocosmo
deus.

In our study of the spiritual idea of man the following is
the definition to be established and used :

A person is a self-conscious, self-determining being, con-
scious, in relation to other persons, of a law of duty obligatory
but not compulsory on his will.

Personality is incapable of demonstration, but it underlies
all human thought and speech. Like the idea of God it is
confirmed by many lines of study, historical, philosophical,
moral, and ontological. Accordingly the following will be the
subjects of the succeeding chapters : the historical ezidence for
the universal belief in the soul ; the philosophic analysis of the
grounds of this belief, along the lines of the consciousness of
the essential dift'erence between mind and body, of the ineradi-
cable conviction of personal identity, and of the will as the ex-
pression of personality; and the zintness of the conscience to
moral freedom. Then, as in Part I, we will conclude our study
by an examination of the denials of the spiritual idea of man:
the scientific, philosophic, and theological denials of freedom
of the will ; the denials of conscience in Utilitarian and Evolu-
tional Ethics ; and the denials of ontology in Nescience and
Agnosticism.

246

CHAPTER XIV

THE UNIVERSAL BELIEF IN THE
IMMORTAL SOUL

The universal belief in the soul is the most obvious expres-
sion of faith in spirit. It is treated as a mark of humanity by
all anthropologists, and both of the main theories of the origin
of religion, nature worship and fetishism, are based on man's
instinctive conviction of personality.

The modern study of comparative religion is as purely induc-
tive as any science. It uncovers the foundation truths w^hich
form the basis of all religions, and gives us material for a study
of the soul as a simple fact in the universal consciousness of
man. Anthropologists in recent years have gathered together
a mass of material about the faiths of primitive peoples,
which shows the beliefs and convictions of man concerning
himself, as expressed in traditions and customs, laws and wor-
ship. From these we can infer the intuitions which lie deep
in human nature itself. However, many of the books on an-
thropology have a strong anti-spiritual bias, and we must draw
our own conclusions from their data. They must be read
critically, and a distinction must be drawn between their facts
and their theoretic conclusions. Illingworth warns us that " we
must remember that the science of religions has only partial
access to the phenomena with which it deals ; and, further, that
it is still in the empirical stage, most of its generalizations being
as yet more or less hypothetical, and needing careful scrutiny
before they can become premises, from which further conclu-
sions may be drawn." ^

Writers of all schools agree, as we saw earlier, that the
idea of God is universal, and so also do they agree in acknowl-

1 Personality, Human and Divine, pp. 164, 5.

247

248 Basic Ideas in Religion

edging that man everywhere believes himself somehow a spirit,
or at least an immaterial being, able to control his own body
while alive, and survive it at death. All religions, as distin-
guished from philosophies, teach the immortality of the soul,
though varying in their conceptions of the nature of the life
to come and the degree of personal identity.

Evidence for this faith in spiritual being goes back to pre-
historic times. The study of the cave dwellers of the stone
ages shows that this was true even in the dim beginnings of
human life. The fact that prehistoric men reverently buried
their dead together shows that they recognized the ties of
family and kinship and, as they laid their tools or weapons
beside them, they must have believed, like the American In-
dians, in another life in which they would be needed and could
be used. Quinet exclaims : " In this primeval being, in whom
I knew not whether I was to find an equal or the slave of all
other creatures, the instinct of immortality reveals itself in the
midst of the tokens of death ! How different does he seem to
me after this discovery ! What a future I begin to discern
in this strange animal, who scarcely knows how to build him-
self a better shelter than that of the beast, and yet who tries to
provide eternal hospitality for his dead ! I seem to touch the
first stone on which rests the edifice of things human and
divine. After this beginning the rest is easy to believe." ^

All the great races of antiquity believed in immortality.
Among the nations of Chaldea the earliest cuneiform tablets
speak of immortality and judgment, though indefinitely. Pro-
fessor Craig in editing Assyrian and Babylonian texts com-
ments: "There was a belief in a future existence, how uni-
versal or limited we cannot say ; but that it existed and entered
as a controlling factor into the life of the King and, as it would
seem, of necessity, therefore, into the life of the people, the
monumental psalms and prayers declare. . , . There was a
vagueness and indistinctness about these visions of the future
as there always has been and, in the nature of the case, always

^ La Creation.

The Universal Belief in the Immortal Sonl 249

must be. On this subject of eschatology, however, the Baby-
lonians, Hke the Egyptians, far surpassed the Hebrews, while
in their doctrine of Sin and Pardon their spiritual vision was
equally clear." ^

The Book of the Dead of the Egyptians taught a personal
survival of the dead, a resurrection of the body, in anticipation
of which the corpse was embalmed, and a judgment, or weigh-
ing of the heart in the hall of Osiris. This Book represents
the psychology, the ethics, and the conception of immortality
in the forms which they assumed in the Nile Valley from six
thousand to ten thousand years ago. The Zoroastrian dualism
taught that the life of man has two parts, that on earth and
that beyond the grave. After his earthly life each one is
punished or rewarded according to his deeds, and spiritual
blessing is reserved to the faithful worshipers of Ormazd.
Thus a belief in immortality pervades the Persian religion,
and is held by most authorities to have strongly influenced the
later Jewish ideas of immortality.

The earliest religion of Greece and Rome seems to have
been ancestor worship, as is shown by their " lares and
penates " in each household. But ancestor worship is itself
the expression of faith in the soul's life after death. The
teaching of their mythology concerning the place of the dead
will be treated later. The Scandinavian myths tell of a mate-
rial kind of life after death. Even the favorite horse of the
deceased was slain that he might be served by it in the spirit
world. The North American Indians believed that in the
world to come their spirits would continue their old pursuits,
so they buried bows and arrows with the dead. The Peruvians
and the Aztecs made mummies of the dead and had definite
teaching concerning the punishment of the wicked.

Caesar tells us that the belief in the immortality of the
soul was the ground work of the British faith, taking from
them the fear of death, and inspiring them with courage. The
Welsh Triads reveal ideas concerning: the nature of the soul

^Assyrian and Babylonian Religious Texts, Preface.

250 Basic Ideas in Religion

not unlike the religions of India. " The soul is a particle of
the Deity possessing in embryo all its capability. Its action
is defined and regulated by the nature of the physical organiza-
tion it animates. The soul which prefers evil to good retro-
grades to a cycle of animal existence, the baseness of which
is on a par with the turpitude of its human life. The process
of brutalization commences at the moment when evil is volun-
tarily preferred to good. To whatever cycle the soul falls, the
means of reattaining humanity is always open to it. Every
soul, however frequent its relapses, will ultimately attain the
proper end of its existence — reunion with God. A finite being
cannot support eternity as a sameness or monotony of exist-
ence. The eternity of the soul, until it merges in the Deity, is
a succession of states of new sensations, the soul in each unfold-
ing new capabilities of enjoyment." *

This general faith in existence after death took different
forms according to the philosophic conceptions of the race.
Races believing in a personal god or gods believed in personal
immortality, whereas pantheistic religions had only vague ideas
of personality, and looked forward to absorption into the great
world spirit, through rebirth by transmigration. However, in
early India the Rig Veda contains many references to individ-
ual immortality. The soul is supposed to ascend in the smoke
of the funeral pyre in a sublimated body free from imperfec-
tion. This immortality is strongly personal, for the dead join
and know their families. There is no rebirth in the early
books, as was taught by the Brahmins later. Spirit is the
animating, thinking principle which can leave the body in
sleep and separate from it at death. Its location is in the
heart. At death the good enjoy a life of bliss and joy with
their fathers under a tree of beautiful foliage, and all rejoice
with the chief of the dead. The early Vedas are indefinite as
to retribution. There is some slight mention of a dark under-
ground world, as in the Scandinavian myths. As a later devel-
opment came the Brahmin teaching of transmigration of souls,

* E. O. Gordon, Prehistoric London, Its Mounds and Circles,
pp. 40, 41.

The Universal Belief in the Immortal Soul 251

and the Buddhist theory of Karma, an endless series of exist-
ences, stretching on into the dim future and terminating in
absorption into the world-soul, a condition known as Nirvana.
This, if not actual extinction, is at least complete quiescence, the
absolute zero of being. It is hardly necessary to point out that
even these long flights of metaphysical reasoning are based
upon the primitive belief in man's survival after death. But
the mass of the people probably never held the fine spun
theories of the later philosophic books and continued to believe
in personal immortality, as, indeed, the Buddhists now allow
in China, Japan, Siam, and Ceylon. Thus the religious faith
of the heart, which the masses everywhere held, has proved
too strong for philosophic speculations.

At the present time all savage races hold belief in the soul.
It comes out clearly in their funeral customs, their language
about the dead and their complete psychology. Everywhere
we find the conviction of a spiritual nature belonging to man,
somehow distinct from the body's life. Thus when the Ton-
gans were explaining to a European their belief in the con-
tinued existence of those who had died, one of them took hold
of the stranger, and said, " This will die, but the life that is
within you will never die." The Macusi Indians of Guiana
say, " that although the body will decay, ' the man in our eyes '
will not die, but wander about." In many cases the spirits are
supposed to haunt the familiar scenes of former days and need
to be driven away. For instance, the Bodo of Northeast
India on the funeral day of a friend, take with them to the
grave the usual portion of food and drink for the deceased
and, addressing him while they present the repast, they say:
" Take and eat ; heretofore you have eaten and drunk with us,
you can do so no more ; you were one of us, you can be so
no longer; we come no more to you, come you not to us."

The Navajo believes that there are three entities in man, his
body, his soul which survives and continues its existence in
the land of spirits, and his spiritual body, an indefinite sort
of third element. The West African negroes have this type
of psychology very highly developed. The Tshi-speaking

252 Basic Ideas in Religion

negroes of the Gold Coast believe in this triple division of man ;
(i) his corporeal body, which perishes; (2) his soul, or ghost,
w^hich only comes into being when the corporeal man ceases to
exist, and proceeds to Dead-land where it continues the former
vocations of the man as the vehicle of individual personal exist-
ence; and (3) the indwelling spirit of the living man, which is
called his kra. This spirit existed independently before the
man's birth, and after his death will continue to exist independ-
ently of the soul or ghost. The Ewi-speaking peoples of the
slave coast hold exactly similar views, having merely another
name for the third element. The Ga-speaking peoples of the
eastern districts of the Gold Coast have modified the original
conception and believe that each individual has two kra, a male
and a female of opposite dispositions.^

Instances of particular beliefs could be multiplied, but prob-
ably enough has been said to show that the existence of a belief
in the soul on the part of man is universal both with respect
to the divisions of race and the length of time the human family
has been on earth. This spiritual idea of man shows itself
especially in the concept of personal survival after death.

It remains for us to examine the charge that the Jewish race formed
a strange exception to this beUef in personal immortality.

We admit that there is no emphasis laid on immortality and no
definite teaching as to retribution in the life to come. But this
does not prove that the people as a whole did not believe in a survival
of the soul in a shadowy sort of way as did the early Greeks. Abso-
lute unbelief is incredible. How could they have had that genius for
religion which all grant them if they had not this fundamental faith?
" It can hardly be maintained that such stories as that of the conversa-
tion at Endor between the living Saul and the dead Samuel could eman-
ate from a people destitute of belief in a life after death." 6 Anthro-
pologists, who are unbiased, hold that the early Israelites did believe in
spirit. If they were materialists, they form a solitary exception to the
rest of mankind, which is all the stranger because the ancient Chaldeans,
their progenitors, the Egyptians, among whom they had sojourned, and
the Canaanites, who surrounded them, all believed in the soul. Beneath
the customs and religious observances of the Hebrews we are conscious

6 Cf. Maj. A. B. Ellis, in The Popular Science Monthly for April, 1890.
' « Fiske, Life Everlasting, p. 39.

The Universal Belief in the Immortal Soul 253

of the presence of Semitic traditions flowing as an undercurrent.
Israel's religion did not end like the natural tribal religions, but it
began where they began. We find the shadow of the old religions often
falling across the narrative. The sacred pillar which stood by Jehovah's
altar and also by Rachel's grave was connected with the primitive
worship of the dead. Many a time did the prophets endeavor to uproot
this superstitious belief. When the Children of Israel rebelled in the
Wilderness " they joined themselves unto Baal-peor, and ate the sacri-
fices of the dead." The Jewish mourners shaved their heads as in the
days of the old hair offerings, and covered their faces before the dead,
lest they should see its spirit, just as Saul bowed his face to the ground
before the spirit of Samuel. There are allusions which seem to show
that the Hebrews observed the rite, seen among the Arabs today, of
pouring oil and wine upon the graves of the dead. Some authorities
find evidences of solemn funeral feasts like those of other nations, and
in any case they were exceedingly careful of their funeral rites and
burials.

It is quite probable that the Mosaic law purposely ignored the life to
come, because the idea of immortality had such intimate connection in
the popular mind with heathen rites and superstitions. The Egyptian
religion with which they had just been associated dwelt exclusively on
death and the after life. The Egj'ptian " Scripture " was the Book of
the Dead. So much idolatry and worship of the gods was mingled with
Egj^ptian funeral rites that it need be no wonder that Moses and the
Law forbade such worship and are silent concerning the whole here-
after. The Canaanites also had funeral feasts and ceremonies at the
graves of the dead, and many expressions in the Psalms imply that the
people of Israel took part in them, thus worshiping heathen gods and
demons. Funeral customs are slow to change, and many Israelites may
have continued their use even after the law of Moses was proclaimed.
This argument is supported by the incontestable fact that the prophets
and the later legislation condemned the current ritual of the dead. It
was a primative form of worship opposed to that of Jehovah, the one
and only legitimate object of Israel's worship. When we once under-
stand this we can appreciate the significance of the Jewish law and its
declaration that even the least contact with a dead body made a man
unclean.

A somewhat similar reason for the silence of the Pentateuch may be
the fear lest references to the world to come might encourage necro-
mancy and sorcery. The laws against these practices were severe and
explicit. '• The soul that turneth unto them that have familiar spirits,
and unto the wizards. ... I will even set my face against that soul, and
will cut him off from among his people." '' " There shall not be found

' Lev. 20 :6.

254 Basic Ideas in Religion

with thee . . . any one that useth divination, or that practiceth augury,
or an enchanter, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a consulter with a
familiar spirit, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whosoever doeth
these things is an abomination unto Jehovah : and because of these
abominations Jehovah thy God doth drive them (the Canaanites) out
from before thee." ^ Saul when he visits the witch of Endor has to
solemnly swear that she will be protected from capital punishment for
violation of the laws against necromancy which he himself had up to
that time rigorously enforced. The witch seems to think that he is
merely laying a trap for her that he may " cut her off out of the
land," as he has done the rest who were " wizards and had familiar
spirits." ^ That these people existed in Isaiah's time is shown by his
indignant questions, " And when they say unto you, seek unto them that
have familiar spirits and unto the wizards, that chirp and mutter :
should not a people seek unto their God? On behalf of the living
should they seek unto the dead?"io

Another reason for the silence of the Jewish scriptures was the
dreariness and unpleasantness of the ideas of Sheol, the underworld of
the dead, in which Israel like many other ancient nations believed.
Their ideas were quite similar to the early Greek conception of Hades.
Both Greeks and Jews recoiled from such a half-existence, not counting
it worthy of the name of life in comparison with that lived under the
warm sun. And in Greece as in Israel we do not find at first any trace
of the idea of retribution for the deeds done in this life, for the state of
the dead was dream-like, lacking all reality. The ^^xv survived death,
as an individual entity, but still only as a shadow of its old self, its
whole thought a vain regret for the strong, active life in the bright
sun-lit world of reality. This purely subjective, inactive state without
will or hope was described as due to the shades lacking (t>peves, the
organs of passions and affections and will. This is obvious in the ac-
count of the appearance of the shade of Patroclus to Achilles, asking
him to burn his body, for the shades in Hades would not admit him
until the funeral flames should make him theirs forever. Achilles
wakes and tries to seize his friend's form.

"In vain: he might not grasp the shade; aw^ay like _ smoke it flew.
And gibbered 'neath the ground. Upstert the chief in wonderment,
And clapped his hands, and from his mouth the bitter wailing went.
Ah, woe is me ! the shade that roams in Pluto's gloomy hall
Hath shape and size, but in its form nor pith nor power at all."^^

8Deut. 18:10-12.
«I Sam. 28:8-10, 21.
"Isa. 8:19.

11 ///ad XXIII: 100 ff. Blackie's translation. He renders ^/)^''« " pith
and power."

The Universal Belief in the Immortal Soul 255

We have the same thought of utter weakness in the Odyssey. When
the suitors fall before the arrows of Ulysses, Hermes gathers them to-
gether and leads them unwilling to the abode of the phantoms of the
way-worn men. " He started them forth and led them, while they
followed on with squeaking, gibbering cry. Just as when the bats fly
chirping about the depths of some monstrous cave, and one has fallen
from the cluster on the rock, and they cling fast one to the other up
aloft, even so the souls went on and chirped as they went. And
Hermes, the helper, led them down the dank ways." 12

Homer makes no difference between the noble and the vile, the brave
and the cowardly in the after state. All are on a " dead-level " of
emptiness and misery. The passages in the Odyssey describing the
punishment of Tantalus and Sisyphus are late. The Greek mythology
in the earliest period placed the earth and the underworld under differ-
ent gods, Zeus and Pluto. In this the Hebrews differed from them for
they represent Jehovah as omnipresent. " H I make my bed in Sheol,
behold, Thou art there." ^^ " Sheol is naked before God." 1* Amos
represents God as saying " Though they dig into Sheol, thence shall my
hand take them." i^

That the Jews from the first believed in a place of departed spirits
is clear. The phrase " gathered to their fathers " must mean some
place common to all, for Terah died in Horan, Abraham on Mt. Nebo,
Moses on Mt. Pisgah, and generations of Israelites in Egypt and Chal-
dea, away from their ancestors' tombs. Jacob refuses comfort when
he supposes Joseph to be dead, " I will go down to Sheol to my son
mourning," and David says of his child, " I shall go to him, but he
will not return to me."

The Jewish belief of the future life is thus described by Kirkpatrick,
" Death is never regarded in the Old Testament as annihilation or the
end of personal existence. But it is for the most part contemplated as
the end of all that deserves to be called life. Existence continues, but
all the joy and vigor of vitality are gone forever. Communion with
God is at an end : the dead can no longer * see ' Him : they cannot serve
or praise Him in the silence of Sheol : His loving-kindness, faithfulness,
and righteousness can no longer be experienced there. ... To the
oppressed and persecuted indeed Sheol is a welcome rest, and death
may even be a gracious removal from coming evil; but as a rule death
is dreaded as the passage into the monotonous and hopeless gloom of
the under world. The continuance of existence after death has no
moral or religious element in it. It is practically non-existence. The

12 Bk. XXIV, beginning.
"Psalm 139:8.
"Job 26:6.
15 Amos 9 :2.

256 Basic Ideas in Religion

dead man ' is not' It offers neither encouragement nor warning. It
brings no solution of the enigmas of the present life. There is no hope
of happiness or fear of punishment in the world beyond." ^'^ Gesenius
defines the D"'J<Q"1 (Rephaim) as "Manes, shades living in Hades,

according to the opinions of the ancient Hebrews, void of blood and
animal life ( E'QJ ), therefore, weak and languid like a sick person, but

not devoid of powers of mind, such as memory." Job describes Sheol
as " the land of darkness and of the shadow of death, the land dark
as midnight." ^^ The writer of Ecclesiastes says that " there is no
work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol." ^^ Isaiah
in a masterly song of triumph over Babylon represents the arrival of the
king of that nation in the underworld. " Sheol from beneath is moved
for thee to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee,
even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones
all the kings of the nations. All they shall answer and say unto thee,
Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us? Thy
pomp is brought down to Sheol." ^^ It is no wonder that with such
ideas of Sheol as a sad, dark, and pitiable existence, that the Jewish
mind should shrink with dread from the thought of it, and be reticent
in speaking of it. There was nothing to arouse religious emotion in
the dismal world of fleeting shadows.

The chief reason why we do not find the idea of moral judgment in
the future life developed among the Israelites in the time of Moses
is that they had not yet reached the stage of ethical development when
such a belief arises. The Law met them on their own level and con-
fined the penalties of sin to this world. We have seen that this was
true of the early Greeks. It seems to have been the case also with the
American Indians. The whole attention of the Hebrews was centered
on the present world, the more so as the corporate sense among them
was very strong, and the sense of personality weak. Jehovah, as the
God of Israel, cared for the individual only as a member of the com-
munity and as concerned with the coming of the Messianic kingdom. In
this longed for event the individual could only have a representative
share through a descendant. This idea of a corporate immortality for
the race compensated in a measure for the hopelessness of the con-
ception of personal survival. Jehovah's covenant was not with indi-
viduals, but with Abraham's family and his seed after him. The
promises were made to all Israel, and the nation is frequently addressed
as a whole. The promise in the fifth commandment, " that thy days

18 The Psalms, pp. xciii, xciv.

17 Job 10:21, 2.

18 Ecc. 9 : 10.
"Isa. 14:^11.

The Universal Belief in the Immortal Soul 257

may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee," is for
the race. Many of the Psalms are spoken in the name of the people,
and in their behalf Jeremiah utters his Lamentations. This sense of
unity is clearly indicated in the use of the singular for names of tribes
and nations, e.g., Israel, Judah, Moab, Midian, etc. This can be con-
trasted with the western method of using the plural for settled nations
living in towns, e.g., Romani, Germani, etc. The individual was iden-
tified with his family and bound up with its fortunes. The family was
condemned to suffer for the sin of its head. The family of Achan
perished with him, as did also the families of Korah, Dathan, and
Abiram with their heads. Daniel's accusers with their families suffered
the fate they had planned for him. In China the punishment of the
whole family with the offender lasted until recently. The Afghans
made satisfaction for the death of an English officer by executing the
family of the murderer to the second generation. The family was
merged into the larger life of the tribe and nation. Circumcision was
a corporate rite, for it introduced the individual into the nation, and
the father who failed to circumcise his child was punished. The per-
sonality of the individual was, therefore, merged in the community, and
when he looked to the future it was not so much concerning himself that
he thought, as concerning the prosperity of all Israel.

The break up of the Jewish state weakened the corporate feeling and
tended to develop the new sense of personality in direct relation to God
as caring for the individual. Only during or after the Exile do we find
a clear expression of a faith in a future life worth the living, which is
also the sphere of judgment. Then, as Cheyne says, the example of
Zoroastrianism stimulated the Jewish prophets and psalmists to expand
their own germs of truth. Through ethical growth and the teaching
by the prophets of higher conceptions of divine righteousness, and
through the suffering and bitterness of the Exile, earnest men came to
feel that this world and its short life could not be the whole field of
man's activity. The future life was no longer indifferent to moral dis-
tinctions, but became the very home of judgment and stern justice.

It is in the spiritual struggles of Job that we see this change of view-
point taking place, not as the result of logical reasoning, but by heart
leaps born of his sense of intimate and indestructible connection of his
soul with God. At first he has the usual conception of Sheol as a place
which will give him a rest from the disappointments and pains of this
world.

" There should I have Iain down and been quiet ;

I should have slept; then had I been at rest

With kings and counselors of the earth,

Who build soHtary piles for themselves;

Or with princes that had gold,

Who filled their houses with silver ...

258 Basic Ideas in Religion

There the wicked cease from troubling;

And there the weary are at rest.

There the prisoners are at ease together ;

They hear not the voice of the taskmaster.

The small and the great are there ;

And the servant is free from his master." 20

Job was feeling in an acute personal way the problem that disturbed
the childlike faith of early ages, namely the insolent triumph of the
wicked and their freedom from punishment. Job exclaims, " Where-
fore do the wicked live, become old, yea, wax mighty in power? Their
seed is established with them in their sight, and their offspring before
their eyes." 21 How could he help longing that God Himself, who
must be eternally righteous, would solve the awful enigma. " Oh, that
I knew where I might find Him." 22 And the later Isaiah, despite his
undying faith could not repress the sigh, " Verily, Thou art a God that
hideth Thyself, O God of Israel." -^ But Job and an ever increasing
number of earnest souls, found light for the darkness of earth in their
faith in the life to come. They held fast their conviction of eternal
right, despite appearances, and made their appeal from this transitory
world to eternal life for the vindication of God's justice and the triumph
of the good. This desire of the soul for the manifestation of righteous-
ness was not vindictive, but vindicative, and it greatly intensified the faith
in immortality. " If a man die, shall he live again ? " questions Job.2* In
some after life there will be a renewal of the intimacy of the soul with
God, which has been sundered by the grave and the sojourn in Sheol.
The vindication of the right which human hearts demanded with an
insistance which could not be silenced, received its most triumphant
expression in the cry of faith and trust of the doubt-tossed Job :

" I know that my Redeemer liveth,

And that He will stand up at the last upon the earth :

And after my skin, even this body, is destroyed.

Then without my flesh shall I see God ;

Whom I, even I, shall see for myself,

And my eyes shall behold, and not as a stranger." 25

20 Job 3:13-19.

21 Job 21 :7, 8.

22 Job 23 :3-
23Isa. 45:15-
2* Job 14:14.

25 Job 19:25-27.

CHAPTER XV

PHILOSOPHIC ANALYSIS OF THE

SOURCES OF THE BELIEF

IN THE SOUL

I. CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE ESSENTIAL

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MIND AND

BODY: EGO AND WORLD

In the development of our own personality and mental pow-
ers our first clear impression was the consciousness of the es-
sential difference between the self and the world, for the earli-
est rational perception of an infant is the vaguely felt distinc-
tion between itself and the things outside its body. It knows
the world first, but this experience arouses the feeling of its own
distinct existence. Professor James writes : " The first sen-
sation which an infant gets is for him the Universe. And the
Universe he later comes to know is nothing but an amplifica-
tion and an implication of that first simple germ which, by ac-
cretion on the one hand and intussusception on the other, has
grown so big and complex and articulate that its first estate
is unrememberable. In his dumb awakening to the conscious-
ness of something there, a mere this as yet (or something for
which even the term this would perhaps be too discriminative,
and the intellectual acknowledgement of which would be better
expressed by the bare interjection ' lo! '), the infant encounters
an object, in which (though it be given in a pure sensation) all
the ' categories of the understanding ' are contained. It has
objectivity, unity, substantiality, causality, in the full sense in
which any later object or system of objects has these things." ^

^Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 8.

259

26o Basic Ideas in Religion

Professor Minot thus describes the process. In his first
five months the infant lays the foundations of knowledge. In
the seven months following he is engaged in original research,
constant, untiring, amazing, trying to find out something about
himself and his environment. He is getting the fundamental
concepts. When six months old the baby already has the idea
of cause and eflfect, and begins to appreciate the value of human
intercourse. He has discovered the material universe in which
he lives, the succession of time, the nature of space, his own
existence, his ego and its relationship with other individuals
of his own species. " By eight months the baby is upon the
full career of experiment and observation. Everything with
which the baby comes in contact interests him. He looks at it,
he seizes hold of it, tries to pull it to pieces, studies its texture,
its tensile strength and every other quality it possesses. Not
satisfied with that, he will turn and apply his tongue to it, put-
ting it in his mouth for the purpose of finding out if it has any
taste. In doing this hour after hour, with unceasing zeal, and
never interrupted diligence, he rapidly gets acquainted with
the world in which he is placed. . . . How wonderful it all
is ! Is any one of us capable of beginning at the moment we
wake to carry on a new line of thought, a new series of studies,
and to keep it up full swing, with unabated pace, all day long
till we drop asleep ? Every baby does that every day." ^

The next rational step of the child after distinguishing be-
tween himself and the world, is the perception of the difference
between himself as a thinking, willing power and his own body,
which obeys that will. If our will were never resisted when we
sought to move our body, if matter were plastic to every motion
we made, if we found by experience that all nature took the
course we desired, if no feeling of " other-ness," of a separate
world, should arise over against our personal consciousness, we
would in that case, either suppose that we ourselves are the
creators of the world we live in, as pure Idealism does hold,

2 The Problem of Age, Growth, and Death, pp. 242, 3,

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 261

or we would feel no distinctions at all between the self and
the not-self, that is we would fail to become self-con-
scious.

Two great thinkers have recorded for us what they consider
their first overwhelming- convictions of personality. Thus Pro-
fessor A. Gratry of the Sorbonne writes : " I remember, in
childhood, before I had attained w'hat is called the age of
reason, once experiencing this sense of Being in all its vivid-
ness. A great effort against something external, distinct from
myself, whose unyielding resistance amazed me, led me to
pronounce the words : ' I am ! ' I thought of it for the first
time. Surprise grew into intense amazement and into the most
vivid admiration. I repeated with transport : ' I am ! . . .
being ! being ! ' All the religious, poetic, and intelligent foun-
dation of my soul was stirred and awakened at that instant." *
The self-consciousness of Jean Paul Richter was aroused by
an effort to shut a door against a strong wind. Later he ana-
lyzed his experience into three logical steps, (i) sense of effort
against something unseen, (2) feeling of reality, resistance in
the outer world, and (3) the feeling of his own will sharply
distinct from his body which he controlled, and from outside
things which he could not control.

However this feeling of the ego arises, every one knows
what it is and what it involves. It is the simplest of all
thoughts, arising with the force of an intuition, yet mysterious
and baffling. It marks an epoch in the child's existence when
it ceases to call itself John or Mary, and says " I," and grad-
ually begins to realize the meaning of this shortest word. No
philosophical speculation can shake this intuitive feeling of the
dualism of all experience and of all knowledge, the difference
between the thinking " I " and the outer world, between the
inner life of consciousness and the outer life of sensation. The
idea of spirit arises spontaneously in each individual, and is re-
enforced and made clearer when he attains to personal re-

3 Guide to the Knowledge of God, p. 347.

262 Basic Ideas in Religion

sponsibility. It is formulated and developed by tradition and
philosophy, but these did not create it; it is their ground. It
is the very condition of rational thought. It is a universal
property of man as man. It borrows nothing from logic and
analysis. It creates, but is not created by, language. It was
especially intensified by Christianity, with its assertion of
the worth of the soul in God's sight and its appeal to the in-
dividual man ; but in and by itself personality antedates all
reasoning and all religion.

Lotze and Wundt speak of the " incompatibility of mind and
matter," i.e., we cannot express either in terms of the other.
Human language is the deposit of reason, and we find in all
languages the distinction between matter and thought. We are
conscious of mental states as belonging to ourselves, parts of
our own experience. But things outside of us are common
to all. They are accidental and transitory. The mind thinks,
feels, reasons, and wills ; it has no form and occupies no space.
Matter is ever extended ; it occupies space, it always has body
and weight and is impenetrable.

I place all existence over against myself as the object of
consciousness, which I as subject know. But since this not-me
includes my fellow men, this me is soon enlarged by a knowl-
edge of them, and I rise into social being. Thus our human
environment is most vital to our development. Through it we
persons become the us, and the Cosmos with all its contents
becomes the not-us. In this division we rank the us far above
things. Some philosophers object that we make too strong
a contrast between the not-us and the ns. But their objection
is due to their coolly ignoring the profound significance of the
human environment. By taking note only of the ego and the
Cosmos without this middle term, their next step is the losing
of the self in the Cosmos. They talk glibly of the universal
monism, all inclusive. When we reflect on the multitude of
personalities, each of whom insists on his own individuality,
we must recognize their supreme influence on us, developing
our characters, and making us men and not brutes. There are
several cases of infants left in the forests, who survived

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 263

to grow up hardly human.* The human influences are the
most important that can play on us.

The Hegelian weakness in this fundamental particular has
been excellently dealt with by Professor Rashdall of Oxford.
He specifies the fallacy as " the assumption that what con-
stitutes existence for others is the same as what constitutes
existence for self." " I detect that fallacy," he writes, " in
almost every line of almost every Hegelian thinker . . . whom
I have read, and many who object to that designation. . . . All
the fallacies of our anti-individualist thinkers come from talk-
ing as though the essence of a person lay in what can be known
about him, and not in his own knowledge, his own experience
of himself. ... Of course, I do not mean to deny that a man
is made what he is (in part) by his relations to other persons,
but no knowledge of these relations by any other than him-
self is a knowledge which can constitute what he is to himself.
However much I know of another man, and however much by
the likeness of my own experience, by the acuteness of the in-
terpretation which I put upon his acts and words, by the sym-
pathy which I feel for him, I may know of another's inner
life, that life is forever a thing quite distinct from me, the
knower of it." ^

H. THE INERADICABLE CONVICTION OF
PERSONAL IDENTITY

Another ground for the belief in spirit is the ineradicable
conviction which every one has of personal identity, i.e., the
consciousness of the self as personal being, distinct from all
its experiences, inner and outer, and essentially the same in the
present as in the past.**

This is the one true identity of being which is the source of
all our ideas of identity and unity. Myself implies the con-
tinued existence of that indivisible thing which is " I." Wliat-

* See The Lancet, Aug. i, 1914.

^ Sturt (Edit.) Personal Idealism, pp. 382, 3.

^ For other kinds of identity see Note U.

264 Basic Ideas in Religion

ever this self may be, it is something which thinks, dehberates,
resolves, acts, and suffers. I am not thought, I am not action,
nor am I feeling. My thoughts and actions change every
moment. They have no continual, but only a successive, being,
but the self, which thinks and acts, abides ever the same, and
to that self these experiences all belong. " I " am the per-
manent, invisible substratum underlying them all and preserv-
ing them buried deep in the mystic realm of memory. Every
man is certain of this ego, but it is difficult to defend, when it
is challenged by psychological and metaphysical arguments. It
has been denied from the first by Empiricists, and was con-
sidered as an impossible idea by Herbert Spencer.'^

But the influence of Spencer is weak in comparison with the
teaching of the physiological psychologists in college lecture
rooms and laboratories, who boast that " against opposition,
against bigotry and ridicule, against personal abuse and perse-
cution," they have fought their way to their present position,
" until today it is the dominant conception of the psychology
of personality. . . . Psychologists today appear to be pretty
well agreed as to this result in its general aspects. Conscious-
ness, the realm of personality, appears to be a very complex
combination of elements, which in the last analysis are like
the simplest colors and sounds, and are called sensations.
These are of a great variety and number, and determine by
their character and arrangement various kinds of conscious
states or processes. Thus one grouping gives us thought, an-
other feeling, and another will. Or to put it in a different way,
if we take those states of mind in which we are said to think
or feel or will, and subject them to analysis, we shall find them
to consist of nothing but peculiar arrangements of elementary
sensations ; and the only difiference we shall discover between
them will consist of a difference in the character and arrange-
ment of the sensations involved. Elements in combination,
that is all. . . . Soul and personality . . . indicate for the
psychologist nothing but the kind of correlation in which all

T See Note V.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 265

mental activities are found. Sensations are always somebody's.
The same is true of combinations of sensations. It is / that
think and feel and will. Yet this / does not involve any new
elements ; it is not something new in kind. It is rather only
the way in which all mental elements are found, as a matter of
fact, to coexist. Remove these elements, destroy the correla-
tion or change it, and the soul and personality are removed,
destroyed, or changed. Thus the soul is not a power, a crea-
tive force, an independent existence, separate and distinct
from its sensation elements. It is simply these elements in
more or less stable combination. . . . Remove the conscious
elements, and the personality is also removed." *

The world of science and learning has its alternating seasons
and its capricious fashions. Just at present we are experienc-
ing a wave of empirical psychology. As has been said : " It
began with an increasing self-observation, and it has developed
to an experimental science, with the most elaborate methods
of technique, and with scores of big laboratories in its service.
. . . The whole world of outer experience had been atomized
and explained, and there remained only the world of inner ex-
perience, the world of the conscious personality, to be brought
under the views of natural science. ... It began with an
analysis of the simple ideas and feelings, and it has developed
to an insight into the mechanism of the highest acts and emo-
tions, thoughts and creations. It started by studying the men-
tal life of the individual, and it has rushed forward to the psy-
chical organization of society, to the social psychology, to the
psychology of art and science, religion and language, history
and law."

Ribot thus sums up the characteristics of the new psychol-
ogy : it " differs from the old in its spirit, it is not metaphysical ;
in its end, it studies only phenomena ; in its procedure, it bor-
rows as much as possible from the biological sciences ... it
has for its object nervous phenomena accompanied by con-
sciousness. . . , Psychology becomes, in the proper sense of

8 Professor T. E. Woodbridge of Columbia University at Church
Congress, 1902.

266 Basic Ideas in Religion

the word, experimental. . . . We study not the phenomena of
consciousness, but its variations. Or, more exactly, we study
psychical variations indirectly by the aid of physical variations
that can be studied directly. . . . But it is so far from being
a complete psychology, that it offers us at present only at-
tempts. The future alone will be able to fix its true value,
and to say whether the scientific rigor to which it aspires can
be altogether attained." ^

These words of caution should have been more heeded, but,
as we have seen, the physiological psychologist has often turned
metaphysician, while many writers on psychology do not hesi-
tate to use the slowly accumulating facts of the experimental-
ists in the w^ildest way. The rank and file of the school are
impatient with the moderation of the great workers. Even
Wundt is counted conservative because he admits some pos-
sibility of initiative in the subject of his experiments, and du
Bois-Reymond was not spared when he dared to think that
there were some problems in the universe which could never
be solved on purely mechanical principles.

They hold there is no personal unity, but only a synthetic
unity, a grouping or continuity of inner experiences which per-
mit no causal efficiency to the self. It is like a constitutional
monarch who reigns but does not govern, whose signature is
necessary that a law or treaty may be complete as an act of
the state as a whole, but who signs every document laid before
him impartially and without discussion. Person is sim.ply a
convenient term for a complex of sensations, the concrete given
unity of all conscious activities, but a unity which is merely
continuity and itself does nothing.

Long ago Goethe remarked that many French philosophers
thought they could explain an organism by analyzing it into
its parts. The acute critic put his finger on the flaw in their
reasoning, the fallacy that the axiom, the whole is equal to the
sum of its parts, applies to living and even thinking beings.
They seem blind to the fact obvious to all whose minds are not

» German Psychology of To-day, pp. 5-15.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 267

biased, that there is an element in life, and much more in
mind, as disturbing to their narrow formulas as an infinite
quantity in an ordinary mathematical equation. Professor E.
Hering has shown how liable to err in this way is the physio-
logical study of mind. " So long as the physiologist is only a
physicist he stands in a one-sided position to the organic world.
. . . As the crystal to the mineralogist, the vibrating string to
the student of acoustics, so also the animal, and even man, is
to the physicist only a piece of matter. That the animal ex-
periences pleasure and pain — that with the material life of
the human frame are connected the joys and sorrows of a soul
and the vivid intellectual life of a consciousness; this cannot
change the animal and human body for the physical student into
anything other than it is — a material complex subject to the
unalterable laws which govern also the stone and the substance
of the plant, a material complex whose external and internal
movements are causally as rigidly connected amongst each
other, and with the movements of the environment, as the
working of a machine is with the revolution of its wheels. . . .
Thus the physiologist as physicist stands behind the scene, and
while he painfully examines the mechanism and the busy doings
of the actors behind the drop scenes, he misses the sense of
the whole which the spectator easily recognizes from the
front." ^° Bergson has much to the same effect in Creative
Evolution.

The new psychology with the soul left out, petulantly com-
plains that it can never find the soul by itself — without its
clothes, so to speak. " It never does anything," so it seems to
them, but only because it really does everything as the ever-
present, willing, and active subject of all experiences, feelings,
and thoughts. The eye, likewise, sees all but itself which does
the seeing. Empirical psychology disdains metaphysics, and
ofifers to make all things plain. It sweeps away as " supersti-
tions " the universal faiths and experiences which make men
truly men, the I, the Will, the Conscience. But its " plain

1° Uber das Geddchtniss als eine allgemeine Funktion des organischen
Materie, pp. 4, 5.

268 Basic Ideas in Religion

truths " are simply meaningless to the normal mind. " There
is no need of any underlying entity, the thoughts themselves
are the thinker," but how can there be thoughts without a
thinker? "The mind is only a series of states of conscious-
ness," but how can there be such states if there is no mind to be
conscious of them?

James Ward tells us that there are only three alternatives in
any theory of personality, (i) It is a series of states of con-
sciousness, which is aware of itself as a series. Of this theory
he says, " paradox is too mild a word for it ; even contradiction
will hardly suffice." (2) It is a series of states in which the
parts are aware of each other in succession, A of B, B of C, and
C of D, each in turn serving as object and subject. But this is
only a multiplying of the conscious entity, which is denied as
a unit, into a multitude of entities. (3) All the terms of the
series exist for a spiritual, self-conscious subject. " Hopeless,"
he tells us, " is the attempt by means of phrases such as the
unity of consciousness to dispense with the recognition of a
conscious subject." ^^

William James contended for " the logical respectability of
the spiritualistic position." " I confess," he writes, " that to
posit a soul influenced in some mysterious way by the brain-
states and responding to them by conscious affections of its
own, seems to me the line of least logical resistance, so far as
we yet have attained. . . . The bare phenomenon, however, the
immediately known thing which on the mental side is in apposi-
tion with the entire brain-process is the state of consciousness
and not the soul itself. Many of the stanchest believers in
the soul admit that we know it only as an inference from ex-
periencing its states." ^^

The fact of memory testifies to the reality of personality. J.
S. Mill, though an Empiricist, admits the force of this strange
certainty and experience in which long past acts and thoughts
reappear as present facts in consciousness though recognized as

" Enc. Brit., 9th Edit., Vol. XX, p. 44.

12 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I., pp. 181, 2.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 269

past.^^ So also Hoffding tells us that " In recognition and in
memory is expressed an inner unity to which the material world
affords no parallel." "

The memories are in themselves present feelings, but they
involve a strange belief in their own continued existence.
They imply a permanent substratum which abides, though the
feelings change and pass. My personal identity consists in
my being the same " I " who did or felt some specified fact in
the past recalled by memory. This succession of feelings which
I call my memory is that by which I distinguish myself from
other persons. Memory is explained by the physiological psy-
chologists as impressions left on certain cells in the brain which
are associated together. True, but they correspond to the pages
in a daily diary, a glance at any entry awakens a whole related
group of past experiences most vividly. But the cells like the
pages, are entirely passive, they are not conscious of their own
contents any more than are the pages. It is the self which
makes the impressions, reads and recalls their meaning, and
recognizes the truth of the record — " I did or felt that thing."
To doubt the memory's witness to the unity of our being,
covering all thoughts and feelings, is to doubt the primary fact
of consciousness, which is the subject matter of psychol-
ogy.

Besides this unity of consciousness there is still another prop-
erty of mind unaccounted for by those who study the phe-
nomena of the inner life by the methods of exact scientific
research. Both are so clearly stated by Merz that his words
should be quoted at length. " The first of these properties is
the peculiar, unity exhibited by the higher forms of organic
existence, and still more evident in the phenomena of mental
or inner life. Instead of unity, it might perhaps be better to
call it centralization. Now, the more we apply mathematical
methods, the more we become aware of the impossibility of
ever arriving at a comprehensive unity by adding units or
elements together. The sum of atoms or molecules, however

13 See Note W.

1* Outlines of Psychology, p. 47.

270 Basic Ideas in Religion

artfully put together, never exhibits to our reasoning that
appearance of concentration which the higher organisms or
our conscious self seem to exhibit ... a special kind of unity
which cannot be defined, a unity which, even when apparently
lost in the periods of unconsciousness, is able to reestablish
itself by the wonderful and indefinable property called ' mem-
ory ' — a center which can only be very imperfectly localized
— a together which is more than a mathematical sum ; in fact,
we rise to the conception of individuality — that which cannot
be divided and put together again out of its parts.

" The second property is still more remarkable. The world
... of the inner processes which accompany the highest forms
of nervous developments in human beings, is capable of un-
limited growth; and it is capable of this by a process of be-
coming external : it becomes external, and, as it were, per-
petuates itself in language, literature, science and art, legisla-
tion, society, and the like. We have no analogue of this in
physical nature, where matter and energy are constant quan-
tities, and where the growth and multiplication of living mat-
ter is merely a conversion of existing matter and energy into
special altered forms without increase or decrease in quantity.
But the quantity of the inner thing is continually on the in-
crease ; in fact, this increase is the only thing of interest in
the whole world.

" Now, no exact scientific treatment of the phenomena of
mind and body, no psycho-physical view of nature, is complete
or satisfactory which passes by and leaves undefined these two
remarkable properties of the inner life, of the epi-phenomena
of nervous action, of consciousness. And it seems to me
that Professor Wundt is the only psycho-physicist who, start-
ing from science and trying to penetrate by scientific methods
into the inner or psychic world, has treated the subject com-
prehensively, and fairly and fully tried to grapple with these
two facts peculiar to the inner world — its centralized unity
and its capacity of unlimited growth through a process of
externalization. He has done so by his philosophical theory of
* apperception and will,' and of the ' growth of mental values,'

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 271

two conceptions which lead us into the realm of philosophical
thought." ^^

On the principles of psychology itself we must accept and
ponder all the facts of consciousness, whether we understand
them or not. We cannot get rid of the fact that human ex-
periences belong to some one person and no other. This sub-
jective intuition of the permanent self is correlative with the
objective intuition of the world's unity and " substance." If we
question this ever-present witness of the " I " to itself, we
must question all the affirmations of consciousness, and still
more the validity of the logical reasoning from which the doubts
start.

Equally clear is the witness of our consciousness to the fact
that this unity rests in an active ego, which is more than a
" synthetic unity " that passively registers all the diverse expe-
riences which compose it with absolute indifference as to their
quality. The " newer " psychology of the Personal Idealists,
together with Ward, James, Baldwin, Stout, Sturt, Sigwart,
and others, starts from the universal faith in the self as in-
tensely active. There is not only perception but active apper-
ception. Du Bois-Reymond dwells especially on this principle
of apperception. He is one of those who show signs of a
decided return to a recognition of personality and the mystery
of it. Professor James states as axioms the propositions
that the personal consciousness is continuous as well as chang-
ing, and that it takes interest in some part of the many objects
of thought before it, within or without, and constantly makes
choice between them ; ^^ a strange fact to which Goethe's
phrase applies, " Man bids the moment pause." By no legerde-
main could a " series " fix its " attention " on one of its own
members. This voluntary element in perception is fatal to the
passive theory. And Sigwart from the standpoint of Logic
makes this strong assertion : " In psychology we must start
from the closed unity of the individual consciousness, and ac-
cept the fixed Ego as the center of all relations. . . . The db-

15 History of European Thought in XlXth Century, Vol. II, pp. 524, 6.

16 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 225.

272 Basic Ideas in Religion

jection that the concept of the soul has rendered no service
to psychology applies only to the attempts of rational or meta-
physical psychology to derive definite predicates from the con-
cept of substance or of simple essence, instead of obtaining
them from the given, experienced content of life; apart from
that, the concept of the soul at any rate renders this service
to psychology, that from the point of view of method it alone
makes psychology possible." "

III. THE WILL AS THE EXPRESSION OF
PERSONALITY

The strongest witness to personality is the sense of freedom
as power to choose between alternative motives or courses
of action, and to originate phenomena without and control
thought within. As Augustine vigorously contended the will
is the man. The will is not a " faculty," but the ego itself
energizing or acting, conscious of self-determination, by free
choice and with intelligent purpose. The ego acts with mo-
tives or reasons, but is always conscious of the possibility of
alternative choices. A necessitated will is no will.

This subject is of vast import. Ethical life and man's
spiritual being stand or fall with its acceptance or denial. As
Lotze says, " This conviction is the absolutely fundamental
point upon which the entire religious character of our view of
the world depends. And for him who does not directly expe-
rience and acknowledge this, all questions of religious philos-
ophy are altogether superfluous." ^^ The general trend of
philosophical and scientific and of many ethical writers denies
it, or modifies it into determinism. Huxley thought that " the
progress of science means the banishment of spontaneity," and
Spencer wrote: "Psychical changes either conform to law
or they do not. If they do not, this work, in common with all
works on the subject, is sheer nonsense : no science of psychol-
ogy is possible." But " such ejaculations," comments Pro-

17 Logic, Vol. II, p. 393.

18 Philosophy of Religion, p. 100.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 273

fessor James, " are beneath criticism." ^^ The Neo-Hegelians,
emphasizing spiritual unity, hold freedom to be " irrational,"
though not all of them tell us as bluntly as Bradley does that,
considered theoretically or practically, the belief in free will is
a lingering chimera, like the belief in witches, and that no man
who respects himself can treat it seriously.

Yet the weighty voices are not all against free will, as its
opponents would try to make us believe. All ethical writers
until recently treated it as the condition of moral life. It had
in its favor in the past such worthy supporters as Aristotle,
Cicero, Augustine, Shakespeare, and Kant.^" More recently it
was defended by Lotze and Martineau. The names of a few
other advocates may serve to show the respectable following
that freedom of the will has : In Germany, Eucken, Kuno
Fischer, Rothe, Stern and Zeller ; in France, Boutroux, Del-
boeuf, Fonsegrive, Noels, Renouvier, Secretan, and notably
Bergson. In Great Britain, A. J. Balfour, Boyce Gibson, Ham-
ilton, Illingworth, Lodge, Maher, Seth, Rashdall, Romanes,
Sturt, and James Ward. In America William James has been
a leading advocate. Illingworth has already been quoted as
stating that the immense weight of philosophical authority is
beyond question on the side of freedom of the will.^^ The dis-
cussion of the denials of freedom will be found in a separate
chapter.^-

AsPECTS OF Will Consciousness
There are three aspects of will consciousness; (i) delibera-
tion with choice between divergent motives or desires; (2)
volition with definite purpose; and (3) execution with effort,
the origination by immediate causation of phenomena which
would not begin but for our voluntary action, and the carrying
out, often after long delay, of fore-determined action.

I. Deliberation zcith choice between divergent motives.
Choice is so prominent an element in will action that it is often

'^^ Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, p. 576.

20 Of course the problem was not before them in its modern form.

21 See p. 114.

22 See Chap. XVIII.

274 Basic Ideas in Religion

used to define the will itself, as by Aristotle, Cicero, and Jona-
than Edwards. But more important is deliberation, the weigh-
ing of reasons and the conscious decision between them, for it
proves we are not mere passive spectators of contending forces
or motives in our minds, but that we stand apart from the mo-
tives judging them. We are not the resultant of the final
action of the strongest of the motives, still less is our will their
product. We are the active agents, and they the data for de-
cision. Rothe holds that moral freedom consists in this, that
the " I " is lord of all motives and can form or modify them,
can react against them, and can do the contrary to any one of
them while he concentrates himself within himself.

The less the deliberation, the less the responsibility, as in
cases of delirium or insane impulse, when the actions are simply
instinctive. We say of the hasty act of an angry man that
" he lost control of himself," and we blame him for this lack
of self-control. If he actually cannot check himself, as in de-
lirium, we do not hold him responsible. Attempts have been
made to identify free-choice with motiveless decision. We
are told that if the strongest motive does not decide choice,
then there is no choice, like the fourteenth century ass that
was supposed to starve because he could not make up his mind
to which of two exactly equal and equidistant hay stacks he
should go. But such reasoning is absurd. Will, like love,
must have an object. We must know what we will or desire,
and that object or purpose is urged or resisted by many diver-
gent considerations which it at once arouses, pleasure or pain,
profit or loss, right or wrong. Freedom does not mean mo-
tiveless choice, but a free choice or decision between motives,
making one prevail by our will, like Brennus throwing his
sword in the scale. As Herman Schwarz tells us, an act of
volition is not a mere resultant of contending motives, nor is
it determined by an idea or a feeling, or by any complex of
ideas or feelings in themselves; it is determined by the whole
personality of the willing subject. ^^

23 Psychologie dcs IVillens.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 275

2. Volition zvith definite purpose. Deliberation and de-
cision are followed by an act of volition directed to a foreseen
end. Volition is not concerned with choice, for that is past,
but with intention, the definite aim and purpose, and the means
to attain it. This constant foresight and intention distinguish
will-action from instinct and reflex-action. Instinct is organic,
coordinated action to a certain end without consciousness of
that end. Reflex action is immediate response to a sudden
stimulus without conscious will.

3. Execution zvith effort. The carrying out of the fore-de-
termined action is often hindered or delayed. The two pre-
ceding aspects of will-consciousness have been purely mental,
this on the other hand emphasizes the realizing of intentions.
The executive will enters into the world of actualities and ef-
fects changes in human life and in nature. The long and pur-
poseful delay between willing a definite act and the carrying it
out shows that we have full control of our actions. If motive
alone were the determining cause, action would follow at once
on impulse. The passage from inner purpose, potentiality, to
outer deed, actuality, is profoundly significant, for the will thus
acting on matter with effort is the source of our idea of force.
The origination in nature of certain phenomena which would
not happen but for our free act, shows the will to be, within
limits, a true first cause.

But equally significant is its action within consciousness,
which includes attention, control of thoughts, inhibition of
emotion and action, and inner resistance to force. Each and
all of these powers refute the theory of Hume,^'* and prove the
ego's control of the inner world of consciousness. We cannot
determine what we shall see with the body's eye, but we can
determine what we will view with the mind's eye. We can
preserve a certain train of thought or dismiss it, we can call up
images of the past and dwell on them, and we can refuse to
consider those that arise uncalled. Control of the mind, the
power of concentrated attention, is a mark of mental strength ;

2* See Note W.

2^6 Basic Ideas in Religion

the lack of it means weakness. Villa asserts that " modern
psychologists, such as Bain, Wundt, James, Hoffding, Stout,
Baldwin, and Ladd ... all agree upon one point — namely
that to determine and define the true character of conscious
life, it is necessary to pay special attention to its inner and sub-
jective aspect, consisting in feeling and volition. Psychology,
which was formerly intellectualistic, may now be said to be
decidedly * volitionist.' The laws of consciousness are sub-
stantially the laws of feeling and of volition." ^^ Inhibition
is the repression of emotion and bodily action. It is seen most
strikingly in self-control when enduring pain or provocation
and insult. " Better is he that ruleth his spirit, than he that
taketh a city." -" The animal obeys the strongest impulse,
just as a machine obeys the hand that controls it. But while
man has many of the strongest animal impulses and appetites,
such as hunger and the instinct of self-preservation, he holds
them under control. Finally as the mark of the highest
manhood we have the resistance to internal difficulty, as in
obeying the call to duty when the lower nature desires ease,
and the resistance to external force, so that, though the body
be punished, the will remains steadfast against all obstacles.

The Grounds of Belief in Freedom

I. The Affirmation of Consciousness

This consciousness of freedom is a mark of humanity. All
men live and act under it, and all social life depends on it.
The deniers of freedom do not appeal to any elements in con-
sciousness, nor to any facts in human life and society. They
hold a theory, philosophic or scientific, and rule out all the
evidence which makes against it. They simply affirm the im-
possibility of freedom on their own premises, but their premises
are not proven. Theory may be against free-will, but expe-
rience is for it. Professor Sidgwick says that there is a
formidable array of cumulative evidence oflfered for the in-
ward determination of the will, but he admits that over against

25 Contemporary Psychology, p. 373.
28 Prov. 16 :32.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 277

this is " the immediate affirmation of consciousness in the mo-
ment of deliberate action. And certainly, in the case of actions
in which I have distinct consciousness of choosing between al-
ternatives of conduct, one of which I conceive as right or
reasonable, I find it impossible not to think that I can now
choose to do what I so conceive, however strong may be my
inclination to act unreasonably, and however uniformly I may
have yielded to such inclination in the past." ^^

But why all this mystification? Why cannot we accept as
philosophical truth that verdict of our consciousness which we
assume in the whole course of our lives as true, and which we
treat as practical truth in all our dealings with each other, and
in every reflection on ourselves? Why is a verdict of con-
sciousness — and that the most certain of all — to be treated
as less trustworthy than a verdict of the senses on purely me-
chanical lines?

However, as the various denials of freedom will receive sys-
tematic treatment in another chapter, we can here be content
to pass on to other grounds for our belief in freedom.

2. Affirmation of Conscience

We are conscious of our freedom because of the conviction
of duty, the feeling of obligation, the sense of responsibility for
thought and action, the passing of judgment on others and our-
selves, and the sense of guilt and remorse after any wrong
doing. We are more certain of our moral freedom, including
the power of choice and our responsibility for our choice, than
of any other fact whatsoever. Two elements stand out clearly
in moral experience: the insistent voice of conscience that we
should do right at any cost, and the profound feeling of self-
condemnation if we fail in a great duty. Social judgment is
less striking than self-judgment. A man unjustly condemned
by a court may go to death with peace and upright head, but
many a criminal has found the burden of conscious guilt too
great to bear and has sought release from it by voluntary con-
fession and submission to just penalty.

*T Methods of Ethics, p. 64.

278 Basic Ideas in Religion

Bentham and Tyndall made a futile attempt to ignore " mo-
tive " and judge only " act." Bentham proposed that the
word " ought " be dropped, and in its place phrases suggesting
pleasure and profit be used. But you cannot destroy facts
of interior experience simply by abolishing the terms which
for ages have described them. In the irony of fate, Tyn-
dall's own death, through a mistake of his wife in giving
him an overdose of chloral, refuted his theory that people
must be judged not by their motives but solely by their
acts.

Some ethical writers assure us that freedom to choose be-
tween right and wrong is a delusion, the real use of which
however they cannot explain. Yet according to the principles
of evolution, its universality implies reality and usefulness.
Balfour makes excellent use of this argument : " The spectacle
of all mankind suffering under the delusion that in their de-
cision they are free, when, as a matter of fact, they are nothing
of the kind, must certainly appear extremely ludicrous to any
superior observer, were it possible to conceive, on the natural-
istic hypothesis, that such observers should exist ; and the
comedy could not be otherwise than greatly relieved and
heightened by the performances of the small sect of philoso-
phers who, knowing perfectly as an abstract truth that free-
dom is an absurdity, yet in moments of balance and delibera-
tion fall into the vulgar error, as if they were savages or ideal-
ists. The roots of a superstition so ineradicable must lie deep
in the groundwork of our inherited organism, and must, if not
now, at least in the first beginning of self-consciousness, have
been essential to the welfare of the race which entertained
it." 2«

There is a vast difference between our feelings after an
accidental action causing the death of another and after the
same act done with malice prepense. One we deeply regret,
the other causes self-condemnation and bitter remorse. We
known only too well that remorse after wilful sins is no delusion

28 Foundalions of Belief, p. 21.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 279

but a bitter reality. Some writers, however, think they can
explain it as a useful urging to better life in the future. T. H.
Green succeeds in raising a cloud of dust to obscure his illus-
tration of Esau's self-reproach. He says that Esau might well
feel remorse for his conduct, for though it was the joint out-
come of his character and his environment, yet since his prog-
ress of development included his reaction on circumstances, he
was bound to regard the act as his own and reproach him-
self.-^ Spinoza writes frankly that repentance is not a virtue,
for it does not spring from reason. On the contrary the man
who repents of what he has done is doubly wretched. But like
Green and Hoffding, who follow him, he held that the delusion
of remorse has continued a human experience because it has a
use, for it urges men to avoid the sins which have caused such
self-reproach. But if character is an unalterably fixed proc-
ess, then remorse is incredible and foolish, and as the keenest
expression of the sense of freedom it will lose its moral dy-
namic just as soon as men come to know that all acts are fated
by divine decree or mechanical necessity.

How utterly abhorrent and impossible such a view is, be-
comes apparent when we apply it to explain a crime like
the Brockton murder, discussed by Professor James : " We
feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest of the
universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
really have been better in its place. But for the deterministic
philosophy the murder, the sentence, and tbe prisoner's opti-
mism were all necessary from eternity ; and nothing else for a
moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place.
To admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be
to make a suicide of reason ; so we must steel our hearts against
the thought. ... If this Brockton murder was called for by
the rest of the universe, if it had to come at its preappointed
hour, and if nothing else would have been consistent with the
sense of the whole, what are we to think of the universe? Are
we stubbornly to stick to our judgment of regret, and say,

29 Prolegomena to Ethics, pp. 99 ff.

28o Basic Ideas in Religion

though it couldn't be, yet it would have been a better universe
with something different from this Brockton murder in it?
That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing for us
to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a kind
of pessimism. The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.
Calling a thing bad means, if it means anything at all, that the
thing ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its
stead. Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in
its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place in which what
ought to be is impossible, — in other words, as an organism
whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irre-
mediable flaw." ^° Thus to pass judgment on the sum total
of things as indifferent to all moral distinctions lands us in
pessimism. The only escape, he continues, is to give up
our ethical judgments, as having no ground in the nature of
things and declare optimistically that this is the best possible
world. The answer to such perplexities is the frank acceptance
of the truly human faith that man, though in body a part of na-
ture and subject to her laws, rises above her mechanical system
into the higher realm of spirit. Then conscience will rise in
its might and, while bidding us leave the world order to take
care of itself, will cause us to abhor and punish all the wilful
crimes which men may do.

3. Affirmation of Practical Life

The whole question is practical and moral rather than
speculative and scientific. Solvitur amhulando. The press-
ing reality of moral evil forbids acceptance of the necessi-
tarian hypothesis, and forces a decision in favor of personality.
Determinism saps the spring of ethics, and, as we have just
seen, its world-view ends in Pessimism or sentimental
Optimism ; either theory is inconsistent with a sensitive con-
science and energetic activity.

The theoretical denial of free-will therefore is not, as Sidg-
wick fancied, a matter of indifference. Ethical life, as all
humanity has heretofore understood it, would become impos-

80 Will to Believe, pp. 161, 2.

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 281

sible under a common belief in scientific fatalism. The modem
test of reality and truth is, " will the theory work? " No man
dares live out this idea. Responsibility and justice are the basis
of the social order, and if the gospel of Necessity were pro-
claimed from the housetops and accepted by the multitude it
would utterly destroy the authority of the moral conscience.
Religion would vanish first, for men who have become con-
vinced that they are mere puppets could not believe for a mo-
ment in spirit or God. The very words would have no mean-
ing. Mechanical men can think only a mechanical universe.
With the loss of their old faith that they were personalities,
would follow the loss of that self-respect which belonged to it,
and the mob would affect the same cynical contempt for man
as man, which the philosophers have long felt for the multi-
tude. The men of the slums would not be content to merely
philosophize, as the privileged theorists have been doing, but
w^ould proceed to act out the new evangel of brute instincts and
animal law. The results would beggar description.

If the speculative intellect proves helpless in this field and
serves to perplex us with abstract theories, we must fall back
on the deep certainties of the heart, far more convincing to
those who feel them than any arguments of the head. The
votaries of science warn us against trusting in the feelings and
affections, and boast that, disregarding their desires and in-
terests, they aim only at the Truth at any cost. Curiously
enough, they overlook the fact that in their own system there
is no such thing as Truth in all the universe, for truth and
falsehood in the human sense — not the mere correspondence
between our " ideas " and outer facts, but moral reality — ex-
ists only for free beings, and there are no personalities to think
and to will the true, the good, and the beautiful. Truth in the
sense of knowledge of external facts is merely material for
interesting thought, or useful for profit and loss in bodily com-
fort or material affairs. Syllogisms help us to deduce new
truths from the old, but for the most part they do not touch
our deeper selves, except so far as their premises concern moral
duty. But in a determined act of difficult volition, a masterful

282 Basic Ideas in Religion

" I will " or " I will not," we are conscious of our dignity as
men ; not mere puppets, but fellow workers with God.

The will in such a case is indeed the man ; we touch here our
deepest self, Kant's transcendental noumenal man, or St. Paul's
" I," which approves the law of duty. An act of will, self-de-
termining the life and character, is a psychical fact, a private
experience which can only be known through a similar expe-
rience. All the great thinkers and poets of the ages have
affirmed moral freedom as the very mark of man, but like the
Scriptures they recognize that true freedom is not release from
all restraint that we may do whatever we will, but the royal
law of liberty setting us free from the flaws and fetters of the
lower self that we may will and love our highest. This is a
freedom which cannot be given us outright, but only as po-
tential in our spirit, which it is the high but difficult task of
each soul of man to will and strive to acquire, till he comes to
feel that the service of God is in very truth perfect freedom.
The highest ethical teaching, realize thy higher self, and the
Gospel preaching are at one.

Professor James enforces this view, holding that the all-suf-
ficient justification of belief in moral freedom is to be found in
the fact of its necessity to ethical life and human civilization.
" Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth, and even our
good luck, are things which warm our heart, and make us feel
ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things,
and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the
amount of efifort which we can put forth. Those are, after all,
but effects, products, and reflections of the outer world within.
But the effort seems to belong to an altogether different realm,
as if it were the substantive thing which we are, and those
were but externals which we carry. If the ' searching of our
heart and reins ' be the purpose of this human drama, then what
is sought seems to be what effort we can make. He who can
make none is but a shadow ; he who can make much is a hero.
The huge world that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions
to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. Some of the tests we
meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we an-

Analysis of Sources of Belief in the Soul 283

swer in articulately formulated words. But the deepest ques-
tion that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning
of the will and tightening of our heart-strings as we say, ' Yes,
I zinll even have it so.' . . . The world thus finds in the heroic
man its worthy match and mate ; and the effort he is able to
put forth to hold himself erect and keep his heart unshaken is
the direct measure of his worth and function in the game of
human life." ^^

(For a discussion of the relation of scientific theories to
human personality see Note X, and for Thomson's views on
" Brain and Personality" see Note Y.)

31 Principles of Psychology, Vol. II, pp. 573 and 578.

CHAPTER XVI

WITNESS OF CONSCIENCE TO PERSON-
ALITY AND IMMORTALITY

I. CONSCIOUSNESS OF DUTY AND
RESPONSIBILITY

The consciousness of duty and responsibility is a funda-
mental fact in human nature. It was developed, but not cre-
ated, by social experience. Conscience draws its beginnings
and inspiration from a higher spiritual environment and, like
life, dominates and determines its own development from
within. Like the will it is intensely personal but relates al-
ways to others besides the self. The feeling of otightness to
render to God and man that which is their due is an inseparable
element in personality. It fulfils the same function of creating
and maintaining form and order among human units, that
gravitation performs amid the elements of matter. Con-
science is the focus of personal life, and the generating center
of character. It is an intense form of intuition, a most cer-
tain and self-evidencing conviction. As Emerson said of it,
" The divine origin of the moral law is fully shown by its su-
periority to all the other principles of our nature. It seems to
be more essential to our constitution than any other feeling
whatever. It dwells so deeply in the human nature that we
feel it to be implied in consciousness. Other faculties fail —
Memory sleeps ; Judgment is impaired or ruined ; Imagination
droops — but the moral sense abides there still. In our very
dreams, it wakes and judges amid the chaos of the rest. The
depth of its foundations in the heart, and the subtlety of its
nature in eluding investigation into its causes and character,
distinguish it eminently above other principles." ^

1 Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

284

Witness of Conscience to Personality 285

We studied under the Anthropological Argument the wit-
ness of conscience to God's moral character as the source and
basis of righteousness. Here we study the correlative truth
that our sense of duty toward God and our intimate relation
to Him implies our own spiritual being. We justify our faith
in personality by the fact that we have this sense of duty, for
it is as truly a trait of mankind as walking upright or the power
of speech. Unless the reason of man were fundamentally
moral, as it is fundamentally mathematical, the developed life
of civilized society were impossible, as impossible as a plant
without root and seed, as running without feet, as arithmetic
without the certainty that two and two make four. There is
an interdependence between social life and ethics. Each de-
mands and develops the other. Only through relations with
other persons, our will agreeing or conflicting with theirs,
do we come to a true knowledge of our own personality.
In all ages and races it has expressed itself in religious faith
and duties, in family life, in the organization of the tribe and
the state, and in civil laws.

The reality and the authority of the feeling of supreme obli-
gation to do what is felt to be right at any cost to self is not
affected by the obvious fact that differing races and civiliza-
tions have differing standards as to good and evil acts. We
must distinguish between the feeling of " oughtness " to do what
seems to us to be the right, and the concrete duties as to which
the sense of obligation does vary among different races and
ages, according to their stage of ethical culture. The motive
in these cases determines the quality of the act. Deeds ab-
horrent to us may have a motive that explains them. St. Paul
expresses this clearly : " And he that doubteth is condemned
if he eat, because he eateth not of faith, for whatsoever is not
of faith is sin." ^ Faith here means a firm conviction that the
act is lawful for the doer.

The important fact is that no tribe has ever been found with-
out the sense of moral obligation irrespective of pleasure or

2 Rom. 14 -.23.

286 Basic Ideas in Religion

pain, just as none has ever been found without the sense of the
Divine. Individuals in savage tribes often commit vile and
cruel acts, but they do not do habitually and as a tribe any-
thing which their consciences condemn as utterly wrong. It
is easy to exaggerate the peculiarities of race morality, but
points of agreement among them are greater than the points
of difference. In savage races, morality is often tribal ; men
of other tribes are enemies. Fighting and hunting are the two
chief occupations of the savage. While there is much cruelty
to enemies and delight in bloodshed, yet they have developed
to a high degree the virtues possible in such a condition of life,
bravery, patience, endurance, industry, and defense of and
provision for those who are dependant. Some writers, like
Clodd, consider savages as little better than gregarious animals
because they are uncivilized. This is the same mistake as is
made by those who look on polite society as lifting an indi-
vidual ipso facto to a higher moral level. But in truth the
contrary is often the case, and fine manners may be but a
veneer over selfishness, deceit, and lust. Low civilization and
low morality are no more identical in savage races than intel-
lectual culture and moral soundness are among ourselves.
Comparatively high moral ideas and lives may coexist with a
very primitive civil order and even with barbarism. We must
not judge backward races by our high ideals of Christian duty,
to which we ourselves do not attain, but according to the light
of their day.

Human history is a process of ethical and social education,
and the progress must be slow in order to be real — not mere
obedience to authority but an inner growth in moral convic-
tions. Each step in ethical development is marked by a con-
sciousness of the imperfection of the preceding stages. As
moral life develops, the great teachers of a nation condemn
earlier unworthy ideas of God. A striking instance of this is
seen in the protest of conscience against the immoral elements
in the popular religion of Greece. Plato banished Homer and
Hesiod from his Republic because of the conception they gave
of the gods. The Greek tragic poets also condemned them.

Witness of Conscience to Personality 287

Abraham on the heights overlooking Sodom protested even
to the angel of the Lord against action w^hich seemed to him
unjust. He was not condemned for his appeal to his own
sense of right. It is the glory of Israel that this instance was
typical. She could not outgrow her religion, as a system, as
the Greeks did, for the prophets of the Lord were her teachers,
and their revelation of His righteousness was the mainspring
of her ethical growth. Thus she gradually, though reluctantly,
learned to subordinate ritual to ethical duty and spiritual re-
ligion.

In some early peoples and religions, as we saw, retribution
was not connected with the conception of the future state.
But in the vast majority of religions, man's craving for justice,
his profound sense of the divine source of goodness, developed
the faith that God must somewhere and somehow vindicate
Himself, and that souls who trust Him will not perish like the
brutes. With the rise of this conception, the future life re-
ceived a vividness and clearness which it did not have before.
The idea of progress and happiness in the next world arose,
and immortality, based not on selfish grounds but on highest
hopes, became a necessity for noble souls, something without
which faith itself trembles and grows weak. In spite of the
apparent power of evil, the soul felt that there must be some
One to whom it could appeal in the certain hope that righteous-
ness would not forever be weak before evil, that right must
prove victorious, if not here, then, in the world of spirits be-
yond, and so the very darkness of earth drove man to look
beyond the earth. That God in due time will vindicate His
righteousness is part of the revelation of God in Christ. Noth-
ing is more prominent in the Gospel than the certainty that
the other world will unveil the everlasting distinctions of good
and evil that are half lost in the twilight of this sinful ex-
istence.

That the Messiah would judge the world was a central ele-
ment in the teaching of Christ. It was this ethical element in
His Gospel, as much as His resurrection, that " cast light upon
life and immortality," and made the latter a real living convic-

288 Basic Ideas in Religion

tion in the hearts of men, such as it never was in even the high-
est thought of the Greeks. In Greece the earher beHef in a
shadowy future realm, indifferent to moral distinctions, gave
place, at least in devout souls, to the thought of a judgment
which would determine the soul's destiny for weal or woe for-
ever. Pindar is the first to speak definitely of retribution.
He writes : " Victory sets free the fighter from the pain and
the struggle, and to the wealth of a noble nature made glorious
it bringeth power, putting into the heart of man a deep and
eager mood, a star seen far off, a light wherein a man shall
trust, if he but know the things which shall be, how that all
guilty souls pay penalty for sins done in this upper realm of
Zeus, for one there is who judgeth under Earth pronouncing
sentence by unloved constraint. The good dwell in sunlight,
free from pain . . . but the evil suffer misery, dire to look
on." ^ Plato in his Republic relates the myth of Er, the son
of Armenius, who returns from the dead after twelve days
to warn men of the stern justice ruling in the world below.*
This would seem to bear witness to the popular faith in his
day.

In CEdipus Rex we find Sophocles picturing the divine au-
thorship of the moral law.

" Oh ! may my constant feet not fail,
Walking in paths of righteousness,

Sinless in word and deed —

True to those eternal laws
That scale forever the high steep
Of heaven's pure ether, whence they sprang;
For only in Olympus is their home,
Nor mortal wisdom gave them birth :
And howsoe'er men may forget,

They will not sleep ;
For the might of the god within them grows not old." '

The Eleusinian mysteries were introduced into Greece about
500 B. c. in connection with the worship of Demeter and Diony-

3 Olympian Odes, II :5o ff.
* Book X.
6 Lines 463 ff.

Witness of Conscience to Personality 289

sius. But while they were concerned with the Hfe beyond,
and doubtless gave comfort to the initiated, they reached only a
select few, who looked down on the vulgar herd and made no
attempt to teach them. Plutarch thus quotes Sophocles on
the mysteries :

" Thrice happy they who, while they dwell on earth.
Have gazed upon these holy mysteries.
For theirs alone is life beyond the grave.
Where others find but woe and misery." ^

In The Frogs of Aristophanes there is the following hymn on
the life to come for those who had taken the initiatory vow.

" Let us hasten, let us fly.
Where the lovely meadows lie.
Where the living waters flow,
The roses bloom and grow.
Heirs of Immortality.

" Since our earthly course is run,
We behold a brighter sun.
Holy lives, holy vow.
Such rewards await them now." ^

An objection has been raised by Strauss, George Eliot, and
many others to the customary views of immortality, and such
arguments as those of Kant supporting it, that it seems to ad-
vocate a future life as necessary to reward faith and good-
ness. Some Christians, as for instance Paley, have so written,
though Kant did not, as to justify this charge. Reaction
against such selfishness has driven many writers to deny that
there is another life. Others like George Eliot have argued
for a sort of corporate immortality, which she claims to be a
higher ethic. This view has never received finer expression
than in her words :

"O may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence; live

In pulses stirred to generosity,

« De audiendis Poetis, Chap. V.
' Lines 449 flf.

290 Basic Ideas in Religion

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

Of miserable aims that end with self,

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,

And with their mild persistence urge man's search

To vaster issues."

There is an element of nobility in this wish and hope. It
was realized on a large scale in the faith of the early Hebrews,
who thought little of their own personal immortality, but
worked and prayed for the kingdom of God among their
descendants. Public spirited men often give large sums for
institutions which shall benefit coming generations, and such a
niot've has its place and value. The harm comes only when
this idea is made a substitute for, instead of a complement of,
personal immortality.

The strange fancy prevails in some quarters that this cor-
porate immortality is less selfish than the Christian ideal, be-
cause the individual works for a good which he will never
see or share. But there is nothing selfish in desiring to see
the fruits of one's own kindly deeds. Fairbairn speaks of the
strong influence on his own character of his maternal grand-
father, whom he never saw, but who was his mother's ideal
and inspiration in the bringing up of her son. Can we be-
lieve that the grandfather is less noble in aim and character,
if now he rejoices to see the working out for good of his
life in the lives of others?

It is enough to condemn any such teaching that the motive
of such corporate immortality would be without any influence
on the lives of common men, who would then care little for
anything but self-indulgence. As Renan said : " You will
get much less from a humanity which does not believe in the
immortality of the soul than from one which does believe."
Napoleon Bonaparte, who had certainly a profound knowl-
edge of men, refused to listen to the arguments in favor of
" that amazing hybrid, Theophilanthropy, offspring of the
Goddess of Reason and La Reveilliere-Lepeaux." He made
this crushing retort to M. Mathieu, " What is your Theophilan-
thropy? Oh, don't talk to me of a religion which only takes

Witness of Conscience to Personality 2gi

me for this life, without telling me whence I come or whither
I go." ^ John Fiske exclaims impatiently, " The positivist
argument that the only worthy immortality is survival in the
grateful remembrance of one's fellow creatures would hardly
be regarded as anything but a travesty and a trick. If the
world's long cherished beliefs are to fall, in God's name let
them fall, but save us from the intellectual hypocrisy that
goes about pretending we are none the poorer!"^

However, the objection that the hope of personal immor-
tality is disguised selfishness springs from a misconception of
its whole spirit. To deny that goodness depends on reward is
a very different thing from saying that goodness and truth
themselves are transitory things which perish when man dies.
Xo goodness worthy of the name ever did spring from desire
for pay, or fear of harm. No true love of God or man can
ever be selfish. But in saying this we do not mean that we
may not aim at ethical qualities and desire the inner peace and
blessedness which they bring with them, just as St. Paul al-
ways sought a " conscience void of offense toward God and
men." ^° Spiritual qualities bring spiritual blessings — com-
munion with God, peace passing understanding, joy in the serv-
ice of God, freedom from " the body of death," ^^ and power
to grow in grace and to realize our noblest possibilities. Such
spiritual blessings are included in Christ's Beatitudes, where
each grace has its cognate beatitude in kind, as for instance,
" Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness,
for they shall be filled." ^- We long for the future life because
of the promise it gives of reunion with our lost ones, and the
possibility it oft'ers of wide service in the Master's Kingdom,
for we are told that when He pronounces His " Well done,
good and faithful servant," He makes His reward in terms
of opportunity for twice as much continued service. Envy
and jealousy would mar Heaven itself, as we learn from the

8 Rose, Life of Napoleon I, Vol. I, p. 252.
8 Through Nature to God, p. 170.
10 Acts 24:16.
" Rom. 7 :24.
12 Matt. 5 :6.

292 Basic Ideas in Religion

Parable of the Laborers. The character of virtue is lowered
by selfish working for reward. As Tennyson tells us the de-
sire of virtue is " the glory of going on, and still to be."

" Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,

Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea —

Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong —
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she;

Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.

" The wages of sin is death : if the wages of Virtue be dust.

Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desired no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die." ^^

IL THE HOPE OF IMMORTALITY

We cannot prove immortality ; we can only give confirma-
tory hints of a universal hope, hints that can not be put as
forcibly as those that make for faith in God. This belief to be
clear demands a soul capable of it, and in tune with it. A
true and satisfying sense of immortality must be achieved
through life, not through intellect. It cannot be taken second-
hand. We must stand on the divine side of life, and think
from that point of view, before we can be assured and certain
of eternal Hfe. " The faith in immortality depends on a sense
of it begotten, not on an argument for it concluded," said
Horace Bushnell, and Frederic W. Robertson held that, " the
nearer you approach the instinctive state, the more indubitable
immortality becomes."

James Martineau tells us that man does not believe in im-
mortality because it has ever been proven, but he is forever
trying to prove it, because he cannot help believing it. He
writes : " Were the problem surrendered to physics and meta-
physics, it could never quit its state of suspense; there would
be nothing to forbid the future: there would be nothing to
promise it ; and in such a question this intellectual balance
would be tantamount to practical negation. Not till we turn

13 Wages.

Witness of Conscience to Personality 293

to the moral aspects of Death, do we meet with the presiding
reasons which give the casting vote : here it is that, having
got the conditions of the case into right form, we call the real
evidence and weigh the probabilities to which it points. When
I speak of ' moral ' aspects, I mean all that are relative to the
character, either of God as the ordainer, or of man as the self-
knowing subject of death. As between beings. Divine and
human, standing in spiritual relations to each other, what place
does this institute hold, and what significance does it appar-
ently possess? . . . With us human beings, the usual animal
order of means and ends is inverted ; the inner springs of
action, instead of merely serving the organism, dominate and
use it : our faculties are set up on their own account, and
carry their own ends. From this position I now advance a
further step, and say that the divine ends manifestly in-
wrought in our human nature and life are continuous and of
large reach ; and, being here only partially or even incipiently
attained, indicate that the present term of years is but a frag-
ment and a prelude." ^^

It is not strange that immortality cannot be demonstrated.
As Dr. Osier put it in a lecture, " Science is organized knowl-
edge, and knowledge is of things we see. Now the things that
are seen are temporal ; of the things that are unseen science
knows nothing, and has at present no means of knowing any-
thing." On the other hand neither science nor philosophy can
give any good and valid reasons against immortality. The
facts of life, especially on the inward side, point plainly to a
future life, but it is impossible to demonstrate its existence
scientifically by verification, for to do so one would have to die,
and pass into the future state. This proof, in the nature of
the case we cannot have now. But we may meanwhile ponder
the many facts of life, and inner experiences, hopes and con-
victions, which confirm the natural faith in immortality.

The charge is made in some quarters that the interest in the
future life is declining, and that many are claiming they de-

1* Study of Religion, Vol. II, pp. 346, 7.

294 Basic Ideas in Religion

sire no more than this life. But the main ground for such
views is probably discontent with the old conception of Heaven
as a place merely of rest, or of praise without active service.
This is a repelling rather than an attractive thought to the
modern man. Nor is it the Scripture teaching, for Heaven
is there rightly pictured as a city — the ideal state — with
abounding duties and the strength to do them. Confidence in
the life everlasting will be restored and become a vital factor
in men's conduct if they are taught that every activity of
which human beings are capable is a sacred thing, which
in the divine ideal of it is altogether noble, beautiful, worthy
of all honor, and not destined to perish in the using, but to
be trained to ever higher and higher perfection till its scope
is illimitable. Thus in Browning's words,

" All that we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist ;
Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist.
When eternity confirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard.
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;
Enough that he heard it once ; we shall hear it by and by." ^^

The Incompleteness of Life

Our faith in immortality is strengthened by the feeling, that
our mental and spiritual equipment is in excess of our present
needs. Earth does not offer a field large enough for the exer-
cise of our highest powers and, the more gifted a man is, the
more he realizes his failure to attain his ideal. On the earthly
plane there is an enormous waste of power, without a parallel
elsewhere, for the brutes have only such faculties as are indis-
pensable in the struggle for life; they are not so made as to
dream dreams and see visions and aspire to ideals which the
speedy coming of certain death mocks at, and stamps as folly.
Man transcends in thought all physical limits which bind this
body ; memory oversteps them, imagination soars beyond them,

^^ Abt Vogler.

Witness of Conscience to Personality 295

sympathy forgets them, mathematical thought searches secrets
in farthest space and remotest time, and man is at home in
the infinite. This freedom from any temporal or spatial limi-
tations is not confined to great minds. It is the peculiar
privilege of all human thought, forming its background,
though not always present in the consciousness, just as we all
live and act under the infinite sky though for the most part
we think not of it. This appears from the simple analysis of
the four ways in which we set our life at any present moment
over against a larger life and world, (i) We are never con-
scious of our present thought or action without more or less
vivid memory of our past life and thought of the years before
us. (2) We associate and contrast our individual life with
the social organism of the family and the state, which likewise
reach far back and stretch forward. (3) The man of thought
passes beyond this and contemplates all life, organic and hu-
man in contrast with the world-whole, the universe out-reach-
ing us on every side, yet not beyond our thought's grasp.
(4) This reach of vision grasping the cosmic process as one
whole, a related system of things in time and space, carries
with it inevitably the faith or certainty of an eternal spiritual
order transcending the physical world as its source and sup-
port. Our very feeling of the transitory character of all
earthly things arises from our deeper feeling of a higher ex-
istence that passeth not but abideth forever.

William James says that " the demand for immortality is
nowadays essentially teleological. We believe ourselves im-
mortal because we believe ourselves fit for immortality." ^^
He thinks that " what Lotze says of immortality is about all
that human wnsdom can say," ^'' and quotes him as follows :
" We have no other principle for deciding it than this general
idealistic belief : that every created thing will continue whose
continuance belongs to the meaning of the world, and so long
as it does so belong; whilst every one will pass away whose
reality is justified only in a transitory phase of the world's

16 Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 348.

17 Ibid., p. 349.

296 Basic Ideas in Religion

course. That this principle admits of no further application
in human hands need hardly be said. IVe surely know not
the merits which may give to one being a claim on eternity,
nor the defects which would cut others off." ^^

It would impeach the whole truthfulness of Nature, who
with her endowments gives the opportunity of their exercise,
if there were no realm where the noblest elements in man,
reason and spirit, which especially constitute him a human
being, could not reach their perfect expression and com-
pletion. Goethe bears testimony to this, " My belief in the im-
mortality of the soul springs from the idea of activity ; for
when I persevere to the end in a course of restless activity, I
have a sort of guarantee from Nature that, when the present
form of my existence proves itself inadequate for the energiz-
ing of my spirit, she will provide another form more appropri-
ate. When a man is seventy-five years old, he cannot avoid
now and then thinking of death. This thought, when it comes,
leaves me in a state of perfect peace, for I have the most
assured conviction that our soul is of an essence absolutely
indestructible ; an essence that works on from eternity to eter-
nity. It is like the sun,which to our earthly eyes sinks and sets,
but in reality never sinks, but shines on unceasingly." ^^

But in reply to such hopes, we are sometimes bluntly told
that when all is said, man is an animal and subject to the laws
of all animal life. Why should he in sublime self-conceit ex-
pect to survive when they perish. But the analogy halts ;
there is an enormous difference in a vital point. A seed de-
velops duly and orderly into a perfect plant which, having
brought forth a flower and then a seed like to itself, withers
and dies, its whole work done, its end attained. This cycle is
true of man's physical nature also, in all cases where the
bodily development runs its full course and a child is born
to take the place of the man who dies. But the body and its
life is not that which differentiates man from the beast, it is
his mind and spirit, and here the analogy fails. No man at-

^^Metaphysik, § 245 fin.

19 Conversation with Eckermann, Feb. 4, 1829.

Witness of Conscience to Personality 297

tains his loftiest mental stature, still less his spiritual ideal.

Even the longest life, is incomplete on its intellectual side.
Such a life as Goethe's finds on materialistic principles its best
symbol in a broken column — a work well begun but left in-
complete. But such a symbol, though common in cemeteries,
has no place in Christian thought. Life for children of the
Highest can have no broken lines. Measured in time's brief
sections the other part is hidden — it does seem broken off —
but seen as God sees it and as we shall see it one day, it rises
upward without a break or flaw.

Even the preparation for man's proper work in the world
in full activity is out of all proportion to the time available
for that work. Ten years at least are required for intelligence
and self-control to replace the instincts and appetites which
form the sole guides for the half-animal child, another fifteen
years are needed for the physical growth and education and
maturity of manhood, thirty or thirty-five years must suffice
for the strong and rejoicing exercise of the slowly maturing
powers, and the remaining twenty-five belong to the forces of
decay, beginning later in some lives than in others, but inevi-
table in all. This is the record of human life at its best ; it
takes no account of the hours, totalling years, past in sleep, or
lost through sickness or fatigue, and it passes over the multi-
tude of pathetic cases where noble souls are early called away,
their promise unfulfilled, their fund of energy, to the human
eye, wasted.

So far from men's outgrowing the craving for a larger,
unbounded life, as some declare, the progress of science, the
conquests of civilization, the garnered fruits of the world's
culture, make the future life more than ever an urgent need
in strong and healthy souls. The rebellion against " dusty
death," the demand for immortality as the only just consumma-
tion of life's fragmentary beginnings and many failures, grows
more intense as man becomes more conscious of his divine
gift of reading the thoughts of his Maker. In the morning
of fresh enthusiasms and vigorous power, the student presses
forward eager and exulting, and storms the lofty heights of

298 Basic Ideas in Religion

known science only, like Moses on Pisgah, to die reluctant in
full sight of the promised land of wider knowledge and
grander power, to fall with palsied hand and weakened eye and
faiHng brain. With all the vast increase of human knowledge
and the marvelous expanding of our faculties, our sympathies,
and our aspirations, the melancholy fact remains that there has
come no increase of years wherein to use them. This is the
sad note which Browning strikes in Cleon, the poem in which
he pictures the wide culture of our day as the lofty watch-
tower lifting the man of thought far above the dreary flats of
common-place life. " But, alas, the soul now climbs it just to
perish there ! " seeing all the beauty, craving all the light, eager
for the wider reaches of thought and knowledge open to the
exulting gazer from the height, but yet not able to do more
in proportion to the opportunity than men in the narrower
horizon of early days before the stately tower of science was
upreared with its wider outlook on infinite space and time. It
does seem that to the man,

" Who seest the wider but to sigh the more,
Most progress is most failure."

Well may the thinker who limits his outlook to the horizons
of earth cry out in bitterness of soul against the limitations of
knowledge, against the hard antithesis between the art that is
long and the life that is short, and rebel against the fate that
weakens his brain or ends his life just as he has acquired the
wisdom which comes with years of broadening experience and
mature thought.

Cleon, the man of many-sided genius, poet, artist, architect,
musician, and author, cries :

" It is so horrible,
r dare at times imagine to my need
Some future state revealed to us by Zeus,
Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy,
— To seek which, the joy- hunger forces us:
That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait
On purpose to make prized the life at large —

Witness of Conscience to Personality 299

Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death,

We burst there as the worm into the fly,

Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no !

Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas.

He must have done so, were it possible ! "

But Cleon the pagan, looks with contempt at the Christian
who has had the revelation.

" Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew,
As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised.
Hath access to a secret shut from us?
Thou wrongest our philosophy, O King,
In stooping to inquire of such an one,
As if his answer could impose at all !

Their doctrine could be held by no sane man."

We feel instinctively that moral character is the highest,
holiest thing we know ; that its discipline and perfecting is
the one credible aim and purport of the great worlds of mat-
ter. The value of the soul and its infinite possibilities is the
special revelation of Christianity, which intensified the sense of
personality, but noble hearts all the world over have dimly
felt it even in the days of darkness. They sadly complained
that the divine purpose in respect to man, the realizing of all
that was highest in his capacities, fails utterly if this life be all,
and in none more clearly than in the noblest, whose imperfect
goodness and unrealized aims no one is so ready to admit as
they themselves are. We feel with Arnold that resignation is
difficult in view of the shortness and uncertainty of human ex-
istence,

"A life
With large results so little rife.
Though bearable, seems hardly worth
This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth." -°

Read such a life as that of John Stirling, unknown to the
world, yet blessed with such biographers as J. Hare and Car-
lyle, or drink in the beauty of such souls as Keats or Sidney

20 Resignntion.

300 Basic Ideas in Religion

Lanier, and then ask yourself whether you can beheve that
such choice flowers of humanity fully realize the divine idea
in them in the short span of their earthly lives. Each of them
could say with Browning,

" I know that earth is not my sphere
For I cannot so narrow be but that
I still exceed it."

Arthur Hallam will live forever in the noble In Memoriam,
the grandest monument ever erected to a human soul. As we
read it we share Tennyson's admiration, for we learn through
many a word and hint the strength of his character and the
wonderful reach and promise of his mental ability. We can-
not doubt the poet's comforting reasonable faith that his great
powers undeveloped here would find full and exulting activity.

" In those great offices that suit

The full grown energies of heaven." 21

It is as if our body were the scaffolding, and the spiritual
nature were the beautiful temple being erected within. Then
wouFd we have the strange anomaly of a perfect scaffolding
built for a work of holy faith, which itself is never finished,
but falls into ruin with the taking down of the scajffolding.

Bishop Butler was the first to state this ethical basis for faith
in the future life, though he also defended iht metaphysical
proof. But Butler did not develop the argument as fully as
Kant, who based all the elements of religion, God, the self
and immortality on the Categorical Imperative of Duty.
Kant's argument is simple :

1. Since conscience commands unconditionally, allows no
alternative, no excuse for individual profit or pleasure, we
must be able to obey it, i.e., we must be free agents.

2. Since conscience bears witness to a moral law higher than
humanity and infinite in its scope, such law cannot be physical.
It does not belong to the mechanical order of things. There
must be a God, of whose essential being the moral law is the
expression, and to whom our spirits are related.

21 Canto XL.

Witness of Conscience to Personality 301

3. We know by sad experience that in this world, right-
eousness does not rule and prevail and bless its servants as it
should. A good will is the highest and truest thing on the
earth. But that will is weak in itself, is beset by obstacles,
resisted by evil men and evil institutions, crushed under mis-
eries, and not blessed with that success and peace which we
feel should come to the man who tries to stand on God's side
and do His will.

Therefore, unless these thoughts are delusions, there must
be a life beyond the life of the senses where the present hin-
drances will be removed ; where duty and the will to obey will
have free scope to act ; where man can realize his highest ;
where virtue and happiness, here often sundered, at last shall
meet ; where the good shall be the happy, and where love shall
no longer wear the crown of thorns.

We could not have any sense at all of imperfection, any
dissatisfaction with self, any feeling of the transitory character
of all earthly things, if we had not within us, a standard of
perfection and the feeling of unlimited possibilities, if our in-
ner world did not open out on every side upon the infinite and
eternal. We are in Pascal's great phrase " of royal lineage,
exiled and discrowned, yet conscious of our higher birth," or
in St. Augustine's saying, " Thou hast made us for Thyself
alone, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee." We
can quote the unexpected witness of Renan, to the fact that
" man is most religious in his best moments. It is when he
is good that he says that virtue must correspond to an eternal
order ; and it is when he looks upon things in a disinterested
manner that he finds death absurd and revolting. How can
we fail to suppose that it is in such moments that man gains
the highest conceptions ? " In another place he writes, " We
then say boldly that religion is a product of the normal man;
that man is the truest when he is the most religious and most
assured of an infinite destiny." ^-

On the other hand, if goodness roots and lives only in human

22 See an article by Allier in The Independent, Dec. 22, 1892.

302 Basic Ideas in Religion

wills, all ideals, all righteousness, and all faiths must vanish
with the disappearance of these wills — a thought which car-
ries with it the loss of faith in God Himself. We feel it
cannot be, especially in the light of what we know of the
relations between God and man.

Immortality Implied in Any Communion with God

Man's very faith in God carries with it the assurance of a
spiritual life, for of all our ideas, none is so useless for purely
physical existence as that of God, and it could not arise, as we
have seen, from our phenomenal experience. For man to
know God, likeness in being is required — only spirit can know
spirit. For God to love man — as devout experience testifies
He does — human worth is required. The Eternal One does
not love ephemera. If the noble souls who have known the
loving God most truly and realized His fellowship in the spirit,
pass away into nothingness, would not God suffer perpetual
bereavement as He buries in continuous succession the unful-
filled promises of His own creation, which must then be reck-
oned as failures? The long procession of mankind would
be naught but an unending funeral train passing before the
throne of the Eternal One, who, though called " Our Father,"
would yet be unable to save His children from disappearance
in the empty void.

When the Jews saw Jesus weeping at the tomb of Lazarus,
they said, " Behold how he loved him ! Could not this man,
who opened the eyes of him that was blind, have caused that
this man should not die ? " -^ The argument is valid. Love
which has omnipotence at its disposal is not true love if it per-
mits not simply the body of the loved one, but the spirit also,
to perish utterly. Browning has the same thought :

. " He, the Eternal First and Last,
Who, in his power, had so surpassed
All man conceives of what is might, —
Whose wisdom too, showed infinite,
— Would prove as infinitely good ;

23 John 11:36, 7-

Witness of Conscience to Personality 303

Would never (my soul understood),
With power to work all love desires,
Bestow e'en less than man requires." ^4

Christ gave the Jews of His day who denied immortality
an argument they could not refute, " But that the dead are
raised, even Moses showed, in the place concerning the Bush,
when he called the Lord the God of Abraham, and the God of
Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Now he is not the God of the
dead, but of the living; for all live tmto Him." ^^

Man is the only animal who theologizes, i.e., thinks of and
believes in God, and he is the only animal who foresees death
and sees beyond it. The two " faiths " are correlative, the ex-
pression of spiritual instincts which may be trusted as certainly
as the bird trusts the strange impulse that drives it to the far-
off South which it has never seen before. This faith of man
in his own spirit cannot be explained as due to " sense impres-
sions," for the simple reason that no outer experiences could
suggest it, as the psychologists themselves declare. The evo-
lutionists' maxim of utility fails utterly to explain the univer-
sal ideas of God and immortality, for man, as an animal, has
no more use for that concept than other brutes. It has no
relation to his animal functions of eating, self-preservation, and
reproduction. Nor does it help him in his purely worldly life,
for the believer is not necessarily rewarded on earth. Some
men of pure science boast that they have no need of " that
hypothesis." But in the realm of the ethical, social, and reli-
gious life, it is a most potent and vivifying faith, which justifies
itself by its fruits without, and certifies itself to the soul within.

This intercommunion between God and man implies two
thoughts converging in one. ( i ) Man made in God's image
is His child, and not merely His creature. Christ showed this
by many comparisons between man and the rest of creation,
and by His proclamation of God as the Father of all men.
Therefore man can know God. (2) God's care for man and
His self-revelation to him show God's estimate of him and his

2* Christmas Eve.
25 Luke 20 -.2,7, 8.

304 Basic Ideas in Religion

worth, for the Eternal would not make friends with the crea-
tures of a day. Man, on earth for but a few and quickly pass-
ing years, knows the Eternal One because He has made him
but little less than Elohim. This thought that communion with
God implies continued life in God, a relation which the mere
accident of death cannot break or end, is the strong foundation
of faith in an immortality worthy of our hopes.

" Oh, ye that plod, turning the sod,
Your worship lifts you up to God.
Not of the earth had ye your birth.
Others are ye of better worth.

Spirits, not clay,

Children of day.
Not beasts of burden, souls that pray."

CHAPTER XVII

THE WITNESS OF THE HEART AS SEEN
IN THE POETS

The witness of the heart, as seen in the higher faith of hu-
manity expressing itself in the poets, is the ontological argu-
ment for man's spiritual being, for the great poets give worthy
utterance to the unspoken feelings and convictions which lie
hidden in the common heart. They are prophets of humanity,
and speak on some aspects of religion more deeply, though less
clearly than the theologians. The great poets of the world and
especially of the nineteenth century were men of spiritual faith
in God and man, and their study is helpful to the Christian
thinker. The truly great poet is he who gives worthy expres-
sion to the thoughts of the mass of men, and they love him
because he says for them what they cannot say for themselves.
There lies in the heart of the average man a whole world of
possible thought and true feeling, more than philosophy can
explore, which awaits the poetic insight that can give it expres-
sion, and reveal man to himself at his best.

Both philosopher and poet work on the same inner material,
drawing spiritual life out of the common consciousness, but
they work on different lines. Philosophy seeks to analyze, test
and verify our intuitions and spiritual ideas. Poetry takes
them for granted. It has high and noble faith in truth, con-
fident that its thought springs out of the common heart of man
and that the hearts of men will respond to it. It trusts not
to clear-cut argument but appeals directly to the great faiths
of humanity. It is in the hidden depths of inspiration and
faith that poetry finds its store-house. Matthew Arnold says
that poetry is criticism of life, yet not of life on its outer
side, but on its deeper side and in its secret sources. The fact

30s

3o6 Basic Ideas in Religion

that poets study man, not on the side of the body as scientists
do, nor of the mind as do philosophers, but chiefly on the inner
side of feehng, gives force to their witness to God and immor-
tality.

The starting point of religion is never mere reason. Man
has instinctive faith, the intuition of the divine. The great
poets appeal to this underlying faith and awaken it to clear
vision, making us realize its deep significance. " The greatest
thing a human soul ever does," writes Ruskin, " is to see
something clearly and then to tell what it has seen in clear
speech. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think,
and thousands can think for one who can see. To see with
deep insight and speak with power is poetry, prophecy, religion
all in one." It is because the poets are seers, because they
breathe the atmosphere of admiration, hope, and love in which
men at their highest live, that they afford a witness to the
deeper nature of man, and the high and holy things of God,
more beautiful in form and convincing in force than any words
of the philosophers.

The most hopeful element in the thought of today is that
the spirit of the poets is beginning to affect the thought of
the thinkers. The singer's clear vision rouses new hope in
their hearts and they dare now to sink their shafts of analysis
deeper than the intellectual stratum into the profounder world
of feeling and will, the elemental nature of man. Professor
Hoffding in his recent Philosophy of Religion, concedes that
" it well may be that poetry gives more perfect expression to
the highest Reality than any scientific concept can ever do."

When we speak of the poets in this connection, we mean the
Christian poets. Here and there we do find in the nobler
Greek poets, as we have seen, strains breathing high hopes of
the life to come. But such thoughts were the heritage of the
few, the many groped in darkness. But the ancient hopes even
at the highest never rose into strong convictions, full of inspira-
tion. Nowhere do we realize so clearly the work of Christian-
ity in revealing the truth of life and immortality, as when we
compare the ancient and modern poets. Thus there is an in-

The Witness of the Heart 307

finite diflference between Homer and Dante. It is not simply
that more than two thousand years have elapsed between them,
but that the Christian poet stands in the clear light of the eternal
world, while the Greek lives in the dim twilight of uncertainty.
What characterized the Greek poetry was the vitality of the
earth life, full of fresh interest and eager expectations — Hades
was a shadow. But of the higher consciousness of the Middle
Ages it might almost be said that the two are reversed. Earth
is shadowy and Heaven and Hell the reality. Dante's great
lessons, it must be remembered, are independent of their local
clothing in the ideas and dogmas of his age. He speaks to
all men in clearest words of the awful significance of human
life, lived in the felt presence of that eternal world to which
man in spirit belongs. He sets forth the infinite worth of
goodness, and the infinite guilt of sin, and the momentous
consequences of our choices in time on our destiny in eter-
nity.

From Dante on to the nineteenth century there is not a great
poet in Christendom who can be quoted as a whole on the
atheistic or materialistic side. They have their sceptical moods
like all who think deeply, but there is " just so much of doubt,
as bids them plant a foot upon the Sun-road." It could not
be otherwise for they see through the phantom show of things
into the abiding realities of God, into the deeper realm of
motive and principle, hope and faith, whence springs the ethical
and spiritual life. Their world reaches up into the heights
and down into the depths beyond the plummet of the senses.
Earth does not confine it. Time does not limit it. Even
when the world to come is not definitely mentioned, the thought
of it is ever present, like the mighty dome of the sky over-
arching with the infinity of space our petty earth.

This is true of the whole abounding life and thought of the
wonderful Elizabethan period and of no writer is it more true
than of Shakespeare — most objective of all poets, laying bare
the hearts of men, but hiding his own so completely that we
cannot tell even in the Sonnets, whether or no we touch the
real man. Yet the Sonnets do seem in a few cases to reveal

3o8 Basic Ideas in Religion

his own underlying faith. His oft repeated expressions of the
transitoriness of all earthly things, such as

". . . Everything that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment," ^

seem to demand the certainty of an eternal world. He never
fails to bear sincerest witness to the superiority of true charac-
ter to circumstance, and to that sense of duty which scorns
all consequence. That great panorama of human life, just as
it is with its tragedy and its comedy, its mighty conflicts within
and without, demands as a background divine law and eternal
order to account for its profoundly felt significance. The can-
vas is too large and the noble figures too great for the narrow
horizon of earth. The man who could write the sonnet num-
bered 146 must have had the clearest vision of the truths and
realities which alone will survive the passing of the body.

" Poor Soul, the center of my sinful earth.
Fooled by these rebel powers that thee array.
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body's end?
Then, Soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store ;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more :
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then ! "

Although Christianity is absent from Shakespeare in clear
dogmatic form, the Christian conception of life and duty is
everywhere present. Nowhere does conscience appear so def-
initely in its power to convict as in the tent before the battle
when Richard HI wakes from his dream to cry:

" O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me !
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.

1 Sonnet 15.

The Witness of the Heart 309

... I rather hate myself,
For hateful deeds committed by myself. . . .
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain." 2

Or in the effort of the guilty King in Hamlet to pray :

" O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven ;

It hath the primal eldest curse upon 't,

A brother's murther ! — Pray can I not,

Though inclination be as sharp as will;

My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;

And, like a man to double business bound,

I stand in pause where I shall first begin.

And both neglect . . .

. . . Then I'll look up;

My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer

Can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murther! —

That cannot be; since I am still possess'd

Of those effects for which I did the murther.

And oft 'tis seen, the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law : But 'tis not so above :
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell'd,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults.
To give in evidence." ^

But the Elizabethan outburst of vigorous and lofty thought
disappeared as suddenly as it arose, and the practical and pro-
saic spirit of the people reasserted itself under the influence
of Bacon and Locke. Milton indeed is a master who found
ityi comrades, and none who shared his high and noble plane
of thought. His " soul was like a star, and dwelt apart." He
is the most Christian poet of first rank, large portions of his
two long poems being paraphrases of the Genesis narrative of
the Creation and the Fall, and the Gospel story of Paradise
regained. In his own generation he had great influence, and
many of the popular conceptions still lingering concerning

2 Act. V, Sc 3.

3 Act. Ill, Sc. 3.

310 Basic Ideas in Religion

Satan, the Fall, and the Atonement are Miltonic and not
Biblical. With the change in point of view much of his reli-
gious teaching has lost its value for us. This criticism, how-
ever, does not apply to the shorter poems, such as the Ode
on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, or On Time.

" Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race :

Call on the lazy leaden stepping hours,

Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace ;

And glut thyself with what thy womb devours —

Which is no more than what is false and vain,

And merely mortal dross ;

So little is our loss !

So little is thy gain !

For when as each thing bad thou hast entombed,

And last of all thy greedy self consumed,

Then long eternity shall greet our bliss

With an individual kiss :

And joy shall overtake us as a flood ;

When everything that is sincerely good,

And perfectly divine,

With truth and peace and love, shall ever shine

About the supreme throne

Of Him, to whose happy-making sight alone

When once our heavenly-guided soul shall cHmb,

Then all this earthly grossness quit,

Attir'd with stars, we shall forever sit,

Triumphing over Death, and Chance, and thee, O Time."

It is a sad and sudden descent from these mountain heights
of Christian faith to the dreary level of the commonplace
worldliness and prosaic self-complacency of the eighteenth cen-
tury before the days of Cowper. Its most admired poet was
Pope, the mechanical rhymester, with his materialistic and
fatalistic Essay on Man with man left out. Its one writer
with a spark of real genius, Gray, a poetic soul capable of
noble work, could meditate in a village churchyard and write
an Elegy, beautiful in its measured cadences, heart moving in
its pathetic picture of the vanity of human life, but as barren
of Christian hope and faith as though penned by Cicero or
Seneca. Our only heritage in worship from that epoch, except

The Witness of the Heart 311

Addison's Twenty-third Psalm, is Hadrian's hymn to the soul
which was reset by Pope. Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate, re-
cently stated that in his youth, he could repeat the whole of
The Deserted Village, the Essay on Man and the Elegy in a
Country Churchyard. They are representative eighteenth cen-
tury poems, and they are as silent in respect to the great
truths of Christianity as though their writers had never heard
the name of Jesus Christ, or the sound of His (jospel. Con-
trast them with nineteenth century lyrics and dramatic poems
and we have reason for hopefulness. If Christianity sur-
vived that polite indifference, it will surely be impregnable after
the glowing and outspoken faith of the Victorian age.

But at eventide it was light. The close of the eighteenth
century was marked by the most remarkable revival of spiritual
thought in the history of literature. It came with the sudden-
ness of a glorious sunrise and quickening breeze after the suffo-
cating night of damp, low-lying clouds. The first streaks of
the dawn are found in Cowper and Thomson, who broke away
from the artificial meter and matter of the school of Pope,
with its dislike of nature and distaste for simplicity of life.
Their muse does not leave the peaceful homes in quiet places
for the feverish gaiety and excitement of the town. The kind
reception given to The Task, and the many friends it won for
the shy and morbid poet, shows that the heart of England
was still sound.

Cowper is the forenmner of Wordsworth, and many passages
describing peaceful rural scenes read almost like extracts from
the latter's poems. But he lacks the depths of Wordsworth's
nobler thought, though he is more specifically Christian in his
attitude to Christ ; as in these words where we have the first
expression of the immanence of God spiritually present through
Christ in heart and soul.

" Thou art the source and center of all minds,
Their only point of rest, eternal Word !
From Thee departing, they are lost and rove
At random, without honor, hope, or peace.
From Thee is all that sooths the life of man,

312 Basic Ideas in Religion

His high endeavor, and his glad success,
His strength to suffer, and his will to serve.
But, O Thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all thy gifts thyself the crown!
Give what thou canst, without thee we are poor.
And with thee rich, take what thou wilt away ! " *

A band of earnest and thoughtful poets arose in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century as the result of two great
movements, the revival of spiritual Christianity under Wesley
and the Evangelicals, and the heart-stirring hopes and faiths
aroused by the French Revolution, with its assertion of the
rights and dignity of man, ere they disappeared in the gloom
of " The Terror " in France and the military despotism of Na-
poleon. These were the Lake Poets, Byron, Coleridge,
Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. It was an entirely new
feature in English poetry, and to find its like in religious
thought we must go back to the Christian Platonists, Henry
More and Benjamin Whichcote. The marvel is that a pre-
cisely similar movement took place in about the same period
in Germany under the lead of Herder, Lessing, Schiller and
Goethe, by all of whom Coleridge was greatly influenced. Not
all of the Lake Poets are specifically Christian, but even the
poets of the Revolt, Byron and Shelley, who are anti-
Christian, strike a deeper note and have more faith than Pope
or Dryden. Shelley, more sinned against than sinning, for no
sympathy or pity was shown him, struck a deeper note than
Byron. At the very heart of his revolt against the dead level
of things established, is the longing which makes Prometheus
exclaim :

"... I would fain

Be what it is my destiny to be.

The savior and the strength of suffering man,

Or sink into the original gulf of things."

In them all there is the breath of a new spirit, conscious of
God's nearness and reality in the great world of nature, its

* The Task, V : lines 896-906.

The Witness of the Heart 313

Source and Life. They have glimpses of the vast Power at
the heart of nature.

" Which wields the world with never wearied love
Sustains it from below, and kindles it above."

One evident characteristic of this school was a weak sense of
man's personal being as distinct from God. They all incline
to the extreme form of the Divine Immanence which dwells
so intently on God's presence in nature, that man's own per-
sonality shrinks almost out of sight.

Wordsworth is easily the leader of this group. His main
characteristic was that his mind was open equally to the world
of sense, the finite, and to the sphere of the infinite, which bor-
ders on and surrounds our little world, which is a part of in-
finitude itself. From the sense-world we go out to the bound-
less in space, time and power. Our own short-coming in the
presence of the Moral Ideal gives us the conception of abso-
lute duty and links us by a personal bond to an answering Will.
Each finite life truly lived passes under the shadow of infinity.
The whole poem Intimations of Immortality breathes the pro-
foundest faith in man's spiritual being, carried to the extreme
of Plato's faith in the preexistence of the soul. This indeed
is the one defect in his point of view, he looks backward rather
than forward. Tintern Abbey best illustrates the power of in-
sight into the secret of Nature's peace, which comes to one,

" While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things."

In this same poem we see his belief in the World-Spirit as
personal, for to him Nature is

" The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being."

The final words differentiate the thought from pantheism as it
appears in Shelley. This personal conception of God under-
lies the Prelude:

314 Basic Ideas in Religion

" Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe !
Thou Soul that art the Eternity of thought,"

ill which he has in mind the Christian ideas of both the Logos
and the Holy Spirit. Still more clearly is God conceived as a
personal spirit in the grand Ode to Duty, which throws the
whole emphasis on the ethical character of the Power which
creates and sustains the world.

For the most part the Lake Poets were passive spectators,
meditating rather than acting. This is one of the limitations
besetting the attitude of pure contemplation. They show a
lack of interest in man as man, and a disinclination, especially
after the failures of the hopes aroused by the French Revolu-
tion, to take any active part in life. They opened the eyes of
those who were ready for this message, but they held aloof
from those who had no sympathy with their point of view.
They had no word for the fighter and the worker.

" The eye — it cannot choose but see ;
We cannot bid the ear be still ;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against, or with our will.

" Nor less I deem that there are powers
Which of themselves our minds impress ;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

" Think you, 'mid all this mighty sun
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come.
But we must still be seeking? ""^

But alas ! our age has eaten of the wormwood, which in mystic
vision St. John saw fall from heaven into the waters of earth,
and they became bitter. Such calm and quiet thought, save
for a moment, is impossible for us. Science, which is the tree
of knowledge — not of life — has changed the aspect of Na-
ture, which often turns to us a face as stern as that of the

^ Expostulation and Reply.

The Witness of the Heart 315

Sphinx, and suggests dark questions which we must face, but
cannot solve.

Meditation is essential to the perfectness of the Christian
life, but it should not end in itself. It is meant ever to prompt
and rouse men to act. This action is the keynote of the wider
outlook and clearer faith of the Victorian poets, a faith that
sees God present and ruling, not only in the fixed order of Na-
ture, but in the seemingly confused but ever progressive life
of humanity. Our best poetry today is human and dramatic.
It loves to dwell in the haunts of men amid their toils and
struggles, their conflicts and passions, their sins and virtues.
Humanity is its theme, many-sided, perplexing in its mystery,
baffling in its frequent perversity and degradation, yet in-
domitable in its hope. Humanity is ever capable of rising
again, and therefore it is worthy of reverence. Our poetry
today is theistic not pantheistic, and holds that man is made in
God's image. Thus we have another forward movement in
the vigorous action and wider hopes and profounder interest in
man of the Victorian poets, but without losing that sense of the
divine presence which was the noble legacy of their predeces-
sors. At no period in any nation did Christianity so inspire
and dominate poetic literature, even in writers not Christian
in a technical sense, as in this age.

But the heights of faith were not taken without a struggle,
and two noble souls faltered and fell in the conflict. Arthur
Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold, reluctant poets of doubt
and sadness, are exceptions to the faith and hope which char-
acterized their contemporaries. They represent the many who
were swept off their feet by the sudden appearance in its might
of the spirit of science, pointing to her mighty works as a
proof of her sole right to dominate all thought, determine
all truth, and test all creeds. They are the type of the per-
plexed souls of whom Liddon said, " They would believe if they
only could." They were not blind to the issues at stake, and
their awful significance for all that is highest and holiest in
human life, individual and social. Through their poems there
runs as an undertone " the eternal note of sadness " which

3i6 Basic Ideas in Religion

Matthew Arnold heard in the " melancholy, long, withdrawing
roar " of the ebbing tide at Dover Beach.

Clough especially dared to face the horror which the new
earth-spirit raised, and he recoiled. Bitterly he asks :

" Is it true, ye gods, who treat us

As the gambling fool is treated ; . . .

Is it true that poetical power,

The gift of Heaven, . . .

All we glorify and bless

In our rapturous exaltation . . .

Is, in reason's grave precision,

Nothing more, nothing less,

Than a peculiar conformation,

Constitution and condition,

Of the brain and of the belly? "^

Arthur Hugh Clough was a young man of brilliant promise,
who entered Oxford as Balliol scholar. He was an enthusi-
astic follower of Doctor Arnold, but he found the mass of the
students under the influence of John Henry Newman, whose
theology was directly antagonistic to the Rugby School. He
became the friend of Ward and Jowett and Matthew Arnold,
but he did not fulfil the great expectations of his friends. He
found the tendency in theological thought was mainly to sacer-
dotalism — patristic and ecclesiastical — rather than to the
broader and deeper conceptions of God and man of Arnold
and Maurice. He stood between the old faith and the new,
and drifted into the stormy sea of doubt, beset with questions
he could not solve, and with no pledge of certainty on which to
rest. It is hardly fair to call him an unbeliever, though he
was a sadly perplexed sceptic. The majority of his poems
deal with Bible characters and topics, always reverently, for his
whole spirit is deeply devout. His doubts were intellectual,
never of the heart. He warns us out of his own experience
with the barrenness of the purely critical spirit when he bids us
hold fast the old.

6 " Wen Gott Betriigt, ist Wohl Betrogen:

The Witness of the Heart 317

" ' Old things need not be therefore true,'
O brother men, nor yet the new ;
Ah ! still awhile the old thought retain,
And yet consider it again !

" The souls of now two thousand years
Have laid up here their toils and fears.
And all the earnings of their pain —
Ah, yet consider it again !

" We ! what do we see ? each a space
Of some few yards before his face;
Does that the whole wide plan explain?
Ah, yet consider it again !

" Alas ! the great world goes its way,
And takes its truth from each new day;
They do not quit, nor can retain,
Far less consider it again." ^

Matthew Arnold also felt that the science-spirit, reducing
all experiences to quantitative forms of matter and motion, was
as fatal to all the higher interests of humanity as it was to
spiritual faith. In one pessimistic address, he foretold the
passing of pure literature which deals with human life and
conduct, and the increasing neglect of human studies in our
colleges, under the pressing demand for technical training, the
abject worship of the "practical" and all that makes for ef-
ficiency and the getting of money. But the revolt of the hearts
of both these men against the nightmare of their heads is na-
ture's own protest against such a denial of all that makes man
truly man. Their very sadness at the thought of the passing
of all high and holy truths is in itself a tribute to the hold which
these truths had on their inmost souls. In spite of doubt they
strike the same note of duty as the others and call on men to
act on the noblest lines they know and never to despair. Poor
Clough, heart true, but head perplexed, proclaimed nobly what
he did believe, though alas he could not live it.

''Ah! Yet Consider It Again.

3i8 Basic Ideas in Religion

" Hope evermore and believe, O man, for e'en as thy thought
So are the things that thou seest; e'en as thy hope and belief.

Go from the east to the west, as the sun and the stars direct thee,

Go with tlie girdle of man, go and encompass the earth.

Not for the gain of the gold; for the getting, the hoarding, the having,

But for the joy of the deed; but for the Duty to do.

Go with the spiritual life, the higher volition and action.

With the great girdle of God, go and encompass the earth.

Say to thyself: It is good: yet is there better than it.
This that I see is not all, and this that I do is but little;
Nevertheless it is good, though there is better than it." ^

Arnold also refuses to be paralyzed by doubt, to feel com-
pelled to choose " between madman and slave," between fri-
volity and superstition. So he bids us hope in Oberman Oiice
More, where the spirit of the noble worker for man whispers
clearly to Arnold's soul :

" Despair not thou as I despaired,
Nor be cold gloom thy prison !
Forward the gracious hours have fared.
And see ! the sun is risen ! . . .
What still of strength is left, employ,
This end to help attain:
One common wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again!"

One prayer rose up clear and true from his perplexed heart in
the noble litany of Staghiiis.

" Thou, who dost dwell alone ;
Thou, who dost know thine own ;
Thou, to whom all are known
From the cradle to the grave,^
Save, oh ! save."

Clough in his very protest against the ecclesiastical side of
Christianity bids man not to lose faith that the prophet long
withdrawn in Sinai's darkness, will reappear.

" 'Tis but the cloudy darkness dense;
Though blank the tale it tells.

8 Hope Evermore and Believe.

The Witness of the Heart 319

No God, no Truth ! yet He, in sooth,

Is there — within it dwells ;
Within the skeptic darkness deep

He dwells that none may see,
Till idol forms and idle thoughts

Have passed and ceased to be :
No God, no Truth ! ah, though, in sooth

So stand the doctrine's half:
On Egypt's track return not back,

Nor own the Golden Calf.

" Take better part, with manlier heart.

Thine adult spirit can;
No God, no Truth, receive it ne'er —

Believe it ne'er — O Man!
But turn not then to seek again

What first the ill began ;
No God, it saith ; ah, wait in faith

God's self-completing plan ;
Receive it not, but leave it not.

And wait it out, O Man !

"'The Man that went the cloud within

Is gone and vanished quite;
He Cometh not,' the people cries,

' Nor bringeth God to sight :
Lo these thy gods, that safety give.

Adore and keep the feast ! '
Deluding and deluded cries

The Prophet's brother-Priest :
And Israel all bows down to fall

Before the gilded beast.

" Devout, indeed ! that priestly creed,

O Man, reject as sin;
The clouded hill attend thou still.

And him that went within.
He yet shall bring some worthy thing

For waiting souls to see :
Some sacred word that he has heard

Their light and life shall be;
Some lofty part, than which the heart

Adopt no nobler can.
Thou shalt receive, thou shalt believe

And thou shalt do, O Man 1 " »

9 The New Sinai.

320 Basic Ideas in Religion

We can speak only briefly of the two leading poets of faith
triumphant — Tennyson and Browning. Tennyson is the
clearest of the great modern poets and most helpful to us, for
he fought his way to faith through darkest doubt, and his poems
deal with every phase of the nineteenth century's troubled
thought. Reared in an ideal home of faith and culture, he
came in contact at Cambridge with the chilling doubts and
supercilious tone of arrogant young science. Before that was
fairly faced and conquered, the death of his dearest friend, Ar-
thur Hallam, plunged him into despair from which he emerged
only after many years through the influence of Frederick
Maurice. But the victory was won, for he never again
doubted the eternal verities, not even when he penned the dark
thoughts of Fastness, which closes with the frequent note of
love clinging to her own and defying fate and death :

" Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs after many a vanish'd face,
Many a planet by many a sun may roll with the dust of a vanish'd race.

What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices of prayer?

All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all that is
fair?

What is it all, if all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last,

Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps of a mean-
ingless Past?

What but the murmur of gnats in the gloom, or a moment's anger of
bees in their hive? —

Peace, let it be ! for I loved him, and love him forever : the dead are not
dead but alive."

His earlier thought is best expressed in some passages in
The Idylls of the King, The Two Voices, The Higher Pan-
theism, and The Vision of Sin. This last, with its solemn
warning of the profound significance of the daily choices which
go to determine character, closes with a veiled prophecy,

" At last I heard a voice upon the slope

Cry to the summit, ' Is there any hope ? '

To which an answer peal'd from that high land.

The Witness of the Heart 321

But in a tongue no man could understand ;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn."

Professor Sidgwick speaks of the effect of Tennyson on the
men of his time: " What In Memoriam did for us, for me at
least, in this struggle, was to impress on us the ineffable and
irradicable conviction that humanity will not and cannot ac-
quiesce in a godless world ; that the ' man in men ' will not do
this, whatever individual men may do, whatever they may tem-
porarily feel themselves driven to do, by following intellectual
methods, which they cannot abandon, to the conclusions to
which these methods at present seem to lead. The force
with which it impressed this conviction was not due to the
mere intensity of its expression of the feeling which Atheism
outrages and Agnosticism ignores ; but rather to its expression
of them along with a reverent docility to the lessons of science,
which also belongs to the essence of the thought of our age." ^"
The value for us in this age of scientific tendencies is that he
faced the actual facts and ideas which made against his own
faith and did not live in a fool's paradise of untried dreams.
Huxley and others declared that he was the poet who had the
deepest insight into scientific truths. He honors science,

"... May she mix

With men and prosper! . . .

. . . Let her work prevail ; " ^^

but he warns against trust in mere intellect. He did not blind
himself to the all-pervasive power of the spirit of science, even
in the seventies. He scornfully refused compromises, cling-
ing to the deep words of Christ, even when they seemed stripped
of all meaning through the prevailing denial of Divine and hu-
man personality. His own faith was so strong that he dared
to give utterance to darkest thoughts of what would be the re-
sult should the scientific concept prevail of a universe that is
an unintelligible complex of ether and atoms, with no room for

'^'^ Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son, p. 302.
11 In Memoriam, CXIV.

322 Basic Ideas in Religion

spirits or for thought beyond the pampered body's needs. Like
Job he held fast his sense of righteousness, because it alone
gives meaning to human life and inspires man to live as he
knows he ought. He is the prophet of moral freedom and asks
why, if man is a spiritual being, he may not trust the heart's
convictions, the deeper nature within. He dared to make the
venture of faith, to trust where he could not see. He willed to
believe.

" For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven : wherefore thou be wise.
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith ! " ^^

The line of thought and feeling which brought Tennyson
back to faith after his long years of grief is preserved for the
comfort of multitudes in the poem In Memoriam. " It must
be remembered," writes Tennyson, " that this is a poem, not
an actual biography. It is founded on our friendship, on the
engagement of Arthur Hallam to my sister, on his sudden death
at Vienna, just before the time fixed for their marriage, and
on his burial at Clevedon Church. The poem concludes with
the marriage of my youngest sister Cecilia. It was meant to
be a kind of Divina Commedia, ending with happiness. The
sections were written at many different places, and as the
phases of our intercourse came to my memory and suggested
them. I did not write them with any view of weaving them
into a whole, or for publication, until I found I had written
so many. The different moods of sorrow as in a drama are
dramatically given, and my conviction that fear, doubts, and
suffering will find answer and relief only through faith in a
God of Love. ' I ' is not always the author speaking of him-
self, but the voice of the human race speaking through him." "

The three- fold basis of the poet's faith is given in this poem
as (i) the clear consciousness of personal being expressed in
the will and ethical life ; (2) the witness of the heart, the under-

12 The Ancient Sage.

^^ Alfred Lord Tennyson, A Memoir by his Son, pp. 304, 5.

The Witness of the Heart 323

lying world of profound feelings and emotions, which certify
themselves as real; and (3) the faith which springs from strong
pure love between friend and friend, husband and wife, par-
ent and child, which seems too real, too spiritual for death to
end. He thus anticipates the modern appeal to the whole of
man, not to the intellect alone, and the modern witness of love
to life which dominates our thoughts.

Tennyson is the prophet of the spiritual universe, the
preacher of the great fundamental facts of human nature.
He rests his faith directly on the certainty of man's spiritual
being as revealed in his will, and in his power of love and sacri-
fice. No poet save Browning so clearly identified the man
with the will as his deepest self-expression.

" O, well for him whose will is strong!
He suffers, but he cannot suffer long;
He suffers, but he cannot suffer wrong." i*

In the Prelude to In Memoriani he strikes the highest Chris-
tian note in lines that will never die. He thus addresses Christ,

" Thou seemest human and divine,

The highest, holiest manhood, thou.

Our wills are ours, we know not how;
Our wills are ours, to make them thine."

He returns to this note as fundamental in the last canto.

" O living will that shalt endure

When all that seems shall suffer shock,
Rise in the spiritual rock.

Flow thro' our deeds and make them pure,

" That we may lift from out of dust

A voice as unto him that hears,

A cry above the conquer'd years
To one that with us works, and trust,

" With faith that comes of self-control,

The truths that never can be proved

Until we close with all we loved.
And all we flow from, soul in soul."

1* Will.

324 Basic Ideas in Religion

In the second place Tennyson appeals to the heart, our emo-
tional nature on its deepest side, that which comes in contact
with the eternal and infinite world.

" If e'er when faith had fallen asleep,

I heard a voice, * beUeve no more,'

And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep,

" A warmth within the breast would melt

The freezing reason's colder part,

And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer'd, ' I have felt.'

" No, like a child in doubt and fear :

But that blind clamor made me wise;

Then was I as a child that cries.
But, crying, knows his father near;

" And what I am beheld again

What is, and no man understands ;

And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro' nature, molding men." ^^

Lastly we note Tennyson's appeal to love's undying hope.
The deepest yet simplest element in Tennyson, Browning, and
many others is the personal note, their own experience of love
at its highest to move men to noble sacrifice of self.

" Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with

might ;
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of

sight." 18

The theological basis of his conviction is clear and certain,
God is love, and He will not let His loved ones perish ; which
is the thought which underlies Christ's own words, " He is not
the God of the dead, but of the living." Tennyson strikes this
note clearly in the opening line of the Prelude, in his special
title for Christ, and in what follows, where he makes his strong

!•> Canto. CXXIV.

18 Locksley Hall, 11. 33, 4.

The Witness of the Heart 325

appeal direct to God as Incapable of deceitfully rousing holy
thoughts and lofty hopes only to mock His creatures in mad
despair.

" Strong Son of God, immortal Love,
Whom we, that have not seen thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove ;

" Thine are these orbs of light and shade ;

Thou madest Life in man and brute;

Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made.

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;

And thou hast made him: thou art just."

This gives him his conviction of immortality in which he
shall again know the friend he mourns.

" Eternal form shall still divide

The eternal soul from all beside ;

And I shall know him when we meet." ^^

He tells us that

" The love that rose on stronger wings,

Unpalsied when he met with Death,

Is comrade of the lesser faith
That sees the course of human things." ^^

One more quotation will show how he yields himself in absolute
trust to this love.

" Love is and was my Lord and King,

And in his presence I attend

To hear the tidings of my friend.
Which every hour his couriers bring.

" Love is and was my King and Lord
And will be, tho' as yet I keep

17 Canto, XLVII.

18 Canto, CXXVIIL

326 Basic Ideas in Religion

Within the court on earth, and sleep
Encompassed by his faithful guard,

"And hear at times a sentinel

Who moves from place to place,

And whispers to the worlds of space,
In the deep night, that all is well." ^^

In our limited space we can barely notice Browning, the most
stimulating and suggestive of our poets, perhaps more a
philosophic student of the human heart in its strange com-
plexity than a poet proper. There is no writer who will bet-
ter repay study, if the average reader will confine himself to
such portions of his voluminous works as come clearly within
his own range of thought. Browning wrote mainly for him-
self, careless of his readers, and it is but waste of time to at-
tempt to comprehend many of his poems, e.g., Sordello or Red
Cotton Night-Cap Country, and many phrases, also, in poems
otherwise clear. But enough that is suggestive of profound
thought on vital things remains to occupy a lifetime in some of
his dramatic poems and lyrics.^"

He seems to put both sides of faith and doubt fairly, weigh-
ing the pros and cons, but ere long there is always a sudden
turn of thought and a most personal note showing on which
side he stands.

"Just when we're safest, there's a sunset touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides —
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature's self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring
Round the ancient Idol, on his base again.
The grand Perhaps ! We look on helplessly.

10 Canto, CXXVI.

20 Such as Pippa Passes, The Ring and the Book, Christmas Eve and
Easter Day, Calaban upon Setebos, The Epistle of Karshish, A Death
in the Desert, Saul, The Bishop orders his Tomb, Bishop Blougram's
Apology, Clean, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Imperante Augusta Natus Est, The
Flight of the Duchess, Abt Vagler, A Grammarian's Funeral, A Blot in
the 'Scutcheon, The Inn Album, and In a Balcony.

The Witness of the Heart 327

There the old misgivings, crooked questions are —
This good God — what He could do, if He would.
Would, if He could — then must have done long since:
If so, when, where, and how? Some way must be —
Once feel about, and soon or late you hit
Some sense, in which it might be after all,
Why not, 'the Way, the Truth, the Life'? "21

No writer ever felt more keenly that the proper study of
mankind is man, and kept more closely to his text. He stands
next to Shakespeare in his scope as a poet of humanity. His
men and women are far more real than Tennyson's. They are
very flesh and blood, capable of evil, but capable also of re-
pentance and rising again into a larger life. He repudiates all
dark dreams of a fated life beyond hope of turning. His
creed is that not man alone, but God and man together de-
termine each life, and God never fails to do His part. He is a
preacher of repentance and conversion, though he seldom uses
the latter word.

" Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows !
But not quite so sunk that moments
Sure tho' seldom are denied us.
When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,
And apprise it, if pursuing
Or the right way, or the wrong way,
To its triumph or undoing.

" There are flashes struck from midnights,
There are fire-flames noon-days kindle,
Whereby piled-up honors perish.
Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle.
While just this or that poor impulse,
Which for once had play unstifled,
Seems the whole work of a lifetime,
That away the rest have trifled." 22

The great ideas of Christianity dominate his thought, though
his neo-platonic concept of evil as negative and unreal is in

21 Bishop Blougram's Apology.

22 Cristina.

328 Basic Ideas in Religion

conflict with Christianity's ethical principles. But the Incarna-
tion is central in his thought:

" The acknowledgement of God in Christ,
Accepted by tliy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it." ^3

The heart of his belief, like Whittier's and Tennyson's, is ex-
pressed in the line,

" God, Thou art Love ! I build my faith on that." 2*

But it is especially as the poet of Immortality, with clear,
never-failing vision of the eternal world continuous with this
little life, which it crowns and consummates, that he deserves
our gratitude. Full of strong vitality and keenly conscious
of the personality of individual men and women, he voiced the
indignant protest of a strong, healthy nature against the dreary
sigh that this life is enough. He approaches his one great
theme from every side, directly and indirectly. From Pauline,
his first poem, on to the noble Epilogue in Asolando, which
proved his fitting epitaph, he never wavered in his certain as-
surance of man's spiritual being and God's love for him as His
child.

In Paracelsus the ground for faith in immortality is philo-
sophic. It is an essentially reasonable belief, man's whole being
points to it ; to deny it is to make utter confusion on the higher
side of thought. A Grammarian's Funeral depicts the scholar,
who laid firm and deep the foundation of his learning, work-
ing with patience and accuracy at which men marveled and
mocked. He met their scorn of his " waste of time " by his
sublime trust that he had eternity to work and grow in. They
cry,

". . . ' But time escapes ; Live now^ or never ! '

He said, 'What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has forever.' "

Aht Vogler, the great musician, using his noble art, as Sidney

^^ A Death in the Desert.
2* Paracelsus.

The Witness of the Heart 329

Lanier did, as a means of approach to God, dreams of a per-
fect harmony in the world to come, which earth cannot give:
" On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven a perfect round."
In The Ring and the Book, dedicated to his wife as though she
were still alive, the life to come appears at the end of the
tragedy to be the indispensable clue to earth's perplexities, and
the one possible justification of God's strange providence.
Pompilia murmurs,

" O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,

No work begun shall ever pause for death ! "

His faith shines clearly in his brave poem Prospice on the
death of his wife, his noble comrade in his work. In thought
he faces death fearlessly, almost eagerly, certain of reunion
with her.

" O thou soul of my soul ! I shall clasp thee again,
And with God be the rest ! "

Browning agrees with Tennyson in resting his faith in God
and Immortality mainly on the witness of the will to human
personality and the profound significance of true love and sacri-
fice. Both have the authority of Scripture. " He that loveth
not his brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he
hath not seen." ^^ " Ye do not wnll to come unto Me that ye
may have life." ^® But very early Christian thought under
the influence of Eastern asceticism turned away from the Old
Testament ideal of the family life which Christ reaffirmed, and
placed the tenderest affections of the heart under the ban.
Even Protestant Christians of the sterner type have taught
the same unchristian idea of a necessary antagonism between
love to God and love to man. More to the Christian poets and
the witness of the heart, clinging to its own dear ones, than
to the theologians, do we owe the recovery in the nineteenth
century of the real meaning of St. John's deep words, " He

25 I John 4 :20.
2' John 5 140.

330 Basic Ideas in Religion

that loveth not, knovveth not God, for God is love." -^ They
point ever to this way of approaching God and knowing His
truth.

" Were reason all thy faculty,
Then God must be ignored;
Love gains Him at first leap."

The true poet is a prophet or revealer of God, and he often
speaks more deeply than he is aware when stirred to his depths
by some great experience or bitter grief. It is the glory of
our literature on the side of faith that so many of its greatest
poems are elegies, outpourings of sorrow over a loved one lost
to sight, yet at the same time full of faith triumphant over
death, soaring aloft like the lark to meet the dawn out of the
very chasm of the grave. It is a noble list ; Milton's Lycidas,
Shelley's Adorns, Matthew Arnold's Thyrsis (on Arthur Hugh
Clough) and Rugby Chapel (on his father), Tennyson's In
Memoriam, Lowell's Lines on CJianning, and Emerson's On the
Death of His Son.

Most striking also are the many swan songs written when
the poets stand consciously or unconsciously on the threshold
of death. Even the doubters seem to have prophetic glimpses
of the land beyond, and seeing light not darkness, they speak
words of hope and not despair, as did Clough in his last sonnet
written at Florence.

" For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.

Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back through creeks and inlets making.

Comes silent flooding in, the main.

" And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light ;

In front the sun climbs slow — how slowly;
But westward look ! the land is bright."

Then there is Whittier's tribute to Oliver Wendell Holmes
27 I John 4 :8.

The Witness of the Heart 331

near his own end, and Longfellow's The Bells of San Bias,
written a fortnight before he died.

" Oh, bells of San Bias, in vain
Ye call back the past again ;

The past is deaf to your prayer.
Out of the shadows of night
The world rolls into light ;

It is daybreak everywhere."

This reminds one of the Hymns to the Marshes of Glynn sung
by Sidney Lanier on his couch of pain and death,

" How dark, how dark soe'er the race
That must be run,
I am lit by the sun."

Browning sounds a trumpet note in the Epilogue to Aso-
lando which closed his works and life, " Speed ; fight on ; fare
ever There as here." And lastly, most familiar of all, is
Tennyson's Crossing the Bar.

" Twilight and evening bell.

And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

" For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the bar."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE DENIALS OF THE SPIRITUAL IDEA

OF MAN^

DENIALS OF FREEDOM

The denials of the freedom of the human will are of three
kinds, according to the fundamental conception from which
the reasoner starts. There are the denials made from the
scientific standpoint, which have a physiological basis. There
are those from the philosophical point of view, with a psycho-
logical foundation ; and finally, the pantheistic denials, which
are primarily theological in conception.

I. Scientific, Physiological Denials

These denials are sometimes called " hard determinism," for
they claim man to be under the stern rule of external neces-
sity. They are based on the law of causation, and every
phenomenon, mental or physical, is said to be the necessary or
invariable result of preceding physical antecedents. It is the
favorite contention of physiological psychologists. There are
four chief arguments which can be treated separately, though
they run together in ordinary thinking.

I. Freedom unthinkable and unprovable

Those who hold consistently to mechanical monism flatly
deny that freedom of the will is provable, or can even be con-
ceived. As early as Hume we find it declared that men begin
at the wrong end of the question of liberty when they approach
it by examining the " faculties of the soul " ; we should begin
with the operations of the body and unintelligent matter. This

1 The denial of personal identity was discussed in Chap. XV.

332

Denials of Freedom 333

theory holds that there is no gap in the physical order where
freedom may interpose. The whole thought process, delibera-
tion, decision, and execution, depends on purely physiological
causes and is as determined and inevitable as visible changes
in the body. As one advocate has put it : " There is no such
thing as free will. In the light of the monistic philosophy those
phenomena which we have been accustomed to consider the
most free and most independent, the manifestations of the
human will, are subject to laws exactly as rigid as those of any
other phenomena in Nature."

Freedom is, then, unthinkable and unprovable. But this is
true of all the ultimate facts of consciousness. To deny the
reality of an affirmation of the universal consciousness simply
because we cannot understand it, that is, state it in terms of
sensation, is to beg the whole question of the possibility of
spiritual being or powers. It is no objection that we cannot
form a picture of what takes place in will action, for what we
can intuit is never more than the fact of the action.

Physical science overlooks the fact that psychic experiences
lie beyond the reach of its study. I cannot doubt the affirma-
tion of my consciousness that " I," as a personal cause, can
carry into execution a certain course of action out of the many
which arise in my mind. Hence we claim that will action does
have a cause, but this cause is the ego, as psychic as is the
will itself. When confronted with this ultimate analysis the
physiological psychologist can only deny the validity of the
belief in the self, as Herbert Spencer does : " Unavoidable as
is this belief, established though it is, not only by the assent
of mankind at large, indorsed by divers philosophers, but by
the suicide of the sceptical argument, it is yet a belief admitting
of no justification by reason; nay, indeed, it is a belief which
reason when pressed for a distinct answer rejects." ^ This
simply demands that we believe only in what we can under-
stand and can state in terms of physical science. But what if
physical science does not cover all truth and all experience ?

2 First Principles, § 20.

334 Basic Ideas in Religion

On what does a verdict of sense rest for its own boasted
certainty, but consciousness itself? That we are free all our
experience affirms ; that we are not free is simply the dogmatic
affirmation of science on the ground that purely materialistic
principles do not permit such a belief. As Professor Graham
acknowledges : " In spite of the speculative conclusion that the
will is not a free causal agency, is there not the equally clear
practical conviction that man can control the course of his life
and actions to some considerable degree ? I think we must ad-
mit it." ^ Professor Poynting likewise contends for the ac-
ceptance at its full value of this psychical fact. " I hold that
we are more certain of our power of choice and of responsi-
bility than of any other fact, physical or psychical. . . . We
are certain, all of us, in everyday life, that this power of choice
exists, whatever conclusion we may come to in the quiet of
our studies. It appears to me equally certain that there is no
correspondence yet made out between the power of choice and
any physical action, and there does not seem any likelihood that
a correspondence will ever be made out. . . . Every time an
intention is formed in the mind and a deliberate choice is made,
we have an event unlike any other previous event. Freedom
of the will is a simple fact, unlike anything else, inexplicable." *
Being thus unique, unlike all outer experiences, it cannot be
explained scientifically, for scientific explanation consists
simply in classifying together like phenomena. But these will
experiences, sharp and clear, refuse to be thus classified. It
is just as much the duty of the true scientist to recognize these
unlike phenomena as to recognize the common and easily
classed events. When this is pointed out the experimental
psychologists claim that though they cannot prove their con-
tention, yet scientific continuity demands the exercise of the
scientific " faith " that all life is mechanical. But such faith
has no place in science, where ascertained truths and working
hypotheses alone are legitimate.

Hoffding has shown the difficulty involved. " The will as

3 Creed of Science, p. 145.

* Hibbert Journal, July, 1903, pp. 743, 4.

Denials of Freedom 335

such, our activity as the activity of a conscious being, cannot
be an object of immediate self-observation hke ideas and feel-
ings. We observe the motives and the result of the will, but
not the will itself, just as in the sphere of material nature we
observe the conditions and phenomena of energy, but not energy
itself. . . . The reason why we cannot make the will the ob-
ject of self-observation like sensations, ideas, and feelings may
lie in the fact that the will as a persistent presupposition en-
velops all the changing states and forms of the conscious life.
Consciousness exists only on account of the uninterrupted work
of collecting the single elements into a totality. Such a work
of combination and concentration is evident in the simplest sen-
sation as much as in every ideation, every feeling, every
impulse, every determination. At every point an activity
manifests itself, which is just as original a phase of conscious
life as the elements (phases or attributes) which observation
and analysis directly light upon." ^ The very fact that we
can form the concept of energy is due to the fact that we have
already used that idea in the form of will ; for every psychical
operation is an act of will.

2. The universality of causation

This argument holds that every phenomenon is linked to all
others in the relation of cause and effect, and that psychical
phenomena are no exception. It has already been discussed
as relating to physical nature.^

Three things can be urged against such a view. First, ef-
ficient causation itself is denied by logical empiricists. We
have seen how Hume plays fast and loose with cause and ef-
fect ; denies it in nature, afiirms it absolutely in mental action.^
Mill and Bain argue that we have no proof of force, and that
events are related merely as antecedents and consequents.
Philosophical analysis, instead of finding all causative agency
limited to matter, fails to see any force whatever in nature,

5 Problems of Philosophy, pp. 55-57-
e See Chap. III.
7 See Note C.

33^ Basic Ideas in Religion

except such as is inferred from the analogy of our will-force.
We see only a succession of changes. That there is a causative
energy producing the effect is an idea which the mind reads into
the phenomena out of its inner experiences. But if force is
not something tangible and visible to the senses, and yet cannot
come from within if the mind itself be purely passive, as the
theory holds, whence can come the strange idea of power to act
which is our earliest and most intense experience?

In the second place, the theory denies the significance of de-
liberation before important action, a most certain and, at times,
painful experience. The difference between the mental and
material worlds is ignored. Motives are treated as if they
were " motors," a term of physical force suggesting the com-
pelling of the will to a certain course of action. For the sake
of clearness it would be wise to drop the word motive, which
suggests power, and use the word " reason." Motives are
thoughts or desires which the ego considers and weighs, decid-
ing at last which one it will follow. As the will is not a me-
chanical force, it cannot have a mechanical antecedent. The
voluntary act is abrupt, spontaneous, and intentional. The
time and choice of methods of its execution are freely de-
termined after deliberation. Consequently the originative and
directive force must be a kind of power distinct from the me-
chanical, i.e., it is psychical. Wundt states that we have no
right to apply a purely physical law to internal experiences, for
they contain certain psychical elements which are entirely lack-
ing in natural phenomena.

In the third place, we see that the same begging of the ques-
tion underlies the further conclusion that free-will is logically
incredible, because it implies change and action without any
efficient cause whatever — as Jonathan Edwards argued. But
the whole quibble is exposed, if we simply grant the first af-
firmation of every unsophisticated consciousness, that the ego
is itself an active agent, the only agent in fact whose ex-
pression and manifestation is deliberate volition. The will is
not a " faculty," but the ego energizing. In the ego we are
face to face with a mystery felt to be inscrutable, a mystery

Denials of Freedom 337

the more profound the greater the effort we put forth to
compass it. If what we call the will be simply the self as it
flashes into conscious act, then plainly the fact of freedom is
not one to be expressed in terms of mechanics. If we grant
the mystery of the ego, the property of freedom cannot be
held to be impossible in se merely because it is inexplicable as
the ego itself. What sort of logic is it which, admitting a
mystery, insists that it shall not be mysterious in its qualities?
Locke's short phrase, " we know not the way of the will," is
certainly no justification for our refusing to accept freedom
on the ground that we cannot comprehend it. We are con-
tent to reply, " our wills are ours, we know not how."

3. The predictability of human actions as shown by statistics

This objection to freedom is modern, and is based on the
tables of statistics so much used today. It throws emphasis
on the outer environment, whose conditions influence men in
the mass, determining their actions. The constancy of the
actions is supposed to be indicated by the common averages of
social phenomena, such as marriages, divorces, suicides, thefts,
failures, etc. This is supposed to prove that men like animals
in droves are completely controlled by outer forces or physical
motives. Man therefore is a part of physical nature, obeying
her inevitable forces, and his actions are predictable.

But the fallacy is obvious. Aggregate action in a multitude
is confounded with the action of individuals who can each re-
sist the common influences. Human nature being common to
all, men exposed to common motives, pleasant or painful, react
to them in similar ways. Uniform conditions tend to produce
uniform motives and similar actions, but uniformity is not
necessity. At certain hours enormous crowds go across the
Brooklyn Bridge under similar motives, but any individual
or any number of them, may determine not to obey the com-
mon impulse on particular occasions. Each night a varying
number of the same general crowd do not go over at the usual
hour, and always for a personal reason. Hence the " motives "
cannot be irresistible. Each man out of the thousands who

338 Basic Ideas in Religion

make up a statistical table is free to determine whether he will
take his place in the ranks of the average per cent. The ex-
ceptions here emphatically prove the fact of freedom of indi-
vidual choice and initiative as over against outer circum-
stances. Statistics prove that men act with reasons, not with-
out them.

Facts when averaged out of millions of cases, cease to be
human facts ; they stand in no relation to us, dealing as they
do with masses, never with individuals. The statistician pur-
posely ignores individual cases, and eliminates " accidental
variations." But the whole problem turns on the individual.
It is the personalities with their individual wills who ;-esist the
environment, and so give evidence that they are not puppets.
In cases like the rise of the marriage rate in prosperous times,
the plain inference is that men act with reasons, not mechanic-
ally under external forces.

4, Free-zuill is another name for change, and chance is chaos

This assumes a priori that " the reign of law " forbids all
possibilities of alternative action. Thus John Fiske in his
earlier days declared, " No middle ground can be taken. The
denial of causation is the affirmation of chance, and between
the theory of Chance and the theory of Law, there can be no
compromise, no reciprocity, no borrowing and lending." *
Here again the whole argument turns on the assumption that
a fixed and mechanical order rules throughout the universe, in
human thought and action as inexorably as in the relations of
material bodies. It falls to the ground, if a spiritual order
above nature be granted, such as Fiske does admit later in his
Concord Lectures.

It is obvious that men do act on the world about them. But
the rock of offense to the scientific mind is the claim that such
action on the fixed order of nature is " free " — the expression
of reason and purpose, not the fated result of the forces and
laws which play upon men within and without. We could not
ask for a better example of what Bacon called the " idol of the

8 Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. II, p. 187.

Denials of Freedom 339

den." What does this ill-omened "chance" mean? In the
world of nature chance means whatever happens by mechanical
physical cause aimlessly and to no purpose ; what we would
consider accidents. The proper meaning of the word in re-
gard to human beings is simply undetermined possibility. Be-
fore I make a decision among many courses of action, all
of which are possible, there is uncertainty as to which I shall
do. My final choice may seem " chance " to an observer, but
not to myself. But the word is used by Fiske as an oppro-
brious term for acts of human free will, anarchic and not
fated in nature's order. He applies the chance of the physical
order to its very opposite in the human order. How can the
same word mean opposites? Only because the monists lay
down the postulate that there is no difference between the world
of nature and the world of man. The whole vmiverse is me-
chanical, permitting no mind action, for that would bring in
mental forces and powers acting under other principles than
physical causation, producing confusion in a machine world
and disturbing its beautiful symmetry, just as physical forces
working by chance disturb the harmony of our human world.
Aristotle uses the word with the proper distinction : " The
principles of causation seem to be nature, necessity, chance,
and, moreover, reason and human agency." ^

Before any doubtful course of action I have open to me
several choices and all are possibilities to my individual will.
I feel I can select any one of these and make it an actuality.
But here the protest of physical science becomes vehement.
It says that there are no possihilia in the sense that I may cause
any one to happen which I choose. The futurabilia are al-
ready determined by my inner and outer conditions and can
no more be altered than the facta. Possihilia are already de-
terminata waiting their fixed time for coming into the world
of facta. But I am certain with a conviction interwoven with
my sense of freedom that any one of many possible acts are
open to me. If science declares that I am utterly mistaken.

» Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. Ill, Chap. 3.

340 Basic Ideas in Religion

that I must do the one that is fated, all others being impossible,
I ask what does science know about the matter. Let her keep
to her own field of facta, the things which have been done;
she has nought to do with possihilia, the things which may or
may not be done. She cannot penetrate into my conscious-
ness. If I ask how she knows that there are no uncertainties,
she reiterates as of old her affirmation, " they are impos-
sible."

This scientific nightmare, that if anything happened other
than that which was predetermined, chaos would result, ignores
the commonplace fact that all the alternatives before a sane
mind are equally possible as outer acts, for all fit into a frame-
work of nature which is supremely indifferent as to which
choice we make. Nature admits any of the multitude of activi-
ties open to men. Even in the world of history we cannot say
that only one course is open to men of action without causing
permanent confusion. If Caesar had not been murdered, or if
Moscow had not been burned, history would have been changed,
but the stream of onward movement would have been just as
orderly, though on different lines.

In ordinary life our decisions, for the most part, concern
only trifling things, but still if these are freely decided after
deliberation, it follows that we have equal freedom in great
things — great to us on moral grounds. So, too, the simplest
act affecting nature, as the planting or cutting down of trees,
if it happen through our free-will, is as much a " miracle " as
the blowing up of a mass of rock. The greatness of the act
is not the point at issue.

Any such power at all, the determinists urge, would be anar-
chy. It would add another force to the sum total of force in
the universe and thus would violate the law of the conserva-
tion of energy. The answer to this claim is simple. No one
claims that the will creates energy, but simply that energy is
stored up in organic life, and that our wills release it, or direct
it along different channels according to our design. If we can
store up enormous energy, as in dynamite, and release it by
the slight pressure of a child's finger on an electric button, as

Denials of Freedom 341

when the Hell Gate rock was blown up in New York harbor,
why may not the human body be a store-house of subtle energy
subject to the human will ? We know nothing of the marvelous
qualities of the brain save that it is adapted to be the organ
of the mind, which can act directly upon it, and cause bodily
actions which in turn affect nature. We do not claim that the
brain in any sense creates force, but it may easily be a center
of energy stored up by regular bodily processes, which the will
releases.

Sir Oliver Lodge and Professor Poynting hold that there
is abundant evidence that life is a directive power, controlling
energy and guiding it to definite ends. Lodge writes as fol-
lows : " My contention then is — and in this contention I am
practically speaking for my brother physicists — that whereas
life or mind can neither generate energy nor directly exert
force, yet it can cause matter to exert force on matter, and
so can exercise guidance and control. . . . Guidance of mat-
ter can be effected by a passive exertion of force without doing
work ; as a quiescent rail can guide a train to its destination,
provided an active engine propels it. . . . Energy must be
available for the performance of any physical operation, but the
energy is independent of the determination or arrangement.
Guidance and control are not forms of energy, nor need they
be themselves phantom modes of force : their supposition upon
the scheme of physics need perturb physical and mechanical
lazi's no whit, and yet it may profoundly affect the consequences
resulting from those same laws. The whole effort of civiliza-
tion would be futile if we could not guide the powers of na-
ture. The powers are there, else we should be helpless ; but
life and mind are outside those powers, and by prearranging
their field of action, can direct them along an organized
course." ^^

Similarly the French writer Courbet shows that there is
really a place in the organization of the universe for the mani-
festation of activities independent of matter. Such activities,

1° Life and Matter, pp. 148-9.

342 Basic Ideas in Religion

he maintains, would be impossible only if the sum of all forces
of the universe were unalterable ; which is not true, force
being only one of the factors of energy. He says : " The will
of intelligent beings is thus a force acting upon matter ; and
the appearance or disappearance of this force has nothing to
do with the constancy of energy. Free individuals, to reach
their ends, use the total of the energy in the world, but they
need neither to increase nor diminish it. . . . It is as absurd
to say that they cannot use this energy because it is constant,
as to assert that man cannot move about in the water because
the mass of the ocean is invariable. Again, though science
teaches that the sum of the energy in the universe is constant,
it also teaches that this energy is continually in transformation.
Why should not human activity be one of the agents of these
transformations? . . . And why should this faculty of trans-
formation not suffice to assure the free exercise of this activity?
If I want to go from Havre to New York I take coal and I
transform the heat-energy that results from its combustion into
energy of translation, that is, into motion. I do not have to
create or to dissipate energy ; it is sufficient to transform it, and
this transformation assures me the free exercise of my will
power." ^^

II. Philosophic, Psychological Denials'

In contrast with the scientific denials these are often grouped
under the name of " soft determinism." In general they hold
that man is free in so far as his conscious will is not controlled
by any external force, but not free as to following or not the
strongest motive. What motive shall prevail is determined by
his character. Self-determinism is simply self-expression.
The character itself is determined by heredity. These are the
common views of many modern psychologists and writers on
ethics.

I. The will is determined by the strongest motive
This is the oldest and simplest form of determinism. Since

11 Cosmos, Paris, Aug. 25, igo6.

Denials of Freedom 343

;the ego is beset by many motives, it seems natural to argue that
the motive which is followed prevailed because it was the
strongest. The so-called will is entirely passive, it is merely
the pointer on a pair of scales, which are filled with motives pro
and con, till one side overbalances the other, when the will
turns to that side, and a volitional discharge takes place. The
will is only an effect, not a cause. It is the mere expression
of mental action, as the hands on the face of the clock exhibit
the exact preponderance of the action of the works within.

This theory received early statement by John Locke and
Jonathan Edwards. The latter defines the will as that by
which the mind chooses anything, and states that the will can
never disagree with desire. His argument is as follows. If
the will be determined, there is a determiner, for every effect
must have a cause. If so, the will is both determiner and de-
termined ; it is a cause that acts and produces effects upon it-
self, and is the object of its own influence and action. If there
is an act of the will in determining its own acts, then one free
act of the will is determined by another, and so we have the
absurdity of every free act, even the very first, determined by
a foregoing free act. But if there is no act or exercise of the
will in determining its own acts, then no liberty is exercised
in determining them. Whence it follows that liberty does not
consist in the will's power to determine its own acts ; or, which
is the same thing, that there is no such thing as liberty con-
sisting in a self-determining power of the will.

Fiske in his Cosmic Philosophy follows Edwards, thinking
that the idea of freedom can only be shielded from the charge
of arrant nonsense by such a crude conception as the following.
" Over and above particular acts of volition, there is a certain
entity called * The Will,' which is itself a sort of personage
within the human personality. This entity is supposed to have
desires and intentions of its own. . . , This autocratic Will
is ' free,' and sitting in judgment over ' motives,' may set aside
the stronger in favor of a weaker, or may issue a decree in de-
fiance of all motives alike." "

12 Vol. II, p. 174.

344 Basic Ideas in Religion

The underlying fallacy lies in treating the will as an entity
or faculty in itself, whereas that which really acts is the ego.
It is a fact of every man's consciousness, though most myste-
rious, that the " I " is self -moved. We say, and every one un-
derstands, " I love myself," " I judge myself," " I determine
myself" (i.e., will and act). On the determinist theory the
will is passive like a weathercock surging round with every
gust, till a steady gale holds it firm. Edwards does not dream
of the possibility that the " I " — not the will — may throw its
decision on the weaker motive and make it prevail over the
stronger, the still small voice over the storm of passion.

Language itself forbids our thinking of the self as purely
passive. Even Bain speaks of a veto on immediate action after
a decision, but who says " veto," if we follow only the strong-
€st motive. Various efforts have been made to change the
.words in common use, so that the new theories might be swal-
lowed more readily by the general public, like sugar-coated
pills. J. S. Mill in his autobiography tells of the dejection
into which he fell because " the doctrine of what is called
Philosophical Necessity weighed on his existence like an in-
cubus." He obtained relief in his own mind only when he
drew " a clear distinction between the doctrine of circum-
stances and fatalism ; discarding altogether the misleading
word Necessity." ^^ Sully proposed abandoning the term
necessity and substituting " determination." Bain also refers
to the " obnoxious words liberty and necessity as being to blame
for the mystery in the matter." It is a credit to these English
students that they recoil from fatalism, but no amount of
verbal legerdemain will relieve their doctrine from it in the
last analysis.

The fatal difficulty in the theory, as Villa points out, is the
impossibility of finding a common measure for the vast variety
of motives which appeal to men. Locke and Edwards think
they solve the problem simply by classifying all motives under
pleasures and pains. But intensity of feeling or promise of

i'pp. i68 and 170.

Denials of Freedom 345

pleasure and profit will not serve, for the sense of moral duty,
by which men act, is never " stronger " than the passions and
appetites. Our desires and our experiences are too complex
to be so simply grouped. What relation do the pleasures of
the senses bear to the pure joys of the mind, or the faiths and
longings of the soul? True men are not swept away helpless
before them, but resist them firmly in obedience to the still
small voice of duty and honor. Martineau says that the will
has to live and move among objects which, in their pleasurable
or painful aspects, are perfectly heterogeneous, and are no
more measured by one common standard than light, weight,
and electricity are measured by the thermometer.

To say that the strongest motive is ever that which prevails
is to beg the question. Motives are not causes of actions,
but reasonable grounds for action between which the causal
self weighs and decides. The determinists assume that to
choose freely is to choose irrationally and incalculably. This
would reinstate chaos, they say. This assumes that inde-
terminate choice is the same as motiveless choice. But this
is neither logically nor psychologically correct. It may be hard
to choose not from lack of motives but from excess ; the sus-
pense of the will may be due, not to apathy and lack of interest,
but to clash of conflicting desires. It is surely a strange con-
fusion which lumps together two such different cases. To
have no cogent motive for deciding either, and to be distracted
by strong but contrary impulses, are surely diflferent as con-
ceptions, different as experiences, and different in their results.
The mind of the man who has no motive is a blank ; that of
the man who has conflicting motives is a tumult. The act of
the former seems capricious and incalculable ; that of the other
seems reasonable and perfectly calculable. Whichever way his
decision falls, his friends (who think they know him) will
say it was just like him; that it might have been foreseen, and,
in short, was thoroughly rational and calculable.

2. The will is the necessary expression of character

This, it is claimed, is the only rational idea of freedom.

34^ Basic Ideas in Religion

Each man is free to do what he desires, but not free to will
what he shall desire. Thus Spencer writes : " That every
one is at liberty to do what he desires to do (supposing there
are no external hindrances), all admit; though people of con-
fused ideas commonly suppose this to be the thing denied.
But that every one is at liberty to desire or not to desire . . .
which is the real proposition ... is negatived by the analysis
of consciousness." ^* The upholders of this view include
Hegel, Bradley, Green, the two Cairds, Paulsen, Hoffding,
Wundt, and Leslie Stephens.

This is a great advance on the preceding view. Motives are
not regarded as independent and controlling pulls and pushes
to and from pleasure and pain. They are the logical products
of the individual mind and life in all its experiences and in-
most constitution. The strength of the motive which prevails
lies not in itself but in its peculiar appeal to the individual's
character. It is what he wishes to do, and he wishes that par-
ticular thing because it accords with his character. His free-
dom of will consists in his being able to do what he desires to
do.

This is the most plausible form of determinism, and is urged
by the majority of philosophic writers as the only intelligible
theory. They insist that alternative choice demands alternative
character. Freedom, or the power to change one's usual mode
of action, means the denial of the persistence of habit and the
constancy of character, and leaves us without a guide in judg-
ing men. At no time has man any influence whatever on his
character. Nothing seems so plausible as the maxim that
" each man acts out his character in accord with himself."
But as soon as we ask whence comes the character, then the
disguised fatalism of the theory appears. Common men think
of character as itself the product of morally free acts, good
or bad, done so often that they have become habits of con-
duct, which they believe can be modified to some degree. But
the idealistic determinist does not admit that a man has any

^* Principles of Psychology, § 219.

Denials of Freedom 347

influence at any time upon the " self," which they call his
character. At each moment he must act as he does because
he is what he is, and what he is depends inevitably on what he
has been in all his past. Thus we arrive at the vision of an
inner fate, which is just as destructive to ethical life as any
scientific determinism.

The Neo-Hegelians fight shy of plain speaking on this point,
but fatalism is involved in their whole system ; and a clear per-
ception of it is the all sufificient answer to them, for we cannot
accept any theory, no matter what fine phrases disguise it,
which makes us mere puppets, worked by automatic strings
within. Green, however, openly identifies the self and the
character, saying that a man's character is himself, showing
itself in his will. Man being what he is and circumstances
what they are at any particular moment, the determination of
the will is already given, just as an efifect is given in the
sum of its causes. The determination of the will might be
different but only through the man being himself different.
The will, therefore, is simply the man, any act of will is the
expression of the man as he at the time is.^^

William James, A. J. Balfour, and all Christian philosophers,
protest in the interest of ethical life against such a system.
The former writes: " If my action follows, as absolute Ideal-
ism declares, inevitably from my character at this moment, and
my present character in turn is determined in a like inevitable
way by my character of yesterday, and I have therefore never
had the slightest option as to the kind of character imposed
upon me, then you may call my behavior at any time sesthetic-
ally beautiful or ugly, but morally good or bad it cannot
be."

Balfour criticizes the theory as follows : " Now it may seem
at first sight plausible to describe that man as free whose be-
havior is due to ' himself ' alone. But, without quarreling over
words, it is, I think, plain that whether it be proper to call
him free or not, he at least lacks freedom in the sense in

15 Works, Vol. II, pp. 308-333.

348 Basic Ideas in Religion

which freedom is necessary in order to constitute responsi-
bility. It is impossible to say of him that he * ought,' and
therefore he ' can,' for at any given moment of his life his
next action is by hypothesis strictly detemiined. This is also
true of every previous moment until we get back to that point
in his life's history at which he cannot in any intelligible sense
of the term be said to have a character at all. Antecedently to
this the causes which have produced him are in no special
sense connected with his individuality, but form part of the
complex of phenomena which make up the world. It is evi-
dent, therefore, that every act which he performs may be
traced to pre-natal, and possibly to purely material antecedents,
and that even if it be true that what he does is the outcome
of his character, his character itself is the outcome of causes
over which he has not, and cannot by any possibility have, the
smallest control. Such a theory destroys responsibility, and
leaves our actions the inevitable outcome of external condi-
tions, not less completely than any doctrine of controlling fate,
whether materialistic or theological." ^'"^

The fallacy here resembles that of the strongest motive.
That theory ignored the self, and treated the will as a faculty
acted on by motives ; this theory confounds the character with
the man himself. " A person is the sum total of his con-
scious states so that when the desires and aversions of a man
determine his voluntary acts, it is the * person ' who determines
them." This identification of the self with the character is
not proven, and cannot be. The feeling is invincible that the
self forms and possesses the character. It is not something
which possesses and dominates him. It is his habitus, the
clothing of his spirit. In every crisis of a man's life he rises
in the freedom of his personality above his character, faces it
directly, and passes moral judgment on its springs of action
and desire, which he feels present within. It is because a man's
spirit can thus transcend and judge his own character that
genuine moral and responsible acts become possible and actual.

'" A Criticism of Current Idealistic Theories, Mind, Oct., 1893.

Denials of Freedom 349

Aristotle recognized this in his ethical writings: "We are in
a certain sense cooperative causes in the formation of our
own characters, and it is in consequence of this that we pro-
pose to ourselves such and such an aim." ^^

Character is a certain bias, an inner environment of mental
and moral tendencies and aversions, partly natural, but largely
the result of the individual's free choices and actions oft re-
peated in his whole past life. Human character is a growth,
and in its formation the individual has a certain power of
self-government by free-will, subject to the law of conscience,
and therefore he is responsible for it. It is true and sadly
frequent that men yield to certain temptations, drink or lust
or greed or lying, till they gradually become fixed habits, mak-
ing the men their very slaves. But they were not always so,
such men have made and riveted their chains. The reality of
the repentance and conversion of just such men shows that
they can " rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher
things." ^^ Character can be modified by new acts, even as it
was created by earlier free acts, though such modifications re-
quire strong effort. Hence Illingworth furnished us with
an admirable definition of character when he said that char-
acter is the momentum one gains from past acts of choice,
that is, by the past use of freedom.^^

We do not deny the influence of formed character on the
will, we simply deny that the man in each case is shut up to
one single line of action within the sphere of his character.
There is always more than one possibility open to him. He
has ever a choice between a higher and a lower line within the
limits of his ordinary habits. But in each case the definite
choice and act affects his character, intensifying it for good
or bad. Character is not fixed, unalterable, so that only one
course is open to a man. Diverse desires connected with the
self are always present, though each has its connection with
our inner life and represents the man in some degree. Thus

I'' Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. Ill, Chap. 5.

18 /m Memoriam. Canto i.

19 Personality, Human and Divine, p. 34.

350 Basic Ideas in Religion

we say of one act, " It was so like him," and of another, " It
■was so unlike him," meaning that the one was in harmony
with the main current of his aspirations and common life,
while the other was not. From this standpoint it appears that
the self which chooses and acts is not characterless, but that
the character of every man has many sides and aspects, and
is ever forming.

There are two elements in the formation of character, one
is freedom of choice at each critical moment, and the other is
the opportunity which determines what moral possibilities shall
be open to a man according to the circumstances in which the
man stands. At each crisis two or more ways are presented
to him, and he can pursue any one. At the end of his course,
he finds himself in a situation compounded and recompounded
of opportunity and choice. Both act on each other ; opportuni-
ties limit choices, and choices develop opportunities. It is like
the wind and the helm determining day by day the course of
the ship, the one from without and the other from within. But
even in the hard moments when the tempest seems to defy
the helm and threatens destruction, the captain has a choice;
he can let the ship drive ahead, alert to all dangers, or he may
lay to and drift, watchful of every lull to regain control.

3. Heredity determines character

The determinists take still another step and declare that
character itself is largely due to ante-natal influences. This
is a necessary corollary of the preceding position, and the
logical conclusion of the determinist theories. The germ of
character to be developed is the resultant of conditions and ac-
tions in the lives of our ancestors and of all the generations
before us. To trace the chain farther back would be to carry
it into the causality of the whole universe.

This adds the dread element of heredity to the old problem,
and only recently has it been studied scientifically. In older
thought character was man's own creation, hence his own
responsibility. This theory makes character fated and un-
alterable from the very birth to death. We cannot ignore nor

Denials of Freedom 351

escape this miasma. It is in the air. Under the influence of
physiology, psychology, and evolutional ethics, it hangs like a
nightmare over a large portion of modern thought and litera-
ture, suggesting doubts and killing hopes, in a way that
threatens to make life for many what Thompson describes our
age to be in his City of Dreadful Night. Through plays,
novels, poems, scientific discussions and magazine essays it
permeates all classes of minds.

This is the dreariest and most hopeless fatalism, for it roots
man's whole inner life as well as his body in the vast cosmic
process. The mechanical theory of evolution leaves not a
shred of dignity wherewith man can wrap himself and stand
upright in self-respect. Pessimism exudes from fatalism like
sepia from a cuttle fish. What could be more dispiriting than
to doubt the reality of all effort, to deny the possibility of self-
conquest and triumph over circumstances, to find heroism an
illusion and virtue a dream? What could break the spring of
life more completely than to feel that our feet are tangled in
a net whose meshes were woven for us by our ancestors, and
for them by tailless apes, and for them by gilled amphibians,
and for them by amoebae, and so through all the stages of life.

The strange facts of heredity — inexplicable despite all
theories — do not exhaust man's being and therefore cannot
be the sole determining factor in his whole existence. They
are appalling and conclusive only to those who on other
grounds have lost all faith in man's spiritual being. If we look
within, we have all the evidence we need that we are neither
reflex action machines, played on by cosmic forces, nor cvirious
puppets worked by strings which run back to our far off an-
cestors. Heredity does present us with moral problems and
responsibilities ; for amid the influences which act steadily upon
a man, one of the most certain and pervasive is the influence
of the " dead hand " of those whose flesh and blood he inherits ;
and in like manner, he may be laying up an inheritance for weal
or woe which his children and grandchildren will enter upon
in the soHdarity of human Hfe.

The sins of the fathers do create limitations on the children's

352 Basic Ideas in Religion

freedom of action, making certain sins easier or more tempting,
because appealing to their inherited temperament, but they do
not destroy all freedom, the power to choose the good, though
the inherited propensities to certain vices may make the duty
harder on that particular side. The inheritance which evil men
transmit to their children may form at times an inner environ-
ment comparable with the outer environment of wealth or
poverty, culture or rudeness, social standing or obscurity ; but
the inner environment, though a drawback, does not in itself
determine the whole life and conduct any more than does the
outer environment. Every man is bom to struggle with evil
within and without as the conditions of ethical growth, and his
natural ancestry only determines the peculiar mode and particu-
lar field of his individual trial and testing, what kind of sin
shall entangle his feet in the race for the goal, whether greed
or lust, temper or sloth, ambition or cowardice. But this pecul-
iarity in each case is not fate. The conditions of the battle
may be determined in each life, but the man can fight the battle
in the strength of his spiritual being, in reliance on God. The
stronger his faith in his own manhood as real, the weaker
becomes the power of the inner environment to conquer him.

This idea of heredity as determining character is directly
opposed to two principles drawn from our study of evolution.
The first is that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited.
Evidence is accumulating to uphold Weismann's view that only
congenital variations are inherited. These may include temper-
amental tendencies as well as physical characteristics. Thus
if moral and spiritual qualities are inherited at all, the field of
heredity is enormously reduced by this law of non-transmission
of parental acquirements.

In the second place, the great fact in evolution, its motive
principle, is variation. Recent evolutionists look upon such
variations as starting within the organism in definite lines on
a new departure. When humanity appeared, there would be
corresponding variations on the inner thought side and the
tendency to a new line of action. If any ancestor of mine
could inaugurate a new departure from the previous family

Denials of Freedom 353

type of life or character, why may not I also develop new
traits and begin new lines of action? The limitations which
beset us, the seemingly enormous influence of heredity and en-
vironment on character and will power, are apt to blind us to
the fact that there still remains a region of possibilities, of
things which are not, but which may be, or which need not have
been and yet are. In this field we are literally creators, able
to bring into being conditions or facts which without us would
not have been. In the aggregate such new departures affect
the whole course of human history vitally and indelibly. All
civilization depends on this power of change by individual
leaders breaking through the barriers of hereditary customs,
fixed traditions, and the tyranny of the social order. This
advance certainly is not detennined by heredity, for it con-
sists in consciously departing from the past.

Heredity accomplishes nothing in the field of history. It
is simply the balance sheet of a nation's social and political
aptitudes and habits at a given time or period ; its inherited
capital, embodied in laws and customs. It stands for con-
servatism, for things established. It does not stand for ad-
vance, but stands rather in the way of progress. Forward
movement demands initiative, new determinations, new ideals,
which certainly do not spring from the past, though they are
related to it. The civilizations which blindly followed heredi-
tary influences, like China and India, ceasing to change, ceased
to be truly alive. They slept, rather than lived ; stagnated,
rather than acted.

To be valid against all freedom, the inherited traits must
be irresistible. They may limit the sphere of possible activity
and modify individual responsibility in some cases, but they
no more necessitate fated choices than does the external en-
vironment which also conditions our action. In that case the
children of corrupt or drunken parents would be hopelessly
doomed to ruin, not so much born as damned into the world, as
South said. It would be a mercy in such cases to give them
quick and easy death, as some logical theorizers actually
propose to do. But facts today make against this confident

354 Basic Ideas in Religion

dogmatism. We are the children of a thousand ancestors, and
in our veins runs the intermingled blood of the diverse streams
of many lives. While there is much that is good and pure,
there are also many rivulets of passion, duplicity, greed and
malice, which seem to form a combination that would predes-
tinate us to certain destruction. But it is not so.

The most convincing and hopeful answer to this new Fatal-
ism is the testimony in all countries shown by years of social
relief among the criminal classes, that hereditary tendencies
can be modified and even eradicated by good training and
early change in social environment and home influences. In
most cases the children of criminals who have been put in
good surroundings have outgrown all moral likeness to their
parents. Statistics are given running as high as ninety per
cent, of such poor outcasts who are now educated, refined, law-
abiding and prosperous citizens. " We can think," wrote Mr.
Loring Brace, " of little Five Points thieves who are now minis-
ters of the gospel or honest farmers ; vagrants and street chil-
dren who are men in professional life ; and women who as
teachers or wives of good citizens are everywhere respected ;
the children of outcasts or unfortunates whose inherited tend-
encies have been met by the new environment and who are
industrious and decent members of society." Environment
has been shown to be a stronger force than heredity.

In concluding this section it must be noted that the practical
ignoring of this consideration in lectures delivered and in class
books used in our colleges and universities cannot fail in the
long run to do harm. Everywhere there is a tendency, and
more than a tendency, to explain men's lives and actions by
anything rather than their own wills. They are the product
of ancestral influences or the creatures of their surroundings,
or animals, following always the strongest motive. The one
possibility, ruled out regardless of all inner facts, is that they
may be real personalities with a decided voice in their own
destiny. Such teaching would prove disastrous, if the stu-
dents really believed it, and at best it may weaken their sense
of duty and form an excuse for inaction. Men, young and

Denials of Freedom 355

old, need to be taught in unmistakable terms that they them-
selves, and not their inner or outer surroundings, are mainly
responsible for their wrong-doing or flabby do-nothingness.
The world has grown better in the past, only by the determina-
tion of strong men to make themselves better despite ancestry
and environment, and to wage steady w-arfare against inherited
traits and tendencies and against the social influences which
drag men down. *' But all men are not strong." True, but
let us not tell the weak that they cannot do any better and are
not to blame ! We must preach effort and hope, not laissea
faire and despair. If the fad of academic sociology is to help
and not injure the " sociological units," it must seek to educate
their wills and to strengthen their sense of individual duty
and responsibility.

III. Pantheistic, Theological Denials

This attack on freedom holds that it is inconsistent with
absolute unity, because it is irreconcilable with the Divine Will
as sovereignty, power, and foreknowledge of all events. All
forms of pantheism are opposed to freedom on the ground that
it makes man independent of God. The discussion of these
denials belongs to works on Christian theology, rather than on
fundamental or natural theology. Suflice it to say here that in
early Greek theology human freedom was emphasized as a
mark of divine likeness. The fatalism of Augustine met with
little acceptance in the mediaeval Church, and was not held
among the mass of Christian people until it became embodied
in some of the Reformation teaching. True Christian theol-
ogy, based on the plain teaching of the whole Bible, recognizes
that God voluntarily limited Himself, when He created free
spirits. The absence of any time element with God removes
from His self-limitation all difficulty as to fore-knowledge.

In the contrast with some theological depreciations of man
we might note the striking words of the great evolutionist,
Professor Cope : " It is now well to consider how far an
automatic mind has any claim to personality or individuality,
as generally understood. From the usual standpoint, a being

356 Basic Ideas in Religion

without ' liberty,' or will, properly so called, is without charac-
ter, and in so far a nonentity. Even the character of the Deity
cannot escape this destructive analysis ; for according to
Spinoza, if He is good, but a single line of action, without
alternatives, lies open to God, if He be at the same time omnis-
cient. All this is changed if the element of spontaneity in
character be presupposed. The existence of such a quality in
man renders foresight of his decisions no more than a calcula-
tion of chances, and in other cases impossible ; thus offering the
only conceivable limit to omniscience, and hence to omnipo-
tence. As we regard the goodness of God as the anchor of
the universe, if that goodness be in some respect inconsist-
ent with omnipotence, we are strengthened, if we discover
that there is ground for correcting our traditional supposi-
tions in regard to the latter. Can we not find this ground
in a liberty or freedom which is the condition of what we
suppose, in the absence of knowledge, to be the characteristic
of the highest class of conscious existences? " '°

It has already been pointed out that Spinoza did not dare
to apply his mechanical system to inner thoughts and purposes
of the heart, for his very enthusiasm for his high and holy
ideals made him transcend his own system. But in doing so he
had to give up his whole philosophy. Fatalism has no loop-
holes. It must control the inmost thoughts as well as the outer
actions. Spinoza is utterly illogical when he blames one friend
for an action of which he does not approve, or urges another
to exert himself to assiduous study for the cultivation of his
soul.

Many of the Hegelians join hands with the Empiricists in
scornful condemnation of the insane pride which supposes men
to be real agents with power to act and to affect the course of
nature, like a mob of little gods. But better petty gods than
petty puppets, deluded in all high faiths and hopes, whose
very creation would be a mockery. The philosophers, who
aim at unity at any cost, reject freedom because it separates

20 The Origin of the Fittest, p. 456.

Denials of Freedom 357

man from God and makes him independent, no matter how
sHghtly, of " The Absolute," and impHes a phirality of
" causes " which is absolutely inconsistent with philosophic
unity. But that, in turn, outrages our moral consciousness
with its profound conviction of responsibility and sin.

The best answer to the Hegelians is given by James Seth :
"This (Hegelian) unification of consciousness in a single
Self is sometimes carried so far that to speak of self-conscious-
ness or mind in the plural is branded *as an apostasy from the
only true philosophic faith. But any plausibility which this
point of view may possess within the realm of pure intellect
vanishes at once as soon as we turn to the moral sphere ; we
are not merely contemplative intellects, we are, above all, agents
or doers. It is well, as Hegel does, to insist on the rational
character of the universe, but to make Thought the exclusive
principle is either to fall into a one-sided extreme or to use
' thought ' in a non-natural sense. Thought can not fairly be
made to include will, and any theory of the universe which
neglects the fact of will omits that which seems to communi-
cate a living reality to the whole. ... It is in the will, in
purposive action, and particularly in our moral activity, as
Fichte, to my mind, conclusively demonstrated, that we lay
hold upon reality. ... In the purposive ' I will,' each man is
real, and is immediately conscious of his own reality. What-
ever else may or may not be real, this is real. This is the
fundamental belief, around which scepticism may weave its
maze of doubts and logical puzzles, but from which it is even-
tually powerless to dislodge us, because no argument can affect
an immediate certainty — a certainty, moreover, on which our
whole view of the universe depends. ... In our wills we feel
a principle of self-hood, which separates us even from the
Being who is the ground of our existence. This is most mani-
fest in the sphere of moral duty. ' Our wills are ours to make
them Thine,' as the poet finely puts it. But they must be really
ours, if there is to be any ethical value in the surrender — if
there is even to be any meaning in the process at all. If there
are not two wills involved, then no relation between them is

358 Basic Ideas in Religion

possible, and the imaginary duality is an illusion incident to our
limited point of view. But the ethical consciousness places its
veto once for all upon any such sophistication of its primary
and absolute deliverance; and by that absolute deliverance, we
shall do well, I think, to stand. The speculative reason sees
no alternative between absolute dependence, which would
make us merely the pipes upon which the divine musician plays,
and absolute independence, which would make the world con-
sist of a plurality of self-subsistent real beings. These are
the only kinds of relation which it finds intelligible. But it
seems to me that it must be, in the nature of the case, impos-
sible for the finite spirit to understand the mode of its relation
to the infinite or absolute Spirit in which it lives. That rela-
tion could only be intelligible from the absolute point of view.
The fact, then, that we can not reconcile the partial independ-
ence and freedom of the finite self with its acknowledged de-
pendence upon God in other respects, need not force us to
abandon our primary moral conviction, in deference to a specu-
lative theory which may be applying a finite plumb-line to
measure the resources of the infinite. After all, why should
the creation of beings with a real, though partial freedom and
independence be an absolute impossibility? It is certainly the
only view which makes the world a real place — which makes
the whole labor of history more than a shadowy fight or aim-
less phantasmagoria." -^

In conclusion let it be said, as has been many times in this
work, that if the speculative intellect is thus powerless to
help, and serves only to perplex us with sophistries, we must
fall back on those deep convictions of the heart which are more
certain and conclusive to him who feels them than the logical
arguments of the head. Our moral destiny seems left in our
own hands. In ethical as in religious life we must walk by
faith not by sight, " believing where we cannot prove." One
power remains. We can take sides with the Right, and will to
believe all that makes for the high and holy in life and thought.

21 Two Lectures on Theism, pp. 45-

Denials of Freedom 359

and reject the mechanical theories which degrade or deny our
nlanhood. We can act as free men, wilHng and working for
the good to which conscience witnesses, and as we do thus
set our hearts on the things that make for peace and faith,
they become certain reaHties to us, inspiring and uphfting.
The very effort this decision forces us to make against the
lower elements of denial — the appetites of the body, the im-
pulses of the senses and the appearance of mechanism in the
world — will make us stronger men in will and character, and
our faith in freedom will grow settled and unquestioning. A
good will — a will set to obey God's commandments — is the
only truly good thing in the universe. Hence we understand
the maxim : " Freedom of will is something to be acquired, not
given outright." This freedom is the harmony of our own
will with the Supreme Will, and when it has been attained we
know that " God's service is perfect freedom."

CHAPTER XIX

DENIALS OF CONSCIENCE

Conscience as the intuition of Eternal Righteousness, has
been denied along two lines :

I. Social or Utilitarian Ethics
This is the view that this world and its experience is
the sole source and field of conscience. Utility, the merely
present good for oneself and others, is the sufficient basis and
rule of Ethics. This is the theory expounded by Bentham,
Mill, Grote, and others. For a discussion of it the reader is
referred to any good history of ethics, especially H. Sidg-
wick's and to the well known first chapter of Lecky's History
of European Morals^ written from the intuitive standpoint.

II. Evolutional Ethics

This theory combines intuitive and utilitarian elements. Our
intuitions of right and wrong are a set of the brain in favor of
certain kinds of action, inherited from race experiences of
pleasure and of pain, animal as well as human. They are a
priori to the individual but a posteriori to the race.

C. M. Williams begins his important Review of Evolutional
Ethics by remarking on the astonishing rapidity with which the
theory of evolution has been accepted, not only in natural his-
tory but in every department of science, and not least in ethics,
as a guiding principle in all study. " Every year, and almost
every month, brings with it a fresh supply of books, pamphlets
and magazine articles on ' The Evolution of Morality,' ' L'
Evolution de la Morale,' ' Die Evolution der Sittlichkeit,' * Sitt-
lichkeit und Darwinismus.' So many are the waters which
now pour themselves into this common stream, that the cur-

360

Denials of Conscience 361

rent threatens soon to become too deep and swift for any but
the most expert swimmers." ^ Though outhned in Chapter IV
of the Descent of Man, naturahstic ethics owes its present
vogue more to Herbert Spencer than to Darwin. WiUiams
outhnes the systems of ten other leading writers, EngHsh and
Continental, and the magazine writers and college professors
who take its premises for granted are too numerous for men-
tion. Its apparent simplicity commends it to the popular mind.
Ignoring all " metaphysical illusions " as to any superhuman
element in conscience, it claims to furnish evidence of the
origin in animal life through a continuous evolution, not only
of bodily structure, but of the moral and spiritual faculties of
man. The moral sense is only a highly differentiated form of
social instinct of gregarious animals. The conscience is a com-
plex of associated social impulses and feelings, which ultimate-
ly are traceable to innumerable sense-impressions in primeval
animal relations, oft repeated, till they have become mental
habits, and at last emerged in human consciousness as moral
intuitions. The sense of duty, of obligation to a certain course
of action, is simply a prudential regard for social opinion and
personal advantage, which seems mysterious and sacred merely
because we feel it is " a power not ourselves," no product of
our personal experience or will, and we know not its real
origin. Beginning in social interrelations, it grows more
complex with advancing civilization, and varies accordingly,
but it can never rise above its source into any transcendental
sphere. In morals, as in science, the one law of study and rule
of action is the observation of commonplace " facts." Ethical
facts have, indeed, their own peculiar environment in con-
sciousness, but they are determined as definitely and invariably
by their antecedents as the phenomena of the physical order.
As Dr. Brinton bluntly puts it in his work on early religions,
" We can scarcely escape a painful shock to discover that we
are bound by such adamantine chains. As the primitive man
could not control the processes of nature, so are we slow to

ip. 2.

362 Basic Ideas in Religion

acknowledge that others, not less rigid, rule our thoughts and
fancies." ^

In this, as in all other controversies with men of science,
we differ not so much as to observed facts — we reverently
accept all proven facts as parts of God's own revelation of his
method of working in the past and the present — but as to the
principle by which we correlate and interpret the isolated phe-
nomena. Shall we study them solely in the light of mechanical
forces acting in or on matter, and of our observation of animal
instincts and habits? Or shall we use for our guide the light
of that rational consciousness which alone enables us to observe
and reason about natural facts, as certainly brutes do not?
Why should we not interpret ethical facts, at every stage,
under the illumination of the inner environment of our per-
sonality and consciousness of moral obligation? The contrast
appears clearly in the two phrases, " The Ethics of Evolution,"
and " The Evolution of Ethics." The first looks on ethical life
as merely a stage or episode in the continuous process of evolu-
tion, which brings forth in succession a multiplicity of hetero-
geneous phenomena out of an original homogeneity, as Spen-
cer expresses it, by the simple principle of segregation of parts
and the differentiation of function. The Evolution of Ethics,
on the other hand, admits that ethical life, having once appeared
from a higher source than the phenomenal world, was devel-
oped or evolved under the progressive advance of social rela-
tions and moral civilization. That is obvious. Ultus homo
nullus homo, is especially true of the ethical homo. Moral re-
lations cannot exist apart from social relations — but that is
a different thing from saying that ethical being itself is the
creation of society.

Evolution itself creates nothing. It is merely a process of
change or growth in a preexisting something which is the sub-
ject of the modification or development. In the beginning the
Divine Sower w^ent forth to sow, and the seeds sown, having
life in themselves, develop in due order, according to their

^Primitive Religions, p. 8.

• Denials of Conscience 363

time and their " soil " ; but never apart from His presence or
without His knowledge. We may admit the evolution of con-
science in the sense in which alone theists can accept the evolu-
tion of physical life. Just as the immanent formative principle,
the archetypal energy, built up each organism according to its
kind, through successive forms, till the divine idea is realized
in the final type, so the spiritual energy, the moral archetype
of conscience, precedes and dominates its own evolution, how-
ever slow the process and untractable the material. The ethi-
cal differs in one vital point from the physical development.
Man has no control over the material environment, an ever-
present factor in evolution, but the social environment is itself
the creation or expression of humanity. The ethical ideas and
judgments, manners and customs of any age are the product,
not of external influences, of food and climate, but of spiritual
forces, the interaction of human wills and personalities. In
a word, conscience has its life in itself. Spontaneous genera-
tion of moral ideas out of non-moral animal existence is no
more possible than the genesis of physical life out of inorganic
matter. The advocates of unbroken continuity in the evolu-
tional process, one thing after another arising out of the pre-
ceding very different things, do not seem to realize the difificul-
ties and assumptions involved in their view. It has never been
more clearly put than in Spencer's letter to Mill, first pub-
lished in Bain's Mental and Moral Science. " I believe that
the experiences of utility organized and consolidated through
all past generations of the human race, have been producing
corresponding nervous modifications, which by continued
transmission and accumulation, have become in us certain facul-
ties of moral intuition — certain emotions corresponding to
right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in the
individual experiences of utility." ^ The strength of this
apparently simple explanation consists in its reconciliation of
the intuitive and utilitarian theories of morals which, till it
appeared, struggled for the mastery in the field of ethical

3 p. 722.

364 Basic Ideas in Religion

science. It agrees with Butler and Kant, who looked on the
" categorical imperative " of duty as something transcendental
— a voice within, not an impulse from without — and also
with Mill and Bentham, who explained conscience by the law
of the association of ideas, determined in this case by agree-
able or disagreeable social experiences. The latter were nearer
the evolutional conception than the former, only they did not
carry their " experience " far enough back, wrongly supposing
the individual life sufficient for the genesis and growth of the
moral sense anew in each generation. The foundation stone
of this whole system is plainly the assumption that sensations
of social pleasure and pain in earlier animal life, necessarily
fleeting and varying, were capable of producing such impres-
sions on the " brain tracts '" concerned, that they were trans-
mitted to later generations in the form of intuitive moral im-
pulses apart from similar " sensations." Darwin, in his Origin
of Species, admitted that the difficulties connected with animal
instincts " would probably appear to the reader sufficient to
overthrow the whole theory." *

But Spencer shows no such diffidence about his view of the
easy transmutation of animal sensations into human intuitions.
What evidence can we possibly have of the nervous modifica-
tions alleged to be produced by social experiences or of their
transmission, not only as " inherited habits " of action, but as
inner intuitions apart from any action? Even if we start with
rudimentarv' human society, which, strictly taken, the theory
does not permit us to do, there is no evidence that the com-
monly feeble feelings of self-approval or self-reproach in social
relations, so deeply impress the nervous organization, that they
can be handed down to descendants. This easy assumption of
an interrelation between mental and physical processes, so in-
timate that ethical feelings leave traces of themselves on brain
structure, meets with no support whatever from the represen-
tatives of the physical psychology. Wundt and Miinsterberg,
Clifford and Huxley, Hodgson and Spalding, Titchener

* See Note K.

Denials of Conscience 365

md Scripture, all work on the hypothesis of the entire inde-
pendence of the " parallel " streams of psychical and physical
lotion. Consciousness is only the passive, subjective side of
:ertain nerve movements, not itself an active factor in the
A^ork.^ Whether or not the material process " causes " the
Dsychical, they are all agreed that psychical states cannot pos-
sibly affect the course of the nervous " shocks " and motions,
lot even in the case of volitions where we feel most conscious
Df self-determination. " If my will," says Lange, the historian
of Materialism, " can deflect a single atom a millionth of a
millimeter out of its path as determined by the laws of
mechanics, the scientific formula of the Universe would be-
come inexplicable." Professor Huxley later took back his
early admission that " Our volition counts for something as a
condition in the course of events," adding in a note, '' To speak
more accurately, the physical state of which volition is the ex-
pression." **

I am not aware that Spencer has noticed this objection, but
he has vigorously contested the view of Weismann that
acquired characteristics — i.e., bodily modifications or mental
habits arising after birth — are not transmitted by heredity.
This manifestly cuts the ground from under both the Darwin-
ian theory that instincts are inherited habits, which begin in
*' chance " actions, and the Neo-Lamarckian view of the in-
heritance of organs modified by use or disuse. The evolution-
ists of the old school claim that Weismann has made many
concessions under their criticisms, but it is certain that he has
not modified his original strong assertions to the extent of
admitting the inheritability of nervous modifications due, ex
hypothese, to mere emotions. If not, Spencer's theory is left
altogether in the air.

The objections to it on the psychical side are equally obvious
and cogent. Evolutional Ethics have been well defined as the
Natural History of Morals, and therefore must fail, if it
appears that in the nature of things there can be no Ethics

=5 See pp. 225-8.

6 Methods and Results, p. 163.

366 Basic Ideas in Religion

in natural history. It will be objected that this is a matter of
definition, but the material for the definition is part of the
common consciousness. All men, barring philosophers of a
certain school, look on the sense of duty and of responsibility
as the essential element in ethical life. Both imply an underly-
ing conviction of personality and moral freedom, and none of
these ideas or feelings are conceivably present in the animal
consciousness. No one has stated more forcibly than Profes-
sor Cope, the greatest American evolutionist, the fact that the
ethical consciousness depends on the sense of freedom, with
which Kant also connected it, and therefore that not even the
rudiments of morality, properly so-called, can be found in ani-
mal existence.

This difficulty is evaded by writers like Littre and Carneri,
and, unfortunately, also by Professor Drummond (following
John Fiske), by identifying the moral altogether with the so-
cial consciousness, and assuming that the altruistic impulses
connected with sexuality, gregarious habits, and the slowly de-
veloping family life, somehow issued in the higher ethics of
the truly human life. Here we have the fallacy, so often re-
curring in this whole field, of supposing that we can get rid
of essential differences or new departures, by the simple de-
vice of imagining their beginnings to be " imperceptible," and
then allowing time enough for them to develop into very per-
ceptible dififerences — a mode of argument which shows that
the study of external nature does not always develop the logi-
cal faculties. The instincts of propagation and self-preserva-
tion, and even of the care of the young, are mere organic im-
pulses in animals. They furnish material for morality when
once it has appeared, but they have in themselves no moral
character, because unaccompanied by any sense of duty or of
freedom. If once we begin this fantastic search for the rudi-
ments of ethics in nature, there is no logical reason why we
should begin with the animal world. We may see mind in
plant life, find loves and hates in chemical affinities and repul-
sions, as Haeckel does, and rejoice, with Drummond, to behold
the beginning of self-sacrifice in the division by fission of proto-

Denials of Conscience 367

plasmic cells. It is refreshing amid this confusion of words
and ideas to read Professor Huxley's blunt repudiation of this
easy identification, in all essential rudiments, of animal and
human life. He uses the strong expression that " there was a
stage when, if I may speak figuratively, the Welt-geist repented
him that he had made mankind no better than the brutes and
resolved upon a largely new departure." Then truly human
life began in man's struggle against the cosmic process, and in
his rising above nature's law that might makes right. In his
Romanes Lecture on Ethics and Evolution, he writes, " The
practice of that which is ethically best — what we call goodness
or virtue — involves a course of conduct which, in all respects,
is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle
for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands
self-restraint ; in place of thrusting aside or treading down all
competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely re-
spect, but shall help his fellows ; its influence is directed, not
so much to the survival of the fittest, as to the fitting of as
many as possible to survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial
theory of existence." " We welcome his indignant protest
against the cold-blooded theorists who covertly advocate imita-
tion of nature's rough-and-ready method of maintaining a
strong species — or healthy state — by eliminating pitilessly
the unfit to live, sickly infants and hopeless invalids, idiots and
paupers, the feeble through age, the whole herd of incapables.
What holds back the butcher's hand ? Why not cry with shark
and tiger, and the conquering hordes of Attila and Zenghis
Khan, Vae victisf Why should not the minority suffer for
the good of the majority, if, indeed, we aim only at " the
greatest happiness of the greatest number"? It is impossible
to answer these questions without bringing in considerations
fatal to the first principles of evolutional ethics, for if man be
simply the product of nature, he should be well content to live
by nature's own law that might is right. Why should he feel
strange self-reproach when he walks in the footsteps of his

T Pp. 81, 2.

368 Basic Ideas in Religion

brute ancestors and cruelly shoves aside and kills off those who
stand in the way of his pleasure? Why does the helpless effect
protest against its equally helpless cause, both being mere parts
in a mechanical process? Why do the children of nature
sternly judge their mother and repudiate her methods with
horror, such as fired the denunciations of John Stuart
Mill ?

All unconscious of its profound significance in the coming
days of evolution theories, our fathers rightly gave the name
*' humanity " to all impulses and acts which spring from pity,
sympathy, and loving-kindness. They are truly human, not
to be developed out of brute instincts by any juggling with
words. There is great need of clearness on this point. The
question is not whether " altruistic " actions — we cannot speak
of motives — appear here and there in the animal world, but
whether, when they do appear, they prove so immediately
profitable to the beast which does them as to give it an advan-
tage in the struggle for life, and to be handed down to its
young, through nervous modifications. Others may let their
imaginations run riot in picturing the beginnings of compassion
in the dim aeons when " dragons tore each other in their slime "
and dream idyls of the evolution of the father and mother out
of the lair of the tiger and the leafy home of the monkey. We
content ourselves with the narrower horizon of human history
and ask the question, when and where we can find the Golden
Age when Love smiled and Justice reigned among men ; when
loving-kindness " paid " in immediate pleasure and personal
profit; when prophets and saints, the doers of good and the
ministers of mercy, found such satisfaction and honor in their
life, that they and those who saw how they profited, acquired
that " set of the brain " toward gentleness and self-denial which
we call humanity? The very question seems a cynical satire
on the world as it is. We know that, through the ages, Christ's
way of love is not the way of personal happiness and profit.
As life goes on, we learn the sad truth that the happy are not
the good and the good are not the happy, though we never
doubt they ought to be one and will be in God's own time. All

Denials of Conscience 369

history witnesses " Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong for-
ever on the throne," yet we never lose our faith that

" The scaffold sways the Future and behind the dim Unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own." ^

Fiat justitia, pereat niundus, said the Roman of old, and the
modern thinker carries it backward to the world beginning, and
voices the undying faith of the heart in the eternal nature of
righteousness. It is not necessary that any world exist, but
it is necessary that justice be done and ultimately triumph in
any world that does exist.

Had Darwin only studied the inner world of human charac-
ter and motive, as well as the animal life of sensation and in-
stinct (which with his characteristic honesty, he admits he did
not do ®), he and others would have perceived the fallacy which
underlies and vitiates the whole theory of the purely animal
origin of conscience. It assumes that the altruistic impulses,
sympathy, benevolence, generosity and justice, arose by easy
stages from the primitive instincts of self-advantage and self-
preservation, and became everywhere the stronger and more
enduring, as soon as animals became gregarious. But even
granting that social impulses were strong in the prehistoric
brute man, he would still be in the egotistic stage so long as
they were purely self -regarding, merely the prudent avoidance
of bites and scratches from his mates whose convenience he
interfered with. How could such a non-moral animal rise
into the truly ethical life of duty? Darwin's only connecting
link is remorse, self-reproach (enforced by outer disagreeable
consequences) for having followed his selfish and not social
impulses. But why should an intelligent brute — all the crea-

8 Lowell, The Present Crisis.

» To Charles Lyell, he wrote, " I have thought only vaguely as to man.
I have done scarcely anything in psychology." To J. Galton, " I have
never tried looking into my own mind. I have never systematically
thought on religion in relation to science, or on morals in relation to
society." Miss Cobbe remarks, " Mr. Darwin told me that he had
never read Kant, and accepted with reluctance the loan I pressed on
him of Semple's translation of the ' Metaphysic of Ethics.' He re-
turned it in a few days, after, I believe, a cursory inspection."

370 Basic Ideas in Religion

ture is at this stage — feel any ethical self-reproach for yield-
ing to the imperious demands of his animal nature, psychical
or physical ? Only on the supposition, unconsciously taken for
granted, that he and his fellows already recognize, however
dimly, the supremacy of the conscience, the ought, over every
other principle of human action. But obviously then, he is
not a brute in the process of becoming a moral agent, but al-
ready a true man, with an intuitive feeling of the obligation of
Right, apart from any considerations of gain or loss. Only a
self-conscious moral agent in an ethical environment, however
rudimentary, could feel true remorse, the shame of wrong-
doing, not the mere fear of penalty, which the theory, by an
obvious fallacy of inversion, makes the source of the very con-
science which it presupposes.

We may, therefore, claim the evidence of historical and
human, as opposed to hypothetical and animal, experience, for
the old faith, that conscience is a voice from a higher environ-
ment, and has its birth in the spiritual and the divine, not the
psychical and social realms of being. The undying hopes, the
abiding convictions, the soaring aspirations, " the truths which
wake to perish never " — these are the mystic instincts of
man's higher nature, no more imagined by him or evolved out
of experience than are the physical instincts of the lower nature
he shares with the brutes. Science affirms that these last, in
each and every case, correspond to a material world without.
Why should not faith hold with equal reason that the intuitions
of the soul are as true and reliable in their intimation of a
world eternal, an environment of Spirit?

" For Nature, giving instincts, never failed
To give the ends they point to."

Ethical Science need not start with the idea of God, but it
must end with it, if we look beneath the surface and question
the depths of our being. Duty finds its initial principle in
conscience, and no conception of conscience is so simple — and
profound — as that which lies in its etymology. It is con-
scientia, trwe'iST^crt?, joint-knowledge not only of man with

Denials of Conscience 371

men, but still more of man with God, the finite spirit's dim
but real consciousness of the root of its Being in the Infinite
Spirit and its obligation to live by the law of His life. Per-
sonality is ethical in its very essence. God is not power nor
knowledge, but God is love, and all spiritual existences are
made in His image, and tend to His likeness. They approve
the Law as holy, just and good, even, when in self-willed re-
bellion, they dare to violate it. It is this fact, that duty is the
realization of our highest self, which glorifies obedience to the
voice within, into a willing cooperation with the eternal order,
and makes the service of God perfect freedom. Wherever
conscience is found, and it is found wherever men exist, it is
never associated primarily with human relationships, but with
a higher and divine order. The unsophisticated heart, awed by
dim visions of perfect righteousness and conscious of its own
wilful sin, ever believes that all holy desires, all good counsels,
all just works proceed from God. Even the Greeks rose
above the philosophers' idea of purely social ethics and civic
righteousness. Plato thinks that men are good " by a certain
inspiration of the gods." Antigone makes her pathetic appeal
from the conventional rules which thwarted her sisterly love
to " The unwritten and enduring laws of God." ^°

The ultimate test of any philosophical or social hypothesis
is whether it will work, whether it fits into the actual order of
things. It cannot be too often emphasized that this new view
of the purely animal origin of ethical sentiments and of duty
as merely the self-regarding social instinct, somehow evolved
into an " intuition,'' has never been put to the test of consist-
ent practice. The theorists of the study and lecture hall
shrink back from the enfants terrihles, the educated nihilists of
Russia and France, who take them at their word, and, look-
ing on themselves and their fellows as simply highly intelligent
animals, propose to live by brute law. Even M. Taine, the
lucid teacher of scientific Positivism, did not dare teach his
children on the lines of his own philosophy, but had them in-

10 See p. 436.

372 Basic Ideas in Religion

structed in moral duty by a Protestant pastor whom he es-
teemed. There is a tacit agreement in certain quarters to keep
ethical theories and ethical practice apart, but the day has past,
for esoteric teaching, and philosophic, no less than scientific,
ideas filter down from college halls and laboratories and Twen-
tieth Century Clubs into the common mind as never before, and
what is whispered in the closet will be preached on the house-
top,

I do not deny the noble character of much of the ethical
teaching, on its social side, of many writers of the New School.
It is true that they agree in material points with the intuitive
moralists, in the exposition of practical duties. Herbert
Spencer's Justice is a helpful book so long as we read it apart
from the theory of the animal origin of conscience in the Data
of Ethics. But the practical question is, can we permanently
thus divorce theory and practice? Will the conduct com-
mended in the later work continue to seem reasonable and " our
duty " if the principles of the earlier ever really prevail?

We are confidently assured that people are utterly weary of
speculation and abhor metaphysics. " They care nothing about
origins and crave only facts." It is true that heretofore they
have not philosophized because they had no need. They were
all unconscious " ontologists," acting on philosophical prin-
ciples, just as M. Jourdain talked prose without knowing its
name. But what if we force them to think by denying the
very foundation of the settled habits and beliefs heretofore
taken for granted? True civilization is moral and spiritual,
not economic and materialistic ; the slow creation or expression
of lofty ideas of God and man as spiritual personalities, inti-
mately related. Will the " practical " superstructure of pru-
dential, social morality abide firm, if the " transcendental "
postulates of the highest ethics be scornfully swept into the
limbo of obsolete superstitions ? Individual thinkers, protected
by their home training and social environment, may live good
lives while denying any spiritual ground whatever for good-
ness. Jean Marie Guyau, a faithful son and husband, may
write of Morality Without Obligation or Sanction as safe and

Denials of Conscience 373

sufficient for all, but we need not look beyond France herself,
to see that common men cannot maintain themselves without
conscience, even on the lower plane of purely worldly honor.
Balfour touched the quick of this vital problem (which ex-
plains the bitterness of many of his critics) when he raised the
question, whether any truly ethical ideas would or could sur-
vive the saturation of the popular mind with the avowed prin-
ciples of evolutional morals and physiological psychology. His
two propositions seem incontrovertible, that no moral code
can be effective which does not inspire emotions of reverence,
and that such exalted feelings are dependent on the origin from
w^hich those, who accept such a code, suppose it to emanate.
In melancholy words, reminding us of the somber majesty of
Thanatopsis, he pictures man as " pure science," conceives
him naked and unadorned by the faiths and fancies of dream-
land, and asks whether such a race '* can any longer satisfy
aspirations and emotions nourished upon beliefs in the Ever-
lasting and the Divine." " Man, so far as natural science by
itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the uni-
verse, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very
existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode
in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the com-
bination of causes which first converted a dead organic com-
pound into the living progenitors of humanity, science, indeed,
as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings
famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future
lords of creation, have gradually evolved, after infinite travail,
a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelli-
gence enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the
past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless
blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty
aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a
period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed
compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation,
the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will
be dimmed, the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate
the race which has for the moment disturbed its solitude. Man

374 Basic Ideas in Religion

will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. The
uneasy consciousness, which in this obscure corner has but
for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe,
will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. ' Imperish-
able monuments ' and ' immortal deeds,' death itself, and love
stronger than death, will be as though they never had been.
Nor will anything that is, be better or be worse for all that
the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven
through countless generations to effect." ^^

It is utterly beside the mark to declare in reply that men
should do the right for the right's sake alone, without any
thought of obligation to God or of " pay " hereafter. The
question is whether under such conditions there will long be
any idea of right in any sense higher than prudent egotism.
" Society will survive all wreck of creed." True, but what
kind of society will it be that does survive? All men are in-
spired and molded by their ideals, but out of what shall the
ideals themselves be molded, when ancient faith in God and
noble thoughts of man have vanished, like childhood's dreams,
from off the earth? " Self-made men worship their maker,"
and self-evolved brutes, when they know the naked truth, will
worship the animal and intellectual self — the highest existence
in the Universe — and serve it with heart and mind. On what
logical grounds can we condemn them ? Why should not short-
lived creatures of earth live earthly lives? The age needs
sorely the warning of the aged Tennyson — may it be heeded !

"Gone for ever! Ever? No — for since our dying race began
' Ever, ever and forever ' was the leading light of Man.
Those who in barbarian burials killed the slave and slew the wife
Felt within themselves the sacred passion of the second life.

' Truth for truth, and good for good ! ' The Good, the True, the

Pure, the Just; —
Take the charm * Forever ' from them, and they crumble into dust." 12

11 Foundations of Belief, pp. 30-32.
^^ Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After.

CHAPTER XX

DENIALS OF ONTOLOGY. AGNOSTICISM

The subject of Agnosticism is unwelcome to the common
mind, but it must be pondered by the Christian student.
Theoretic atheism is rare today, but practical atheism, the
banishing of the thought of God from common life and the
neglect of prayer and worship on the specious plea that our
minds are too limited in their very nature to know God at all,
this vague, elusive doubt is in the very air, a deadly taint
fatal to faith in the thoughtful and thoughtless alike. The ag-
nostics speak humbly enough, insisting that they do not deny
the awful mystery of the Infinite Power; they only wish to
exalt it to a rightful place far beyond our petty ideas — so far
indeed that it fades away from the mind, like a dream when
one awakens.

It is not a new mode of thought, but is as old as the Sophists
of Greece. It never found more concentrated expression than
in Spinoza's saying, that there is as much or as little resem-
blance between man's idea of God and Deity, as there is be-
tween a dog on earth and the constellation Canis Major in the
heavens.

The subject of Agnosticism falls naturally into three divi-
sions. Nescience, Scientific Agnosticism, and Ethical Agnosti-
cism.

Nescience, the Relativity of Knowledge

This form of agnosticism may be stated as holding that our
knowledge is limited to phenomena and conditioned by our
faculties. The mind is an active, organizing principle, which
works up the raw material of sensation into clear knowledge,
according to its own categories of thought. But we cannot
pass beyond this knowledge ; we can know things only as they

375

376 Basic Ideas in Religion

appear to the senses and are related to each other by the
mind. Noumena, things in themselves, back of appearances,
are absolutely unknowable.

Kant is the greatest exponent of this view, holding as he
did that the three great ideas of the Reason, the self, the world,
and God are mere relative, regulative principles. As there are
no physical objects congruous to these ideas, we cannot know
them as they are. Though they are the points about which
all knowledge and thought center and are the most certain of
all experiences, yet they are only laws of the mind's working.

The expression of his nescience is found in his Critique of
Pure Reason, but it should be read in connection with his Cri-
tique of Practical Reason. In the classical passage in the Cri-
tique of Pure Reason, he writes : " We have now not only
traversed the region of the pure understanding, and carefully
surveyed every part of it, but we have also measured it, and
assigned to everything therein its proper place. But this land
is an island, and inclosed by nature herself within unchange-
able limits. It is the land of truth, surrounded by a wide and
stormy ocean, the region of illusion, where many a fog-bank,
many an iceberg, seems to the mariner, on his voyage of dis-
covery, a new country, and while constantly deluding him with
vain hopes, engages him in dangerous adventures, from which
he never can desist, and yet which he never can bring to a
termination." ^

But it should ahvays be remembered that Kant qualified his
strong statements of the impotence of Reason alone in such
great matters by maintaining that, " We enter on the path of
pure speculation only in vain. But we have reason to expect
that in the only other way open to us, the path of Practical
Reason, we may meet with better success."

Agnosticism scorns metaphysics, but it lands us in contradic-
tions as puzzling as Hegel's law of the identity of opposites.
Ultimately we are forbidden to know anything as it really is,
because in becoming known to us things are transformed into

1 Transc. Logic. Div. I, Bk. 2, Chap. 3. Meikeljohn's translation.

Denials of Ontology. Agnosticism 2)77

something else under the laws of relativity. Thus we never
arrive at the real knowledge of objects. The whole position is
false. We pursue a phantom of our own making which dis-
solves into absurdity as soon as we realize the meaning of the
solemn assertion that the very nature of knowledge forbids
the possibility of knowledge.

Sir William Hamilton in his Philosophy of the Uncondi-
tioned held the self-evident existence of the world, of the self,
and of God on the immediate affirmation of consciousness. He
thus advanced beyond Kant's sceptical position, that the regula-
tive ideas of the reason cannot guarantee their objective valid-
ity, i.e., the existence of any corresponding reality outside of
thought. But he took away with one hand what he gave with
the other! It affords no spiritual help to be assured that the
great postulates have most certainly existence outside our
minds, if we are straightway informed that they exist beyond
reach of our thought. Although self-evident, they remain in
themselves incomprehensible, can never be the objects of
clear knowledge, because definitio est negatio, and to know is
to condition. This follows, it is argued, from the fact that
wordfe descriptive of God, such as infinite and absolute, express
purely negative ideas, and deny the possibility of any clear
thought of the abstractions for which they stand. Hamilton
carried his doubt of revelation to the extreme of saying that
the height of reverence would be to erect an altar to the Un-
known God.

This line of thought starts from the proposition that " The
Infinite " or " The Unconditioned " means something in its
own nature inconceivable, the negation of thought. This con-
clusion is reached by an apparently simple line of argument:
(i) The Infinite is that which has no limits. But everything
man knows has limits. Therefore man cannot know the In-
finite. (2) Consciousness implies a distinction between two
things. To be conscious is to be conscious of some object, and
that object is known by being distinct from all other objects
by certain qualities which are limitations. Affirm one quality
and you deny the opposite. If we say this object is a ball, we

37^ Basic Ideas in Religion

deny that it is a cube or a cone. (3) The Infinite cannot be dis-
tinguished from finite things by any lack of the qualities which
finite things have, for then the Infinite would have defects
and be finite. (4) The Infinite cannot be distinguished by the
possession of qualities which finite things do not have, for
such qualities would be infinite, and being infinite we could
not know them. (5) An object of thought is always one
thing out of a number of other things, to which it is related
in definite ways. The Infinite embraces all things and we can-
not contrast it with other things. To speak of a consciousness
of the Infinite is to affirm a contradiction in terms, for con-
sciousness means knowledge of distinction and relations. The
Absolute exists out of all relations because it embraces all
qualities and includes all thinking beings. Hence it cannot be
known in any mode or degree.

Schleiermacher and Ritschl in Germany, and Mansel in Eng-
land, in his Bampton Lectures of 1858, applied this philosophy
to Christian Theology with disastrous efifect. Mansel showed
his lack of humor and his Christian followers their lack of logi-
cal consistency, when he taught that out of this inconceivable
something — equivalent, in our minds, to blank nothing, which
we cannot think or call a Creator, or good or loving —
there has come an infallible Revelation, which is certified not
by the witness of our own spirit, but by the miracles it narrates
and the prophecies it contains, as if both did not imply a living
God. But we are warned that even the Bible does not tell us
what God really is, but only how He wills us to think of Him.
Ideas and images, which do not represent God as He is, may
yet represent Him as it is our duty to regard Him. They are
not in themselves true, but we must nevertheless believe and
act as if they were true. A finite mind can form no concep-
tion of an Infinite Being which shall be speculatively true, for
it must represent the infinite under finite forms, but yet a con-
ception which is speculatively untrue may be regulatively true.
A regulative truth is designed not to satisfy our reason, but to
guide our practice, not to tell us what God is, but how He wills
us to think of Him. Even the moral law is regulative only.

Denials of Ontology. Agnosticism 379

" Ethical ideas are not by any means the eternal truth itself,
but merely laws which God has revealed, economically, with
reference to our human nature without being Himself bound by
them. , . . God has the right to suspend occasionally the moral
laws, not less than the laws of nature, without canceling their
validity in ordinary life." ^

It was this arbitrary and mechanical conception of God
which led to the memorable protest of J. S. Mill, the sceptic,
against the teaching of the theologian, on the ground of that
inner witness, to which St. Paul made his appeal, commending
himself to every man's consciousness by manifestation of the
Truth : " If, instead of the ' glad tidings ' that there exists a
Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human
mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am
informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes
are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are
the principles of his government, except that ' the highest hu-
man morality which we are capable of conceiving ' does not
sanction them ; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as
I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at
the same time call this being by the names which express and
affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that
I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me,
there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel
me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not
what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures ;
and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling
him, to hell I will go." ^

As will be stated more at length in the next section the fal-
lacy lies in treating pure abstractions — " the Infinite " and
" the Absolute " — as having being in themselves. The words
are not negative but intensely positive. For example, infinite
space or time means space or time without limit, but the idea
of each remains the same; it is not sublimated into inconceiv-

2 Letter of Mansel to Rev. L. T. Bernays.

^Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, Vol. I, pp.
130, I.

380 Basic Ideas in Religion

ability. Infinity of quality, which alone belongs to the Divine
Personality, is equivalent to perfection or the absence of any
limitations on the nature or action of the quality in question.

Scientific Agnosticism

This is the most seductive form of spiritual doubt. It is the
direct result of the scientific trend of educated and uneducated
thought alike. The mind, like the hand, is subdued to what
it works in, and steady investigations conducted for years on
purely materialistic principles with the mind itself, the living
power which does the work, ignored, a paralysis of thought
must follow on its higher human side, as well as on the side
of faith. Agnosticism, whether serious or flippant, is only the
expression on the thought side of a paralysis of faith already
accomplished.

Darwin admits this fully : " Disbelief crept over me at a
very slow rate but was at last complete." Its completion
appears in the pathetic words : " Then arises the doubt, Can
the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed
from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be
trusted when it draws such grand conclusions ? " * How true
is the saying of Pascal, " It is dangerous to make man see too
clearly how nearly equal he is to the brutes, without showing
him his greatness." ^

Here we see the fallacy underlying the mechanical evolution
view, that we must hark back to the beginning of each thing,
even man, in order to understand it. What matters if the
far-off ancestor of my body was a brute, if at the end of the
ordained development I emerge a man? The vital question
is not, what we are developed from, though it be a germ cell,
indistinguishable from that of a worm, but what is the divine
plan that implanted in that germ its law of growth ? The deep
words of the Psalmist, " A body thou hast prepared me," are
as true of the age-long growth of the body in the great womb
of nature, as of the months long development in the mother.

*Life and Letters, Vol. I, p. 282.
« Thoughts, XI.

Denials of Ontology. Agnosticism 381

How can we meet this darkest doubt? When God seems to
have vanished from the heavens and the earth, man shrinks
from being but Httle less than God to being but Httle more than
an ape. It is not the master minds in the great world of
science, the men of broad culture and wide outlook and healthy
interest in the world's great life, but the multitude of faithful
specialists in narrow fields, who must be awakened to the half-
forgotten truth, that the proper study of mankind is man.
It was only when John Fiske ceased to be the devotee of
science and became the student of histor}', that the greatness
of man, the person, the thinker, and the doer, dawned on him
and he wrote The Destiny of Man and The Idea of God. It
is the studies which recognize and honor man in the wide
sweep of his thought, and in the complexity of his being, and
the marvels of his creations in the world of mind and of things,
which make us feel that our knowledge of the world, and of
God depends in the end on our insight into man's own nature.

Herbert Spencer '^ stands out prominently as the philosopher
of science, but he advocates also certain constructive prin-
ciples which make for faith. He differs from the Positivism
of Comte, who forbids any thought or speech of the Infinite,
as an idea belonging to the outgrown theological stage of
human culture, by affirming its certain existence, and holds
that we cannot escape the thought of it. As he says, Comte's
agnosticism goes too far. It expresses our confessed in-
ability to know or conceive the nature of the Infinite Power
manifested through phenomena, but it fails to indicate our con-
fessed ability to recognize the existence of that power as of
all facts the most certain. In First Principles he agrees with
Hamilton and Mansel in looking on our profound conscious-
ness of Infinite Reality, which rests on intuitive feeling, as
more certain than any knowledge of phenomena known through
the senses. It is noumenon, immediate knowledge. Here
Spencer writes as an ontologist, but he rejects the ontological
interpretation of the words Infinite and Absolute.

' On Spencer's methods see Note Z.

382 Basic Ideas in Religion

" The absolute is conceived merely by the negation of con-
ceivability," writes Sir WilHam Hamilton. " The Absolute
and Infinite," says Mansel, " are thus, like the Inconceiv-
able and the Imperceptible, names indicating not an object of
thought or of consciousness at all, but the mere absence of the
conditions under which consciousness is possible." '' If they
were correct, we should not have even the word Infinite. No
one will dispute the proposition that all our knowledge is of
relations between things and that everything is related to other
things. If then ex hypothese, a something called the Absolute
exists in some transcendental manner related to nothing what-
ever, then plainly I cannot know it. It is for me a nonentity !
I have nothing to do with it and it has nothing to do with me.
Comte then would be right in advising men to leave such an
empty abstraction severely alone. Spencer, like Mill before
him, pointed out that the words infinite and unconditioned are
adjectives and have no meaning apart from objects. They
cannot be formed into concrete abstractions (if such a phrase
is permitted) by printing them with capitals. The negative
elements Mansel emphasized are simply read into them by the
omission of any object for them to qualify. When used as
proper adjectives, they are not negative, but intensely affirma-
tive. They have no power to make an object of which we are
thinking disappear as soon as we think of it as " infinite." On
the contrary, they extend and intensify the quality to which we
attach them. Infinite space and time cannot be thought of
clearly for they have no limits, but they remain space and time
within the farthest reach of our minds. The ultimate Reality
is at once known and unknown, even as our being is known and
unknown. We know ourselves intimately, and other men suf-
ficiently for all purposes of intercourse and love, but we do not
know even our own being as a " whole " in all relations to God
and man, still less can we know ourselves through and through.
The subconscious realm is as deep and broad as the conscious.
Human personality is almost as great a mystery as the Divine.

7 As quoted by Spencer, First Principles, § 26.

Denials of Ontology. Agnosticism 383

But if we are greater than we know, if we cannot explain or
conceive the self, and yet do know its reaHty with absolute cer-
tainty, then the Infinite Self may also be known to our spirits
in certain aspects and yet transcend us in others. This much
we willingly grant to the law of relativity.

Confusion also arises from confounding the mathematical
infinity of quantity with the moral infinity of quality. We
know things only by their limits in space and relations to other
things, but persons we know through their qualities. We know
them truly and sufficiently for all purposes of mutual inter-
course and affection. Such personal knowledge of God as
Father, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, is possible, for the " infinity "
of the attributes through which we know Him means simply
that they exist in Him in ideal perfection, free from the limita-
tions in will and act which thwart them in all human expe-
rience. Partial knowledge of an infinite person (infinite as
self-existent and perfect in all attributes) may be true to the
divine fact, though necessarily incomplete. In no part of in-
finity do qualities change their essence, and we can know them,
for though they transcend the same qualities in ourselves, they
never contradict them.

Spencer thinks only in terms of quantity, and the Infinite
for him is the Eternal Energy, of which all the cosmic phe-
nomena are the appearances ! Thus he leaves on one side
Hamilton's metaphysics about the Absolute, which exists out
of relations and without qualities and cannot be a cause at all.
He holds that the Infinite is not a negative but a positive idea,
corresponding to a Reality which can be apprehended but not
comprehended — " a necessary datum of consciousness, having
a higher warrant than any other whatever," and our " indef-
inite " knowledge of it may be true. Its authority transcends
all other authorities whatsoever, for not only is it given in the
very constitution of our own consciousness, but we cannot even
conceive a consciousness so made as not to give it.^ " Besides
that definite consciousness of which logic formulates the laws,

8 See Note O.

384 Basic Ideas in Religion

there is also an indefinite consciousness which cannot be formu-
lated. Besides complete thoughts, and besides the thoughts
which though incomplete admit of completion, there are
thoughts which it is impossible to complete, and yet which are
still real, in the sense that they are normal affections of the
intellect." ^ " This consciousness of an Incomprehensible
Power, called Omnipresent from inability to assign its limits,
is just that consciousness on which Religion dwells." ^° He
proposes to reconcile science and religion by assigning to the
first all that may be known definitely, the realm of " facts," and
to religion what is felt, but cannot be known, the realm of feel-
ing without contents at all.

This is a division which would only result, as we know it has
resulted, in practical atheism, cool indifference to any thought
of God, for humanity will never be content to worship with
lowly adoration before the fog of an unknowable something.
In Mind, Motion, and Monism Romanes, who was once his de-
vout disciple, thinks that he knows too much about the Un-
knowable to be a pure agnostic. " The distinctive features of
Mr. Spencer's doctrine of the Unknowable are not merely non-
agnostic, but anti-agnostic. For the doctrine affirms that we
have this much knowledge of God — namely, that if He exists.
He must for ever be unknown. Without question, this would
be a most important piece of definite knowledge with regard to
Deity, negative though it be; and, therefore, any man who
holds it has no right to be called an agnostic. To me it has al-
ways seemed that the doctrine of the Unknowable, in so far
as it differs from the doctrine of the Unknown, is highly un-
philosophical. ... It is a perfectly philosophical statement for
any one to make that, as matters now stand, he can see no
evidence of Theism ; but to say that he knows the human
race never can have such evidence, is a most unphilosophical
statement, seeing that it could only be justified by absolute
knowledge. And, on this account, I say that the doctrine

» Spencer, First Principles, §§ 27, 34.
" Ibid., § 27.

Denials of Ontology. Agnosticism 385

of the Unknowable ... is the very reverse of agnostic." "
Our controversy with Spencer, therefore, concerns not his
agnosticism so much as his confident gnosticism, his dogmatic
declaration that infinite Being must and shall be forever un-
knowable, and especially his cool assumption of authority to
define the Unknowable solely in terms of " force," which he
apprehends within certain limits determined by his purely scien-
tific training. " It " is not passive and inert but intensely
active. It is energy infinite and eternal, all pervasive, omnip-
otent, the ever present cause and sustainer of the phenomenal
world, which is its manifestation. Thus far we may go with
his kind permission, but no farther. To use not only our sense
experience but also our inner consciousness of personality,
moral character, and freedom is to transgress the limits of
knowledge. To ascribe to the infinite Reality back of phe-
nomena, consciousness and will and moral character is a trans-
cendent audacity, a marked illustration of " the impiety of the
pious." ^^

But his own very definite apprehension of the Unknowable
and its physical qualities is an act of pure faith. He trusts
the witness of his own consciousness far beyond the testimony
of his senses. All this is known with deepest conviction on
the ground, not of experiment or of science, but through our
inner noumenal experience, somehow in touch with noumenal
Being — a position which his European critics tell him involves
the denial of his whole system of thought.

But if we trust it this far, why not go farther with equal
certainty? If we know this much of the " infinite and eternal
energy " from which all things proceed, why must we think it
in terms of physical force only, and not in the deeper terms of
that very consciousness to which he appeals for the proof and
certainty of its reality? As the only force I know is my own
will power working to a definite purpose, why may I not hold
with equal certainty that infinite extention implies infinite in-

11 Pp. 117, 118.

12 First Principles, §§ 27, 34.

386 Basic Ideas in Religion

tention? If my intuition of causality justifies my believing in
a universal, eternal cause, why do not my equally strong in-
tuitions of final cause, of personality, and of moral duty justify
me in looking on " It " as also necessarily intelligent and per-
sonal in the highest sense and the source and ground of eternal
righteousness ?

It is well, therefore, to recognize and proclaim the truth that
logical consistency is not the whole of reality, and that the re-
volt of the heart against the " facts " of science wrought into
a cast-iron system, is just as legitimate as the supercilious de-
nial of the faiths of the heart by the cold logic of mere under-
standing. " Stay," says the alchemist to his weeping wife in
Balzac's powerful novel : " Stay ! I have decomposed tears.
They contain a little phosphate of lime, some chloride of soda,
some mucus, and some water."

It is Herbert Spencer himself who is guilty of the audacity
of limiting the trustworthy elements in the consciousness of
man to the few which he has chosen to use in his singularly
limited point of view. Why should I limit my appeal to the
witness of purely scientific minds already prejudiced, which
foreclose any of the higher faiths and hopes of men? Why not
trust the wider and deeper consciousness of the master minds
of the race, before " science " atrophied the power of faith and
clear vision? Why may I not follow the soaring thought of
Plato rather than the earth-bound vision of Spencer? " O ye
heavens," exclaims the seer, " can we ever be made to believe
that action and life and soul and mind are not the possession of
Perfect Being? Can we imagine that it is devoid of all thought
and exists only in meaningless quietude ? " Should we not use
all that is highest in us in the interpretation of the infinite First
Cause, and believe with Aristotle, that it is and must be God —
life itself and thought in itself, and the good in itself, each in
perfection !

" The deepest thing in our nature is this Binnenlehen (as a
German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the
heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and un-
willingnesses, our hopes and fears. . . . Here is our deepest

Denials of Ontology. Agnosticism 387

organ of communication with the nature of things; and com-
pared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract
statements and scientific arguments — the veto, for example,
which the strict Positivist pronounces upon our faith — sound
to us like the mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibili-
ties, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have ac-
tively to deal, and ' as the essence of courage is to stake one's
life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that that
possibility exists.' " ^^

Ethical Agnosticism

This adds to Spencer's Unknowable Energy what Spencer
denied to it — the attribute of righteousness on the ground of
our ethical consciousness. As the universe is a system of
physical order demanding an eternal cause, so it is also a
moral order, the source of which must be in the Ultimate
Reality. But this view agrees with the preceding in denying
personality to the Unknowable.

It was held by the Roman Ethical Stoics. Its first modern
exponent was Kant, who in his Critique of Practical Reason
and Critique of Judgment, advanced beyond his earlier nescience
to the affirmation of an Eternal Righteousness at work in the
universe with a moral aim, the physical world existing only
for the ethical perfection of man. Fichte developed this side
of the Kantian philosophy — the moral order itself is God. In
England its chief advocates have been Carlyle and Matthew
Arnold. Matthew Arnold's view is given fully in Literature
and Dogma. He says that the moral aspect exhausts the pos-
sible knowledge of Israel's God, and we must not suppose that
the Jewish religion necessarily required or ever believed this
Something to be personal. " God was to Israel neither an as-
sumption nor a metaphysical idea ; He was a power that can be
verified, as much as the power of fire to burn or of bread to
nourish; the power, not ourselves, that makes for righteous-
ness. And the greatness of Israel in religion, the reason why

13 William James, Is Life Worth Living?

388 Basic Ideas in Religion

he is said to have had religion revealed to him, to have been
entrusted with the oracles of God, is because he had in such
extraordinary force and vividness the perception of this power.
And he communicates it irresistibly because he feels it irre-
sistibly ; that is why the Bible is not as other books that incul-
cate righteousness." ^*

This view may be met by the simple argument that there
can be no moral order or ethical aim in the universe without
ethical will and character in the world's Source and Sus-
tained An impersonal power that makes for righteousness is
a contradiction in terms. It must mean either " makes for "
in the sense of aiming at righteousness, or else " produces right-
eousness," though the phrase hardly admits that meaning. We
must have either Theism or Atheism, there is no half-way
house.

F. H. Bradley comments that after all his grandiloquence
about the Eternal, Arnold tells us we cannot really know
anything that is eternal, " unless we give that name to what-
ever a generation sees happen, and believes both has happened
and will happen, just as the habit of washing ourselves might
be termed ' The Eternal not ourselves that makes for clean-
liness,' or early to bed and early to rise, ' the Eternal not our-
selves which makes for longevity,' and so on ; that ' the Eternal,'
in short, is nothing in the world but a piece of literary clap-
trap. ... If what is meant is this, that what is ordinarily
called virtue does always lead to and go with what is ordinarily
called happiness, then so far is this from being ' verifiable ' in
everyday experience, that its opposite is so ; it is not a fact
either that to be virtuous is always to be happy, or that happi-
ness must always come from virtue. . , . ' Is there a God ? '
asks the reader. ' Oh, yes,' replies Mr. Arnold, ' and I can
verify him in experience.' 'And what is he then?' cries the
reader. ' Be virtuous, and as a rule you will be happy,' is the
answer. ' Well, and God ? ' ' That is God,' says Mr. Arnold.
* There is no deception, and what more do you want ? ' I sup-

" P. 182.

Denials of Ontology. Agnosticism 389

pose we do want a good deal more. Most of us, certainly
the public which Mr. Arnold addresses, want something they
can worship; and they will not find that in an hypostasized
copy-book heading, which is not much more adorable than
' Honesty is the best policy ' or ' Handsome is as handsome
does,' or various other edifying maxims which have not yet
come to an apotheosis." ^^ Arnold deserves such sharp criti-
cism because of his flippant flings at Christian belief all
through his book.

Lange closes his instructive History of Materialism by the
earnest warning to hold fast to noble ideals as we value our
manhood. David Strauss in his destructive The Old Faith
and the New pauses to moralize on the mystery of the vast
power back of all we see, and the comfort of the feeling that we
are somehow akin to it.^'' Haeckel, the veritable sans cullotte
of materialism, who exultingly assures us that his monism
" shatters the three dogmas of religion, the personality of God,
the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will," bids
us take heart and find comfort in the cult of the good, the beauti-
ful, and the true!

Truly this is feeding on the wind! Martineau may well
warn us in noble words of the vanity of trusting to such illu-
sions. " Amid all the sickly talk about ' ideals,' which has be-
come the commonplace of our age, it is well to remember that,
so long as they are dreams of future possibility, and not faiths
in present realities, so long as they are a mere self-painting of
the yearning spirit, and not its personal surrender to immediate
communion with an Infinite Perfection, they have no more
solidarity or steadiness than floating air-bubbles, gay in the
sunshine, and broken by the passing wind. You do not so
much as touch the threshold of religion, so long as you are
detained by the phantoms of your own thought : the very gate
of entrance to it, the moment of its new birth, is the dis-
covery that your gleaming ideal is the everlasting Real, no

15 Ethical Studies, p. 283-5.
i«P. 164.

390 Basic Ideas in Religion

transient brush of a fancied angel wing, but the abiding pres-
ence and persuasion of the Soul of souls. . , .

" The rule of right, the symmetries of character, the re-
quirements of perfection, are no provincialisms of this planet ;
they reign beyond Orion and the Southern Cross : they are
wherever the universal Spirit is; and no subject mind, though
it fly on one track for ever, can escape beyond their bounds.
Just as the arrival of light from deeps that extinguish parallax
bears witness to the same ether there that vibrates here, and its
spectrum reports that one chemistry spans the interval, so does
the law of righteousness spring from its earthly base and em-
brace the empire of the heavens, the moment it becomes a com-
munion between the heart of man and the life of God." ^^

1'^ A Study of Religion, Vol. I, pp. 12 and 26.

APPENDIX

NOTE A
POSTULATES AND INTUITIONS

Before defining an intuition, it would be well, in the interest of clear-
ness, to define also an axiom.

An axiom is a general proposition or principle accepted as self-evi-
dent, either absolutely or within a particular sphere of thought. Each
special science has its own axioms (Cf. the Aristotelian apxal "first
principles.") Aristotle considers that there are ultimate principles of
thought which are behind all special sciences. According to his usage,
these axioms, in which the sciences interconnect, are implicit in the
psychological mechanism, but come to a kind of explicitness in the first
reflective reaction upon it, and without reference to any particular con-
tent of it. They are not to be used as premises, but as immanent laws
of thought.! Descartes and his followers used the word as a definite
self-evident principle, the basis of philosophy. Kant narrowed it to in-
clude only self-evident (intuitive) synthetic propositions (i.e., space and
time).

Intuition in philosophy is a term applied to immediate or direct appre-
hension. Universal principles present themselves, as necessarily true in
their own right without any sort of proof. The word "intuition" as
used below would therefore correspond to " axiom." Intuitions are
truths laid down by our rational constitution and our ethical needs.
They form the pre-suppositions of all reasoning. Without them even
speech is impossible. As men's bodies are built on a common plan, so
are their minds constructed on the common frame of like intuitions and
methods of working. Herbert Spencer admits that there must exist
certain principles which, being the basis of science, cannot themselves
be established by science. " The fundamental intuitions that are es-
sential to the process of thinking must temporarily be accepted as un-
questionable; leaving the assumption of their unquestionableness to be
justified by the results." ^ The word intuition, like conception, is both
a substantive and a verbal noun. It means the act of intuiting in direct
vision and also that which is intuited. Kant distinguishes between em-
pirical and pure intuition, but the English usage rightly confines the
word to pure intuitions, for so-called empirical intuitions are not in-

1 Anal. Post, Bk. I, Chaps. 2, 3, lo, 32, Bk. II, Chap. 19.

2 First Principles, § 39.

393

394 Basic Ideas in Religion

tuited directly, but through the medium of the senses. Pure intuitions
are ideas of the Reason which arise spontaneously and with convictive
force in the normal mind, as it becomes conscious of itself and of the
world. Experience does not create, but it does awaken and develop
them. They are thoughts or judgments which arise coincidentally with
all experiences, but the experiences do not create them, for intuitions are
concerned with relations between things, and relations are perceived
only by the mind. Impressions on the senses do not form knowledge
but only the material for knowledge, for knowledge results from the
action of the mind on those impressions. On the other hand, intui-
tions cannot work until experience of things without awakens them
to action and furnishes material for thought. We have eyes with
which to see, but we cannot use them so long as all is dark, and
there is nothing to see. We see before we know how we see, but
when once we discern our eyes we know we could not see without
them. The acorn cannot grow without air, light, and water, but in all
eternity the three conditions could not create the living seed. Life
itself is the best analogy; intuition is dynamic, directive; it organizes
the material given by perception, much as the life germ dominates the
particles which go to form the tree.

Postulates are propositions deliberately taken for granted, because
necessary for the purpose of life and thought, but not in themselves evi-
dent beyond question. Kant held that the postulates of experience are
general expressions of the significance of existence in the experience of
a conscious subject. The element of reality in such experience must
always be given by intuition. Lotze gives a contrast between postulates
and hypotheses, which will make the definition clearer. He says that
postulates are " absolutely necessary assumptions without which the con-
tent of observation with which we are dealing would contradict the laws
of thought," while hypotheses are "conjectures, which seek to fill up the
postulate thus abstractly stated by specifying the concrete causes, forces
or processes, out of which the given phenomenon arose in this particular
case, while in other cases maybe the same postulate is to be satisfied by
utterly different though equivalent, combinations of forces or active
elements." ^ Thus a hypothesis may be ruled out by postulates without
any reference to the concrete facts which belong to that division of the
subject to explain which the hypothesis was formulated.*

3 Logic, § 273.

* These definitions of axioms and postulates are largely taken from
Encyclopedia Britannica, nth Edit., Ill, 68; XIV, 208, 717; XV, 670;
XVI, 902.

Appendix 395

Marks of Intuitions

The marks of Intuitions are, I. Necessity; II. Rationality; and III.
Universality (a corollary of I and II).

I. Necessity

Intuitions are necessary in that they arise of themselves under proper
stimulus in every normal mind. They are logically necessary in that
the mind accepts them as self-evident, as in the case of mathematical
axioms.

II. Rationality

Rationality is a mark of intuitions because they are themselves the
principles of reason. A simple test is the impossibility of denying
them. They act from the very beginning of thought, as when a child
asked his mother, "What was there before God made the world?"
She answered " God." " And what was there before God ? " " Noth-
ing, my child." " But there must have been a place where God was."
Here the great intuitive principles of space and time dominated the
child's thought. The principles of mathematics and of grammar are
examples of rational intuitions. Mathematics is the best illustration of
the internal, rational nature of intuitions. The axioms of mathematics
are true in themselves and hence the basis of logical reasoning. The
story is told of the mathematician Pascal that his father tried to keep
him when a boy of twelve from studying mathematics until he had
mastered Latin and Greek. But when the boy insisted on knowing what
mathematics was, his father told him that in general it was the means
of making figures rightly and of discovering their relative proportions.
Pascal, alone in his play room, meditated on this statement in his
recreation hours, and made figures on a board with cliarcoal. He did
not even know the names of what he drew, but called a circle a
" round," and a line a " bar," and so forth. After inventing his defini-
tions, he made axioms, and finally complete demonstrations. When his
father at last discovered what he was doing, the boy had pushed his
researches as far as the thirty-second proposition of the first book of
Euclid.^

The science of logic is also an excellent example. The syllogism was
not the invention of one man, Aristotle, for it is universally inherent in
all men and does its own work in the mind. Aristotle merely put the
principle into words. All we do when we write out a syllogism is to
express the law of the mind in a formal way. But the argument
convinced even before it was expressed formally, because it followed
the laws of reason.

'^ Clark, Pascal and the Port Royalists, pp. 3-6.

396 Basic Ideas in Religion

There is a corollary to this mark of rationality which might be
suggested here. The logical necessity of these intuitive truths carries
with it the conviction that they must correspond to realities. We can-
not think that the necessities of reason can be false, because the reason
of man is also the reason of God ; as Plato said, " God geometrizes."
Lotze holds that the confidence of reason in itself is the certainty we
feel that there is a meaning in the world and that the nature of the great
universe of which we are thinking parts must be such that it would
give us as necessary ideas only such as harmonize with its own
realities.^

III. Universality

UniversaHty follows from the necessity of intuitions. A principle
which is necessary to every normal mind must be universal. Indeed
universality is itself a ground for believing in the fundamental charac-
ter of intuitive conceptions. But they are also universal in that they
relate to and govern all the operations of the mind and originate our
general or universal ideas.

On the practical side this catholic mark reveals a universal reason, a
communis scnsus, making common experiences in perception and com-
mon modes of thought possible. One of the deep sayings of Heraclitus
is that " the law of all things is the law of Universal Reason, but many
men act as if they had a private reason of their own." The value of
this mark of universality is its testimony to the Logos in all men,
making experience and common knowledge possible. Men early felt
that beliefs common to all could not be false.

Classes of Intuitions

The simplest classification gives three kinds of intuitions ; I. Ontologi-
cal. Intuitions of Being or Reality: God, self, the world; II. Logical,
of relation between things : space, time, causation ; III. Personal or
ethical, of relation between persons : morality, religion, etc. These cor-
respond to the three great divisions of human thought, each with its
primary assumption : Philosophy, God and Self ; Science, the World ;
Religion, God in relation to Man.

I. Intuitions of Being

These are the three bases of all thought — God, the Self, and
the World; or in the order in which they originate, the Self, the
World, and God. Kant defines these as the Ideas of Reason, the three
regulative principles involved in the very nature of the mind, and to
which no congruous objects exist in the sphere of empirical cognition.
" Beyond the sphere of experience there are no objects which reason

« Cf. System of Philosophy, Part II, Metaphysic, pp. 412 and 535, 6.

Appendix 397

can cognize," so we cannot have any clear idea of them. " They are not
to be regarded as actual things, but as in some measure analogous to
them." We must posit the real existence of the objects, but we cannot
profess to know those objects^

Locke admits that we know these three existences with a peculiar
certainty, different from all other ideas and not the result of any logical
process or proof.

Herbert Spencer accepts these as the intuitions without which we
cannot think at all. But he defines them in Spencerian dialect in accord
with his denial of the mind's innate activity, i. Force, the ultimate of
ultimates, the unknown cause of the known effect we call phenomena
(God). 2. Likeness and unlikeness among these effects. These arouse
ideas of time and space, cause and effect, quality and quantity (The
World). 3. A segregation of these effects into subject and object —
the thinker and the thing known as thought (The Self).^

IL Intuitions of Relations Betzvcen Things

Space and time. These intuitions are the fundamental forms of
thought without which we cannot know or think the outer world of
things. The root concept of Time is succession; that of Space is co-
existence. The one yields the science of number — Arithmetic ; the
other the science of form — Geometry.

Some of the elements in our concepts of space and time may be
grouped comparatively :

Time Space

There is but one time, and all The same,

different times are parts of the
one.

Different times are not co- Different spaces are not suc-

existent or simultaneous, but sue- cessive, but are coexistent or
cessive. simviltaneous.

Time cannot be thought away; The same,

but everything in time can be
thought away, or imagined as non-
existent.

Time has three divisions, Past, Space has three dimensions,

Present, and Future. Length, Breadth and Thickness.

"^ Critique of Pure Reason: Transc. Dial. Bk. II, Chap. III.
8 First Principles, § 51.

398

Basic Ideas in Religion

Time is infinitely divisible.
Time is homogeneous and con-
tinuous.

The same.

By means of time we count.

Time has no persistence, but no
sooner exists than it vanishes.

Time has no rest.

Everything in time has dura-
tion.

By means of space we measure.

Space can never pass away, but
persists forever.

Space has no motion.

Everything in space has posi-
tion.

Time itself has no duration, but
all duration is in it, and is the
persistence of that which abides or
continues, in contrast with time's
own restless lapse.

The unit of time is without
duration.

Space has no movement, but all
movement is in it, and the mov-
able's change of place is in con-
trast with the absolute immobility
of space.

The unit of space is without ex-
tension.

Every part of time is condi-
tioned by every other part.

Time is everywhere present.
Every part of time is everywhere,
i.e., simultaneously in every part
of space.

Time makes changes possible.
Forces act in time as their pre-
condition, but time itself does not
act, is not an agent.

The same.

Space is eternal ; every part of
it exists through all time.

Space makes substance pos-
sible. Substances exist in space
as their precondition.

Time and Space form the puzzle of philosophy. Kant held that they
were purely subjective though necessary forms of thought. In the
second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason he denied that he was an
idealist. But his successors were more logical, and his original position
became the starting point of modern Idealism. The discussion of space
and time has been greatly enriched by Bergson in Time and Freezvill.

Substance and Causation. These intuitions are both awakened by
our inner experience of will-power. The essence of substance is
impenetrability, it occupies space and oflfers resistance to our pressure.

Appendix 399

All bodies have certain primary qualities, extension, weight, and form.
Substance means that which underlies them, and expresses the uni-
versal belief that qualities cannot exist per se, but always inhere in
matter which gives them support and reality.

Substance is out of favor in many philosophic quarters today, but it
cannot be denied logically save on some theory of thoroughgoing Ideal-
ism, for no experience is so direct and immediate as the sense of
resistance to our force. Modern science makes for substance in its
theory of the identity of the ultimate particles of matter, the qualities
of the atoms varying according to the mode of combination, or motion,
of the corpuscles or electrons.^

The intuition of causality, that is, " every effect must have a
cause," is a clear example of an intuitive judgment, for we never see
the " force " which actually causes the motion, and we believe it acts
simply on the ground of our own experience of causing motion by our
muscular force. The intuition of cause must be used to interpret all
experience.

The remaining relations between things may be summarized in the
categories as set forth first by Aristotle and later by Kant :

Categories

Quantity

Quality

Unity.

Reality.

Plurality.

Negation.

Totality.

Limitation.

Relations proper Modality

Substance and Accidence. Possibility and Impossibility.

Cause and Effect. Existence and Non-existence.

Action and Reaction. Necessity and Contingence.

" Kant's successor, Hegel, pointed out that his list of categories was
incomplete in various directions : also that a special category or cate-
gories ought to be added for organic life, as the idea of life is one of
the fundamental ideas. There is no reason why a category or general
conception of life should not be just as much constitutive of our
experience as the category of substance." ^^

III. Intuitions of Relations Between Persons

The intuitions of the first class are ontological ; of the second, logical ;
of the third, ethical. The last hold only between persons, for duties
are due only to persons and imply mutual obligations ; rights and duties
are correlative. The essence of moral intuition is the peculiar feeling

^ See Chap. XIII, on " The New Theory of Matter."
1*^ Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality, pp. 75, y6.

400 Basic Ideas in Religion

of oughtness different in kind from all other feelings. Conscience
implies innate knowledge of ethical principles, just as the intellect
demands common logical principles. As Origen said long ago, man
would not be guilty of wrongdoing if all races did not have certain
universal notions of duty innate and written in divine characters in
their hearts. ii Ethical intuitions stand the test of all other intuitions.
They are necessary, for they form the basis of all social life without
which man could not be man. They stand the test of rationality, for
all the faiths and duties are dependent on these ethical relations. And
they are universal, for they arise in all normal minds. Every race has
the sense of duty.

It has been urged that these moral intuitions are not as certain and
fundamental as the logical, because they are not as intense and com-
pelling. In the ethical realm there is no room for force. Things of
the senses must be felt or known whenever presented to us, but in
moral life we must will in order to know or clearly see our duty. We
can close our wills to the claims of the soul as we cannot shut our eyes
to the demands of the body. Huxley answers the objection that the
moral sense is weak in some men ; " Some people cannot by any means
be got to understand the first book of Euclid ; but the truths of mathe-
matics are no less necessary and binding on the great mass of mankind.
Some there are who cannot feel the difference between a grave-stone-
cutter's cherub and the Apollo Belvidere; but the canons of art are
none the less acknowledged. While some there may be, who, devoid of
sympathy, are incapable of a sense of duty; but neither does their
existence affect the foundations of morality. Such pathological devia-
tions from true manhood are merely the halt, the lame, and the blind
of the world of consciousness; and the anatomist of the mind leaves
them aside, as the anatomist of the body would ignore abnormal
specimens." ^^

But this principle applies equally to spiritual convictions and faiths.
That some men do not realize spiritual realities does not discredit these
realities to those who do. Darwin felt this of his spiritual dullness which
he acknowledged to be the result of his devotion to the sole study of
outer things and his ignoring of the inner world. " It may be truly
said," was his comment, " that I am like a man who has become color-
blind." 13

Even Hume had a similar thought. " The mathematician, who took
no other pleasure in reading Virgil, but that of examining /Eneas's
voyage by the map, might perfectly understand the meaning of every

11 Contra Celsus, i -.4.

12 Hume, with Helps to the Study of Berkeley, p. 239.

i-"' F. Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. I,
Vol. II, p. 281.

Appendix- 401

Latin word employed by that divine author; and, consequently, might
have a distinct idea of the whole narration. He would even have a
more distinct idea of it than they could attain who had not studied so
exactly the geography of the poem. He knew, therefore, everything
in the poem : but he was ignorant of its beauty, because beauty, properly
speaking, lies not in the poem, but in the sentiment or taste of the
reader. And where a man has no such delicacy of temper as to make
him feel this sentiment, he must be ignorant of the beauty, though
possessed of the science and understanding of an angel." i*

That religious faith is not so strong and constant as the intuition of
the self and the world is the result of the alienation of man from God
through his evil will. God is not a phenomenon manifested through
the senses and is therefore not to be ignored, but a Person holding per-
sonal relations with men. In all such relations, intimate knowledge
and friendship depend on sympathy. We must will in order to know.

NOTE B
ARISTOTLE'S CAUSES

Aristotle's four causes are the Material, the Formal, the Efficient, and
the Final.

I. The Material Cause is that which underlies the phenomenon : the
matter out of which it proceeds or is made. It is not a true cause but
a necessary condition of the event, a sine qua non of the eflfect. It
means often the material out of which a thing is made; also " matter of
thought," such as the premises of a syllogism.

II. The Formal Cause is the form or idea of the thing or act, which
exists first in the mind, and which we gradually embody in matter or
express in action. In the case of divine action Aristotle called the form
the essence of the thing, for divine thought is creative. The best
analogy is the artist who paints a picture simply to express some beauti-
ful vision, with no ulterior object — its beauty is its own excuse for
being.

III. The Efficient Cause is the force which directly causes motion or
change to begin, the force being directed by the will along definite lines.
It is the true cause or force and the only kind of cause that pure science
recognizes. Aristotle expresses the relation of Final to Efficient Cause
as the passage from potentiality to actuality. This efficient cause may
be either immanent, e.g., Hfe force, or it may be mechanical, operating
from without.

IV. The Final Cause is the end or purpose for which the thing is
made. If the artist paints a picture for the money it will bring him,

" Essays, Part I, No. i8. The Sceptic.

402 Basic Ideas in Religion

and not for its own sake, the profit is its final cause. It differs from the
Formal, in that it looks beyond itself and becomes a means to some-
thing else. Practically all intentional actions express final causes, ends,
and aims. In Divine action the Final Cause is the Good.

(Metaphysics, Bk. I, Chap. 3, Physics, Bks. I and II, Post. Anal., Bk.
II, Chap. II.)

NOTE C

HUME'S INCONSISTENCY

Hume is not consistent. He claims that all thought is derived ulti-
mately from perceptions of sense impressions or from ideas which are
faint images of impressions. Yet he admits a great number of ideas
of which the simplest would vanish before the demand to point out the
impression from which it is derived. He cannot avoid using terms
which are dynamic, although he denies the reality of force. He says
that " the true idea of the human mind is to consider it as a system of
different perceptions or different existences, which are linked together
by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy,
influence, and modify each other." 1 Here all his terms are those of
energy, and he does not seem able to escape thinking in terms of causa-
tion, although he wrote elsewhere " no internal impression has an
apparent energy, more than external objects have." 2 He is unwilling
to consider causality as real, yet he goes so far as to make custom the
great guide of life, an active principle or law of the mind. But most
glaringly does his inconsistency appear when he denies the possibility
of miracles because they are violations of the laws of nature. In his
earlier days he had claimed there was no such thing as a law of nature,
for that implies causal connection, and everything in nature happens
haphazardly. Besides they carry us back to the idea of God, which he
began by denying.

The best test is whether Hume can live up to his theory. He him-
self admits that he cannot make his system work, but leaves such
philosophical views to his study. " Most fortunately it happens, that
since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, Nature herself
suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy
and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation,
and Hvely impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras.
I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with
my friends ; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would
return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained, and

1 Human Nature, Bk. I, Pt. IV, § 6.

2 Ibid.. § 14.

'Appendix 403

ridiculous, that I cannot find it in my heart to enter into them any
further." 3 No man today denies results accepted by science, and just
as long as scientists stay in their province their results are convincing,
for they are universal and tally with what we already know and have
experienced.

I
NOTE D

PSYCHICAL CAUSATION

In what has been said above we have been interested chiefly in physi-
cal causation in the external world. Villa, however, shows that in the
interior psychical realm this same principle assumes a different form.
" The causal principle, which is one of the most important axioms in
logic, as applied to the relations between external objects, assumes a
particular form which is termed physical, or mechanical causality. This
principle is not solely founded on the general notion that every fact
must be both the cause and effect of other facts : but it also shows that
the quantity of matter and energy which forms the substratum of
physical phenomena remains unaltered, though its form varies. Be-
tween the cause and effect there exists, therefore, an equivalent of
value. Quantitative equivalence is the distinctive characteristic of
mechanical causality, while it is entirely absent in the case of psychical
causality, which has to take into account such subjective and variable
elements as feelings and impulses. Consequently, although external
facts have their part in mental phenomena, the latter cannot possess
that character of comparative fixity which alone renders a quantitative
measurement possible. In its absence there can be no exact corre-
spondence of cause and effect. Moreover, the mental processes, con-
sidered by themselves, entirely lose the character of quantity, retaining
only that of quality. For example, a sensation, taken by itself is purely
a qualitative fact (endowed with a certain amount of intensity), and
nothing more ; and if the notion of quantity cannot be applied to sen-
sations, it is even less applicable to the feelings, which are eminently
qualitative facts. We have, therefore, two causal series — a mechani-
cal series, which is quantitative, and a psychical series, which is quali-
tative. We cannot, however, insist too much on the fact that there are
not in reality two distinct series, that the distinction is merely an
abstraction of our own thought." (Contemporary Psychology, p. 114.)

3 Ibid., § 7.

404 Basic Ideas in Religion

NOTE E

KANT'S STATEMENT OF THE TELEOLOGICAL

PROOF

Kant gives the following as the main points in the proof:

" ist. There are everywhere in the world clear indications of an in-
tentional arrangement carried out with great wisdom, and forming a
whole indescribably varied in its contents and infinite in extent.

" 2nd. The fitness of this arrangement is entirely foreign to the
things existing in the world, and belongs to them contingently only ;
that is, the nature of different things could never spontaneously, by the
combination of so many means, cooperate towards definite aims, if these
means had not been selected and arranged on purpose by a rational dis-
posing principle, according to certain fundamental ideas.

"3rd. There exists, therefore, a sublime and wise cause (or many),
which must be the cause of the world, not only as a blind and all-
powerful nature, by means of unconscious fecundity, but as an intelli-
gence, by freedom.

"4th. The unity of that cause may be inferred with certainty from
the unity of the reciprocal relations of the parts of the world, as por-
tions of a skilful edifice, so far as our experience reaches, and beyond it,
with plausibility, according to the principles of analogy." (Critique of
Pure Reason, 2nd Division, Bk. II, Chap. 3, §6.)

(The language used under the 2nd has been held to imply a deistic
conception of the divine action as from without. But Kant may have
used the words " foreign " and " contingent " to imply only that more
mechanical forces could not contain or do the work of the mind.)

NOTE F

EXAMPLES OF THE RATIONAL CONSTI-
TUTION OF THE UNIVERSE

In Mendeleeff's Law (1869) we have the chemical elements divided
into eight groups or families. Each family differs from the others in
ways determined by a definite plan of proportional atomic weight, heat
receptivity, etc. When the table was first constructed three elements
now included in it were not known, scandium, gallium, and germanium.
It was seen, however, that the gaps existed, and it was predicted by
Mendeleeff that elements would be found with atomic weights approxi-
mately 44, 69, and 72, and that these elements would have certain proper-
ties which were clearly stated at the time. The predictions were con-
firmed by the subsequent discovery of all three of these elements, and

Appendix 405

their properties were found to agree very closely with the descriptions
given long before the elements were known. But Mendeleeff was to be
still further vindicated. Lord Rayleigh discovered helium and argon in
the atmosphere, and from an investigation of the properties of these
two gases, made specially from the point of view of the periodic classi-
fication of the elements, Ramsay concluded that there ought to exist
three other simple bodies, of similar properties and of higher atomic
weight, which would, together with helium and argon, make a new
family in Mendeleeff's table. After having searched everywhere for
these elements, he succeeded in finding them in the air and in isolating
them. These gases are neon, krypton, and xenon.

Thomas Hill has such an excellent discussion on these lines that it is
well to quote him at length. " It is from these diagrams of nature that
men get their first suggestions of geometric beauty and law, and are
stimulated to the invention of new laws. Nor can we fail to notice how
frequently the law which men have invented, proves to have been al-
ready known and used in nature. The mathematician devises a geo-
metric locus, or an algebraic formula from a priori considerations, and
afterwards discovers that he has been unwittingly solving a mechanical
problem, or explaining the form of real phenomenon. Thus, for ex-
ample, in Peirce's Integral Calculus, published in 1843, is a problem in-
vented and solved purely in the enthusiasm of following the analytic
symbols, but in 1863 it proved to be a complete prophetic discussion
and solution of the problem of two pendulums suspended from one
horizontal cord. Thus also Galileo's discussion of the cycloid proved,
long afterward, to be the key to problems concerning the pendulum,
falling bodies, and resistance to transverse pressure. Four centuries
before Christ, Plato and his scholars were occupied upon the ellipse as
a purely geometric speculation, and Socrates seemed inclined to reprove
them for their waste of time. But in the 17th century after Christ,
Kepler discovers that the Architect of the heavens had given us mag-
nificent diagrams of the ellipse in the starry heavens ; and, since that
time, all the navigation and architecture and engineering of the 19th
century have been built upon these speculations of Plato. Equally re-
markable is the history of the idea of extreme and mean ratio. Before
the Christian era, geometers had invented a process for dividing a line
in this ratio, that they might use it in an equally abstract and useless
problem — the inscribing a regular pentagon in a circle. But it was not
until the middle of the present century that it was discovered that this
idea is embodied in nature. It is hinted at in some animal forms, it is
very thoroughly and accurately expressed in the angles at which the
leaves of plants diverge as they grow from the stem ; and it is em-
bodied approximately in the revolutions of the planets about the sun. . . .
" Now in all these cases of the embodiment in nature of an idea

4o6 Basic Ideas in Religion

which men have developed, not by a study of the embodiment, but by
an a priori speculation, there seems to us demonstrative evidence that
man is made in the image of his Creator; that the thoughts and knowl-
edge of God contain and embrace all possible a priori speculations of
men. It is true that God's knowledge is infinite and beyond our ut-
most power of conception. But how can we compare the reasonings of
Euclid upon extreme and mean ratio, with the arrangement of leaves
about the stem, and the revolutions of planets around the sun, and not
feel that these phenomena of creation express Euclid's idea as exactly
as diagrams or Arabic digits could do; and that this idea was, in some
form, present in the Creation? "^

NOTE G
BERKELEY'S ARGUMENT FOR GOD

Berkeley's starting point is Locke's postulate of " material substance "
as the mysterious ground and source of all the ideas which sense im-
pressions somehow arouse in our minds. He asked. Why should we
postulate as the World Cause a something called matter of which we
know nothing? Why should we not believe that God is the Author of
Nature in a direct and immediate way by Himself causing ideas to
arise in the minds of all men in that definite and fixed order which we
call the laws of nature. He thought he proved the reasonableness of
this view by teaching that matter cannot exist apart from thought, for
" to exist means to be perceived by some mind," either God's or man's,
for only spirits exist, the Divine Being and human spirits.

He states his theory clearly and convincingly — for those who accept
his philosophy — in Sections 145-148 of The Principles of Human Un-
derstanding. " From what has been said, it is plain that we cannot
know the existence of other spirits otherwise than by their operations,
or the ideas by them excited in us. I perceive several motions,
changes, and combinations of ideas, that inform me there are certain
particular agents, like myself, which accompany them and concur in
their production. Hence, the knowledge I have of other spirits is not
immediate, as the knowledge of my ideas ; but depending on the inter-
vention of ideas, by me referred to agents or spirits distinct from
myself, as effects or concomitant signs.

" But, though there be some things which convince us human agents
are concerned in producing them, yet it is evident to every one that those
things which are called the Works of Nature, that is, the far greater
part of the ideas or sensations perceived by us, are not produced by, or
dependent on, the wills of men. There is therefore some other Spirit

1 Natural Sources of Theology, pp. 66-68.

Appendix 407

that causes them; since it is repugnant that they should subsist by
themselves. But, if we attentively consider the constant regularity, or-
der, and concatenation of natural things . . . and at the same time at-
tend to the meaning and import of the attributes One, Eternal, Infinitely
Wise, Good, and Perfect, we shall clearly perceive that they belong to
the aforesaid Spirit, * who works all in all,' and ' by whom all things
consist'

" Hence, it is evident that God is known as certainly and imme-
diately as any other mind or spirit whatsoever distinct from our-
selves. We may even assert that the existence of God is far more
evidently perceived than the existence of men ; because the effects of
nature are infinitely more numerous and considerable than those ascribed
to human agents. There is not any one mark that denotes a man,
or effect produced by him, which does not more strongly evince the be-
ing of that Spirit who is the Author of Nature."

Berkeley never escaped the influence of Locke. His " spirits " are
simply minds working on logical lines. He never attained to the
thought of the intuitive knowledge of God, spirit knowing spirit. God
has to be inferred from the phenomena, the laws of nature, just as we
infer other men's spirits from their bodily actions. But even on these
purely logical lines it might have occurred to him by analogy that if
men can give form and expression to their thoughts by means of undula-
tions in the air so that other men can know them, and can even em-
body them permanently in picture and printed words, still more can
God embody his thoughts on one side of His being in the visible world
if He will.

His practical denial that the Creator could do this only perplexed
men. For if God is the Author of all our ideas, He certainly must be
the intentional source of that most persistent " idea," the conviction of
an external world, which if Berkeley be right, is an utterly false idea.

NOTE H

SPINOZA, BACON AND DESCARTES ON
TELEOLOGY

Spinoza, whose philosophy denied any free will or purpose in God,
rejected all final causes as imaginary. He says that teleology inverts
the true order of thought. Men found themselves possessed of sense
organs, and as they were most useful, even indispensable, to their life
they concluded that the Power which made them designed them for
special purposes. But in fact, such things are only conditions of ex-
istence in the great totality of things. Sight, for example, is not the
final cause of the eye as an instrument of vision, but rather the neces-
sary result of the eye as it exists. Men have been guilty, according

4o8 Basic Ideas in Religion

to Spinoza of the fallacy of inversion. The idea of plan or design
is posterior to the objects in order of time, since it is aroused in the
mind by the sight of these objects. But men invert this natural order
of things, and say that the plan was conceived first, and the objects
made to conform to it. " The accusation is perfectly valid upon one
condition ; vis., that there are no plans or purposes in nature back of
the object, and according to which it was shaped. But suppose there
are such plans and purposes? Then design-advocates have not been
guilty of the fallacy of inversion. The plan did exist before the object;
and it is not the human conception which is projected back into eternity
as the Creator's thought, but that thought itself, which man perceives
upon the contemplation of the object, instead of conceiving it as a
' fiction of his imagination.' " ^ Spinoza is plainly guilty of the logical
fallacy of begging the question. " It is not a legitimate attack, De-
sign-advocates assert that there are plans and purposes in nature.
That is their main position. The fact that these are prior in time is in-
volved in this fundamental proposition. Now, Spinoza's attack re-
solves itself into this : Upon the assumption that your fundamental
proposition is false, you are guilty of a fallacy of inversion." -

The answer to this sophistry is simply that our minds are so made
that we must interpret the Universe in terms of purpose, as Kant shows
clearly in the Critique of Judgment. Our certainty as to the eye's
final cause is confirmed by the fact that we can make a camera on the
same general lines as the eye. Spinoza, however, did make a real
contribution to the cause of teleology in his attack on the fallacy that
the universe was made with reference to its utility to man. This was
a common fallacy of his day and he helped to banish it. More will be
said later about Spinoza's fundamental assumptions that all natural
objects flow from God by virtue of a fatal necessity, for of course if
this view is true, there are no such things as final causes.^ But for
the present we answer that our concept of God as personal and free
and Lord of all is as credible as Spinoza's and more so. Our Deity
is not a fatalistic creature, tied to his own nature, but a living, willing,
and acting agent — and such a God does reason and plan.

Bacon spoke scornfully of final causes as " barren virgins," but to be
accurate it was not final causes which he was criticizing, but the misuse
of them, and it was the search for them in the province of physics that
he said was barren. Causarum finalium inquisitio sterilis est, et tan-
quatn virgo Deo consecrata, nihil parit. But the revelations of modern
science have furnished so many examples to be used in an argument
for final causes that it is impossible to agree with him. Bacon carried

1 Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, p. 131.

- Ibid.

3 See Chap. XI.

Appendix 409

his prejudice so far that he never accepted Harvey's discovery of the
circulation of the blood, because it was based on the construction of
the valves in the arteries and veins. Gassendi more wisely held that
we should recognize divine intent in all organs whose purpose was
plainly revealed.

Descartes opposed final causes by rebuking man's vanity in thinking
he can discover them. "We wholly reject from our philosophy the
search for final causes ; for we ought not to take so much upon our-
selves as to believe that God wished us to take part in his counsels."
But his exclusion of final causes is more in appearance than in reality.
He holds a theory of creation by vortices or whirlwinds, motions in the
original matter, which resulted in the universe as we know it by a sort
of evolution. "Even if He had given it (the Cosmos), at the begin-
ning, no other form than that of chaos, provided that, having
established the laws of nature, He gave it His concurrence to act as it
is wont, one may believe, without prejudice to the miracle of creation,
that by this alone things purely material would in time have been able
to become such as we see them at present ; and their nature is much
more easy to conceive when they are seen originating by degrees in this
way, than when they are considered as entirely made." * When Des-
cartes elsewhere declares that he sought the laws of nature without
resting on any principle but the " infinite perfections of God," was not
this in reality to revert to the principle of ends, perfection being the
supreme end?

NOTE r
CRITICISM OF DARWINISM

Charles Darwin's great work published in 1859 was epoch-making,
for the world was ready for his theory, seemingly fortified beyond
all question by the many illustrations from animal life. Others before
him had held views of evolution, but none had ever brought to it such
a wide knowledge of facts taken from a hitherto ignored field, that of
the artificial breeding of stock and plant. The idea on which Darwin
had been laboriously working occurred to his friend Alfred R. Wallace,
about the time that Darwin was getting ready to make his theory public.
It was during a sickness in the Malay Archipelago that Wallace
applied the Malthusian theory to the whole organic world. He writes :
" One day something brought to my recollection Malthus's Principles
of Population, which I had read about twelve years before. I thought
of his clear exposition of 'the positive checks to increase' — disease,
accidents, war, and famine — which keep down the population of savage

*Discours de la methode.

41 o Basic Ideas in Religion

races to so much lower an average than that of more civilized peoples.
It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are con-
tinually acting in the case of animals also. , . . Vaguely thinking over
the enormous and constant destruction which this implied, it occurred
to me to ask the question, Why do some die and some live? And the
answer was clearly, that on the whole the best fitted live. . . . Then it
suddenly flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily
improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would in-
evitably be killed oflF and the superior would remain — that is, the
fittest would survive." That same evening Wallace began a paper on
the subject which he sent by the next post to Darwin. Darwin had
been working on the same idea for twenty years and had his book
developing it nearly ready. It was characteristic of him that he in-
sisted on Wallace sharing with him the honor of the discovery. Wal-
lace with equal magnanimity gave the title Darwinism to his own book
when it appeared thirty years later.

The voyage of the Beagle (1831-6) deserves to be ranked among the
great voyages of discovery, for on it the young Darwin, as government
naturalist, made observations which set him to work on his fruitful
theory. He tells us this himself : " On my return home in the autumn
of 1836, I immediately began to prepare my journal for publication,
and then saw how many facts indicated the common descent of species.
... In July (1837) I opened my first note book for facts in relation to
the Origin of Species, about which I had long reflected, and never
ceased working for the next twenty years." Two observations espe-
cially puzzled Darwin and made him seek an explanation. He found
that each island in the Galapagos Archipelago had its own distinctive
animal population. Yet the species on one island were the counter-
parts of those in the neighboring islands and were all related to the
species on the continent. Only one explanation seemed possible, that
they had belonged to a common stock before the days when the islands
separated from the mainland and from each other, and had afterwards
developed along their own lines. The other observation was that the
living animals in South America bore a striking correspondence to the
fossils he dug from the red mud of the Pampas. Again it was borne
in upon him that the structural resemblance between the living and the
extinct must be due to common origin. Thus the foundation was laid
on which he was to build for a score or more of years after his return.

The title of Darwin's book clearly defines the theory. The Origin of
Species by means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored
Races in the Struggle for Life. The first section of this title is neither
clear nor proven, but the second part is both clear and proven. Darwin
was a most accurate observer, but hardly a philosophical thinker when
it came to interpreting his facts. He wrote cautiously in order to

Appendix 41 1

avoid giving offense, and tried to palliate all he said so as not to seem
dogmatic. In his historical preface he quotes from writers of authority
so as to pave the way for his views.

The last sentences of this book are worth quoting as summarizing
his theory: "These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth
with Reproduction ; Inheritance, which is almost implied by reproduc-
tion ; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions
of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to
lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection,
entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved
forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most
exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the produc-
tion of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this
view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed
by the Creator into a few forms or into one ; and that, whilst this
planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from
so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved."

Add the words " by chance," and you have Darwin's fundamental
position. Christians are willing to admit development, but they object
to his theory of chance. Darwin was hardly a materialist, but he
furnished the ammunition the materialists needed. He was willing to
attribute the " germs of life," from which the whole evolution proceeds,
to God's creative action, on the lines of Deism, and admits that the
laws were inbreathed by God, but afterwards everything simply hap-
pened fortuitously. He was never an aggressive sceptic, but he gradu-
ally lost faith in God and became an avowed agnostic. He persistently
refused to admit any inner guiding principle in evolution, and though
he admitted the difficulty of his theory of chance he never really gave
it up. He is very frank in his letters. When he sent his book to Asa
Gray in 1859 he wrote, " I fully admit that there are very many diffi-
culties not satisfactorily explained by my theory." 1 About a year later
he wrote to Huxley, " I entirely agree with you, that the difficulties on
my notions are terrific." 2 When Lyell came over to his view Darwin
was much reassured, and confessed in a letter to the new convert :
" Thinking of so many cases of men pursuing an illusion for years, often
and often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself
whether I may not have devoted my life to a phantasy." ^

In i860, the year after the publication of the Origin of Species,
Darwin had reached the stage of utter bewilderment : " I grieve to
say," he writes to Asa Gray, " that I cannot honestly go as far as you

1 Francis Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Vol. 11, p. 13.

2 Ibid., p. 147.

3 Ibid., p. 25.

412 Basic Ideas in Religion

do about Design. I am conscious that I am in an utterly hopeless
muddle. I cannot think that the world, as we see it, is the result of
chance; and yet I cannot look at each separate thing as the result of
Design." * And in an earlier letter of the same year he says : " I am
bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that
I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evi-
dence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me
too much misery in the world. . . . On the other hand, I cannot anyhow
be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature
of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I
am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with
the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we
may call chance, not that this notion at all satisfies me." ^

Darwin's theory applied only to the organic world and rested on the
three principles of heredity, variability, and natural selection. Heredity
is the biological law by which all beings endowed with life tend to
repeat themselves in their descendants. It is for the species what per-
sonal identity is for the individual. Through it the groundwork re-
mains unchanged amid incessant variations, and by it, according to
Darwin, the acquired and advantageous characteristics are handed down
by the parent to the young, though in this modern biologists do not
generally support him. All living things tend to vary from the parental
form slightly and fortuitously. Some variations are obviously of ad-
vantage to their possessors, and these useful variations are preserved
by natural selection, and increased and developed through the genera-
tions that succeed in the long interval of time. Thus Nature takes the
place of the selective human breeder and gradually produces the new
species out of the varieties resulting from variation.

The struggle for existence arises from the fact that while the off-
spring always exceed the parents enormously in number, yet the total
number of living organisms in the world does not and cannot increase
year by year, the food supply being limited. Hence the vast majority
of plants and animals die premature deaths. They kill each other in a
thousand different ways; they consume the food of others and starve
them, they prey on each other, they are destroyed wholesale by the
powers of nature, cold and heat, rain and hail. The struggle to live
is tremendously severe, because hundreds seek to live where there is
only room for two or three. It is the Malthusian formula of population
vs. food carried out in the terrible logic of reality. But why do some
always survive? What gives them their peculiar privilege? If all
were exactly alike we would say it was simply their luck. But they
are not exactly alike. Some are stronger and healthier, fiercer to fight

■* Ibid., p. 146.
s Ibid., p. 105.

Appendix 413

or quicker to flee than others, and some are more cunning or gifted
with keener sight, or protected by their shape and color from pursuers.
Among plants the smallest differences may be useful; the earliest shoots
grow strong before the slug attacks them, and bring forth seed earlier
in the autumn. Plants armed with spines may escape being devoured,
and certain kinds with bright flowers may attract insects and be fer-
tilized sooner than others. A spot on the skin which is sensitive to
light ultimately becomes an eye. Hard bumps appear on some cattle
and develop into horns which are obviously useful. In the course of
many droughts the necks of giraflfes lengthen so that they can reach the
leaves on the trees. Something must be left to " chance," but on the
whole the fittest, those best adapted to their surroundings, will survive.
On the other hand, some organs which are not useful are lost. Thus
the beetles in Madeira are wingless.

Such is the Darwinian theory in brief. It is all very simple, as
simple as that a round stone rolls down hill easier than a cube. Ani-
mals with certain advantageous variations have advantages over others.
At the best the theory is based on mere analogy. Darwin passed
from intelligent action of man directly to nature's blind killing off of
unfavorable life forms. He speaks of " selection," but in reality in
Nature intelligence and the isolating elements are absent. And the
variations which he gives nature to work on are imperceptible, a
difficulty which he seems to consider is overcome by assuming an
infinitely long time for the process.

He is guilty of what might be termed a new logical fallacy, the
fallacy of the imperceptible. He seems to think that if a thing grows
slowly by minute gradations it needs no explanation, the process is its
own cause. But no modification, however gradual, can begin a new
line of growth, nor create even in germ that into which it is to develop.
The smallest germ of an eye, a tiny nerve surface sensitive to light,
is a new thing in nature when it first appears, and the environment
could never produce it. It is from the first a potential eye, and all
after developments simply carry on to perfect form the possibilities
latent in that sensitive film. At times he seems to feel this difficulty,
for he wrote to Asa Gray, " I remember well the time when the thought
of the eye made me cold all over, but I have got over this stage of the
complaint, and now small trifling particulars of structure often make
me very uncomfortable. The sight of a feather in a peacock's tail,
whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick! " ^ But still he refuses to admit
any inner directing force causing the variations, as Gray and Lyell held.

The following is an example of how he argued in his first edition of
the Origin of Species before sharp criticism made him strike out the

6 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 90.

414 Basic Ideas in Religion

last sentence. " In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne
swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a
whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the
supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did
not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of
bears being rendered by natural selection more and more aquatic in
their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths till a creature
was produced as monstrous as a whale." '^ This led to a correspondence
with Lyell in which he wrote, " Will you send me one line to say
whether I must strike out about the secondary whale, it goes to my
heart." * Two days later he wrote again, " I will certainly leave out
the whale and bear." ^ A year later the matter is still weighing on
him, and a sentence to Lyell shows that he had meant to illustrate by
this the first step from bear to whale by natural selection, " Observe,
that in my Polar Bear case, I do show the first step by which conversion
into a whale ' would be easy,' would oflfer no difficulty ! " i*^

The most obvious criticism is that imperceptible changes would not
survive, for they would be too small to give any real advantage in the
struggle for existence, nor would organs in the process of growth aid
in the survival of the animal. But if any one supposes the variations
large enough to be of real use, he passes at once beyond the Darwinian
position. Even if the modifications were great in degree, but not a new
departure in kind, the action of the environment could never alone
produce the effect Darwin imagines. The wind might blow forever on
a fin and never change it into a wing. No landing of fishes on the
beach, no matter how many generations of them tried it, could ever
modify them in the direction of reptiles. Tubercles chancing to appear
on the sides would not develop into limbs, unless there was an innate
tendency already present. Such a directive principle of development
Darwin would not admit.

The Darwinian theory holds that variations must be useful in order
to be selected, and that they are coincident with changes in the environ-
ment. Romanes in his earlier lectures admitted that a single clear case
of a new organ slowly developing and of no use till perfected would be
fatal to Darwinism. The Duke of Argyll pointed to the electric bat-
teries in fishes, and Romanes frankly admitted the great force of the
argument. All the while that the electrical apparatus was developing,
it would require an enormous expenditure of nervous energy of no im-
mediate use to the fish. How can we conceive on the principle of
utility of such a change taking place in a single fish, or a few fishes ? So

"^ First Edition, p. 165.

8 Francis Darwin, Life and Letters of Charles Darzvin, Vol. II, p. 30.

^ Ibid., p. 31.

10 Ibid., p. 129.

Appendix 415

the Duke of Argyle held that many organs are prophetic of future use,
therefore they are preserved. If organs change in the embryo when
their change can only be of use after birth, they must have so changed
in their philogeny, or race development, and the change must have been
just as purposeful. Romanes gave up the position, and in his Post-
Darwinian Questions, he argues that specific characters are often of no
use whatever to the species, and quotes many modern evolutionists as
on his side.

Bateson thinks more has been thrown on the environment than actual
facts warrant. It has not changed pan passu with the " advantageous "
variations, making them survive and the others perish. In fact the
unmodified forms often survive and prosper as well. Many butterflies
and other insects have shapes and markings which seem to mimic the
leaves of trees, yet other species survive which do not have them.
According to natural selection the latter ought to have been ruthlessly
killed off. It is advantageous for the elator beetle to be able to spring
into the air when laid on its back, but the other species also survive
which are doomed to lie helpless because they lack this power to
spring. Darwin admitted that this survival of old forms quite perplexed
him, and he was never able to explain it on his view.

The crux of the whole problem is not the survival but the arrival of
the fittest. Darwinism really accounts only for the non-survival of the
unfit, but in no way accounts for the arrival of the fit. If we ask how
the arrivals and survivals so fall together that an orderly system
emerges from these chance variations, we get no satisfactory answer.
The favorable variations are taken for granted, and we have only the
truism that the fittest do survive. Are these numerous variations purely
fortuitous? If so, we have a definite progression resulting from pure
chance. But such a supposition defies the notion of law and fixed order
on which all interpretation depends. All the facts point to a doctrine
of descent, but not to the happy-go-lucky theory of the production of
innumerable forms on which natural selection is free to work her won-
derful transformations. The modern view is that the creation of a
new species has already taken place before the question of survival
comes up. Cope points out that " a selection cannot be the cause of
those alternatives from which it selects. The alternatives must be pre-
sented before the selection can commence." ^^ The question is whether
it will be able to get a foothold. So far as a sentence can sum up the
theistic point of view, we would say that species are not made by Dar-
winian methods, but are developed by immanent forces ; and that
natural selection has nothing to do with the origin of species, but con-
cerns only the survival of those already formed.

" The Energy of Evolution, " Amer. Nat." Vol. XXVIII, p. 205.

41 6 Basic Ideas in Religion

Professor Kellogg in a careful study of the attack on Darwinism
has this to say about his own position : " Finally I desire to add an
objection that has real weight with me, whatever may be the personal
attitude of other naturalists or students to it. And that is, that a
constantly increasing number of working biologists find themselves, on
the basis of their cumulative individual observation and experience and
thought, unsatisfied with the explanation of adaptation and species-
forming off'ered by selection theories. Men using, or rather, testing,
these theories every day in their work in field and laboratory, find
selection insufficient to explain the conditions that their observation
and experiments reveal to them. These men are students in all the
different lines of biological work; they are zoologists, botanists, paleon-
tologists; they are students of anatomy, physiology, cacology (correla-
tion of organisms), and taxomony (classification) ; they are embry-
ologists, pathologists, animal and plant breeders. From all these lines
of work come increasing complaints ; selection cannot explain for me
what I see to exist. From some the cry is more bitter : selection is a
delusion and false guide; I reject it utterly. For me, I repeat, this
is an objection of much significance and importance. Just as modern
chemistry seems to be finding its long useful atomic theory now a
restraint and a hindrance in understanding the wonderful new facts
that have followed the pushing out of investigation into the rich fields
of physical chemistry, so the biological experimentalists, the students
of variation and heredity, of life mechanics, of physico-chemical biol-
ogy, are finding the rigid theory of selection's control of all processes
and phenomena a rack on which they will no longer be bound." 12

Geddes and Thomson in their little book on evolution have a fair
statement of the value of natural selection as at present understood:
" Natural selection remains still a vera causa in the origin of species;
but the function ascribed to it is practically reversed. It exchanges its
former supremacy as the sole determinant among practically indefinite
possibilities of structure and function, for the more modest position of
simply accelerating, retarding or terminating the process of otherwise
determined change. It furnishes the brake rather than the steam or the
rails for the journey of life; or in better metaphor, instead of guiding
the ramifications of the tree of life, it would, in Mivart's excellent
phrase, do little more than apply the pruning-knife to them." i3

The greater importance of variation has steadily come to the front,
and is being carefully studied in the patient accumulation of the facts
of variation. The greatest English worker on these lines, Bateson,
writes : " All the different theories start from the hypothesis that the
different forms of life are related to each other, and that their diversity

12 Darwinism To-day, pp. 89, 90.
"^^ Evolution, p. 248.

Appendix 417

is due to variation. On this hypothesis, therefore, Variation, whatever
may be its cause, and however it may be limited, is the essential
phenomenon of Evolution. Variation, in fact, is Evolution. The readi-
est way, then, of solving the problem of Evolution is to study the facts
of Variation." i*

It is a common blunder to confuse Darwinism with Evolution. It is,
of course, only a theory of evolution, but because it was first on the
field, and was presented in a clear consistent form, it was rapidly caught
up and generally accepted. It has become a lullaby to the popular
mind, and its catch phrases are supposed to be a test of scientific
orthodoxy.

The English evolutionists seem loath to depart entirely from the
great pioneer. But on the Continent it is different. The students there
are not bound to Darwin by patriotic ties, and the criticisms of him
have been many and bitter. One of the most recent critics, Dennert,
has published a little book with the significant title At the Deathbed of
Darwinism. He gives a resume of the views on the Continent against
the Darwinian theory. Although too violent to make a good debater
he proves his main thesis, which is set forth in his opening words :
"Some twenty years ago it was perfectly justifiable to identify the
ideas of Darwinism and the doctrine of the descent of man, for at that
time Darwinism was the only theory of descent extant. The few who
would not accept this could easily be numbered. Only occasionally a
scholar, such as Wigand, Kolliker, Nageli, and a few others dared to
raise their voices in protest. Now all this has changed. Practically all
naturalists now make a sharp distinction between Darwinism and the
doctrine of descent. A survey of the field shows that Darwinism in
its old form is becoming a matter of history, and that we are actually
witnessing its death struggle. . . . The bulk of modern scientists no
longer recognize it, and those who have not yet discarded it at any
rate regard it as of subordinate importance. In place of this, older
views have again come into acceptance, which do not deny development,
but maintain that this was not a purely mechanical process."

There was another point in Darwin's theory which has not been
dealt with above, namely that instinct is inherited habit. But inasmuch
as this opens up the whole difficult question of what instinct is, it has
seemed best to treat it in another note (Note K), which can most
profitably be read after the study of Chapter V.

^* Materials for the Study of Variation, p. 6.

41 8 Basic Ideas in Religion

NOTE J
THE CELL AND ITS LIFE HISTORY

The cell is the unit of structure in all organic life. It consists of
protoplasm, which is composed of cytoplasm and a nucleus. In the
nucleus are tiny chromatin grains which seem to be the essential ele-
ments of the cell, and outside the nucleus in the protoplasm is a
tiny body called the centrosome which functions in cell development.
All other features in the cell can for our purposes be ignored. It
is in cell division that we see most beautifully the working out of
the inner laws. The division of cells is of two kinds ; amitosis, or
direct division, which is unaccompanied by any visible mechanism
and is of rare occurrence, and mitosis, which is the almost universal
form and therefore concerns us most. In mitosis the chromatin
granules become arranged in a coiled necklace-like thread. This con-
tracts, the granular origin becomes less evident, and the coils fewer
in number, until it resembles a string. The string then breaks up into
a number of U shaped chromosomes. This number is held to be con-
stant for the cells of any given species of plant or animal, though the
variation in number between the different species is very great. Mean-
while outside of the nucleus in the protoplasm the centrosome has
divided into two, which move to the opposite poles of the nucleus.
Radiations extend out from them into the protoplasm and, as the fine
membrane of the nucleus disappears, the radiations invade the nuclear
area, where they join the little fibers of that region and a continuous
spindle is formed between the two centrosomes. The remaining radia-
tions extending in all directions are called astral rays. The details of
this process vary greatly in the different species. The chromosomes
now arrange themselves in the equatorial plane of the spindle, and
each splits longitudinally into two. This splitting is a reappearance
of a division which has already been suggested in the chromosome
string, or even in the chromatin grains themselves. The sister chromo-
somes now pass to the opposite poles of the spindle, and there ad-
here to each other end on end. In this manner the chromatin ma-
terial of the nucleus is equally distributed into two parts. This
continuous chromosome string lengthens out into the bead-like thread,
and from that breaks up into the separate chromatin grains. The
spindle and astral rays disappear, and new membranes surround the
two new nuclei. At the same time the protoplasm of the old cell
divides equally by simple constriction, and two perfect cells result
out of the material of the parent cell. These then grow to full size
and in turn set up cell division exactly similar to that by which they
were formed. And so the process continues. The dominant life
force holds the whole in harmonious interaction. Nor is this process

Appendix 419

of division the only activity of the cell, for each cell illustrates all
the phenomena of living things. It assimilates food, and even searches
for it if it be a unicellular organism. It builds the food into ma-
terial for its own substance and thus grows. It shows powers of
respiration and excretion, and has the power of responding to stimuli.
But it is in the development of the germ cell that the dominant
life force is most beautifully seen. Provision must be made so that
when the two germ cells, male and female, come together the mingling
of chromosomes does not yield double the number characteristic of
that species. In the growth of most of the metazoa and in all the
higher forms certain cells are set apart for reproductive functions.
These are for the male small motile spermatozoa, and for the female
large yolk laden ova. When the time for fertilization arrives these
cells vary from the ordinary methods of mitosis, and by a process of
reduction, too complicated to describe here, the male germ cell results
in four spermatozoa, each carrying only half the typical number of
chromosomes, while the female germ cell yields one large ovum, like-
wise with half the typical number of chromosomes, and three yolk-
less cells, which are abortive and necessarily functionless. When a
spermatozoon penetrates the ovum the two nuclei mingle and a new
cell results with the standard equipment of chromosomes made up by
the joining of the paternal and maternal reduction chromosomes. After
that cell division takes place as usual and a new individual is formed.

NOTE K
INSTINCT

Before proceeding to a discussion of the Darwinian and other views
of instinct, it would be well to define what instinct is. Instinct is (i)
an impulse in living creatures to perform certain definite actions for
the good of their young or for their own protection, (2) which acts
are repeated by each generation without change at certain points in
their life under given circumstances, (3) without previous training, (4)
without attempting any improvement, and possibly, (5) in unconscious-
ness of the purpose to which these acts are the means.

I. Darwin's view of instinct is that chance actions which happened
to be of use to the creature were handed down to its descendants. A
beneficial course of action better enabled the individual to survive, and
was inherited and intensified by the use of future generations until it
became ingrained in the species. That the theory hung on a slender
thread Darwin saw, and wrote as the opening sentence of his discus-
sion, " Many instincts are so wonderful that their development will
probably appear to the reader a difficulty sufficient to overthrow my

420 Basic Ideas in Religion

whole theory." i To quote one of his illustrations : " Now let us suppose
that the ancient progenitor of our European cuckoo had the habits of
the American cuckoo, and that she occasionally laid an egg in another
bird's nest. If the old bird profited by this occasional habit through
being enabled to emigrate earlier or through any other cause ; or if
the young were made more vigorous by advantage being taken of the
mistaken instinct of another species than when reared by their own
mother, . . . then the old birds or the fostered young would gain an
advantage. And analogy would lead us to believe that the young thus
reared would be apt to follow by inheritance the occasional and aber-
rant habit of their mother, and in their turn would be apt to lay their
eggs in other birds' nests, and thus be more successful in rearing their
young. By a continued process of this nature, I beheve that the strange
instinct of our cuckoo has been generated." 2

We are here asked to believe that the foster mother allowed the new
and strange egg to remain in the nest through ignorance, or else we
must suppose much cunning on the part of the cuckoo and great control
over its physical organism, for it lays eggs much smaller than one would
expect from its size, and gives them the color and markings of the eggs
in the nest of the deceived bird. Often it lays them before nests in
hollow trees which have the shape of a baking oven with a narrow
entrance, and pushes them in with its beak. Here it is manifestly im-
possible for the cuckoo to see the eggs it is to simulate. Again how
could a chance discovery of the benefit of freedom from maternal care
affect the little bird in the strange nest? It would have no opportunity
to copy its unnatural parent, and it could not very well reason out the
advantage of a chance action which caused it to be reared in totally dif-
ferent surroundings than it had a right to. If Weismann be right
about the non-inheritance of acquired characteristics this theory is de-
stroyed completely.

Some parents perform their instinctive actions once only and could
not, therefore, like Darwin's cuckoo, repeat chance actions which hap-
pened to result advantageously. There are some insects which lay
their eggs on certain trees, and at once perish. A careful study of
instincts shows them to be of such a character that they are necessary
from the first. There is no room for chance. The lives of insects are
too short for them to learn by experience. Besides it is inconceivable
that the chance acts of a grub should be carried over from its larva
state to its final butterfly or beetle state, and then be transmitted to the
next generation of grubs. Chance actions in the beginning would never
account for the wonderful corporate instinct which governs the work
of a tribe of ants, or a hive of bees. Darwin's theory of fortuitous

1 Origin of Species, Chap. VIII.

2 Ibid.

Appendix 42 1

variation meets its clearest defeat when attempting to explain the
invariable, unerring, spontaneous manifestations of instinct.

II. Another view is that of G. H. Lewes, which has been elabo-
rated by Eimer and others. This theory is that instinct is a sort
of lapsed intelligence. Purposeful acts are repeated till the conscious-
ness of purpose disappears and the acts are spontaneous. They become
automatic and appear in the young as fixed habits or instincts. Ances-
tral experience is inherited as unconscious impulse. As Eimer writes :
" If we suppose, for example, that the collection of honey has become
mechanical, that the bees no longer reason consciously in performing
this labor, yet we must assume that originally they began to collect
honey from reflection and reasoning; for otherwise they would never
have come to do it mechanically." ^

This theory, like Darwin's, starts from actions being repeated so
often that they become habits, and it is open to the same criticisms. In
insect life there is no time for such repetition. The insect dies too
early, and many of its acts are done but once. Intelligent purpose can
hardly be postulated of an effort to prepare for a future state which
the creature does not live to see, as when the parent wasp as soon as
it has laid its egg provides food for the future young. Or again some
forms of life provide for a metamorphosis of which they cannot possibly
have any conscious prevision. The grub of the stag-beetle varies re-
markably from the female larva in the manner of digging the hole in
which its metamorphosis shall take place. The female hollows out a
cavity just its own size, but the male digs a hole as large again, because
it must provide for its horns when it becomes a beetle. Did conscious
intelligence tell it that in the future state it would have horns, and did
the female reason the other way? Von Hartmann shows the foolishness
of such a view with his illustration of the life of the caterpillar of the
Emperor Moth : " It devours the leaves of the shrub whereon it was
hatched ; at the most, moves when it rains to the underside of the leaf,
and changes its skin from time to time ; that is its whole life, which
hardly allows one to look for even the most limited education of the
intelligence. But now it spins its cocoon for the chrysalis state, and
constructs for itself a double arch of bristles meeting at their apices,
very easy to open from within, but which opposes to the outside suffi-
cient resistance to any attempts to penetrate into it. If this contrivance
were a result of its conscious understanding, it would require the fol-
lowing train of thought : * I shall enter the chrysalis state, and, im-
movable as I am, be at the mercy of every adversary ; therefore I will
spin myself a cocoon. Since, however, as a butterfly I shall not be able
to make a breach in the web either by mechanical or chemical means

3 Organic Evolution, p. 425.

422 Basic Ideas in Religion

as many other caterpillars do, I must leave an aperture for egress ;
but that my persecutors may not make use of it, I shall close it with
elastic bristles, which I can easily bend apart from the inside, but
which will offer resistance externally, according to the theory of the
arch.' That is really asking too much of the poor caterpillar! And
yet each step of this argumentation is indispensable if the result is to
be correctly got at." *

As far as the transmission of consciously acquired experience goes
one has only to consider the large population of neuter insects among
the bees to see how impossible the theory is. These neuters cannot
produce their kind. Their special instincts and peculiarities have to be
transmitted, not directly by an antecedent set of neuter insects, but by
females, whose instincts and peculiarities are very different from those
of the neutral portion of their progeny.

Insects today lack this ability to think out their actions, for if
any unusual situation occurs the insect is confused and helpless. A
certain species of wasp feeds her young ones from time to time with
fresh food, visiting at suitable intervals the nest she has made. This
she has carefully covered and concealed with earth, which she removes
and replaces, as far as necessary, at each visit. If the opening be made
ready for her, this, instead of helping her, altogether puzzles her, and
she no longer seems to recognize her young, thus showing how thor-
oughly " instinctive " her proceedings are. Even animals of a higher
grade of intelligence show this difficulty of meeting a new situation.
Superficial resemblances easily fool them, just as the hen is fooled by a
china egg. Dr. Jordan at one time had a lively Macacus monkey called
Bob, which was a nut and fruit-eating monkey and instinctively knew
just how to crack nuts and peel fruits. At the same time he had a
pet monkey Mono of another kind that had the egg-eating instinct.
But Mono had not yet seen an egg. To each of the monkeys Dr. Jor-
dan gave an egg, the first that either of them had ever seen. Baby
Mono, descended from egg-eating ancestors, handled his egg with
all the expertness of instinct. He cracked it with his upper teeth,
making a hole in it, and sucked out all its substance. Then hold-
ing the egg shell up to the light, and seeing there was no longer
anything in it, he threw it away. All this he did mechanically, auto-
matically, and just as well with the first egg as with any other he
afterwards had. And all eggs since given him he has treated in the
same way. But the monkey Bob took his egg for some kind of nut.
He broke it with his teeth and tried to pull off the shell. When the
inside ran out and fell to the ground he looked at it for a moment in
bewilderment, then with both hands scooped up the yolk and the sand

Philosophy of the Unconscious, Vol. I, p. 92.

Appendix 423

mixed with it and swallowed it. Last of all he stuffed the shell into
his mouth.

One mark of instinct is that the untaught young do as good work
as the parents, and never improve on their first attempt. Birds which
build new nests each year do not vary from their methods of former
years. Spiders spinning their webs resemble automatic machines con-
structed to do one act supremely well. Nor does the creature ever
make mistakes, no matter how complex the instinct.

Equally hard to explain is the migratory instinct of animals and
birds. While it is still warm the birds fly south, certain animals go
into winter quarters, and the beetles bury themselves in the ground.
Yet the temperature may still be low when the birds and animals reap-
pear. Von Hartmann discusses this question as follows : " In years
when there will be an early winter, most birds of passage begin to make
preparations for their departure sooner than usual. If a very mild
winter is imminent, many species do not depart at all, or migrate only
a short distance southward. If a severe winter occurs, the tortoise
makes its winter abode deeper. If gray geese, cranes, etc., soon with-
draw from the spots in which they had made their appearance at the
beginning of spring, there is a prospect of a hot and dry summer, when
the deficiency of water in those places would render breeding impossible
to marsh and water birds. In years when floods occur, the beaver
builds its dwelling higher ; and in Kamchatka, when a flood is im-
minent, the field-mice suddenly withdraw in a body. If a dry summer
is approaching, in April or May spiders weave their pensile toils
several feet in length. When in winter house-spiders run to and fro,
boldly contending with one another, construct new and numerous webs
one over another, cold will set in in from nine to twelve days; on the
other hand, if they conceal themselves, there will be a thaw.

" I do not by any means doubt, that many of these precautionary
measures in view of future states of the weather are conditioned by a
sensitive appreciation of certain present atmospheric states, which
escape our notice; these perceptions, however, invariably have refer-
ence only to present states of the weather, and what can the common
sensations produced by the present state of the weather have to do with
the idea of the future weather? Surely no one will credit the animals
with the power of calculating the weather months in advance from
meteorological indications, and with the faculty of foreseeing floods. A
mere feeling of this kind of present atmospheric influences is nothing
more than the sensuous perception which serves as motive, for a
motive must, indeed, always be present if an instinct is to become
active. Nevertheless, it is certain that the prevision of the state of the
weather is a case of unconscious clairvoyance ; the stork departing for
the south four weeks earlier than is customary, knowing as little as the

4^4 Basic Ideas in Religion

stag, which, when a cold winter is at hand, allows a thicker skin than
usual to grow. Animals have in their consciousness a feeling of the
present state of the weather; on this their action follows precisely
as if they had the idea of the future state of the weather. They do not,
however, possess the latter idea in their consciousness. Accordingly,
there only remains as a natural connecting link the unconscious idea,
which, however, is always a clairvoyant intuition, because it contains
something which is neither directly given to the animal by sense-per-
ception, nor can be inferred from the perception through its powers of
understanding." ^

The communal life of bees and ants is another interesting phase of
instinct. Their nervous organism is extremely low. It would be
absurd to think that they could initiate the wonderful series of actions
on which the whole community depends. Each bee or ant has its special
task and performs it unerringly, even though it cost its death. They
have little or no consciousness of the meaning of what they do. The
genius of the hive presides and dominates all its members, just as the or-
ganizing ^pvx■h dominates the developing of an egg or an embryo. Von
Hartmann comments that "it rather looks as if an invisible supreme
architect had laid before the assembly the plan of the whole, and had im-
pressed it upon each individual ; as if every kind of laborer had learnt
his destined work, place, and order of affording relief, and was informed
by some signal of the moment when his turn came. But yet all this is
mere result of instinct; and as by instinct the plan of the whole hive
indwells in each single bee in unconscious clairvoyance, so a common in-
stinct urges each individual to the work to which it is called, at the
right moment; only by such means is the wonderful quiet and order
possible." 8

III. Theistic Conception of Instinct. Both Schopenhauer and Von
Hartmann are strongly against the mechanical or materialistic view of
nature, but their general teaching rules out any divine implanting in
the theistic sense. Kant had deeper insight, for on one occasion he
said, " Instinct is the voice of God."

The evolution of an organism from the germ takes place by epi-
genesis, an inner process which consists in the application of a definite
force or tendency, so as to build up particular tissues and organs. The
force is not applied at random, it is controlled by what the Germans call
Gattungsidee, the Idea of the Species. If we admit a divine plan deter-
mining the physical structure of an organism, why should we not believe
that it determines also psychical features? It would therefore be in-
wrought into the very structure of the animal, and be independent of
anything like Natural Selection. Instinct is a divinely ordained pre-

^ Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 101-103.
* Ibid., p. 112.

, Appendix 425

adjustment of the inner life-processes of an organism to its special needs
and environment. As Von Hartmann remarks, the Gattungsidce of each
species of bird includes the special fashion of its nest and the notes of
its peculiar song, just as much as the fashion of its plummage, the
structure of its skeleton, and the characteristics of its beak and claws.
In either case, an idea is to be realized, a purpose is to be carried
into execution, and this is the proper function of will and intellect com-
bined. The preservation of the animal's life, the choice and collection
of its appropriate food, the continuance of its species, the care of its
young, the building of its home, the fit period for its annual migration
and the proper direction of its flight, are all tasks performed by its
own voluntary efforts, under the guidance indeed of a wisdom im-
measurably higher than its own, but through the conscious use of its
own organs and muscular powers, which are brought into play by a
vague impulse, a blind craving, urging it to attain some useful end of
which the creature itself possibly knows nothing.

Only on the supposition of a Power immanent in and directing the
universe can we understand the strange powers of instinct. Along
with organic evolution this divine Spirit has caused an associated
psychical evolution. Instinct in the lower orders of creation yields
more and more to intellect in the higher orders, until the goal is reached
in the mind of man, whose instinctive acts are very few indeed.

NOTE L

FISKE ON LAW OF SUFFICIENT REASON

Fiske, in his Cosmic Philosophy, follows the lead of Mill. He thinks
the law proves too much. If we make the First Cause responsible for
everything, then it must partake of the qualities of all creation. " If
it reasons and wills, Hke the higher animals, it must also, like minerals,
plants, and the lowest animals, be unintelligent and unendowed with
the power of volition." i It would also have to be material, because
the created object is material. For instance, if a piece of matter were
gifted with momentary intelligence sufficient to enquire into its own
cause, would it not argue, I am material, therefore my maker is also
material? Perhaps it would; but it would more likely say first, I think,
therefore my Maker must also think. But if it could really think as
men think it would also realize the superiority of mind to matter and
their utter dissimilarity, and would see that the logical law would not
require God to have a body, because spirit and body exist in different
planes.

1 Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. II, pp. 388, 9, and Part III, Chap. 2.

426 Basic Ideas in Religion

NOTE M
KANT ON THE TRIBUNAL OF CONSCIENCE

" The consciousness of and internal tribunal in man (before which
'his thoughts accuse or excuse one another') is conscience. Every
man has a conscience, and finds himself observed by an inward judge
which threatens and keeps him in awe (reverence combined with fear) ;
and this power which watches over the laws within him is not some-
thing which he himself (arbitrarily) makes, but it is incorporated in his
being. It follows him like his shadow, when he thinks to escape. He
may indeed stupify himself with pleasures and distractions, but cannot
avoid now and then coming to himself or awaking, and then he at once
perceives its awful voice. In his utmost depravity he may, indeed, pay
no attention to it, but he cannot avoid hearing it.

" Now this original and (as a conception of duty) moral capacity,
called conscience, has this peculiarity in it, that though its business is
a business of man with himself, yet he finds himself compelled by his
reason to transact it as if at the command of another person. For the
transaction here is the conduct of a trial (causa) before a tribunal.
But that he who is accused by his conscience should be conceived as
one and the same person with the judge is an absurd conception of a
court; for then the complainant would always lose his case. There-
fore in all duties the conscience of the man must regard another than
himself as the judge of his actions, if it is to avoid self-contradiction.
Now this other may be an actual or a merely ideal person which reason
frames to itself. Such an idealized person (the authorized judge of
conscience) must be one who knows the heart; for the tribunal is set
up in the inward part of man ; at the same time he must be all-obliging,
that is, must be or be conceived as a person in respect of whom all
duties are to be regarded as his commands; since conscience is the
inward judge of all free actions. Now, since such a moral being must
at the same time possess all power (in heaven and earth), since other-
wise he could not give his commands their proper effect (which the
office of judge necessarily requires), and since such a moral being
possessing power over all is called God, hence conscience must be con-
ceived as the subjective principle of a responsibility for one's deeds
before God ; nay, this latter concept is contained (though it be only
obscurely) in every moral self-consciousness." 1

1 Tugendlehre, p. 293 ff, Abbott's translation, pp. 321-2.

Appendix 427

NOTE N
THE USE OF THE IMAGINATION

We must recognize the part played by the imagination in our appre-
ciation of the beautiful. The imagination is a form of insight, and one
of the elements of faith. " It is that which made Socrates, even with
little scholarship, and Bunyan, with no scholarship, God's seers — adepts
in a wisdom which mere learning could not impart." The imagination
has an interpretative power through the use of mental images which we
form of the works of Creation. It is also a power of expression, for
the mind which has mastered moral and spiritual meanings gives them
forth by imagination to other minds clothed in fitting forms and figures.
Few essays are so full of meaning as Bushnell's Our Gospel a Gift to
the Imagination.

The modern prosaic religion of the West is apt to take offense at
the emphasis we lay on the devout imagination as the needed handmaid
to faith. It seems to many that we are denying the reality of the
tilings eternal which are unseen. On the contrary, it is the imagination
which reveals them as spiritual realities and not mere fancies. Without
this instrument the prophet poets would be helpless to express in living
words their visions of things divine. It is the deep insight of the
devout imagination which creates the symbols and pictures which glorify
the visions of the psalmists and of prophets like Isaiah, Ezekiel, and
St. John the Divine in his Book of Revelation. When advancing years
have taken away from us our childish faith in the letter, it is the
blessed function of spiritual imagination, awakening our spiritual in-
sight to strengthen and recreate our faith again in forms and thoughts
which never pass away, and which uncover the world of spirit as a
certain refuge from the dogmatism of the logical faculty and the denial
of the senses.

The Victorian poets and especially the great prose poet, John Ruskin,
made this line of thought familiar and helpful to the devout lay-mind
long before it affected the clerical mind. Ruskin's main point is the dis-
tinction he draws between the creative and the penetrative imagina-
tion. The creative imagination literally imagines, i.e., makes images or
pictures out of its own interior mass of thoughts, which have no exist-
ence in the world of fact. The penetrative imagination always faces
some given outer object or scene in whose hidden depths it sees divine
symbols, things high and holy beyond the reach of the senses, but cer-
tain to the heart. Ruskin's two forms of the imagination correspond to
the German words Einbildung and Anschauung, which last implies
insight.

On the same line wrote Goethe : " The beautiful is the perfect union

428 Basic Ideas in Religion

of the Idea and the Form which I perceive through my imagination.
It is not correct to speak of a passive perception of the beautiful.
Every time I perceive beauty it is the imagination which plays upon it
and arouses the delight it gives."

NOTE O

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT ANALYZED

I. Ontology Proper — God as Real Being the Cause of

Existence

No term is so suggestive of wearisome metaphysics as Ontology; but
in its proper connotation it simply expresses the revealed name of God,
/ am that I am, spring and support of all existence. Never has the
intuitive ontological faith found nobler expression than in the majestic
words of the Psalmist, " Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place in
all generations ! Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever
Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to
everlasting. Thou art God." But, unfortunately, under the prevailing
intellectualism philosophic believers commonly expressed this intuitive
faith in terms of the head only, and the metaphysical discussion re-
volved in sluggish circles around dreary abstractions. The First Cause,
Necessary Being, The Infinite, The Absolute, such as no heart of man
ever believed in.

Although an element in all philosophy, Anselm (1033-1109) was the
first to formally develop this faith of the spirit in Infinite Being on its
religious side. He did not separate it in thought from the ethical form.
The Ens Realissimum must ever be the Ens Perfectissimum. He did
not argue on the abstract lines of Clarke or Gillespie, nor undertake, as
is often foolishly supposed, to prove the existence of God to atheists
by the quibble that the mere idea of a thing involves its actual being.
His Proslogion is a meditative prayer, not a syllogistic treatise, and
its sub-title. Faith seeking to understand itself, shows that he intended
to clarify man's instinctive belief. He wrote to confirm, not to create,
faith in God. Hence the unfairness of the common summarizing of
his whole thought in the cold syllogism : We have an idea of a Perfect
Being so great that none greater can be conceived; Existence is an
attribute of perfection : Therefore, the Perfect Being exists. Such an
argument has no force for doubters. If this were his reasoning, then
the objection is valid that you can not prove the existence of a thing
from the idea of it. But Anselm rightly insisted that the idea of
God was sui generis, not a mere thought of the understanding, but the
direct intuition of divine reality. He spoke as a man of faith to men

Appendix 429

who had some faith at least, and appealed to the instinctive feeling that
the phenomenal world, and especially our own selves, can not hang in
the air, but must be rooted in necessary and eternal Being. It is this
subjective element of a living faith which alone gives cogency to this
somewhat awkward dialectic, and the lack of it in many readers
explains their utter misunderstanding of his position. In the Mono-
logion he writes : " The rational mind alone among created things can
rise to the search after God, and it alone can find traces in itself of
that which it seeks. . . , We may say of the soul that it is to itself a
mirror wherein it beholds the image of Him whom it can not behold
face to face." ^

Anselm's postulate was that God exists so truly that He cannot be
thought not to exist. He quoted the verse in the Psalms, " The fool
hath said in his heart. There is no God," 2 to show that only a fool
could make such a statement, for either he does not know the real
meaning of the word " God," in which case he is foolish to say any-
thing at all, or he does know its meaning, and in that case he is logically
a fool, for he affirms a contradiction in terms, since " God " means the
universal ground of Being, and the fool's remark would therefore be
" Existence does not exist." When Gaunillo replied in the name of the
fool, that he could imagine a perfect island, more beautiful than any in
the world, but that it would not have any real existence, Anselm
pointed out that his line of thought was applicable only to the one
" idea," which we call God, a necessary idea which carried with it the
conviction of its reality, "because it exists on an assured ground of
truth, otherwise it would not exist at all." 3 Convinced that God is not
a mere name, or thing or creature, but the Ground, the necessary
Being, without which there could be no world-order, Anselm retorts as
to the island, " I reply confidently that, if any one will find for me any
object whatever, existing in reality or in the mind alone, to which the
reasoning of my argument is applicable, besides that one Being quo
majus nihil, I will pledge myself that I will find for him that lost island,
and will secure it to him so that it will never be lost again." *

Descartes' position also has been misunderstood as purely logical,
on the line of the sufficient reason — the innate idea of God implies
Deity as its (external) cause. But underlying the language which sug-
gests this interpretation is ever the conception (unfortunately seldom
clearly expressed) that the idea is itself a dim but immediate intuition
of God. In the Third Meditation, he reasons : I have within me the
idea of infinite substance, because I am myself a substance, that is, real

^ Chaps. 66 and 67.

2Ps. 14:1.

3 Liber Apologeticus contra Gaunilonem, Chap. 3.

* Ibid.

430 Basic Ideas in Religion

though finite being. I could not possibly imagine such an idea, if God
were not a reality, its ground and cause, for experience alone could
never give it. It is the mark impressed by the maker on his work, but
the mark need not be different from the work itself (spirit is made of
spirit and knows its source as spirit). God in some way fashioned
me in His own image and likeness, and I perceive this likeness, in
which is contained the idea of God, by the same faculty by which I
apprehend myself (i.e., not by inference, but immediately).

The older metaphysical statement of the ontological argument (e.g.,
by Clarke and Gillespie) is of little value to ordinary minds. Much
more effective is the recent affirmation by many men of science, on the
ground of consciousness alone, of the certainty of Infinite Reality, even
if they do define the unknowable only in terms of force. Herbert
Spencer writes that the persistence of force is an ultimate truth of
which no inductive proof is possible. " Deeper than demonstration —
deeper even than definite cognition — deep as the very nature of mind
is this postulate. ... Its authority transcends all others whatsoever ;
for not only is it given in the very constitution of our own conscious-
ness, but it is impossible to imagine a consciousness so constituted as
not to give it." ^ We welcome such ontological reasoning, though it is
fatal to Spencer's sensational philosophy.

II. Rational Ontology — God as Supreme Reason

The " substance " form of ontological thought, which has just been
treated, is closely related to the cosmological argument, and similarly
the rational form is closely related to the teleological argument. In
each case the difference is that between an inner conviction and a logi-
cal inference. Rational ontology is well expressed by Goethe: "I do
not ask whether the Supreme Being has reason and understanding, for
I feel that He is understanding and reason itself. Therewith are all
creatures permeated and man has so much of it that he can apprehend
in part the Highest Being Himself." This aspect is not as commonly
felt as the preceding, appealing as it does mainly to minds of a mystical
or idealistic tendency. We cannot even imagine vast power existing and
acting without thought or consciousness. Descartes' maxim holds good
of every form of real existence — Cogito, ergo sum, not Sum, ergo
cogito, for mere existence may be " matter " only. The rational form
of ontology underlies the Bible passages in which the universal order
is expressed in terms of thought and the emphasis falls on the Divine
mind or wisdom, and especially underlies the New Testament doctrine
of the Logos. The Bible symbol of inner reason is light.

Two lines of experience confirm the certainty of a universal Mind :

^ First Principles, ist Edit., § 76.

Appendix 431

(i) the manifestation in the Cosmos of a definite order and relations
and laws which prevail not only on earth but in farthest space — the
same everywhere. (2) the fact of a common mind in man with intui-
tions and judgments of the same kind among all the diverse races of
men. This implies a common source in the divine Logos.

This thought of a common Reason in all minds was the most vital
discovery of the earliest Greeks. From the first their thinkers felt it
had a spiritual aspect ; universal truths must have their origin in the
realm of the divine. Hesiod speaks as a rational ontologist when he
says : " The truth proclaimed by the concordant voice of mankind fails
not, for in man speaks God." ^ Heraclitus also enforces the same
thought : " To speak rationally it behooves us to derive strength from
that which is common to all men. For all human understandings are
nourished by the One Word or Reason of God, whose power is com-
mensurate with His will, and is sufficient for all and overfloweth." ^

The Book of Proverbs thus personifies the Divine Logos or Wisdom :

"Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way,

Before his works of old.
I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning,

Before the earth was.
When there were no depths, I was brought forth,

When there were no fountains abounding with water.
Before the mountains were settled,

Before the hills was I brought forth ;
While as yet he had not made the earth, nor the fields.

Nor the beginning of the dust of the world.
When he established the heavens, I was there :

When he set a circle upon the face of the deep,
When he made firm the skies above.

When the fountains of the deep became strong.
When he gave to the sea its bound.

That the waters should not transgress his commandment,

When he marked out the foundations of the earth :
Then I was by him, as a master workman ;

And I was daily his delight.

Rejoicing always before him,
Rejoicing in his habitable earth;

And my delight was with the sons of men." ^

This passage finds its echo in the Wisdom of Solomon, where the
writer says, " For she that is the artificer of all things taught me, even
wisdom." ^

The Church Fathers often wrote from this point of view. Cyril of

" Works and Days.

7 Fragment of Heraclitus preserved by Stobaeus. See Coleridge,
Statesman's Manual, Appendix D.

8 Prov. 8:22-31.
•Wisdom 7:22.

432 Basic Ideas in Religion

Jerusalem : " The wider our contemplation of Creation the grander is
our conception of God." 1° Basil : " The more profoundly we penetrate
the laws on which the universe is founded and sustained the more do
we behold the glory of the Lord." i^ Gregory the Great : " The won-
ders of the visible creation are the footprints of our Creator ; Himself
as yet we cannot see, but we are on the road that leads to vision, when
we admire Him in the things which He has made." ^^ Thomas
Aquinas writes still more definitely : " All intellectual knowledge comes
from the Divine Intellect . . . and is caused by the Word Who is the
reason of the Divine Intellect." " God acts continually within the soul,
in the sense that He creates and guides its natural light." Augustine,
in the spirit of the later Anselm, declared, " I have on the side of faith
the authority of Christ, from which nothing shall part me. But as to
what my reason can attain, I am determined to possess the truth not
only through faith but through intelligence."

We meet with this form of ontology in early Neo-Platonic and
modern Neo-Hegelian writers, and in mystics and poets in whom the
intellectual element is strong. The French Mystics Fenelon and Male-
branche sought to know God on the side of reason as well as feeling,
differing here widely from their contemporary, Pascal.

Our consciousness of an inner world of thoughts all related in certain
definite ways, brings with it the conviction that this logical order is
necessary — 'is the fundamental condition of all thinking. We feel the
certitude and universality of logical and mathematical principles ; they
must form the working laws of any mind. Given a mind which knows
itself it would feel this a priori, and as soon as outer experience clearly
begins, it would find this faith justified in the existing world which is
framed and ordered according to the very laws it finds in itself. The
mind in us which interprets nature as a rational system must be in
essence one with the universal Mind which constituted that order.
Modern science rests definitely on this principle. Helmholtz de-
clared, " There is only one piece of advice for the scientific student,
trust and act " — that is, on the presupposition that the universe is a
rational cosmos. The argument has had a clear statement by Pfleiderer :
" The agreement, therefore, of the ideal laws of thought, which are
not drawn from the outer world, and the real laws of being, which are
not created by our thought, is a fact of experience of the most incon-
trovertible kind ; the whole certainty of our knowledge rests on it.
But how are we to account for this agreement? There is only one
possible way in which the agreement of our thought with the being of
the world can be made intelligible : the presupposition of a common

10 Cat. IX :2.

" In Ps. XXXIII.

^2 Mag. Moral. XXVI: 12.

Appendix 433

ground of both, in which thought and being must be one ; or the assump-
tion that the real world-ground is at the same time the ideal ground of
our spirit, hence the absolute Spirit, creative Reason, which appears in
the world-law on its real, in the law of thought on its ideal side. . . .
In modern times this thought forms the foundation and corner-stone of
speculative philosophy." i^

No real knowledge of the world outside would be possible or even
conceivable, if there were not an established harmony between man and
his dwelling place, between subject and object; for our knowledge is
knowledge of relations between things, and these relations — the world-
order — are intelligible, written as it were in a language we understand.
It is the product of mind and speaks to mind, both being of the same
kind, though differing in degree. We could not know anything what-
ever, were there not a receptivity for each truth already in our minds,
if we were not at home in the world, if the mind of man were not mi-
crocosmic, mirroring the macrocosmic. But no mind which holds this
point of view can believe for a moment that " mind " is found only in
the microcosmus. It goes without saying that a ]\Iind prior to our own,
and to the world, must have called both into existence.

The thinker as distinct from the scientific observer does not hesitate
to hold this view. " I cannot help discovering in the universe an all-
pervading reason," exclaims Max Miiller. No chance " will account
for the Logos, the thought, which with its thousand eyes looks at us
through the transparent curtain of nature and calls for thoughtful
recognition from the Logos within us." ^*

Lotze clearly expresses the idea of the fundamental unity of human
reason. " In the mental life of the human race there are such im-
mense differences that one might almost doubt whether amid the variety
there really were at bottom any common measure. Yet we believe that
there might be found certain definite features, characteristic modes of
working, which, occurring in all human souls, bring them together into
a common class. . . . This common and indestructible feature of the
human mind consists in the Idea of valid and binding Truth and the
sense of Universal Right and a Universal Standard by which all reality
must be tried. . . . The same impulse appears again in language which,
however poor it may be, is never a mere collection of exclamations in
which disturbance of mind has sought an outlet. All language bears
the impress of a universal and sovereign order, according to which
the relations of things have inherent connection. ... If we choose to
sum up under the name of the Infinite that which stands opposed to
particular finite manifestations, we may say that the capacity of be-
coming conscious of the Infinite is the distinguishing endowment of the

'^^ Religionsphilosophie, Vol. Ill, p. 274 (Eng. trans.).
^* Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1894.

434 Basic Ideas in Religion

human mind, and we believe that we can at the same time pronounce,
as a result of our considerations, that this capacity has not been
produced in us by the influence of experience with all its manifold con-
tent, but that having its origin in the very nature of our being, it only
needed favoring conditions of experience for its development." ^^

The earliest English representatives of rational ontology are the
Cambridge Platonists. It should have been the philosophy of Berkeley,
but he was too much under the influence of John Locke to appreciate
its ontological basis — mind speaking directly to mind. This theistic
Idealism has many able advocates, among them, T. H. Green, lUing-
worth, Royce, Geo. Matheson, and the two Cairds. In America its best
representatives are Samuel Harris and Professor B. P. Bowne.

III. Ethical Ontology — God as Perfection

This form of ontological faith is essentially reverence for what is
holiest, confidence in what is noblest, trust in what is highest. Men
have ever felt that God speaks most directly through the heart. As
finite phenomena suggest an infinite, unchanging cause and ground, so
does our moral life, imperfect in will and deed, bear witness to a moral
reality in which our imperfections disappear and our ideals are realized.
We cannot help believing that our highest and purest conceptions of
righteousness and love must have their foundation in the very nature
of real being. Man cannot conceive a nobler character than actually
exists or think ethical thoughts higher than any in his Maker. Our
highest faiths cannot be " too beautiful to be true " ; rather they must
be true, because they are so beautiful. The moral ideal must have
reality.

This is the simplest and most credible form of Ontology. We, in
Christian lands, naturally think of God, not as the primal Source of
Existence or as the Supreme Reason, but as the Supreme Goodness and
Love. In this ethical realm convictions rule, not inferences or syl-
logisms, and they have a certainty which no reasonings ever have. We
do not justify our moral judgments by any arguments; we are simply
so constituted that we must ascribe worth, ethical values and obliga-
tion to certain feelings, thoughts and relations and, furthermore, we
connect them intuitively with God as their source. This thought of
God as the moral Ideal appeals to the strong ethical feeling of our age.
Not as many thinkers accept Hegel's dictum, " The rational is the
real," as accept the ethical maxim, " The moral is the real." If it is
not so, if our purest and best ideals and hopes have no foundation in
reality, if the ultimate root of the universe is not true and good and
loving, then ethical life — distinct from mere prudence — is sapped at

^'^ Microcosmus, Vol. I, Bk. V, Chap. 5, end.

Appendix 435

the foundation. Plato and Aristotle realized this. The former said
that man is good by a certain inspiration of the gods. In the Republic
he asks: "Is it not the noble which subjects the beast to the man,
or rather to the god in man, and the ignoble that which subjects the
man to the beast ?"i6 Pascal says, "There is a logic of the heart of
which the intellect knows nothing." i'' And Tyndall with a touch of
wistful pathos, for he could not bring himself to trust his heart, wrote,
" Round about the sphere of the intellect, sweeps the grand horizon of
the emotions, from which arise our noblest impulses." This logic of
the heart may be stated in terms of what we may call spiritual induction,
a swift rising from many vivid particular experiences to a universal
conclusion, certified by its own self evidence. The Schoolmen called
this Via Eminentiae, and Plato summarized it in The Laws: There are
in us certain virtues, but God possesses all virtues. We cannot do
some things. He can do all things. In us there are both good and evil
impulses ; in God there is naught but Good, and that in perfection.^^
Leibnitz wrote briefly : " The perfections of God are those of the soul
raised to Infinity," and Secretan still more briefly, " Perfection is eter-
nal." Spinoza declared, " I regard reality and perfection as synony-
mous terms." ^^ John Stuart Mill expressed his faith that " even the
most sceptical of men generally had an inner altar to the Unseen Per-
fection while waiting for the true one to be revealed to them." 20

Thinkers of the most diverse types have ever felt the convictive force
of this certitude of duty and the beauty of holiness. Hooker in ma-
jestic words proclaimed its broad reality, that eternal law has its seat
in the bosom of God.^i Butler in the Introduction to his Analogy
remarked : " Our whole nature leads us to ascribe all moral perfection
to God, and to deny all imperfection in Him. And this will forever be
a practical proof of His moral character, to such as will consider what
a practical proof is ; because it is the voice of God speaking in us."
(But he ignores this ethical line of thought in the body of the work,
confining the ontological argument to a brief statement of God as Nec-
essary Existence.) Even Hume, truly a Saul among the prophets, once
admitted that nature has given us a strong passion for what is excellent,
and that the Deity possesses these attributes in a remarkable degree.
Recently Sir Oliver Lodge has written : " No one can be satisfied with
conceptions below the highest which to him are possible : I doubt if it is
given to man to think out a clear and consistent system higher and

16 Bk. 9.

!'■ Thoughts, IX:i9 and elsewhere.

18 Bk. 10.

19 Ethics, Pt. II. Def. 6.

20 Life of Francis P. Cohbe, Vol. II, p. 416.

21 Ecclesiastical Polity, End of Bk. I.

436 Basic Ideas in Religion

nobler than the real truth. Our highest thoughts are likely to be near-
est to reality ; they must be stages in the direction of truth, else they
could not have come to us and been recognized as highest. So, also,
with our longings and aspirations toward ultimate perfection, those
desires which we recognize as our noblest and best; surely they must
have some correspondence with the facts of existence, else they had
been unattainable by us." -- This thought is identical with Anselm's :
" If any mind could conceive anything better than Thou art, O God,
tlien the creature would ascend above Thee and become Thy judge,
which is utterly absurd."

Prophets and poets ever make their appeal direct to this witness of
the soul. They do not argue but proclaim in glowing words and with
fervent conviction, what God must be, and the hearts of men, wise and
simple, respond joyfully to the revelation, confirmed within by a voice
they do not question. For men cannot help believing that the highest
conceptions of Right and Good must have a foundation in the nature of
things, they cannot be mere notions in their own minds, they bear their
own convincing witness to their divine reality. Tennyson bade us :

"Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet —
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet . . .
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see :
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not He? " -^

This is the spirit of the child. In every great genius there is such
trust, which bids him have faith — faith that whatever good may be,
must be. It feels that in the nature of things its finite experiences can-
not exhaust moral qualities, that somewhere, somehow, they must exist
perfectly in infinite terms. Love must be eternal, truth must prevail,
power must be unbounded, right must rule, knowledge must be un-
limited, finite " place " be swallowed up in infinite " space," and time
pass into eternity. This is the logic of the heart.

" God is all wise, all powerful, all good !
All wise and, therefore, knovveth what is best;
All good and willeth, therefore, what is best ;
All powerful and can, therefore, what is best;
And if He can, why must."

The gentlest character in Greek tragedy, loving Antigone, makes her
appeal from man's inhumanity to heaven's law within the heart, to the

" Unwritten and enduring laws of God,
Which are not of today, nor yesterday,
But live from everlasting, and none breathes
Who knows them, whence begotten." 2*

-'^ Life and Matter, p. 82.
23 The Higher Pantheism.
2* Sophocles, Antigone.

Appendix 437

Iphigenia shrinking in horror from the cruel death on the altar at
Aulis holds fast her faith, " I do beheve the gods can do no wrong."
And Goethe, in his tale of her at Tauris, makes her justify that faith
to Thoas, the King, who had told her, " 'Tis not the voice of God, but
thine own heart that speaks," by the profound words, " 'Tis only in our
hearts that God does speak."

This was the experience of Frances Power Cobbe, who had through
doubt given up her early religious beliefs and lost faith in the Bible
which was once her constant guide. She describes the slow winning of
her way from Deism to Theism. Among other mile-posts in her dif-
ficult progress was the following incident : " After a time, occupied
in part with study and with efforts to be useful to our poor neighbors
and to my parents, my Deism was lifted to a higher plane by one of
those inflowings of truth which seem the simplest things in the world,
but are as rain on the dry ground in summer to the mind which re-
ceives them. One day while praying quietly, the thought came to me
with extraordinary lucidity: 'God's Goodness is what / 7nean by
Goodness! It is not a mere title, like the "Majesty" of a King. He
has really that character which we call "Good." He is just, as I un-
derstand Justice, only more perfectly just. He is Good as I understand
Goodness, only more perfectly good. He is not good in time and tre-
mendous in eternity; not good to some of His creatures and cruel to
others, but wholly, eternally, universally good. If I could know and
understand all His acts from eternity, there would not be one which
would not deepen my reverence and call forth my adoring praise.' To
some readers this discovery may seem a mere platitude and truism : the
assertion of a thing which they have never failed to understand. To
me it was a real revelation which transformed my religion from one
of reverence only into one of vivid love for that Infinite Goodness
which I then beheld unclouded." ^s This faith was fixed and certain,
and never lost. In all such cases the appeal is made to the faith of
the heart as sufficient in itself. As Goethe puts it:

" There is a universe within,
The world we call the soul, the mind :
And in this world what best we find
We stammer forth, and think no sin
To call it God, and our God, and
Give heaven and earth into His hand,
And fear His power, and search His plan
Darkly, and love Him, when we can." ^s

This direct appeal to the heart's instinctive faith in God's Perfection,
interpreted in terms of the conscience, is more general today than

25 Life of Frances P. Cobbe, Vol. I, pp. 84, 5.

26 Gott, Gemiith und Welt, Blackie's translation.

43^ Basic Ideas in Religion

formerly, when some forms of theology made, not love and fatherhood,
but power and sovereignty the determinative elements in the Divine
Nature. The nobihty of the moral ideal of many poets and ethical
writers outside the Christian church makes this line of thought vitally
important to the Christian preacher. It was the secret of Phillips
Brooks' success, his power of impressing vast audiences. He pro-
claimed what his own high spirit beheld and believed in the noble con-
viction that his fellows were capable of the same visions of truth, and
his enthusiastic faith in his message and in the capacity of his hearers
to receive it, did open their eyes to see what he saw, making them feel
he was only describing thoughts and feelings in their own souls, to
which they could give no utterance. Leaving to the sceptics and the
cynics, always plentiful enough, the dreary work of quibbling and doubt-
ing, he touched with magnificent power the chords of hope and faith
which He latent in every human heart, and awoke them to music.

The Ritschlian theology of today, which denies the intellectual argu-
ments and every other form of ontology, rests its whole case on our
ethical faith in God. In this it follows Kant, who, outgrowing the
scepticism of the Pure Reason, found rest and certitude in a teleology
and ethical faith, conceived ontologically as a divine purpose for good,
as the basal reality, hidden from the intellect but perceptible to the
heart. In his last critique, that of Judgment, he defines faith as the
moral attitude of the Reason toward beliefs which lie beyond the
reach of intellectual proofs. Our consciousness must assume as true
and real all the conditions presupposed in the voice of duty and needed
for our ethical development. Moral teleology is the certainty which
the Practical Reason has of a moral purpose or design in the Universe,
the belief that it was made for moral beings by a Moral Being. When
a man looks within himself and is conscious at once of his own freedom
and of the law of duty as universal, he feels that this inner world is the
real world, higher than the physical, whose ground of existence is
secondary to mind and conscience. We feel in our hearts that a good-
zdll is the one " good thing " in the world ; it is that alone which gives
moral, absolute worth to a man, and hence the only conceivable aim
of creation is to produce such good-wills, to develop and perfect moral
agents of the highest character. It is a fundamental thought, to which
even the commonest human mind must give immediate assent, that
the final purpose of the Universe, suggested a priori by the Practical
Reason, can be no other than man, i.e., a rational being, existing under
moral laws. For every one feels that, if the world consisted only of
lifeless things, or even of living but not rational beings, its existence
would have no worth, because in it there would be no beings who have
the least idea of what worth or character is. Consequently we must
assume that there is a moral World Cause in order to set before our-

Appendix 439

selves a final purpose consistent with the moral law. For man alone
gives moral worth to the world and we cannot conceive a cause ade-
quate to produce the world which would act without a moral motive.
This moral teleology completes the full concept of the Divine.-''^

This line of thought or feeling, Kant warns us, is not a demonstra-
tion of God. It is valid only for the man whose conscience is awake,
and who feels the supreme and eternal value of ethical life. For such
a man it is sufficient.

NOTE P

ETHICS OF PANTHEISM

Spinoza handles his ethical principles in the same mathematical way
along the lines of rigid determinism as he does his philosophical prin-
ciples. His system has many points of affinity with Roman Stoicism,
which also laid great stress on ethics. Spinoza's God has close analogy
with the aniina muiidi of the Stoics. But he was not the slave of his
own intellectual system, but followed at times mystical lines of thought
and faith logically inconsistent with his theory, even implying intuition
as a power of the understanding and a certain vague immortality
through the intellectual love of God. He shows deep spiritual insight
and sincere reverence for holy things so that his Ethics and Treatise
are written on a high plane. Discovered by Herder, Lessing, and
Goethe, his influence became a potent factor at the end of the eighteenth
century in the awakening of German literature and theology to more
spiritual conceptions of life and religion. The best representatives of
this side of his teaching, which we may call " ethical agnosticism," are
Fichte, Schelling, Carljde, and Matthew Arnold. i

Thus Fichte holds that the living and active moral order is itself
God. But we must not assume any cause for this order, for if we
assign it to a particular Being, he must be distinguished from ourselves
and the world, and thus personality would be attributed to him. In
this moral order every rational being has a determined place and his
fate is a result of the general world order. These statements caused
the charge of atheism to be brought against Fichte, which he indig-
nantly denied. He later modified his expressions, emphasizing a divine
" will " as back of the world order, but not attributing personality to
it in our sense.

-'' See Bernard's translation §§ 83-8
1 See Chap. XX.

440 Basic Ideas in Religion

NOTE Q

THE PANTHEISTIC DENIAL OF PERSONAL
IMMORTALITY

The following illustrations will make clear how pantheism denies per-
sonal immortality :

A Braliman philosopher, Yainavalkya, being about to withdraw into
the forest to meditate and attain immortality, takes farewell of his wife,
who asks him to tell her what he knows of immortality. He replies :
" Thou art truly dear to me and I will answer thee. It is with us,
when we enter into the Divine Spirit, as if a lump of salt was thrown
into the Sea. It becomes dissolved into the water from which it was
produced and cannot be taken out again. But wherever you take the
water and taste it, it is salt. As the water becomes salt and the salt
becomes water again, thus has the Divine Spirit appeared from the
elements and disappeared again in them. When we pass away, my
wife, there is no longer any name." She replies, " My lord, here thou
hast bewildered me, saying that at death, there is no longer any name
(any distinction of individual being)." Her husband answered: "My
wife, what I say is not bewildering but the highest knowledge. For if
there are two beings, then the one sees and knows the other. But if
the one Divine self be the Whole of all things, whom can he perceive
or see or know as distinct from himself? How should he know himself
as distinct from himself? Thus, thou hast been taught, this is im-
mortality."

Jalalu'd-Din Rumi, the Persian, in his great work, The Masnavi,
represents the human soul as seeking admission into the sanctuary of
Divinity, thus : " One knocked at the door of Divinity, and a voice
from within inquired, 'Who is there?' Then he answered, 'It is I.'
And the voice from within replied, * This house will not hold thee and
me.' So the door remained shut. Then he sped away into the wilder-
ness, and fasted and prayed in solitude. Then, after a year, he re-
turned and knocked at the door of Divinity, and the voice again
demanded, 'Who is there?' and the traveler replied, 'It is thou.' Then
the door of Divinity opened wide and the traveler entered in."

In the first decade of the last century the same ideas found pathetic
expression in the correspondence between Schleiermacher and his
friend Frau von Willich, who had just lost her husband, Ehrenfried, a
young divine to whom Schleiermacher was much attached. Frau von
Willich writes : " I implore you, by all that is dear and sacred to you,
give me, if you can, the certain assurance of finding and knowing him
again. Tell me your inmost faith in this, dear Schleier. Oh ! if it
fails me, I am undone. . . . Speak to my poor heart. ... If I think that

Appendix 441

his soul is resolved back, quite melted away in the great All — that the
old will never come to recognition again — that it is quite gone by —
Oh ! this, I can not bear." He replies : " How can I dissipate your
doubt, dear Jette ? It is only the images of fancy in the hour of travail
that you want me to confirm. Dear Jette, what can I say to you? . . .
If he is now living in God, and you love him eternally in God, as you
knew and loved God in him, can you think of anything more glorious
and beautiful?" "Ah! then," she cries, "the apparition has vanished
forever, that dear personal life which is all that I knew — he is
Ehrenfried no longer. He is gone to God, not to be kept safe, but to
be eternally lost in Him." Schleiermacher expostulates with her for
such a complaint : " Nothing is more glorious than to live in God and
be loved in Him. In comparison with this everything that belongs only
to the personal life and arises thence is nothing." She still argued:
"When I loved God and my Ehrenfried, there were two objects of my
love. Now when he is gone, and is living eternally in God, are there
still two objects of my love or only one? If I am to have but one
object of affection now, my husband being merged in the Divine, how
is it that I shall not vanish too, but still remain ? "i

NOTE R
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

The new but wide-spread cult of Christian Science, is a conspicuous
example of ignorant and unbalanced faith in the Divine Immanence.
As set forth in Mrs. Eddy's Science and Health, zvith Key to the
Scriptures, it is a crude, unintelligent form of idealistic pantheism.
God is the one existence. Matter has no reality: man is the finite form
of the Infinite, not really distinct from it, for " there can be but one
soul." The physical world is not the expression of divine ideas (as in
all sane forms of idealism), but somehow evil in itself, "perpetual
misrule under the form of natural law." The system — if it deserves
such a name — is, therefore, a mongrel form of Manichaean Gnosticism,
" mortal mind " playing the part of the Demiurge. True mind is the
transcendent principle of all good — God Himself; mortal mind is a
hostile power, the source of all evil and misery, beginning with the
harmful lie, universally believed, of the reality of matter. No ex-
planation is offered of the nature of mortal mind itself. It cannot be
the product of an " evil spirit," for there are no spirits save God's ; it
cannot be the creation of the human mind, for that is a part of the
Divine Mind. The system is also gnostic in making salvation depend
on knowledge — deliverance from our false belief in matter and pain

1 Aus Schleiermacher' s Leben. In Brie fen. Vol. II, pp. 82 ff.

442 Basic Ideas in Religion

and disease. Sin is ignorance, a form of insanity, not the expression
of a will alienated from righteousness, for there is no real freedom in
the finite creature. More stress is laid on physical than on moral good,
and the latter is treated not as an end but as a means to the avoidance
of pain and death, as in the similar crazes of mind and faith curing.
The emphasis on bodily health appears in the three elements of the
system: (i) The restoration of Christian healings; (2) The establish-
ment of Christianity on a scientific and demonstrable basis (i.e., by
means of miracles of healing the body) ; and (3) The metaphysical
interpretation of Christ's teaching.

The very remarkable motto of the book suggests an extreme sub-
jective idealism (solus ipse ego). But the author shows no acquaint-
ance with the metaphysical terms she uses :

"I, I, I, I itself, I,
The inside and the outside, the what and the why,
The when and the where, the low and the high,

All r, I, I, I itself, I."

Mrs. Eddy takes the words seriously, but they are really part of a
burlesque of Fichte's Idealism which may be found in Coleridge's
Biographia Literaria.'^ She appeals to Bishop Berkeley to support her
denial of matter, but he considers the world the expression of divine
ideas, beautiful and good, whereas she thinks that " to regard God as
the creator of matter is not only to make him responsible for all dis-
asters physical and moral, but also to make him guilty of maintaining
perpetual misrule in the name and under the form of natural law."
The attempt to carry out this crude idealism lands her in absurdities
and contradictions.

Eddyism differs from the simple faith or mind cures in having been
thoroughly organized under a leader with absolute power, and being
based on a book of metaphysics which is placed on a plane with the
Bible. Indeed according to George Tompkins, C.S., one of the author-
ized Scientist lecturers, the New Testament foretold its later rival.
" We consciously declare that Science and Health, zvith Key to the
Scriptures, was foretold, as well as its author, Mary Baker Eddy, in
Revelation X. She is the ' mighty angel,' or God's highest thought to
this age (verse i), giving us the spiritual interpretation of the Bible
in the 'little book open' (verse 2). Thus we prove that Christian
Science is the second coming of Christ — Truth — Spirit." The book
is supposed to be directly inspired. In January, 1901, Mrs. Eddy said,
" I should blush to write of Science and Health, zvith Key to the
Scriptures, as I have, were it of human origin, and I, apart from God,
its author ; but as I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of Heaven

Harper's Edition, p. 260, note.

Appendix 443

in divine metaphysics, I cannot be supermodest of the Christian Science
text-book." The best answer to her claim of inspiration — apart from
the absurdity of the book itself — is her selling at an exorbitant price
what she says are not her words but God's, revealed for the healing of
the nations.

Into the question of whether Mrs. Eddy really discovered Christian
Science or appropriated it from the notes of Phineas Quimby, a faith
healer who had himself cured her, we have not space to enter.

We should recognize the good elements in Eddyism, its reaction
against materialism, its affirmation of the nearness of God to the spirit
of man, its emphasis on love and purity (which is its only point of
contact with Christianity). But we must expose its many utterly anti-
Christian elements and show that its cures, in many cases real, have
nothing to do with its muddled metaphysics. We should not deny
that many recoveries from sickness and chronic troubles have occurred
under this as under other forms of " faith curing " or mental sugges-
tion through all history, especially when a number of believers act upon
each other, but we should show the absence of any proof whatever that
such cures are connected in any way with Mrs. Eddy's metaphysics.
There is no intelligible basis for the incoherent utterances of the " new
scriptures " and the craze itself will die out, but in the meanwhile it
has such wide influence that the Christian thinker must study it.

NOTE S

THE A PRIORI ARGUMENT FOR MIRACLES

The reason why the discussion of miracles is reserved for a note
rather than given in the text, is because miracles rightly understood are
a part of the historic revelation of God to man, and hence belong more
to works on Christian apologetics than to those on philosophic theism.
They are God's immediate action on the world, revealing His love to
men, and declaring His power in control of the world. However, an
argument for the possibility of miracles can be made from the a priori
standpoint, which will enable us to judge adequately concerning the
miracles recorded in the Bible.

First let us notice that there are three elements indicated by the
New Testament words for miracle, (i) "Wonder," Latin miraculum,
a portent, a prodigy, expressing the amazement the miracle arouses in
the beholder. (2) "Powers" (always plural), which carries the
thought a step further back to the agencies, exceeding Nature's forces,
which alone could work the miracle. But these powers need not be
divine, for no moral element is implied by the use of this word. (3)
" Sign," or symbol, of some spiritual truth or reality. This is St.

444 Basic Ideas in Religion

John's word, and by it he connects the miracle at once with God and
His revelation. Hence we pass beyond " wonders " and " powers " to
the idea of moral purpose. It rules out all unworthy miracles, such as
the ecclesiastical, and warns us that there must be a correspondence
between the sign and God's revelation. The miracle must have an
adequate aim as well as adequate power.

Miracles, as " signs," are rational and credible to all who have
faith in a personal God, but the popular idea that they prove per se a
revelation from God is contrary to the Bible teaching. The Mosaic
law bade the people not to follow false prophets, even if they did work
" miracles," ^ and Isaiah warned, " And when they shall say unto you.
Seek unto them that have familiar spirits ... if they speak not ac-
cording to the law and to the testimony, it is because there is no light
in them." 2 Christ Himself rebuked the Jews' demand for signs and
wonders in order to force faith, for such prodigies would have no value
for the soul. He represents Dives in the parable pleading for his
brothers, " I pray thee, therefore, that thou wouldst send Lazarus to
my father's house; for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto
them, lest they also come into this place of torment." And Abraham
replies, " They have Moses and the prophets ; let them hear them."
Dives pleads again, " Nay, Father Abraham, but if one go to them
from the dead, they will repent." To which is given the final reply,
" If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be per-
suaded if one rose from the dead."

The " signs " are not so much proofs as parts of the Revelation
itself, setting forth some spiritual truth, some aspect of the divine glory.
A miracle alone can never create faith in God, for its proper definition
affirms previous faith in God's existence and power. Miracles confirm
faith. Our attitude toward the revelation of God in Christ determines
the possibility of our belief in them. Christ worked no miracles, where
there was no sympathy with His message or Himself.^ All discussion
is futile apart from the central miracle of history, the Resurrection of
Jesus declaring Him to be " the Son of God with power," in which all
other miracles find their justification as part of the historical revelation
of God, which culminated in the Incarnation.

Hence, a miracle is a phenomenon, unexampled in the course of nature
and beyond the operation of its forces, which attests its divine source by
the character and aim of its worker, and by his teaching which our
spirits recognize as divine. Miracles are credible only on the pre-
supposition of a personal God, free to act in the world, and are

1 Deut. 13.

2 Isa. 8 : ig, 20.

3 Matt. 13:58; Cf. 12:39.

Appendix 445

probable only to those who believe also in His love as ready to respond
to the human need of a revelation.

The Scientific Denial of Miracles

Hume's argument against the possibility of miracles is that a miracle
is a violation of the laws of nature because contrary to our uniform
experience. No testimony can establish it, because human testimony
is fallible and nature's order is not. His definition, " A miracle may be
accurately described as a transgression of a law of nature by a par-
ticular volition of the deity or by the interposition of some higher
agency," emphasizes solely the marvel element. Ignoring his own
earlier philosophy of a haphazard world without any definite law of
cause and efl!'ect, Hume now assumes a universe so rigid in its order
that any variation is incredible in itself. No human testimony avails
to prove a miracle against the " unalterable experience of the race,"
for men may lie and deceive or be deceived, but nature's order never
varies.

Mill and Huxley deny Hume's premises of the definite and unalterable
order of Nature's phenomena, the idea that what has been, will be, and
there is no new thing under the sun. In these days, we are all aware
that entirely new and strange phenomena do appear in our laboratories.
" Nature " is only an expression for the sum total of known phenomena.
Its known laws, however uniform, cannot exhaust its possibilities. If
a miracle really happens, it takes its place, as a marvel, among the
phenomena which await scientific explanation. Huxley declares : " I
am unaware of any impossibility except a contradiction in terms, a
round square, a present past. If a dead man should come to life, it
would not prove that Nature had been violated, but only that those laws,
even when built on universal experience, represent only incomplete
knowledge of Nature's mystery." But any amount of evidence could
only prove that the strange event actually occurred, not that it was an
act of God, for no phenomenon can reveal a power not itself phenomenal.

Huxley really agrees with Hume, and his concessions have been
overestimated, even by capable scholars. His position appears in his
analogy between the Virgin Birth of Christ and the parthenogenesis in
certain forms of life, which some thoughtless Christian thinkers also
hold. But parthenogenesis occurs constantly in Nature — a miracle
must be unique. If the physical order be the all, then indeed there
can be no violation or modifying of that order, for there would be no
real and free causation in the universe, either in God or man.

The scientific denial of miracles contends that a miracle is either a
delusion of the mind or illusion of the senses, for if it is a phenomenon
in Nature, it is due to natural causes which as yet our science cannot

44^ Basic Ideas in Religion

define. Mill, however, admits that the action of God in a miracle would
not be a violation of the uniformity of nature, for His will would be a
new cause or " condition," though this is contrary to his own philosophy
which denies any causative power to will. Hence his ultimate con-
clusion is the same as Hume's.

This theory ignores the personal human factors, and isolates the
miracle from its own environment, the progressive historical revelation
of God, and the spiritual and ethical truths which it confirms and which
alone make it credible to us as worthy of divine agency. There is not
the slightest attempt on the part of the critics of this school even to
consider the Christian point of view. The miracles of the Lord, pro-
found and credible in their historical setting, are classed with the
crudest prodigies of the heathen world. Hume argues that if we accept
Christ's miracles, we must also accept Mahomet's miracles and the
Chinese marvels ! Matthew Arnold thinks that a good specimen of a
real miracle would be to turn a pen into a penwiper. Huxley thinks
that we have no right to believe the New Testament miracles and
reject the so-called ecclesiastical miracles. J. H. Newman did grievous
harm to the cause of reasonable faith by his wholesale acceptance and
defense of the numberless marvels of the early and mediaeval church,
however trivial and grotesque.

Theories of Miracles Which Admit of Their Reality

These theories are all consistent with faith, but not equally biblical
or philosophic.

/. The Deistic Viezv. The Deistic conception, as we have seen,
starts from the supposition of God as apart from the world. God
created the world and set its forces in operation according to certain
laws and then withdrew, leaving the world to go on working by itself.
There are two variations of this view : (i) Nature is a vast world ma-
chine working under its own laws, with occasional interference from
without. This was the one definition of miracles in the Deistie period.
This crude idea of a miracle as a violation of the laws of Nature by its
Maker, now held by few Christian thinkers, underlies Hume's argu-
ment and the scientific denial. It corresponds to the Cartesian theory
of God and the world as distinct and apart, but the Creator intervenes
on due occasions to harmonize the divine order and the world proc-
ess, or our thought life and bodily action. Some popular preachers
still expound this view. (2) A later view, on the lines of the pre-
established harmony between mind and body advocated by Leibnitz,
explains miracles as sudden changes in the order of nature, prear-
ranged to happen in coincidence with great crises in the moral history
of humanity, or new methods of working appear at certain prearranged
times. The best illustration is Babbage's proposed mathematical ma-

Appendix 447

chine, intended to show how strange combinations of numbers would
appear of themselves at certain times. But the mere occurrence of a
wonder is not sufficient for a true miracle. There must be a corre-
spondence between the wonder and the spiritual truth it is intended to
emphasize. Hence the world's great clock is arranged to strike at the
hour of destiny in historical crises.

Both these views deny the ever-present and immediate action of
Deity.

//. The Ideal Human View. This theory attracts by its simpHcity
and subtle flattery. Man is meant to be absolute lord of Nature.
Even now, he molds it to his will, his power over it growing with his
scientific knowledge. Christ wrought miracles as the perfect Son of
Man, exercising powers belonging to the ideal humanity. His miracles
differ from ours only in degree. Why, then, should the race not go on
mastering knowledge until man attains his ideal perfection and reaches
the power of Christ? The difference between Christ and man, as to
their power over nature, is like that between a man and a child, or
between perfect and partial knowledge. Christ was the Ideal Man and
His power is that of Ideal Humanity at its highest, exercised as God
meant it to be exercised. This was the theory of Schleiermacher, and
is used by Ebrard in his theory of the Kenosis.

As stated by its advocates, this view at first sight seems simple and
plausible. To Him, the Perfect Man, there is no such thing as the
supernatural. He is simply a perfect man, with perfect human knowl-
edge of the laws of His Father's universe — whether you call it natural
or supernatural — and by this knowledge doing things as a matter of
course that imperfect men cannot do, simply because they have not this
perfect human knowledge; just as any civilized man has more control
over nature than a savage has, because his knowledge, although the
same in kind generically, is widely different in degree.

The premise of this theory is true. Man is meant to be lord over
nature, and he does work " miracles " in the sense that he originates
new phenomena by his free-will force. But we cannot admit that man
can, in his own power, ever work such signs as Christ did, or in the
same way.

But the New Testament teaching does not permit this interpretation.
Christ in the flesh was like unto us in all things. He did " the works
which His Father gave him to do," not by any power inherent in per-
fect humanity, but solely in and through the Spirit. He said, " If I by
the Spirit of God cast out demons, then is the kingdom of God come
upon you." * St. Peter speaks of Him to the crowd at Pentecost as a
" man approved of God unto you by mighty works and wonders and

*Matt. 12:28.

44^ Basic Ideas in Religion

signs which God did by Him in the midst of you." ^ The New Testa-
ment distinctly represents that Christ did not raise Himself from the
dead, but that God raised Him.

The emphasis in the Gospels falls rather on His " weakness " as man
than on His " glory " which comes with the Ascension, when He says
to His disciples, " All authority hath been given unto Me in heaven and
on earth." ^ Only at the Ascension did He as man enter on perfect
manhood, " clothed with power " as God intended man to be in final
glorified state. It is the Fourth Gospel, which more than the others,
emphasizes the divinity of Christ, which yet represents the miracles as
" works " done by the Father. " Believest thou not that I am in the
Father and the Father in me? the words that I say unto you I speak
not from Myself: but the Father abiding in Me doeth His works." ^
Therefore, according to the New Testament His ideal manhood con-
sisted not in perfect knowledge and control of nature, but in His will-
ing obedience to the Holy Spirit and His unbroken communion
with His Father. Science is morally indifferent. Given the knowl-
edge, the sinner and atheist can work its marvels as readily as the
saint. Clifford, the sceptic, investigates molecular physics as accurately
as Clerk Maxwell, the Christian. The scoffing, even the licentious phy-
sician, can discover bacteria and the antitoxins as well as devout
Pasteur, the theist. It is this moral indifference inherent in all purely
intellectual activity, which forbids our classing our works of healing
with Christ's, as has been done under the supposed sanction of the
text, " Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me, the
works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall
he do ; because I go unto my Father." ^ These " works " are not
physical marvels, but miracles in the realm of grace, wrought in faith
and love through the power of the Holy Spirit outpoured by the risen
Lord on His people — the preaching of the Gospel and the gathering in
of thousands into the Christian Church, and the spread of Christianity
through the world, forgiving sins and recreating souls. It is our un-
conscious, materialistic point of view which blinds us to the fact, which
great Christian thinkers felt and taught, that the inner miracles are
more diflScult and wonderful than the outwardly visible. Thomas
Aquinas said : " The three great miracles are the creation of the world,
and of souls, and the forgiveness of sinners." Hooker expresses his
belief that " to convert an unholy man to holiness is as great a miracle
as to create a world."
This view quietly ignores the many miracles of Christ which must

8 John 14:12.
7 John 14:10, II.
«Matt. 28:18.
• Acts 2 :22.

Appendix 449

surpass the powers of man, even after the Resurrection, such as raising
the dead, multiplying the loaves and fishes, etc. The difference is obvi-
ous. We rule nature from without by obeying her. All that we can
do is to arrange unusual combinations of matter, and her forces then
act according to their laws, but God's action is from the center, imma-
nent and creative, and nature obeys His will as our bodies do our wills.

///. The Theistic View. As we have seen in our study of Divine
Immanence, nature is the phenomenal manifestation of divine thought.
A miracle is not a violation of its order, but a special act of the ever-
present and immanent divine Will on which that order depends. Laws
of nature are simply the habitual modes of God's action, unvarying
because of His own wisdom and, also, because only through a fixed
world-order could the mind of man be trained and science be possible.

Christian Theism regards Nature as the embodiment of divine thought
and dependent for its being and order on the ever-present and acting
will of God. Nature has a God-given law of development. We
do not accept the extreme view of Divine Immanence, that God per-
forms every act of nature by a voluntary act. He has imparted energy
to nature, which operates according to laws decreed by Him. But both
philosophy and faith refuse to permit us to think that this relative
independence can be any barrier to God's free action. The uniformity
of nature is the uniformity of God. The laws of nature are simply
God's common, habitual ways of acting. Miracles, on this view, are
credible and most rational. They are simply unusual expressions of
divine authority, voluntary departures for good reasons from God's
regular method of action in the world. No laws are " broken," for the
laws of Nature have no existence apart from God's will and cannot bind
the action of His will.

God, if the master, not the creature, of His own world, must be free
to change His method of working and cause new things to appear
wheresoever He will for sufficient reasons. The heart of man dis-
cerns many such reasons, (i) The mighty works of Christ reveal
the Father, " Who declares His almighty power chiefly in showing
mercy and pity." The common doubt of miracles is due to the entire
ignoring of this reason of the heart, which to Christian faith justifies
the miracles. The signs and symbols of a spiritual order are isolated
from their proper environment, first, the past, the whole long history
preparing for the coming of the Lord of History, and second, the pres-
ent environment, the " psychological climate " of all who feel their need
of God for light and help, and who rejoice to believe that the miracles
of Christ do reveal the Father. Scientific "miracles" are equally in-
credible to the ignorant, who know nothing of the presuppositions of sci-
ence. (2) The reality of a moral order in God and man is another rea-
son for miracles. A world of things ruled by purely physical laws would

450 Basic Ideas in Religion

and must be absolutely unvarying. But once admit free wills, and de-
partures by men from the normal order become possible. If the wills
are bad, they may necessitate unusual action on the part of God Him-
self to correct disorder, which He did not will. But in these special
cases, God does not act one whit more directly than ordinarily, though
He acts in one sense more freely, being unconditioned by what we call
the ordinary laws of Nature, and merely changing His method of
action. The ideal harmony between God and man has been broken and
man's normal relation to nature disturbed through sin. Miracles, there-
fore, are not " a mending of God's own handiwork," but a revelation of
the true order of the universe needed by man who has marred the
world by sin and separated himself from God. It is not God's work
that needs mending, but the world man has made "subject to vanity."
Miracles are not interruptions of the ideal order, but revelations of the
true law — that which ought to be. (3) In the third place, miracles are
sorely needed also to break the tyranny of our senses. The very
uniformity which reveals God's presence and power to the eye of faith,
hides Him from the natural man who lives solely in the sphere of
sense and is ever tempted to forget the invisible Creator in the use and
study of the creation. Spiritual blindness, the dulling of the inner eye
to the things above and within us, is our besetting sin. We study the
wondrous works of nature but see or feel no sign of her Maker. We
do not worship the material creation, as men of old did, but we do
make a very fetish out of nature's order. Men of science, even more
than other men, since God is not so often in their conscious thought,
need some " sign " that God is Lord in His own world and Nature her-
self but His visible garment.

We repeat here the principle that God's freedom and man's stand or
fall together. To deny God's power to act on nature is to deny man's
power to act at all, and lands us in fatalism. But God's will is the one
universal force in the world, the source and origin of all forces. If
God is imprisoned in nature, who imprisoned Him? The only barrier
to God's action is something incredible to the reason, e.g., a round
square, a four-sided triangle. Man as a free agent, acting on the stream
of phenomena, always in accordance with its laws, may be said to
belong to the " supernatural " order, for the natura, the endless process
of birth and change and death either includes him in its resistless cur-
rent or else he stands in his degree above it, by God's own appointment.

There are some Christian believers who think it unnecessary to
insist on miracles, but unless we do believe that the divine rule em-
braces the world of nature as well as of spirit, the scientific Zeitgeist
will deaden faith. If Christ be the Son of God, and God be really the
Maker of the world, we may well ask why did not God give a sign in
Christ to connect the visible world with the invisible?

Appendix 451

Rothe says : " The man who thinks that a miracle is impossible a
priori does not really believe in a free personal God." " The miracle
is not a breaking through of the laws of nature on the part of God, but
an activity on the part of God without the interposition of these laws of
nature." ^ Christian faith has a right to expect that God will manifest
Himself in deed as well as in word. But it will also feel that miracles
need not be many and will be on worthy occasions only, for the divine
world-order is necessary to human reason and to our control of nature.

Upon the Resurrection of Christ rests our whole faith in miracles.
This is the central moment, when the eternal world touched the tem-
poral, and the ever-acting arm of the Lord was uncovered to human
view. The one sign of the Resurrection of the Lord, with all that went
before and followed after, is sufficient. Faith asks no further wonders
in the world of matter, for it rejoices to see and know His mighty
works in the world of spirit. " Blessed are they that have not seen and
yet have believed."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural; Westcott, The Gospel of
Life, Chap. VII ; Fraser, Philosophy of Theism, Vol. II ; Bruce, The
Miraculous Element in the Gospels; Mozley, Bampton Lectures on
Miracles; S. Cox, Miracles, An Argument and a Challenge.

NOTE T

SPENCER ON LIFE

Under the title of " The Dynamic Element in Life," Spencer added a
chapter to the 1898 Edition of his Principles of Biology in which he
speaks as follows : " Evidently, then, the preceding chapters recognize
only the form of our conception of life and ignore the body of it.
Partly sufficing as does the definition reached to express the one, it
fails entirely to express the other. Life displays itself in ways which
conform to the definition ; but it also displays itself in many other ways.
. . . When it is said that life is 'the definite correspondence of hetero-
geneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence
with coexistences and sequences/ there arises the question — Changes
of what? Within the body there go on many changes, mechanical,
chemical, thermal, no one of which is the kind of change in question;
and if we combine in thought so far as we can these kinds of changes,
in such wise that each maintains its character as mechanical, chemical,
or thermal, we cannot get out of them the idea of Life. Still more

» Still Hours, p. 324-

452 Basic Ideas in Religion

clearly do we see this insufficiency when we take the more abstract
definition — 'the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external
relations.' Relation between what things? is the question then to be
asked. A relation of which the terms are unspecified does not connote
a thought but merely the blank form of a thought. Its value is com-
parable to that of a check on which no amount is written. . . , Thus a
critical testing of the definition brings us to the conclusion that that
which gives the substance to our idea of Life is a certain unspecified
principle of activity. The dynamic element in life is its essential ele-
ment. Under what form are we to conceive this dynamic element? Is
this principle of activity inherent in organic matter, or is it something
superadded?" His answer to this question determines nothing. He
holds the required principle of activity can be represented neither as an
independent vital principle imported into the unit of protoplasm from
without, nor as a principle inherent in living matter, emerging from
the cooperation of the components. His conclusions are wholly agnos-
tic. " Our explanations finally bring us face to face with the inex-
plicable. The Ultimate Reality behind this manifestation . . , tran-
scends conception." " Life as a principle of activity is unknown and
unknowable." Despite his perplexity his retraction of the older view
brings him into relation with the Neo-Vitalists. (Sec. 36, b, c, e, f.)

/ NOTE U

KINDS OF IDENTITY

There are three kinds of identity.

1. Inorganic, material sameness. Two ideas are included in this kind
of identity, (a) the permanence of the matter composing a given object,
and (b) the permanence of the idea embodied in a certain thing, apart
from any distinct thought of the matter composing it; e.g., a river
whose water changes.

2. Vital or organic sameness, in plant or animal. This identity or
individuality consists in derivation from a single ovum, and in the per-
manence of the life-force, independent of its matter which is constantly
changing. It is not in the substance that the identity is manifested, but
in the " form." The elements change incessantly in their particles
which circulate in and pass out of the body. Only the form or formative
i^vxv is persistent, and alone maintains the living plant or animal. The
word " form " is used in Elizabethan English for that which the thing
really is, e.g., " Reason is the form of man, and he that lacks this may
well be like a man, but no man is." (Woodhouse, 1605.)

3. Personal identity, the consciousness of the self as personal being,
distinct from all its experiences, inner and outer, and the same in the
present as in the past.

Appendix 453

NOTE V

EMPIRICAL VIEWS OF THE SELF
The Self was denied from the beginning by the Empirical school.
Locke's suggestive questioning as to what forms personal identity was
logically developed by Hume.i All we know or can know are the con-
tinuous states of consciousness which pass through the mind, over
which we have no control and whose origin is hidden from us, since we
know only " ideas." He pictures the mind as a kind of theater, but
for whom is the show? What we call mind is nothing but a bundle
of different perceptions united together in certain relations and sup-
posed falsely to be endowed with a certain simplicity and identity.
This ignores half of the affirmation of consciousness at each moment.
We may not be able to know the self by itself, but it is given with
absolute certainty in even the briefest state of consciousness as the
subject which is conscious of the thought or the feeling. Feelings,
sensations, thoughts, are utterly empty concepts, unless I can call them
mine. In the midst of all those " passing and re-passing and gliding
perceptions," I, the unit being, recollect, judge, and decide. Nay, my
very consciousness of the passing, and the successive character of these
perceptions is due, I cannot help thinking, to the existence of my own
permanent self.

Spencer considers the self impossible because unthinkable. Belief
in the reality of self is, indeed, a belief which no hypothesis enables us
to escape. What shall we say of these successive impressions and ideas
which constitute consciousness? Shall we say that they are the affec-
tion of something called mind, which as being the subject of them, is
the real egof If we say this we manifestly imply that the ego is an
entity. " Considered as an internal perception, the illusion results from
supposing that at each moment the ego, present as such in conscious-
ness, ... is something more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas
which then exists. . . . Either the ego, which is supposed to determine
cr will the action, is present in consciousness or it is not. If it is not
present in consciousness, it is something of which we are unconscious, —
something, therefore, of whose existence we neither have nor can have
any evidence. If it is present in consciousness, then, as it is ever
present, it can be at each moment nothing else than the total conscious-
ness, simple and compound, passing at that moment." • He considers
the self solely as dependent on the environment, a continuous adjust-
ment of a set of inner relations to a set of external relations. He

1 Locke, Human Understanding, Bk. 11, Ch. 27. Hume, Human Na-
ture, Bk. I, Pt. 4, § 6.

2 Principles of Psychology, §219.

454 Basic Ideas in Religion

thinks that free will, did it exist, would be entirely at variance with that
beneficent necessity displayed in the progressive evolution of the cor-
respondence between the organism and its environment. Hence we
shall cease to think, and have the blessedness of automatic machines,
adjusting themselves by instinct to their environment! But if nature
left to herself does her work so well without the help of useless mind,
whence came the strange delusion, which we all have, that we are free
agents and can form our lives and modify even nature's order?

NOTE W
J. S. MILL ON THE MEMORY

" This succession of feelings, which I call my memory of the past,
is that by which I distinguish my Self. Myself is the person who had
that series of feelings, and I know nothing of myself, by direct knowl-
edge, except that I had them. But there is a bond of some sort among
all parts of the series, which makes me say that they were feelings of
a person who was the same person throughout . . . and a different
person from those who had any of the parallel successions of feelings ;
and this bond, to me, constitutes my Ego." And at a later time : " The
fact of recognizing a sensation, . . . remembering that it has been felt
before, is the simplest and most elementary fact of memory: and the
inexplicable tie . . . which connects the present consciousness with the
past one of which it reminds me, is as near as I think we can get to a
positive conception of Self. That there is something real in this tie,
real as the sensations themselves, and not a mere product of the laws
of thought without any fact corresponding to it, I hold to be in-
dubitable. . . . This original element, ... to which we cannot give any
name but its own peculiar one, without implying some false or un-
grounded theory, is the Ego, or Self. As such I ascribe a reality to the
Ego — to my own mind — different from that real existence as a Per-
manent Possibility, which is the only reaUty I acknowledge in Matter.
, . . We are forced to apprehend every part of the series as linked with
the other parts by something in common which is not the feelings them-
selves." (Quoted by James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, pp.
356-7-)

Appendix 455

NOTE X

RELATION OF SCIENTIFIC THEORIES TO
HUMAN PERSONALITY

Science, being the study of phenomena or sense-perceptions alone,
can neither prove nor disprove spiritual Being, but its evidence of the
unreliability of mere appearances and recognition of force as the ulti-
mate reality make against naturalism.

Many men of science are simple agnostics. The whole trend of
their studies turns their thoughts, as we have seen, from the inner life
and its experiences and convictions. But few great men are open deniers
of the faiths of the heart as utter impossibilities. True scientists
make their appeal direct to the reason, not to the mere appearance of
things, and each advance is an achievement of the mind, and becomes
such by the ability to see beneath the visible phenomenon and utterly
reverse its appearances to the eye.

There is much reverent agnosticism acknowledging the mystery of
the universe never felt so truly as today. The dynamic theory of
matter makes for faith, and the great laws of the conservation of
energy and transformation of forces suggest that the peculiar force
we call will-power or simply spirit, the only force we really know, may
survive the death of the body, its own creation, in some other form.

Some theists, in order to illustrate the evolution of man, make use of
the theory of Trichotomy, that man consists of body, soul, and spirit.
(I Thess. 5:23.) The life-force, which is not a transformation of
physical force but proceeds from the Giver of Life, moves upward
tlirough organized but non-sensitive plant life to soul, the organizing
sensitive and semi-conscious life of animals, rising in some higher
forms to the lower self-seeking and contriving faculties of the under-
standing. In man, by inspiration of the Spirit of God, spirit appears,
the self-conscious, rational, and ethical personality, knowing God and
duty, which survives death. Aristotle made the same distinction be-
tween the vegetative and purely sensitive i^^xv of plants and animals
and the "cOj (later called the irveiifia)^ which is inbreathed by God and
makes man more than an animal.

The distinction between the soul and the spirit as revealed in the
psychical or sensuous man, and the true man, conscious of duty and
capable of high and holy faiths, is brought out clearly in Hawthorne's
Marble Faun. Common speech, though using mostly " soul and body,"
recognizes the distinction. We say, "I am a spirit " and " I have a
soul," never vice versa. " A whole-souled " man never means a spirit-
ual or religious man. Give the body of a man to the soul of an ape,
and he would drag it down and degrade it to brutish passions. Give

456 Basic Ideas in Religion

the body of an ape to the spirit of a true man, and he would develop and
make it Hke a human body. Robert Browning states the trichoto-
metric theory as follows :

" Three divers persons witness in each man,

Three souls which make up one soul : first, to wit,

A soul of each and all the bodily parts,

Seated therein, which works, and is what Does,

And has the use of earth, and ends the man

Downward : but, tending upward for advice.

Grows into, and again is grown into

By the next soul, which, seated in the brain,

Useth the first with its collected use,

And feeleth, thinketh, willeth — is what Knows :

Which, duly tending upward in its turn.

Grows into, and again is grown into

By the last soul, that uses both the first.

Subsisting whether they assist or no.

And, constituting man's self, is what Is —

And leans upon the former, makes it play.

As that played off the first: and, tending up.

Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man

Upward in that dread point of intercourse.

Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.

What Does, what Knows, what Is; three souls, one man." i-

While St. Paul cannot be said to have a technical psychology for man,
yet he speaks of three classes of men : (a) sarkikos, sensual, ruled by
the flesh; (b) psychikos, the "natural" man, who lives in the realm of
the senses and emotions, highly intellectual and artistic at times, but
without perception of spiritual things ; (c) /'n<?Mmait^o.y, the spiritual man
consciously following the spirit. The pneuma exists in all the classes,
but is dominated by the flesh or the senses in the first two. " Reason "
has two sides: the higher side which knows duty, self, and God; the
lower side, which observes phenomena and reasons about them. This
is called the understanding or logical faculty. The merely sensuous
man, although he stands on a higher mental plane than the animal, still
acts mostly within that plane. He is capable of more action than the
animal because he is a spirit and has a conscious mind. Thus his mo-
tives and actions differ in degree, not in kind. The higher animals have
simple reasoning powers and look out for themselves, as men do.

The most obvious distinction between man and animal is the
power of rational speech as distinguished from the utterance of cries
expressive of emotion and from mere sign language. No animal speaks,
and no race of man without speech has ever been found. J. S. Mill
makes speech the distinctive mark of a man, expressing rationality.
Max Miiller says : " No reason is possible without language and no

'^ A Death in the Desert.

Appendix 457

language without reason." This distinction is as old as Aristotle and
the New Testament. " Logos " means both the reason, or inner
thought, and the word which expresses the thought. The beginning of
rational speech is still the problem of thought, as insoluble as of old.

Reason could not develop without words, but how could words first
arise for reason to use, and how could the whole society agree as to the
conceptual meaning of the first words? Animals have the same percep-
tions of form and color we have, but they do not arouse the same ideas.
They have percepts but not concepts. They think purely in terms of
sensation, in picture language, and not in abstractions. Stout and Bald-
win define conception as the " cognition of a universal as distinguished
from the particulars which it unifies. The universal apprehended in
this way is called a concept."

Another vital difference is the moral nature. The animal has no
thoughts which correspond to conscience, duty, and faith in the proper
sense. Many psychologists ignore this vital element entirely, but it
cannot be omitted, if man is to be studied in his whole nature. Darwin
admits the great difference on the ethical side. Attempts are made to
show that animals do have ethical feelings, because they seem to act
morally. But it is probable that in such cases we put a human con-
struction on their actions and go beyond their limited experiences.

Whether we accept Trichotomy or not, it is helpful in distinguishing
man from the animal on the side of mind. This view denies the theory
of an unbroken and purely mechanical development from matter to
man. It affirms the immediate action of the great Evolver and Ordainer
of nature at certain transition points. Many evolutionists admit such
new departures in development, which the mechanical theory cannot
explain. Du Bois-Reymond names seven such " breaks " in the proc-
ess.2 A. R. Wallace mentions three : the appearance of the first cell,
the beginning of sensation, and the self-consciousness and conceptual
thought of man.

Lloyd Morgan thinks there are certain departures in mental develop-
ment. " The introduction of the process of analysis appears to me to
constitute a new departure in psychological evolution; (and) the process
differs generically from the process of perceptual construction on
which it is grafted. ... I see no grounds for believing that the conduct
of animals, wonderfully intelligent as it is, is, in any instances known
to me, rational." ^

God is ever acting back of the whole process of evolution, but
He is not compelled to act along a certain line, and at times He initiates
a new departure or mode of action, li an observer from another world
should visit our earth at long intervals and watch the life of its in-

2 See pp. 211-12.

3 Animal Life and Intelligence, p. 373.

45^ Basic Ideas in Religion

habitants, he would notice in the last century an incredible revolution
in mechanical work through the use of steam and electricity. If he
admitted mind to be at work at all, he would not say that it acted at
these points only and that all preceding stages were automatic, but that
here it worked on entirely new lines and used higher forces not known
before. In the same way, we hold that God is ever present and acting
but, at certain points, he acts by new methods or introduces new
powers or agencies, lifting the whole divinely guided process to higher
levels, till it culminates in man, its goal and head. Wallace argues
from physiological traits in man which natural selection cannot explain,
that a superior intellect is guiding the development of man for a
specific purpose, just as the intelligence of man guides the development
of certain varieties of plant and animal life. The mechanical laws of
nature alone are not sufficient to produce man.

The Scripture doctrine of the unity of the human race (Acts 17:26)
receives unexpected confirmation in the scientific theory of monogeny,
that each species proceeds from one primitive stock. Dr. Brinton, a
pure evolutionist, accepts discontinuous evolution and thinks that the
first human pair were gifted with human traits and capabilities which
lifted them above the animal plane.

John Fiske holds that while the theory of natural selection will go
far toward explaining animals and plants, it remains powerless to ac-
count for the existence of man. " The difference between man and the
ape transcends the difference between the ape and a blade of grass.
. . . for psychological man you must erect a distinct kingdom ; nay, you
even dichotomize the universe, putting Man on one side and all things
else on the other." *

Professor Otto of Gottingen suggests that that theory is reasonable
and in accord with scientific facts which holds that the final leap from
animalism to man was so great and sudden as to cause a rich develop-
ment of the psychical nature, surpassing all that had gone before.
This would coincide with the appearance of the personal spirit.^ The
best treatment of the progressive development of life to man, guided
by the spirit of God is found in Le Conte's Evolution and Its Relation
to Religious Thought.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Le Conte, Evolution and Its Relation to Religious Thought: Wallace,
Darwinism; Fiske, The Destiny of Man; Smyth, Through Science to
Faith.

* Through Nature to Cod, p. 82.

5 Naturalism and Religion, pp. 330-6.

Appendix 459

NOTE Y

BRAIN AND PERSONALITY

A flood of light has been thrown by medicine and surgery on the
question of the relation between the brain and the mind. The dis-
covery by physicians of certain material seats of purely mental func-
tions enables us, without invoking the aid of metaphysics, to argue that
personality controls the brain as truly as a musician controls his in-
strument. Dr. W. Hanna Thomson i of New York wrote in 1906 a
book entitled Brain and Personality. What follows is a statement of
the conclusions of Dr. Thomson. Unfortunately space cannot be given
to the wealth of data by which he establishes his findings. All quota-
tions are from this book.

Without entering into an elaborate description of the structure of the
brain, it may be stated that the gray matter of the brain surface " is
specially arranged to subserve certain specific psychical functions only
in certain localities in its substance. It is not the whole brain which
sees and hears, but only particular limited areas to which the conscious-
ness of sight and hearing are confined." 2 Likewise, it seems probable
that " every special psychical function is subserved by its own special
seat in the material organ of the mind." ^ If the integrity of a brain
area is destroyed the mental function which had its seat there is inter-
fered with, even though the sense organ concerned is still intact and
working perfectly. Thus if the visual area of the brain is pressed upon
by a clot of blood, sight may be utterly lost, even though the eye itself
in all its parts with the nervous tract leading therefrom to the brain
be wholly intact. That mental capacity depends on the organization of
the gray matter of the brain, rather than on the amount of it, is shown,
among other reasons, by the fact that we have two hemispheres in our
brain, only one of which is used in thinking. No addition of mental
power, nor of mental endowment is secured by our having two brains,
any more than the faculty of sight is increased in us by our having two
eyes. The advantage of pair organs is that either one of the pair can do
the whole business of both if necessary. The pair organs of eyes and
ears are merely instruments, and not the sources, of sight and hearing.
That our two perfectly symmetrical brains are likewise not the sources,

1 Physician to the Roosevelt Hospital ; Consulting Physician to New
York State Manhattan Hospitals for the Insane; Consulting Physician
to the New York Red Cross Hospital ; formerly Professor of the
Practice of Medicine and of Diseases of the Nervous System, New
York University Medical College; ex- President of the New York
Academy of Medicine, etc.

2 p. 38.
^P- 39-

460 Basic Ideas in Religion

but rather the instruments, of thought is most convincingly established
by anatomical evidence.

" There is a division of labor between the two hemispheres in respect
of the control of those muscular movements which are of a voluntary
character, the centers of those governing the right half of the body
occupying a tract in the gray cortex of the left brain, while those of
the left half of the body are correspondingly located in the right
hemisphere. The most probable explanation of this arrangement is that
it ensures a more perfect balance between the two sides of the body in
its muscular movements." * Yet that one hemisphere is perfectly able
to do all the thinking when the other is destroyed by disease has been
repeatedly shown by persons who have lived many years after the com-
plete paralysis of one side of the body, and yet have thought and acted
and transacted business as efficiently as before. This shows " that we,
as persons, do not depend for our personality upon the number of
ounces of gray matter which our cranial cavity contains, but rather
on whether the gray matter of one of our hemispheres is in good con-
dition or not. If it is, then the gray matter of the other hemisphere is
not needed by us for the purpose of thinking. . . . These undoubted
facts, therefore, lead to just as undoubted a conclusion, namely, that
everything involved in our conscious personality, while related to gray
matter, is only related to, but not originated by, gray matter ; for if it
were originated by gray matter, then both hemispheres would be equally
necessary to our complete personality." ^

There is nothing in the frame of man, or in his organs, or even in the
structure of his brain to separate him clearly from other animals.
" But there is one physiological standard by which man can be truly
measured, which applies to him alone, and which rounds his whole
marvelous being — his faculty of speech. The immeasurable distance
between man and every other animal on earth is fully accounted for by
the existence, the nature and significance of man's words. By the say-
ings of Francis Bacon we find ourselves in the presence of an intellect
which grasps the principles of all knowledge. In the words of Shake-
speare well-nigh every experience of human life is vividly embodied.
We are awed by the sublimity and the solemnity of the thoughts of
him who expressed himself in the words of the Ninetieth Psalm. So,
the more we ponder it, the more impassable grows the gulf between the
minds of those who could speak thus and the minds of dumb animals.
They cannot be the same beings in kind, however similar their bodily
relationships be, because the more we recognize what the presence of
the Logos in man implies, the plainer becomes the reason why he stands
alone in this world. . . . Regarded as a physiological study the faculty

■* pp. 61, 2.
■5 pp. 68, 9.

Appendix 461

of speech consists not in uttering words, but in the power of word
making. The primary truth about a word is that it comes only from
mind. Apart from mind it has no existence. Every word was origi-
nally made by a personality which first designed and invented it. If
there be no personality there can be no making of a word. Hence no
word ever came, or can come, into existence spontaneously. No human
being was ever born with a word. A word, therefore, is an artificial
human product, the outgrowth of a need, just as a knife was first made
by some one who wanted to cut." ^

No speechless race has ever been found, and all languages have the
same mental elements and grammatical structure. " The necessary con-
clusion, therefore, which the philologist must come to, is that the source
of all words is the conscious mind or human personality itself. It is
not, as some reasoners loosely state, that language makes man, but it is
man who makes language. The mind comes first and is altogether the
beginning and cause of the word." '' Words are the instruments which
the thinker invents or makes for himself for the purpose of defining
his thought, and they are as necessary to thinking as they are to speech
or writing. Feelings, however, do not need words in order to be experi-
enced and understood, so that when the brain word-apparatus is damaged
manifestations of feeling may remain, though all recognizable signs of
thought are gone.

" Having considered the relations of words to thoughts, we now come
to a crucial point in all our discussion, namely, the relations of words
to the brain. We can scarcely overstate the importance of certain
modern discoveries on this subject, because they reveal the first recog-
nizable link between the immaterial and the material, between mind and
matter, yet demonstrated in science. That Hnk would never have been
guessed by metaphysicians, for it was only physicians who could have
discovered such facts by their noting the effects of small and strictly
localized brain injuries." ^ Such injuries have left people wholly
bereft of the power to read words, though they can see them, or to
understand words though they hear them. A third kind of injury
results in persons being unable to speak or write words though they can
both hear and read them. By such facts we learn that speech is of two
kinds, (i) The first kind consists of words that come to us. If they
arrive through the ear they are registered in a particular locality in the
cortical area of hearing, which is known as the temporal convolution ;
if they arrive through the eye by reading they are stored away in an
entirely different spot in the cortical visual area, which is called the
angular gyrus. (2) The other kind of speech consists of words which

6 pp.

78-81,

^P.

85.

8pp,

, 87, 88,

462 Basic Ideas in Religion

go from us, and as these involve muscular movements, they proceed
from yet another place in the brain cortex, in a region in which muscu-
lar movements are initiated. Here in a small part of a convolution
called Broca's convolution is stored every word that can be spoken.
" Now, as we have remarked before, the gray matter of no one of these
three seats of words originates or makes any words. They are simply
registered there for use, as they would be on a printed page, or on a
wax leaf of the phonograph, and how that is done we will learn
further on." ^

We might liken these speech areas to shelves of a library, with the
words arranged thereon like so many volumes. When a man learns a
new language he adds, as it were, a new shelf. Thus through injury
to the brain men have lost the use of one language but not of another,
or if they were masters of several languages, they have lost the use of
one completely, of another less completely, and of the others propor-
tionately less, as if their registrations in brain matter lay side by side
like shelves in a book case. Not only so, but in the recovery of the use
of words a patient gets his verbs first and his nouns last, as if the
words were registered in series like books in a properly classified
library. Some injuries partially damage the brain area and seem to
jostle words out of their place, so that the person gets the wrong word
when he speaks. There are also shelves in the cerebral libraries for
other impressions than those of words.

In seeking to understand these strange facts about the human faculty
of speech it should be noted that no one was ever born with this power,
and that the development of the speech areas is an acquired change.
If the word-faculty were an original endowment of the word areas then
both hemispheres would be used for speech, as they are for muscular
control. But as we have stated the entire mechanism in all its parts is
found only in one of the two hemispheres, while the other remains
wordless for life. With right handed persons this hemisphere is the
left, and with left handed persons the right. The explanation of this is
that " the faculty of speech is located in the hemisphere which governs
the hand most used. Hand and speech, therefore, are physiologically
connected." ^o In the origin of language, gesture language was evi-
dently the beginning, and more of it than we can realize continues in
use. Anatomically this is shown in the brain by the close proximity in
which the area governing the use of the hand is to the centers which
preside over the movements of the muscles of the face, of the lips, and
of the tongue. " We can then see how readily facial expression, lending
itself to gesture in attempts at communication, would seek the coopera-
tion of lips and tongue for vocal sounds, soon to become words because

»p. 96.
10 p. III.

Appendix 463

of the human mind back of the sounds. This last element of mind is
indispensable, because otherwise the sounds would have remained for-
ever only like those of an anthropoid ape. But as the right hand is
the oftenest used for every purpose, so is it of the two hands the often-
est used for gesture, which means of course for language. As soon as
other parts were sought for to cooperate with gesture in language, the
appeal would necessarily be to the neighboring centers in the left brain,
and not by crossing the corpus callosum bridge to the corresponding
centers in the other hemisphere. It would not be long, therefore, before
the habit became settled to use only parts in the left brain for this
specialized work, until finally the habit became fixed for hfe." ^^

The question of what makes Broca's convolution talk is not so satis-
factorily answered by studying the beginnings of speech in children
as by studying their learning to read. It will appear as we go on that
learning to speak is not done by automatic imitation as many think.
" No one can imagine that learning to read can be automatic. It
requires instead the most persevering attention and application for
many months. Over and over again the pictures of the separate letters
have to be identified so as to be distinguished from one another, and
then their combination into words successively mastered till the word
symbol and its meaning are simultaneously recognized. This process
of brain shaping has to be done piece by piece, or layer by layer, so
that some persons become word-blind without being letter-blind. But
a less spontaneous cerebral act than this can scarcely be conceived.
If it is not wholly the doing of what we call will, then what is it? But
the most pregnant fact about this process of learning to read is that by
the constant repetition of the will-directed effort to see the letter and
w^ord pictures, an actual modification of gray matter results in a limited
portion of the visual area, so that it can do what no other gray matter
anywhere can do, — see and recognize words. Here, surely, we come
upon a most impressive fact, namely, that by constant repetition of a
given stimulus, we can effect a permanent anatomical change in our
brain stuff, which will add a specific and remarkable cerebral function
to that place, which it never had before, and which, therefore, it could
not have had either originally or spontaneously. . . . But this material
change was not affected easily; rather it came only by laborious and
long-continued work spent on that collection of gray matter, and work
by something which must be wholly extraneous to the gray matter
itself. It is absurd to suppose that any other areas of the cortex which
cannot of themselves recognize a letter or word, are the teachers of the
cells in the angular gyrus which do the reading. It is the conscious
personality alone which does this work, and no better proof of this is

"pp. 114, 5-

464 Basic Ideas in Religion

needed to show that such must be the process than when, in later years,
a student learns to read Greek, Latin, and French." ^2

The principle on which all this depends is that a stimulus to nervous
matter effects a change in that matter by calling forth a reaction to it,
and that repeated stimulation of the same nature, calling as it does for
the same reaction, effects a permanent alteration in the nervous matter
stimulated. This is the fundamental law of habit. The gray layer of
our brains is actually plastic and capable of being fashioned. There-
fore, education is not the training of certain innate mental powers, but
the slow and laborious physical alteration of the brain itself. This
applies not merely to reading but to every form of art and handicraft.

We cannot here follow Dr. Thomson in detail as he proves that all
nervous matter is capable of being disciplined and trained by afferent
stimuli, from the reactions of the simplest protoplasm up the scale of
evolution to the enlarged cerebral hemispheres of the higher mammals
and man. All functions, high or low, follow in their genesis the same
nervous path in reaction to environment. " Thus even with that unique
mental faculty of speech, which we have been considering at length,
we are met at the outset with our old familiar terms Afferent and
Efferent, as plainly as in any function of the spinal cord. Our speech
consists of words which come to us through the afferent channels of the
ear and of the eye, and of words which go from us by the efferent
Broca convolution. Moreover, in the order of time, the afferent pre-
ceded and created the efferent, for the child first heard the words
addressed to its ear, and then slowly taught Broca's convolution to
respond ; slowly, for it evidently understands words some time before
it can learn to stammer them on its tongue. But likewise many of the
longest and most intricate workings of our minds in acts of thinking,
can often be traced to a single afferent excitation which was the origin
of the whole process." ^^

It might be inferred, then, that this afferent energy coming from
without fashions out of the human brain a pure thinking machine,
whose operations, though more complex, yet illustrate the same auto-
matic principles which govern the functions of the spinal cord. " Why
is this not enough? It is in no sense enough, simply because the brain
of man and the mind of man do not correspond. . . . There is a gap
here which no facts of animal evolution even begin to account for.
Man's brain in physical and anatomical respects corresponds quite
closely to that of a chimpanzee, and hence, according to all precedents,
his mind should show but little advance in degree, and none in kind,
over the mind of this ape. . . . But is it thus? Those stupendous
works, the bridge across the Firth of Forth and the Simplon tunnel

12 pp. 119-121.

13 pp. 171, 2.

Appendix 465

through the Alps, existed down to the smallest detail in their engineers'
minds before they existed on earth. Hence, we are in the presence here
of a being endowed with the supreme attributes of a Creator, or one
who solely by his own designing gives origin to things, which other-
wise would not be. Such an endowment makes Man wholly unnatural,
because by this time we know Nature well and her limitations in all
her works. Where in Nature is there anything so weird as he who
found the Infinite Ether and straightway made it the invisible bearer of
his words across oceans ! What else can his mind not do when he
orders electricity to change its tones of thunder to the small tickings of
a telegraph, or by telephone carry his personal voice hundreds of miles
away? Now, our contention is not that such human doings are marvel-
ous, but that they are actually supernatural, because Nature has nothing
which even remotely approximates to them. . . . Physically the gap
between the brain of man and the brain of an anthropoid ape is too
insignificant to count, but their difiference as beings corresponds to the
distance of the earth from the nearest fixed star. Therefore the brain
of man does not account for Man. What does? We are bound by our
premises to seek for an answer to this question only by searching the
brain itself, to note whether in it there are evidences of the presence
of a Something whose agency affords the sole explanation why the
human brain differs so in its capacities from any other animal brain.
Having started with the brain, with the brain we must continue, let
the investigation take us where it may." ^^

Brain matter itself, as we have seen, has none of the properties of
mind, becoming related only in an artificial, acquired way to mental
processes. A man knows, thinks, and devises not with his whole brain,
but only in limited areas of one hemisphere thereof, which he has
educated for the purpose. Thus " the speech centers in the brain are
as much the creations of the individual himself to store the words in
them for clothing his thoughts withal as if he made a wardrobe in
which to store garments for clothing his body." ^^ But not only have
word functions special seats in the brain, but all other mental opera-
tions have their particular cortical regions, which have many of them
been located through injuries in different individuals. "Therefore
while the ability to know is a great attribute of the human mind, yet
these facts prove that there are actual physical bases in the brain on
whose integrity as such this faculty can alone be exercised. An artist
may be lost in admiration while gazing at the Sistine Madonna. An
apoplectic clot may make him the next day, though still able to see that
great picture, no longer able to distinguish it from a wall paper. A
trained musician may be entranced at one time listening to a symphony

i*pp. 176-179.
"p. 180.

466 Basic Ideas in Religion

of Beethoven, but in a few hours, though still able to hear it, he may be
wholly unable to recognize it as music. In both cases a highly de-
veloped mental capacity is lost immediately after a local brain injury.
How are we to explain this sudden abolition of superior mental endow-
ments by such physical changes? The explanation is as conclusive as
it is important, namely, that these knowing areas are found in the same
brain hemisphere that contains the speech centers, and in that hemi-
sphere only, so that the inference is certain that they are all created by
the same agency. . . . Likewise it has been found that the injuries,
technically termed lesions, which produce the various forms of mind-
deafness above described, occur only in the left hemispheres of right
handed persons, or in the right hemispheres of left handed persons; in
other words, they show how these mental functions strictly follow the
hand most used in childhood, just as the speech centers do. Hence we
learn to know just as we learn to think. We think in words, and for
that purpose we register our word memories in their laboriously pre-
pared brain places. So also we register the memories of what we see
and of what we hear in their prepared places, the preparation in both
instances having originally been begun by the most active hand in
response to personal intent. . . . According to the physiological laws
which we have already mentioned, memories of all kinds are doubtless
registered in our brain cells by the original stimulus of each, and when
an agency like a conscious purpose systematically repeats the same
stimulus to the same cells, they become arranged there in a library of
records, as we have shown is the case in the speech centers. . . .^^

" Human brain matter does not become human in its powers until
Something within takes it in hand to fashion it. . . . This Something
is not natural, but supernatural, both in its powers and in its creations
by means of those powers. . . . This can be no other than that greatest
of realities, the Self or the Human Personality. To us this is the most
direct certainty which we know of, because all other phenomena are
contingent upon and relative to personal consciousness. . . .i"

" To speak of a personality which thinks, purposes, and wills as
automatic, is a self-contradiction in terms. We need not appeal to
metaphysics for our argument, because we now meet with another
strong line of evidence that the personality can dispense with the
most important means of efferent stimuli which Nature furnishes, and
yet make good their loss because the personality is independent and
self-determining, and hence can triumph over the most serious depriva-
tions possible of its afferent mechanisms for communication with the
world in which it lives. This has been shown in some members of our
race who have suffered from certain great misfortunes in early life,

16 pp. 188-192.
" pp. 194, 5.

Appendix 467

which, however, constitute in a way most instructive physiological
experiments. To appreciate the force of these demonstrations we must
first take into account how much in each case was lost of life's equip-
ment for mental development. Thus it requires some effort to estimate
how much education the human mind receives from the single afferent
channel of the eye. To do this at all adequately, we must go back to
the first news which the child gets from the outer world by sight. A
series of impressions, first of color, then of form, then of distance, and
lastly of definite objects, are made upon the brain visual area, until by
repetition a vast store of picture memories are there laid up for life, as
so many object lessons. How much, therefore, is the mind of a young
child deprived of, if it becomes blind before this great afferent teacher
could give it a single lesson ! . , . We must not forget that to a human
ear, however young, words soon have some meaning, more than parents
may then suppose, until a few months afterwards they are surprised
that their children know so much. If words once begin to reach
through the ear, the mind springs forward to its limitless inheritance of
thought, and especially of feelings. . . . Close the ear, therefore, of a
child, and it remains more a mere animal than when any other avenue
with the outer world is closed, because it is dumb.

" If we should liken our apparatus for mind training to a boat which
is to take us over the sea of life, the great afferent mechanisms of
the eye and of the ear might then be regarded as corresponding to the
hull and to the frame respectively. Can the personality, therefore, sur-
vive the complete wreck of both, and go on with nothing but the keel
to cling to for the rest of the voyage? The answer would certainly
be no, if the personality depended, not only for its development, but
also for its own origin, upon its afferent mechanisms. If, on the other
hand, the Afferent has nothing to do with the personality except to
inform it, the loss of the Afferent will have no other effect on the per-
sonality than that of leaving it in ignorance. The personality would
then be simply like one condemned to solitary confinement. That being
so, if only some messages could reach him by any route, however un-
usual or roundabout, the personality would be found as complete and
individual as ever." i^

The best known and most instructive case demonstrating this con-
clusively is that of Miss Helen Keller. As the result of sickness she
was from the ages of nineteen months to seven years totally blind and
deaf, and hence dumb also. The only senses left to her were those of
smell, taste and touch. Her teacher. Miss Sullivan, who came to her
in her seventh year, succeeded in teaching her in the first month to
trace by their letters on the palm of her hand eighteen nouns and three

18 pp. 199-204.

468 Basic Ideas in Religion

verbs, without, however, knowing what they meant. " Hardly a month
from the beginning of her education, the awakening came. Miss Sulli-
van had her hold a mug in her hand at a pump, and as the cold water
filled the mug and ran on her hand, the teacher traced anew the letters
w-a-t-e-r on the palm of her free hand. Miss Sullivan writes : * She
dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into
her face. She spelled water several times.' The great step was gained
when this blind, deaf and dumb girl suddenly understood that the
symbol traced in her palm meant — water. She had got a word !
From that moment her personality was set free, like a prisoner allowed
to leave a dark dungeon to go wherever he lists, for now for the first
time she knew that everything had a name, which she could learn on
her palm. ' The next morning Helen got up like a radiant fairy. She
has flitted from object to object, asking the name of everything,' kissing
her teacher for the first time in her gladness. It is touching to read
that she tried to teach her dog by tracing the word water on its paws.
From this beginning her progress was rapid. In two years and a half
she was studying arithmetic, geography, zoology, and botany, and read-
ing general literature." i" Meantime she was asking every conceivable
question, showing that a shut-in mind, so to speak, is concerned with
every problem that interests a normal person.

" Three years after she began with her first word, she commenced to
take lessons in articulate speech. On account of their complete illus-
tration of physiological fact, we will quote a few passages in which she
relates her experience in learning how to make Broca's convolution do
this work. ' I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I
uttered my first sentence, " It is warm." True, they were broken and
stammering syllables, but they were human speech. My soul, conscious
of new strength, came out of bondage. . . . No deaf child who has
earnestly tried to speak the words which he has never heard, — to come
out of the prison of silence, can forget the thrill of surprise which
came over him when he uttered his first word. Only such an one can
appreciate the eagerness with which I talked to my toys, or the delight
I felt when at my call Mildred [her little sister] ran to me, or my dogs
obeyed my voice. . . . But it must not be supposed that I could really
talk in this short time. I needed Miss Sullivan's assistance constantly
in my efforts to articulate each sound clearly, and to combine all sounds
in a thousand ways. Even now she calls my attention every day to
mispronounced words. ... I was forced to repeat the words or sen-
tences, sometimes for hours, until I felt the proper ring in my own
voice. My work was practice, practice, practice. Discouragement and
weariness cast me down frequently, but the next moment the thought

i» pp. 208, 9.

Appendix 469

that I would soon be at home and show my loved ones what I had
accomplished spurred me on.' . . .

" Helen Keller's story of her life begins with a child in her seventh
year, with each of the avenues of incoming and of outgoing speech
closed to her. After two months language begins with one word
lodged in her consciousness by a most circuitous brain path. The book
ends with a young woman, a graduate with honors of Radcliffe College,
versed in the sciences taught there, along with extensive reading in
Latin, Greek, French, German, and English classics, passionately fond
of poetr}' and of history, a writer of the purest English style, and a
thinker of no mean order. . . .

" But the physiological interest of her story is quite apart from the
interest of her biography, great as that is. To a physiologist it is an
example of a living brain, with the cells of the great visual area entirely
and forever atrophied or wasted away, because that is what happens to
those textural cerebral elements in cases of her kind. No word for
reading could ever be registered in her angular gyrus, nor in any neigh-
boring visual cells. And just the same extinction of hearing cells was
present in her temporal lobes, so that not one was left there to catch
the sound of a word any more than that of any other sound. Broca's
convolution for uttering speech, therefore, could not have had a single
' telephone ' wire coming to it from either of these two great afferent
centers. After a while Broca's convolution began to be rung up by
thousands of reiterated messages coming from a wholly unusual quarter
in the brain, namely, the center of the sense of touch. * Practice, prac-
tice, practice,' by the hour at a time — the work of an indomitable per-
sonal will — finally makes that convolution submit to this perpetual
stimulation from the tactile area, till it becomes ready to do what
Helen purposes, whether to speak, to read aloud, or to write." -°

The sense of touch, on which Helen Keller so largely relied, is the
most diffused of all the senses at the surface of the body. Not being
localized in any one organ, like the eye, it is the least specialized of
any of the senses, and its anatomical seat in the brain center is even
yet not fully demonstrated. Normally there can be but very few if
any nerve fibers connecting Broca's convolution with the area of the
sense of touch. Nerve fibers grow in the direction of the stimulus
which courses through them, a property often taken advantage of in
surgery to restore the sensibility and mobility of a part when that has
been lost by the severance of its nerves. " There is no improbability
in the surmise that repeated currents of stimuli will in time project, as
it were, new tracts of fibers from one cerebral convolution to another.
... As a child by practice learns to use its hands and feet, new nerve

20 pp. 211-215.

470 Basic Ideas in Religion

fibers by the thousand grow from the motor center of the cortex, to go
down and make connections with the motor centers of the spinal cord.
Such, moreover, must be the case in the organizing of the speech
centers in tlie speaking hemisphere of the brain." 21

" Another important conclusion is led up to by these facts, namely,
that we can make our own brains, so far as special mental functions or
aptitudes are concerned, if only we have wills strong enough to take
the trouble. By practice, practice, practice, as in Miss Keller's case,
the Will stimulus will not only organize brain centers to perform new
functions, but will project new connecting, or, as they are technically
called, association fibers, which will make nerve centers work together
as they could not without being thus associated. ... A person, there-
fore, acquires new brain capacities by acquiring new anatomical bases
for them in the form both of brain cells, which he has trained, and of
actively working brain fibers, which he has himself virtually created." ^2

" Therefore it is a Power not of the brain, because it is the master-
ful personal Will, which makes the brain human. By a human brain
we mean one which has been slowly fashioned into an instrument by
which the personality can recognize and know all things physical, from
the composition of a pebble to the elements of a fixed star. It is the
will alone which can make material seats for mind, and when made
they are the most personal things in a man's body. In fact they are
the only examples of the kind in his physical frame, because, though he
cannot make one hair of his head white or black, he can and does
make speech centers inside of his head, to say nothing of other centers
of most varied faculty. So long as his brain matter has not become
' set ' as potters would express it, by the lapse of years, he deals with
his cortical gray matter by the purposive exercise of memorizing habit,
as the potter deals with wet clay. And wondrously does he fashion it,
until it no more resembles the same gray matter on the other side of
his head in mental capacities, than unfashioned clay resembles a Port-
land vase. How could this clay itself make this peerless vase? As the
educated hemisphere is the brain of man, while its fellow remains only
that of the animal Homo, whence comes the incalculable difference
between the two?

" Considering that it is not brain which makes man, but man who
makes one of his brain hemispheres human in mental faculties we
might even say that if a human personality would enter a young chim-
panzee's brain where it would find all the required cerebral convolutions,
that the ape could then grow into a true inventor or ohilosopher." "^

21 pp. 218, 9.

22 pp. 223, 4.

23 pp. 238, 9.

Appendix 471

For a further refutation of the materialistic view that mind is the
product of brain and the brain is the storehouse of memories, see
Bergson's Matter and Memory.

NOTE Z
SPENCER'S METHODS

James ColHer, for nine years the secretary and for ten years the
amanuensis of Herbert Spencer, writes as follows of him in a chapter
on " Personal Reminiscences " appended to Josiah Royce's Herbert
Spencer, an Estimate and Review.

" Whence did Spencer derive the materials for the vast structure
which he reared? To no question is the answer more unsatisfactory.
... It may be confidently asserted that he at no time received system-
atic instruction in any branch of science. ... It may be doubted if he
ever attended a course of scientific lectures. What is more surprising
it may be doubted if he ever read a book on science from end to end.
. . . Spencer composed his Social Statics, which is a book on ethics as
well as politics, having read no other ethical treatise than an old and
now forgotten work by one Jonathan Dymond, which he was never
tired of citing, not quoting, for even this book he probably had not read
through. He produced an original treatise on Psychology, and though
he had 'glanced' (it was his favorite word) at Reid and Hume, he
had prepared himself by reading only what he called ' that subtle book,'
Mansel's Prolegomena Logiccc. Excepting Carpenter's Principles of
Comparative Physiology, he had possibly not carefully perused a single
book on Biology when he wrote his Principles of Biology; perhaps it
will be considered an error and a misfortune that he hardly read even
the Origin of Species. He composed his Principles of Sociology with-
out reading Comte or Tylor, and no one was more astonished than he
when Tylor claimed priority in originating the ghost theory on which
the Spencerian science of religion is founded; Primitive Culture had
stood on his shelves for years, but stood unopened. He wrote his final
treatise on ethics without reading Mill, Kant, Whewell, or any of the
recognized authorities on morals, excepting portions of Sidgwick.
Where, then, did he find his ideas, and above all, whence did he procure
his facts?" From his afternoons at the Athenaeum Club, Collier pro-
ceeds to tell us, from reading the periodicals and conversing with the
savants there, from his assistants, and from observation. " Most of
Spencer's ideas, like his facts, were picked up. He was at no time a
great reader. . . . Spencer's library was . . . wofully deficient in the
class of books that might have been expected to be found in it. . . . In
fact, he was not a reader at all, in the ordinary sense of the word, but
only a gleaner."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I

General Works on Theism

Harris, Philosophic Basis of Theism; Martineau, A Study
of Religion; Balfour, Foundations of Belief; Fraser, Philos-
ophy of Theism; Caldecott, Philosophy of Religion and Selec-
tions from the Literature of Theism; Orr, Christian View of
God and the World, Lectures I-IV ; Gwatkin, The Knowledge
of God; Webb, Problems in the Relations of God and Man;
Galloway, Philosophy of Religion; Lotze, Microcosmos ;
Ward, The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism; Royce,
The Religious Aspect of Philosophy ; Rashdall, Philosophy and
Religion; Swete, Cambridge Theological Essays; Eucken, The
Problem of Human Life; Mackenzie, The Final Faith; Berg-
son, Creative Evolution; Waggett, Religion and Science.

Dale, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, Lectures
I-V ; Stearns, The Evidence of Christian Experience; A. J.
Harrison, Problems of Christianity and Scepticism and The
Church in Relation to Sceptics; Fairbairn, The Philosophy of
the Christian Religion. Also the works of Maurice, Illing-
worth, Aubry Moore, Barry, Scott Holland, and Bishop Gore.

CHAPTER II

Max Miiller, The Hibbert Lectures and Origin and Grozvth
of Religion; John Caird, Philosophy of Religion; Jevons, In-
troduction to the History of Religion.

CHAPTER III

Gratry, The Knowledge of God; Flint, Theism; Diman, The
Theistic Argument ; Henderson, The Fitness of the Environ-
ment; Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality; Stout,
Analytic Psychology, Bk. II, Chap. i.

475

476 Basic Ideas in Religion

CHAPTER IV

Eutaxiological Argument; Baden-Powell, The Order of Na-
ture; Fullerton, A Plain Argument for God.

Design Argument ; Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments;
Janet, Final Causes; Matheson, The Psalmist and the Scien-
tist; Cooke, Religion and Chemistry; Le Conte, Religion and
Science.

CHAPTER V

Otto, Naturalism and Religion; Drummond, Ascent of Man;
Wallace, Darzvinism; Darwin, Origin of Species; Descent of
Man; Le Conte, Evolution in Relation to Religious Thought;
Smythe, ThrougJi Science to Faith; Mivart, Genesis of Species;
Bateson, Material for the Study of Variation; Cope, The
Origin of the Fittest; Organic Evolution; Kellogg, Darwinism
Today; Bergson, Creative Evolution; Driesch, The Science
and Philosophy of the Organism; Geddes and Thomson, Evo-
lution.

CHAPTER VI

Illingworth, Personality, Human and Diz'ine; Lotze, Micro-
cosmus, Bk. II, Chap. 5 ; Davidson, Theism as Grounded in
Human Nature; Karslake, The Efficacy of Prayer; Edgar,
Does God Anszver Prayer? ; Arthur, The Difference Between
Physical and Moral Law; Fosdick, Meaning of Prayer.

CHAPTER VII

Martineau, Study of Religion, Bk. II, Ch. 2, God as Perfec-
tion; Kant, Critique of Practical Reason and Metaphysic of
Ethics; Flint, Theism, Lect. VIII; Illingworth, The Problem
of Pain, in Lux Mundi (Gore, Edit.) ; Wallace, The World of
Life, Chap. XIX.

CHAPTER VIII

Kant, Critique of Judgment; Barry, IVhat is Natural
Theology? VI; Kennedy, Natural Theology and Modern
Thought; Arg}'ll, The Reign of Law'.

Bibliography 477

CHAPTER IX

Gillespie, The Necessary Existence of Deity; Knight, As-
pects of Theism; Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine, Part
I ; Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism; Seth, Principles of
Ethics; James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Inge, Chris-
tian Mysticism; Martineau, A Study of Religion, Introduction ;
Lilly, The Great Enigma, Chap. VI.

CHAPTER X

Histories of Philosophy : Erdmann, Weber, Windelband,
Kulpe, Paulsen, Royce, Rogers, and Kuno Fischer.

Spinoza: The best studies from different standpoints are
those by Pollock, Martineau, John Caird, Hoifding, Windel-
band and Erdmann.

Hegel: Morris, Hegel's Philosophy of the State and of His-
tory; Wallace, The Logic of Hegel; Sterrett, The Ethics of
Hegel; Edward Caird, Hegel for Criticism; Seth, From Kant
to Hegel and Hegelianism and Personality.

Pantheism: Eraser, Philosophy of Theism, First Series, Lec-
tures V and VI ; Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Be-
lief; Lotze, Outline of the Philosophy of Religion; Hunt, Pan-
theism and Christianity; Saisset, Manual of Modern Panthe-
ism; Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine.

Divine Immanence: Illingworth, Divine Immanence ; Inge,
Christian Mysticism.

CHAPTER XII

Wundt, Psychology, Human and Animal; Paulsen, Intro-
duction to Philosophy; Royce, The Spirit of Modern Phi-
losophy; Clifford, Essays; James Ward, Naturalism and Agnos-
ticism; James Martineau, Essays, Vol. IV, Modern Mate-
rialism; Flint, Anti-Theistic Theories; William James, Prin-
ciples of Psychology, Vol. I, Chapters 5, 6, and 10; Otto, Nat-
uralism and Religion; Driesch, History and Theory of Vitalism.

47^ Basic Ideas in Religion

CHAPTER XIII

J. J. Thomson, Electricity and Matter and The Corpuscular
Theory of Matter; Lodge, Electrons, or The Nature and
Properties of Negative Electricity; R. K. Duncan, The New
Knoivledge and Some Chemical Problems of Today.

CHAPTER XIV
De Pressense, 'A Study of Origins; pp. 437 ff. ; E. B. Tylor,
Primitive Culture, Chaps. 11-13; Salmond, Christian Doctrine
of Immortality, Book I ; Charles, Eschatology.

CHAPTER XV

Lotze, Metaphysics, Bk. Ill, Ch. i ; Miinsterberg, Psychol-
ogy and Life; Sturt, Personal Idealism; Villa, Contemporary
Psychology, Ch. VIII ; Green, Examination of Hume's Philos-
ophy; Harris, Philosophic Basis of Theism, Chaps. XVI-
XVIII ; Ladd, Physiological Psychology; Momerie, Person-
ality.

CHAPTER XVI

Gilbert, Side-lights on Immortality; Momerie, Immortality;
the Ingersoll Lectures at Harvard, especially Fiske, Life Ever-
lasting, and James, Human Immortality.

CHAPTER XIX

Herbert Spencer, The Data of Ethics; Huxley, Ethics and
Evolution; Schurman, Ethical Import of Darzvinism; Balfour,
The Foundations of Belief; Sorley, Ethics of Naturalism;
C. M. Williams, Revieiv of Evolutional Ethics.

CHAPTER XX

Martineau, Study of Religion, Vol. I, Bk. I ; Wace, Flint and
Schurman on Agnosticism; Ward, Naturalism and Agnosti-
cism; Lilly, The Great Enigma; Momerie, Agnosticism; Mar-
tineau, Science, Nescience and Faith, Essays, Vol. Ill; Bal- ■
four, Foundations of Belief; Iverach, Is God Knowahle?

INDEX

Abraham, 287.

Absolute, the, 103, 176, 184, 185,
194, 357, 375-90, 379, 382, 383,
428; Evolution of the, 181, 191.

Action, Activity, 170, 264, 271, 273,
274, 280, 282, 296, 315, 333, 335,
340, 349, 353, 399, 452 ; Predicta-
bility of, 237, 338; Reflex, 275.

Adaptations, 35, 57, 92.

Addison, Joseph, 311.

Esthetics, 149-66.

Affection (s), Heart, 13, 16, 164,
165, 169, 196, 202, 210, 251, 257,
281, 316, 326, 329, 356, 358, 386,
434, 436, 455.

Afghans, 257.

African tribes, 21, 26, 27, 251.

Agassiz, Louis, 74,

Aquinas, Thomas, 40, 174, 432,
448.

Arguments for the existence of
God, 18-177; Esthetic, 149-66;
Etiological, 39; Anthropologi-
cal, 37, 100-48, 154, 285; Con-
tingency, 39; Cosmological, 2)7~
49, 50, 100, 154, 430; Denials of,
40-9; Design, 7, 51, 52, 57, 59-68,
476 ; Fallacious uses of, 62-4,
408; Eutaxiological, 51-g, 149,
476; Moral, 104; Ontological,
37, 38, 64, 149, 167-77, 305, 428-
39; Teleological, 37, 50-99, 430.

Argyll, George D. C, Duke of,
57, 75, 77, 156, 414, 476.

Aristophanes, 289.

Agnosticism, 2, 22, 27, 108, 209, Aristotle, 3, 40, 50, 59, 69, 8^, 173,

228, 246, 321, 375-^0, 411, 452,

455; Ethical, 387-90; Scientific,

202, 380-387.
Alexander, William, Bishop, 149
Allen, Grant, 57.
Allier, Raoul, 301.
Anaxagoras, 55.
Animal (s), y^, 76, 91, 92, 102, 129,

130, 142-8, 158, 162, 189, 267, 294,

175, 184, 273, 274, 339, 348, 386,
393, 395, 399, 40i, 435, 455, 457-

Armstrong, 153.

Arnold, Matthew, 107, 140, 299,

305, 315-9, 330, 387, 389, 439,

446.
Arnold, Thomas, 316, 330.
Art, 163, 169, 270.
Arthur, William, 476.

296, 227; 361, 362, 366, 380, 419- Atheism, 16, 51, 118, 178, 229, 307,

425; Difference from man, 69, 321, 388, 439; Practical, 375,

70, 276, 303, 455-8; Distribution 384; Theoretic, 375.

of, 74. Atom(s), see also Matter, 154,
Animism, 27, 211, 247. 212, 230-44, 399; Periodic law

Anselm, 428, 429, 432, 436. of atomic weights, 58, 240, 404-5.

Antecedent and Consequent, 41, Attention, 271, 275.

44. 335- Attitudes in Apologetics, 9-13.

Anthropology, 18, 19, 20, 22, 28, Atributes, Divine, 16, 103, 383; Of

118, 167, 247, 252. personality, 108.

Anthropomorphism, 32, 34, 101-3, Audubon, John James, 147.

184. Augustine, 10, yj, 175, 272, 273,
Antigone, 371, 436. 301, 355, 432.

Apperception, 271. Austin, Alfred, 311.

Apologetics, XV, xx, xxi, 1-13, 16, Autolycus, 3, 54.

38, 167, 443; History of, 1-8;
Spirit of, 2, 3, 9-13 ; Spiritual, 6.
Apostles, 13, 172, 187.

481

Awe, 162, 163, 426.

Axiom, 200 ; Definition of, 393.

Aztecs, 21, 249.

482

Index

Babylonians, 129, 248.

Bacon, Francis, 6, 46, 51, 64, 100,

309, 338, 407-9, 460.
Baden-Powell, Sir Robert, 476.
Baer, Karl Ernst von, jy, 81, 85,

86.
Bain, Alexander, 43, 45, 276, 335,

344, 363.

Baldwin, James Mark, 169, 171,
271, 276, 457.

Balfour, A. J., xvi, 112, 169, 171,
273, 278, 347, 373, 475, 478.

Balzac, Honore de, 386.

Barry, Alfred, 475, 476.

Basil, 135, 432.

Basutos, 134.

Bateson, William, 84, 86, 89, 415,
416, 476.

Bathmism, 96.

Baur, F. C, 182.

Beautiful, Witness of the. 149-66.

Beauty, 149-66, 281, 294, 389, 427,
428; Moral, 153; Physical, 153.

Becquerel, A. H., 231, 234.

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 51.

Being, 40, 52, 181, 428-9, 455.

Benevolence, Divine, see Good-
ness ; Denials of, 141-48.

Bentham, Jeremy, 278, 360, 364.

Bergson, Henri, 97, 206, 215, 220,
267, 273, 398, 471, 475, 476.

Berkeley, George, Bishop, 59, 183,
192, 407, 434, 442 ; Argument for
God, 59, 406, 407.

Bernard, Claude, 206, 218, 220.

Bible, I, 3, 5, 6, 7, 32, 52, 135, 172,
176, 188, 282, 316, 329, 355, 378,
388, 430, 437, 443; Quotations
from; Acts, 102, 188, 291, 448;
Amos, 188, 25s ; Corinthians, 9,
13, 158; Deuteronomy, 254, 444;
Ecclesiastes, 11, 154, 172, 256;
Ephesians, 32, 188; Genesis, 137,
154; Isaiah, 53, 58, 158, 188, 254,
256, 258, 444; James, 116;
Jeremiah, 188; Job, 11, 53, 159,
173. 188, 255, 256, 258; John,
Epistles of, 329, 330 ; Gospel of,
9, 19, 168, 175, 302, 448; Leviti-
cus, 254 ; Luke, 33, 303 ; Mat-
thew, 122, 158. 160, 193, 291 447,
478; Micah, 188; Peter, 13, 237;
Philippians, 121 ; Proverbs, 174,
188, 431; Psalms, II. 18, 52, 53,
139, 149, 157, 159, 188, 255, 380,

428, 429, 460; Revelation, 427,

442; Romans, 16, 32, 100, 139,

164, 168, 172, 285, 291 ; Samuel,

116, 254; Thessalonians, 455;

Wisdom, 58, 188, 431.
Biiitienleben, 386.
Biogenesis, 214.
Biometrics, 88.
Bird(s), 7z, 74, 91, 156, 158, 303,

419-25-
Body, difference from mind, 246,

259-62, 270, 296.
Boltzman, Ludwig, 206.
Book of the Dead (Egyptian),

249, 253.
Boutroux, Etienne E. M., 273,
Bowne, B. P., 227, 434.
Boyle Lectures, 59, 60.
Brace, Loring, 354.
Bradford. Sir Edward, 146.
Bradley, F. H., 204, 273. 346, 388.
Brahmin teaching, 20, 186, 250.
Brain, 200, 222-8, 269, 283. 298, 341,

360, 364, 459-70.
Brentano, F., 171.
Brewster, Sir David, 62.
Bridgewater Treatises, 60, 64.
Brinton, Daniel G., 49, 361, 458.
British, Early, Religion, 250.
Brooks, Phillips, 438.
Brooks, William Keith, 88.
Brotherhood. 123, 187.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 190.
Browning, Robert, 131, 172, 190,

194, 294, 298, 300, 320, 323-9, 331,

456.
Bruce, Alexander Balmain, 451.
Bruno, 211.

Bryant. William Cullen, 129.
Buddhism, 20, 186, 250, 251.
Bunge, Alex, von, 218.
Bunyan, John, 427.
Burnett, 63.
Burroughs, John, 147.
Bushnell, Horace, 292, 427, 451.
Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 2, 6, 7, 136,

300, 364, 435.
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 165,

166, 312.

Caesar, Julius, 109, in, 249, 340.
Caird, Edward, 346, 434. 477.
Caird, John, 346, 434, 475, 477.
Callaway, Bishop, 134.
Caldecott, Alfred, 154, 475.

Index

483

Calderwood, Henry, 136.

Calvin, John, 5, 189.

Campbell, McLeod, 7.

Campbell, R. J., 193.

Canaanites, 252, 253.

Caprice, 115.

Carlyle, Thomas, 7, 105, 140, 299,

387, 439-
Carpenter, William Benjamin, 471.
Carneri, B., 366.
Carus, Paul, 225.
Casalis, 134.
Castle, William E., 89.
Categorical Imperative, 55, 300,

364-
Categories of Aristotle and Kant,

399.

Causation, 29, 39-49, 57, iii, 335,
339- 357, 386, 398, 399, 402;
Psychical, 51, 403; Universality
of, 335-7.

Cause and effect, 42, 103, 213, 214,
260, 368, 399, 402, 403.

Cause, Efficient, 40, 42, 50, 60, 401 ;
Final, 40, 50, 51, 60, 63, 64, 191,
200, 401, 408; First, 39, 41, 47,
51, 107, 275, 386, 425, 428;
Formal, 40, 50, 51, 401; Ma-
terial, 40, 42, 401 ; Confederate,
51 ; Secondary, 191 ; Four, of
Aristotle, 40, 50, 51, 401.

Cell, 78, 80, 116, 216, 418; Division,
78, 418, 419; Germ, 64, 87, 90,
96, 203, 419; Soma, 87.

Centralization, 269.

Century, Eighteenth, 2, 310, 311,
312; Nineteenth, 2, 7, 190, 208,
219, 305. 307. 311, 320, 329;
Twentieth, 3, 208, 372.

Chaldseans, 54, 252.

Chamberlain, Jacob, 120.

Chance, 57, 73, 92, 98, 310, 411,
420, 433 ; Free-will, another
name for, 338-42.

Chaos, Free-will is, 338-42, 345.

Character, loi, 108, 127, 131, 139,
140, 279, 282, 284, 293, 299, 308,
320, 342, 346, 347, 349, 350, 3S3,
385, 390; Divine, 100-48, 285,
314; Will, necessary expression
of, 345-55-

Characteristics, Acquired, 86-8,
95, 352, 411, 412, 420; Specific,
87. 88, 415.

Charles, Robert Henry, 478.

Chemistry, 218, 230-44, 416.
Cheyne, T. K., 257.
Child (ren), 48, 112, 122, 183, 259,
260; Of criminals, 354; Ques-
tions of, 40.
Chillingworth, William, 6.
Choice, 67, 272-4, 277, 334, 346, 350.
Christ, 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 122, 123,
158, 160, 168, 172, 173, 175, 188,
193, 287, 302, 303, 310, 311, 321,
323, 324, 328, 368, 405, 432, 444,
447, 448, 450; Ascension, 448;
Crucifixion, 123, 148; Geth-
semane, 123 ; Incarnation, 328,
444; Kenosis, 447; Messiah, 287;
Resurrection, 287, 444, 448, 449,
451 ; Virgin Birth, 445.
Christian Science, 193, 441-3.
Christianity, xv, i, 2, 7, 8, 9, 99,
102, 147, 152, 153, 164, 173, 176,
183, 262, 299, 306, 308, 311, 312,
315, 318, 327, 329, 347, 356, 378,
389, 411, 442, 443, 450, 451.
Christlieb, Theodore, 477.
Chrysostom, 135.

Church, I, 5, 121, 176, 448; Greek
or Eastern, 153 ; Fathers, 3, 135,
188, 432.
Cicero, 53, 59, 273, 274, 310.
Civilization, 353, 372.
Clarke, Samuel, 428, 430.
Clement of Rome, 54.
Clifford, W. K., 225, 364, 448, 477.
Clodd, Edward, 24, 286.
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 172, 315-9,

330.
Cobbe, Frances Power, 369, 435,

437-
Coleridge, Hartley, 125, 312.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 7, 8, 11,

165, 190, 442.
Collier, James, 471.
Communion, 18, 19, 24, 33, 124,
390; With God implies immor-
tality, 302-4.
Comte, Auguste, 23, 25, 26, 43, 45,

381, 382, 471.
Confucius, 30.

Conscience, 16, 70, 104, 126-48, 169,
191, 267, 280, 308, 349, 359, 360-4,
369, 370-3, 400, 437, 439, 457;
Affirmation of, 277-80; Bad or
Evil, 137 ; Denials of, 360-74 ;
Good, 137; Tribunal of, 426;
Witness of, 126-48, 246, 284-304.

484

Index

Consciousness, 48, 100, 104, 108,
204, 212, 222-8, 264, 266, 270, 276,
284, 295, 333-6, 344, 346, 357,

365, 374, 2,77, 378, 383, 385, 386,
430 ; Affirmation of, 276, 277 ;
Ethical or moral, 284-92, 258,

366, 387; Of self, see Self-Con-
sciousness; Primitive (Cope),
96; States of, 268, 271, 453;
Will, Aspects of, 273-6.

Conservation of energy, 47, 340,

403, 455-
Constant, Benjamin, 19.
Conversion, 349.
Cooke, 476.
Cope, E. D., 86, 88, 95, 96, 355,

366, 415, 476.
Corpuscles, 230-44.
Correns, C, 89.
Cosmism, 107.
Cosmos, see Universe.
Courbet, 341.
Cousin, Victor, 38.
Covi^per, William, 190, 310, 311.
Cox, S., 451.
Craig, J. A., 248.
Creation, 309, 406, 427.
Creator (God), 192, 205, 244, 302,

378, 406, 407, 465.
Creighton, J. E., 43.
Crookes, Sir William, 203, 234,

239.
Crystallization, 58, 78, 79, 220.
Cudworth, Ralph, 6, 174.
Cuenot, L., 89.
Curie, Pierre, 231.
Curie, Mme., 231, 232.
Custom (s), 19, 26, 133, 247, 353,

402; Fixed, 41.
Cyril of Jerusalem, 431.

Dale, R. W., 475.

Dall, William H., 86.

D'Alviella, Goblet, Count, 20.

Dana, James Dwight, 65, 74, 77.

Dante, 109, 307.

Darwin, Charles, 21, 47, 66, 67, 74,
75, 85, 86, 91, 95, 147, 155, 197,
361, 364, 369, 380, 409, 415, 457,
476.

Darwin, Francis, 65, 400, 411, 413,

414..
Darwin, George, 86.
Darwinism, 64-8, 72,, 7S, 84, 86, 93,

97, 409-17, 419-21.

Davidson, William L., 476.
Davis, Noah K., 136.
Dawson, Sir John William, 86.
Death, 20, 144, 148, 293, 296, 297,

301, 304, 308, 310, 320, 323, 325,

330, 455-
De Bary, Henrich Anton, 219.
Debierne, A., 231, 232.
Decision, 275, 333.
Degeneration of races, 27.
Deism, 7, 65, 188, 191, 404, 411, 437.
Deity, 100, 143, 356.
Delage, M. Yves, 86.
De la Saussaye, P. D. Chantapie,

19.
Delboeuf, J., 273.
Deliberation, 273, 274, 333, 336,

340.
Demeter and Dionysius, Worship

of, 288.
Democritus, 212.
Dennert, E., 417.
De Pressense, Edmund, 478.
Design, see Teleology.
Desire, 271. 343, 345, 349.
Descartes, Rene, 64, 170, 179, 226,

393, 407-9, 429, 430, 446.
Determinism, 272, 279, 280, 340-6,

439; Hard, 332; Idealistic, 346;

Scientific, 347 ; Soft, 342.
Devolution, no.

De Vries, Hugo, 76, 85, 89, 94, 95.
Dirnan, J. L., 475.
Divine Immanence, 57, 59, 64, 99,

113, 117, 119, 139, 153, 159, 173,

178, 188-95, 210, 311, 313, 425,

449. 477-
Divinity, 16, 129, 159.
Dorner, I. A., 477.
Doubt and Doubters, xv, 7, 9, 10,

II, 172. 307, 315-9, 320, 322, 326,

330, 380, 428, 438.
Dreams, 28-31.
Driesch, Hans, 97, 206, 208, 219,

476, 477-
Drummond, Henry, 72, 366, 476.
Dryden, John, 312.
Dualism, 229, 230, 244, 261, 358.
Du Bois-Reymond, Emil, 79, 170,

208, 210. 266, 271, 457.
Duncan, R. K., 235, 236, 241-3,

478.
During, Eugen, 229.
Duty, see Moral Obligation.
Dymond, Jonathan, 471.

Index

485

Earth, see World.
Ebrard, J. H. A., 447.
Eddy, Mary Baker, 441-3.
Edgar, Robert MacCheyne, 476.
Education, Modern, 197, 354, 372.
Edwards, Jonathan,^ 274, 336, 343,

344-
Ego, see Personality of ^lan.
Egyptians, 249, 252, 253.
Eimer, G. H. Theodore, 86, 88, 94,

95, 421.
Eleatic school, 181.
Electricity, 223, 230-44.
Electro-tonic theory of matter,

xxi, 230-44.
Eliot, George, 289.
Elizabethan period, 6, 307, 309.
Ellis, A. B., 252.

Embryology, 71, 72, 78, 82, 83, 87.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 284, 330.
Emery, 86.

Emotion, 13, 323, 435.
Empiricism, 103, 209, 264, 33s, 356,

453-

Energy, 40, 41, 52, 102, 108, 117,
211-13, 224, 230-44, 270, 335, 336,
341, 342, 402, 449 ; Conservation
of, 47, 340, 403, 455 ; Infinite and
Eternal, 106, 184, 205, 213, 383-7;
Interatomic, 241 ; Spiritual, 263.

Environment, 77, 79, 80-4, 87, 91,
94, 95, 118, 135, 217, 337, 338, 353 ;
Human, 70, 262, 279, 353, 354,
363, 449, 453; Inner, 349, 352,
362; Outer or Material, 70, 221,
363, 414, 454; Spiritual, 33, 34,
108, 167, 194, 222, 284, 370, 453.

Epicurus, 142, 212.

Epigenesis, 424.

Erdmann, Johann Edward, 44, 171.

477-

Eternal and Eternity, 40, 161, 167-
77, 198, 314. 388.

Ether, 63, 200. 204, 232, 244.

Ethics, xvi, 6, 131, 169, 171, 175,
208, 228, 249, 272, 285, 328, 342,
352, 360-74, 400; Evolutional or
Naturalistic. 246, 351, 360-74; Of
Evolution, 362; Of Pantheism,
180, 187, 439; Social or Utili-
tarian, 246, 345, 360.

Eucken, Rudolph, xx, 206, 209,

273, 475-
Euthydemus, 53.
Evangelical Revival, 7, 312,

Evil, see Sin.

Evolution, xxi, 35, 56, 64, 65, 69-
99, no, III, 130, 155, 182, 201,
214, 278, 352, 360, 362, 409-17;
Cyclical law, 74; Inorganic, 56,
69, 70, 213; Of Ethics, 362, 363;
Of the Absolute, see Absolute;
Organic, 56, 62, 67, 69-99, 207;
Psychical, 227, 425, 457; Salta-
tory, 84; Social, 140; Theistic,

77, 415- .
Evolutionists, American, 78, 80;
Continental, 77, 417; English,

417. .

Execution, see Action.

Existence, 39, 67, 174, 262, 263, 381,
394, 399, 428, 435 ; Of God, 127,
406-7; Struggle for, 146, 156,
366, 368, 411, 412.

Experience, 32, 201, 276, 282, 298,
299, 333, 336, 364, 385, 394, 396,
430, 432 ; Moral, 277 ; Sense, 302,
361, 394, 396, 402, 450; Social,
262, 284.

Externalization, 270.

Eye, Example of design, 61, 63.

Ezekiel, 427.

Fairbairn, Andrew Martin, 290,

475-
Faith, XV, 7, 9, 11, 16, 18, 124, 153,
154, 159, 164, 169, 170, 172, 174,
176, 285, 302, 305-7, 310, 315, 317,
320, 322, 323, 326, 329, 358, 370,

386, 387, 401, 427, 436, 449, 451,
457; Cure, 124, 443; Intuitive, 37,
38, 167, 173; Scientific, 39, 334.

Fallacy, Of the Imperceptible, 413;

Whole equal to sum of parts,

200.
Faraday, Michael, 197, 242.
Fatalism, 187, 226, 281, 344, 346,

351, 354, 356, 450.
Fear, 24, 25, 146, 160, 322 ; Religion

the product of, 24, 25, 160.
Fechner, Gustav Theodor, 226.
Feeling, 13, 126, 176, 264, 276, 306,

323.
Felix, Minucius, 188.
Fenelon, Frangois, 432.
Ferrier, J. F., 10.
Fetishism, 25-8.
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 183.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 140, 357,

387, 439, 442.

486

Index

Fischer, Kuno, 127, 169. 273, 477.

Fiske, John, 34, 35, 66, 99, 107, no,
224, 252, 291, 338, 343, 366, 381,
425, 458, 478.

Fishes, 74, 82, 83, 91, I45-

Flint, Robert, 38, 138, 143, 475-78.

Fonsegrive, 273.

Force, 41, 42, 45, 100, 106-8, 112,
119, 211-14, 230-44, 335, 341, 342,
385, 399, 400, 402, 450; Corre-
lation of, 92; Immanent forma-
tive, 56, 60, 62, 64, 77-80, 83,
92, 95, 96, 99, 102, 217, 363, 411,
414, 415, 430; Persistence of, 47;
Physical, 100, 102, 104, 108, 115,
118, 137, 180, 223, 362, 385;
Spiritual, 47, 104; Transforma-
tion of physical, into thought,
223-25.

Form, 52, 401.

Fosdick, H. R, 476.

Fossils, 73-6, 83, 85.

Fraser, Alexander Campbell, 59,

451, 475, 477-

Freedom, Volition, 100, 104, ili-
29, 141, 169, 185, 193, 208, 246,
272-83, 300, 322, 340, 343, 352,
353, 355, 365, 366, 371, 385, 389,
404, 425, 438, 450; Aspects of,
273-6; Denials of, 186, 273, 280,
332-59 ; Grounds of belief in,
276-83 ; Unthinkable and un-
provable, 332.

Fullerton, George Stuart, 476.

Galileo, 405.

Gallov^^ay, George, 475.

Galton, Francis, 86, 88, 89.

Galton, J., 369.

Gassendi, 409.

Gattungsidee, 424.

Gaunillo, 429.

Geddes, Patrick, and Thomson, J.

Arthur, 71, 82, 416, 476.
Gellius, Aulus, 118.
General Consent, Argument from,

18.
Geology, 74, 75.

Germ-plasm, Continuity of, 87, 96.
Gesenius, 256.
Ghost (s) and ghost theory of

origin of religion, 27-31, 471.
Gibbon, Edward, 198.
Gibson, Boyce, 273.
Gibson, W. R., 209.

Gilbert, Levi, 478.

Gillespie, William H., 428, 429,

477-

Gnosticism, Manichsean, 142, 441 ;
Spencer's, 385.

God, 16, 17, 18, 34, 36, 38, 54, 65,
98, 99, 100, 103, 112, 121, 131,
142, 157, 167-77, 184, 187, 18&-
95, 207, 213, 228, 229, 244, 300,
302, 315, 324, 371, 376, 381, 387,
426, 428-39; Denials of, 178-94;
Idea of, see Idea ; Kingdom of,
II, 124, 256, 291; Image of, in
man, see Image; Personality of,
see Personality.

Gods, 29, 30.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7,
165, 172, 198, 211, 266, 271, 296,
297, 312, 427, 430, 437, 439.

Goette, A., 95.

Goodness, 115, 131, 141, 154, 281,
287, 291, 294, 301, 302, 307, 366,
386, 389; Divine, 138, 141-49, I53,
356, 379, 434, 436, 437-

Gordon, E. O., 250.

Gore, Charles, Bishop, 147, 475.

Gospel, 7, 176, 287, 311, 379, 448.

Gould, A. A., 156.

Graham, William, 334.

Grandeur, 160.

Gratry, A., 261, 475.

Gravity, 140, 212, 284.

Gray, Asa, 65, 66, 77, 411, 412.

Gray, Thomas, 2, 310.

Greek(s), 152, 163, 37i ; Art, 153,
163 ; Immortality, 252, 254, 256,
306; Literature, 30, 153, 306, 307;
Philosophy, 3, 152, 371, 431; Re-
ligion, 249, 286-9.

Green, T. H., 279, 346, 347, 434,
478.

Gregory, of Nazianzus, 135 ; of
Nyssa, 188 ; the Great, 432.

Grenfell, Wilfred, 120.

Grote, 360.

Grove, W. R., 49.

Growth, 78, 218, 411.

Guilt, 165, 277, 309.

Guyau, Jean Marie, T)?^-

Gwatkin, H. M., 475.

Haacke, W., 88. 95.

Habit (s), 88, 346, 348, 349, 362,

421-5. 464; Of Divine action, see

Laws of Nature.

Index

487

Hades, 254, 256, 307.

Haeckel, Ernst, 113, 207, 208, 211,

2-25, 366, 389.
Haldane, John Scott, 215, 399, 475.
Hallam, Arthur Henry, 320, 322.
Halleur, 26.
Hamann, O., 95.
Hamilton, Sir WilHam, loi, 273,

377, 381-3.
Happiness, Joy, 127, 157, 301, 322,

367, 368.
Hare, J., 299.

Harmony, Pre-established, 446.
Harris, Samuel, 434, 475, 477, 478.
Harrison, A. J., 475.
Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard

von, 107, 108, 165, 206, 421-25.
Harvey, William, 409.
Hauptmann, Karl, 215.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 455.
Healing, natural power of, 79,

218.
Hearne, Samuel, 414.
Heart, see Affections ; Witness of

the, 305-31-
Heaven, 307 ; Conceptions of, 294 ;

State worship of, in China, 30.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,

169, 179, 181, 185-7, 191, 205, 346,

357,. 376, 399, 434, 477-
Hegelianism, 106, 181-3, 263, 356,

357-
Heine, Heinrich, 186.
Heine, Karl, 206.
Helmholtz, Hermann, 63, 197, 213,

432.
Henderson, Lawrence J., 475.
Heraclitus, 396, 431.
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 7,

70, 190, 312. 439.
Heredity, 86, 89, 118, 217, 218, 342,

365, 412 ; Determines character,

350-5.
Hering, E., 267.
Herschel, William, 70.
Hertwig, Oscar, 95, 206, 208, 216.
Hertwig, R., 95.
Hesiod, 286, 431.
Heterogeneity and Homogeneity,

213, 362.
Heterogenesis, 86, 95.
Hicks, L. E., 408, 476.
Hilary of Poitiers, 54.
Hill, Thomas, 405.
History, 182, 286, 340, 353, 358,

368, 369, 381 ; Witness of, 18-36,
167.

Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 24.

Hodgson, Richard, 226, 364.

Hoffding, Harold, 206, 224, 226,
269, 276, 279, 306, 335, 346, 477.

Hofmeister, W. F. B., 219.

Holiness, 132, 435.

Holland, H. Scott, 475.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 330.

Homer, 30, 34, 173, 254, 255, 286,
307.

Hooker, Richard, 6, 435, 448.

Hope, 306, 307, 310, 315, 318, 324,
330, 355, 386, 434.

Hottentots, 27.

Howitt, William, 134.

Humanity, see JNIan ; Ideal, 447-9.

Hume, David, 23, 24, 275, 330, 335,
400, 435, 445, 446, 453, 471 ; De-
nial of Causality, 40-4; Incon-
sistency of, 402.

Hunt, John, 477.

Huxley, Thomas Henry, 39, 56, 65,
73, 80, 81, 86, 129, 144, 186, 219,
272, 321, 364, 367, 400, 411, 445,
446, 478.

Hyatt, Alpheus, 86, 88, 95.

Hypnotism, 146.

Hypothesis (es), 37, 196, 199, 394.

Idea(s), 107, 220, 389, 406, 434,
453; Of God, 3, 13, 16, 27, 31,
33, 37, 247, 303. 370, 428; De-
nials of, 108, 178-95, 207-29,
321 ; Regulative, 376, 377 ; Spirit-
ual Idea of Man, 3, 13, 16, 124,
126, 167, 169, 246, 272, 300, 303,
305, 313, 323. 328, 337, 455, 456;
Denials of, 193, 207, 321, 332-90.

Idealism, xx, 178, 187, 208, 229,
260, 278, 347, 398, 399, 434, 442;
Objective. 59; Pantheistic, 178,
441 ; Subjective, 442.

Idealists, Personal, 187, 271.

Ideal, Moral, 313, 438.

Identity, Personal, 105, 246, 248,
263-72, 412, 452; Inorganic, 452;
Vital or Organic, 452.

Ideo-plasm, 96.

Illingworth, John Richardson, 114,
133, 154, 247, 273, 349, 434, 475-7.

Image of God in Man, 33, 168, 175,
315, 371, 430.

Imagination, 147, 284, 294, 427.

488

Index

Immanence, Divine, see Divine
Immanence.

Immortality, 19, 20, 123,. 127, 164,
185, 208, 229, 247-58, 284-304,
306, 32s, 328, 329, 389, 439; Cor-
porate, 256, 289-91 ; Hope of,
184, 292-304; Implied in com-
munion with God, 302-4; Per-
sonal, 258, 290-^ ; Pantheistic
denial of, 184-6, 440, 441.

Indians, American, 249, 256; Bodo,
251; Macusi, 251; Navajo, 251;
Nootka, 21 ; Osage. 21.

Individuality, 161, 185, 220, 270,
338, 348, 355.

Inertia, 212, 243.

Infinite (ty), 64, 106, 107, 161, 167-
77, 198, 295, 313, 358, 377, 379,
381, 428, 433-

Inge, W. R., 477.

Insects, 91, 95, 145, 419-25-

Inspiration, 173, 305, 371, 455.

Instinct, 70, 99, 112, 211, 275, 362,
364, 370, 419-25 ; Darwin's view
of, 419-21 ; Definition of, 419,
424; Inherited habit, 88, 365, 417,
421-4; Migratory, 423; Reli-
gious, 18, 34, 118; Social, 361,
371 ; Theistic conception of, 424,

425-

Intellect, see Mind ; Speculative,
358; Witness of the, 37-149.

Intellectualism, 171, 174, 276, 428.

Intelligence, 129, 131.

Intuition (s), 13, 16, 29, 37, 168,
173, 271, 284, 306, 393-401, 429,
439; Classes of, 396-401 ; Defini-
tion of, 393 ; Empirical, 393 ;
Ethical, 135, 361, 363, 364, 372,
400; Logical, of relations be-
tween things, 397-9, 400; Marks
of, 395, 396; Of causality, 39; Of
God, 22, 247 ; Personal, of Rela-
tions between persons, 399-401 ;
Ontological, of Being, 167, 247,
396, 397 ; Pure, 393, 394.

Ionization, 230-44.

Iphigenia, 437.

Irenaeus, 173.

Isaiah, 427.

Isolation, Geographical, 95.

Israel, see Jews.

Iverach, James, 478.

Jacobi, 170.

Jalalu'd-Din Rumi, 440.

James, William, 44, 45, 100, 169,

171, 201, 205, 225, 227, 228, 259,

268, 271, 273, 276, 279, 282, 29s,

347, 387, 454, 477, 478.
Janet, Paul, 63, 476.
Japp, F. R., 221.
Jehovah, 253-6, 387.
Jeremiah, 257.
Jevons, F. B., 24, 475.
Jevons, W. S., 44.
Jews, 22, 23, 30, loi, 133, 135, 149,

188, 249, 252-8, 287, 290, 303, 387.
Job, 159, 160, 185, 257, 322.
John, St., 427, 444.
Jordan, David Starr, 198, 422.
Jowett, Benjamin, 316.
Judgment, 19, 277, 284, 288, 348,

434; Social, 277.
Justice, 132, 138, 258, 281, 287, 368,

437-

Kant, Immanuel, 9, 55, 58, 64, 69,
70, 109, III, 127, 128, 136, 137,
140, 149, 153, 161, 169, 174, 187,
273, 282, 289, 300, 364, 366, 369,
376, 377, 387, 393, 394, 396, 397,
399, 408, 424, 438, 439, 471, 476;
On the Tribunal of Conscience,
426 ; Statement of teleological
proof, 404.

Karma, 251.

Karslake, W. H., 476.

Kassowitz, M., 88, 95.

Kaufmann, W., 242.

Keats, John, 299. 312.

Keller, Helen, 467-9.

Kellogg, V. L., 95, 97, 416, 476.

Kelvin, Lord (Sir William Thom-
son), 47, 67, 94, 170, 197, 215.

Kennedy, J. H., 476.

Kepler, Johann, 405.

Khonds, 21.

Kidd, Benjamin, 139.

Kingsley, Mary H., 21, 26.

Kirkpatrick, Alexander Francis,

^255.

Kismet, 124.

Knight, W. A., 479.

Knowledge, 13, 41, loi, 116, 123,
127, 136. 176, 298, 356, 377. 385,
394, 396, 432. 433, 436, 447 ; Rela-
tivity of, 375-80.

Kolliker, Rudolph Albert von, 77,
86, 417.

Index

489

Korschinsky, H., 86, 95.
Kiilpe, Oswald, 477.

Lactantius, 18.

Ladd, George Trumbull, 276, 478.

Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 87.

Lange, F. A., 226, 229, 365, 389.

Langley, S. P., 46.

Lanier, Sidney, 299, 329, 331.

Lankester, E. Ray, 66, 129.

Lares and Penates, 30, 249.

Larva (e), 81, 83.

Law(s), 46, 55, 57, 1 13-5, 209, 271 ;
"The," 5, 16, 137, 160, 308, 371,
435 ; Mechanical, 208, 212, ^33,
341; Moral, 21, 126-9, 137. 139,
140, 161, 284, 288, 300, 378, 400;
Mosaic, 256, 444; Of Association
of Ideas, 364; Of Consciousness,
276; Of Causation, 39, loi, 332;
Of Excluded Middle, 108; Of
Identity of Opposites, 376; Of
Liberty, 282; Of Nature, 45, 46,
114-25. 402, 445, 449, 450, 451;
Of Relativity, 377, 383 ; Of Suffi-
cient Reason, 103, 104, 425 ; Of
Thought, 276, 393, 394, 400, 432 ;
Uniformity of, 47, 338.

Le Bon, Gustav, 199.

Lecky, William Edward Hartpole,
360.

Le Conte, Joseph, 74, 75, 78, 86,
no, 144, 458, 476.

Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 40,
67, 103, 180, 181, 435, 446.

Lessing, G. E., 7, 312, 439.

Lewes, G. H., 421.

Liddon, Henry Parry, 10, 315.

Life, S7, 84, 97, 102, no, 190, 201,
212, 214-22, 284, 292, 295, 305,
306, 308, 323, 325, 341, 386, 394,
399, 451, 452; Ethical, 38, 48,
127, 272, 282, 303, 307, 322, 347,
358, 362, 365, 434; Human, 38,
282, 295, 299, 303, 307, 308, 366,
400; Incompleteness of, 294-302;
Properties of, 217-9; Spiritual,
38, 303. 307, 358; Spiritual ex-
planation of, XX, 190, 205.

Light, Radiation, 243 ; Velocity of,
42.

Lilly, 477, 478.

Literature, 169, 176, 270, 317, 330,
351.

Littre, Emil, 366.

Livingstone, David, 146.

Locke, John, 6, 39, loi, 132, 309,

337, 343, 344. 397, 4o6, 407, 434,

453.
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 103, 117, 208,

221, 238, 242, 273, 341, 435, 478.
Logic, 12, 109, 113, 171, 176, 196,

271, 386, 395, 396, 400, 432.
Logos, 173, 181, 184, 262, 314, 396,

430, 431, 433, 457, 460.
Longfellow, H. W., 331.
Lotze, Hermann, 169, 171, 272, 273,

295, 394, 396, 433, 475-8.
Love, 116, 118, 122, 124, 131, 141,

147, 153, 176, 194, 274, 291, 301,

302, 306, 320-9, 330, 368, 371,

434, 436, 443, 445.
Lowell, J. R., 330.
Lubbock, Sir John, 24, 147.
Lucretius, 23, 24, 57.
Ludwig, Fr., 206.
Luther, Martin, 5, 189.
Lyell, Sir Charles, yy, 369, 411, 414.

Mach, Ernst, 200, 206.

Machine, analogy of, 56, 116, 118,

163, 195, 197, 228, 267, 276, 330,

351, 446, 454-
Mackenzie, W. D., 475.
Magic, Necromancy, Sorcery, 24,

253-

Maher, Michael, 273.

Mahomet, 446.

Malebranche, Nicholas, 432.

Malthus, Thomas R., 409, 412.

Mammal (s), 74-6, 83.

Man, Mankind, Humanity, 16, 18,
19, 35, 46, 49, 100-48, 153, 155,
161, 164, 169, 188, 197, 207, 246,
247, 262, 267, 276, 278, 280, 282,
29s, 301, 303, 305, 306, 315, 317,
318, 321, 322, 325, 327, 352, 359,
363, 368, 373, 384, 400, 431, 439,
447 ; Evolution of, 69, 70, 74-6,
99. no, 203, 457; Prehistoric, 73,
248; Primitive, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32,
33, 157, 247. 361, 369.

Mansel, Henry Longueville, 105,
378, 381, 382, 471.

Mantegazza, Paolo, 226.

Marilaun, Kerner von, 221.

Marshall, Milnes, 81, 85, 86.

Marshall, H. R., 171.

490

Index

Martineau, James, i8, 49, 139, 153,
174, 273, 292, 345, 389, 475-8.

Materialism, xx, 3, 6, 7, 37, 113,
170, 207-29, 307, 36s, 389, 411,
443 ; Crude, 223.

Mathematics, 41, 198, 295, 393, 400,
432.

Matheson, George, 2, 434, 476.

Matter, 55, 59, 102, log, 112,
126, 140, 157, 179, 190, 192, 196,
199, 21 1-4, 222, 262, 332, 335, 341,
342, 374, 399, 406, 430 ; Decompo-
sition or Disintegration of, 234,
235; New theory of (Electro-
tonic), 230-44; Ultimate par-
ticles of, 238; V'ortex theory of,
213, 409.

Maurice, F. D., 7, 316, 320, 475.

Mayer, J. R., 239.

Maxwell, James Clerk, 197, 448.

Medicine, 226; Ethics of, 133.

Meckel, John Frederick, 81.

Meditation, 314, 315.

Memory, 105, 180, 268-70, 284, 294,
295, 454 ; J. S. Mill on the, 268.

Mendel, Gregor Johann, 89.

Mendeleeff's law, see Atoms.

Mendelism, 88, 89, 90.

Merz, J. T., 200, 269.

Metamorphosis, 81, 421.

Middle Ages, 307.

Mill, John Stuart, 22, 42, 43, 60-2,
104, 142, 144, 268, 335, 344, 360,
363, 364, 368, 379, 382, 42s, 435.
445, 446, 454, 455, 471.

Miller, Hugh, 157.

Milton, John, 309, 310, 330.

Mind, 13, 41, 46, 49, 50-68, loi, 105,
106, 109, 115, 117, 143, 149, 152,
169, 179, 201, 210, 222-8, 244, 262,
281, 292, 321, 323, 341, 343, 346,
357, 370, 380, 381, 430, 457, 459-
70 ; Difference from body, 246,
259-62, 270, 296.

Minot, Charles Sedgwick, 260.

Miracle(s), 3, 7, 8, 32, 119, 123,
195, 340, 378, 402, 442, 444; ^
priori Argument for, 119, 443-
51; Deistic view of, 446, 447;
Ideal human view, 447-9; Scien-
tific denial of, 445, 446 ; Theistic
view of, 449-51.

Missionaries, 2, 19, 21.

Mitchell, S. Weir, 201.

Mivart, St. George, 77, 406, 476.

Modality, 399.

Modifications, Definite, 75-7 ; Im-
perceptible, 75, 76, 365-70;
Nerve, 363, 364, 368.

Molecules, 230-44.

Mollusks, 74.

Momerie, A. W., 478.

Monism, 178, 194, 207, 208, 225,
262, 332, 339, 389.

Monotheism, 22, 25, 26.

Montaigne, Michel de, 132.

Moody, Dwight L., 121.

Moore, Aubry, 475.

Morality, 21, 22, 104, 130, 134, 138,
153, 171, 229, 273, 357, 366, 372,
379, 400, 434, 438, 457 ; Race, 286 ;
Standards of, 132, 133, 186, 204,
285 ; Universal code of, 133, 433.

Moral Obligation, 19, 21, 100, 113,
126, 129, 131, 135, 136, 140, 163,
175, 185, 194, 245, 277, 284-92,
300, 308, 313, 345, 348, 357, 361-
70, 374, 399, 400, 435, 438, 455,
457; Opinion, Development of,
135; Order, 55, 126, 135, 141,
288, 295, 308, 387, 388, 449;
Sense, 169, 197, 357, 361.

More, Henry, 6, 174, 312.

Morgan, C. Lloyd, 86, 457.

Morphology, Comparative, 71-3.

Morris, George Sylvester, 477.

Moses, 253, 255, 298, 303, 444.

Motion, 212, 342; Modes of, 44;
Nerve, 200, 207, 223-5, 270, 365.

Motive (s), 274, 278, 285, 336, 337,
343, 346, 348 ; Strongest, deter-
mines will, 274, 342-5, 348.

Mozley, James Bowling, 451.

Miiller, Max, 19, 22, 26, 27, 118,

433, 456, 475-
Miinsterberg, Hugo, 364, 478.
Mutations, 76, 84, 85, 8g, 91, 93.
Mystery, 11, 45, 105, 106, 139, 196,

244, 31.5, 337, 382, 389. 455;

Eleusinian, 288.
Mysticism, 7, 432; Sufi mystic, 186.
Mythology, 114, 118, 249: Greek

and Roman, 255 ; Scandinavian,

249, 250.

Nageli, 77, 94-6, 4i7-
Napoleon Bonaparte, 290, 312.
Naturalism, 112, 178, 196, 207-29,

455.

Index

491

Nature, 35, 36, 38, 46, 57, 61, 65,
100, 112, 117, 129, 130, 143, 149-
67, 188-95, 199, 209, 296, 313, 314,
333. 338, 340, 367, 368, 370,
402, 406, 412, 445-9, 465 ; Esthe-
tic, 164; Human, see Alan; Sym-
bols for, 54, 129; Worship of,
25-8, 129-31, 165, 247.

Necessity, in, 113, 186, 281, 22>^,
.337, 344,. 395, 399-

Neo-Darwinism, 88.

Neo-Hegelianism, 187, 273, 347,
432.

Neo-Lamarckianism, 87, 88, 365.

Neo-Platonism, 432.

Neo- Vitalism, 219, 452.

Nescience, 246, 375-80.

Neumeister, 219.

Newman, John Henry, 316, 446.

New Testament, 116, 182, 430, 442,
443, 447, 448, 457.

Newton, Sir Isaac, 198.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 229.

Niewenglowski, 231.

Nirvana, 39, 186, 251.

Noels, 273.

Nous, 55, 173, 455.

Number in Nature, 58.

Old Testament, 2iZ, 116, 152, 329.

Omar Khayyam, no.

Omnipotence, 124, 142, 302, 355,
356.

Omnipresence, 255, 355, 384.

Omniscience, 125, 355, 356.

Ontogeny, 81, 96.

Ontology, 167-77, 188, 372, 396,
428-39; Ethical, 148, 175, 434-9;
Denial of, 375-90; Proper, 174,
428-30; Rational, 175, 430-4.

Optimism, 280.

Organism, 78, 79, 80-8, 92, 94, 116,
201, 216, 218, 266, 454.

Organogenesis, 83.

Origen, lor, 173, 400.

Origin, Of Religion, Atheistic
theories of, 23-31, 247; Theistic
theories of, 31-35; Of Species,
77, 78. 85, 89, 415, 416: Muta-
tional theory of, 84, 85, 89, 91-3.

Orr, James. 475.

Orthogenesis, 84, 94-6.

Orthoselection, 94.

Osborn, H. F., 88, 95.

Osier, William, 293.

Ostwald, Wilhelm, 170, 205.
Otto, Rudolph, 84, 85. 97, 98, 210,

458, 476, 477-
Owen, Sir Richard, 71, yj, 78.

Packard, A. S., 88.

Pain, 122, 141-8, 185, 322.

Paleontology, 71, 73-6.

Paley, William, 6, 8, 60, 65, 289.

Pan-psychism, 225.

Pantheism, 22, 106, 108, 113, 178-

87, 191, 2n, 250, 355, 440, 441,

477 ; Difficulties of, 183-7.
Parables, 189.
Parallelism, Psychological, 180,

225-8, 365.
Parthenogenesis, 445.
Pascal, Blaise, no, 132, 162, 173,

301, 380, 395, 432, 435.
Pasha, Rustem, 146.
Pasteur, Louis, 79, 448.
Patroclus, Achilles' dream of, 30,

255.

Paul, St., 9, 13, 16, 100, 102, 121,
^2)3, 158, 164, 188, 282, 285, 291,
299, 379, 456.

Paulsen, Friedrich, 226, 346, 477.

Peace, 125, 163, 296, 313.

Pearson, John, Bishop, 6, 7.

Pearson, Karl, 46, 86, 88, 170, 206.

Peirce, Benjamin, 405.

Perfection, 167-77, 301, 380, 383,
386, 389, 434-9, 447.

Person, Definition of, 246, 266, 348,
383, 399, 401.

Personality, 6, 20, 2,2), 100, 108, 109,
126, 128, 137, 140, 141, 153, 171,
183, 194, 229, 246, 261, 262, 264,
268, 271, 299, 313, 371, 385; Of
God, 13, 16, 38, 100-48, 152, 178,
184-6, 208, 313, 314, 380. 382, 389,
444; Of Man, 13, 16, 28, 70, 100-
48, 161, 162, 184-6, 192, 196, 208,
246-304, 329, 336-8, 343, 344, 347,
348, 354, 355, 358, 362, 382, 453,
455-70 ; Relation of scientific
theories to, 283, 453, 454-8.

Peruvians, 249.

Pessimism, 147, 165, 229, 280, 351.

Peter, St., 13, 447.

Pfleiderer, Otto, 432.

Philo, 172, 173.

Philosophy, 3, 7, 18, 51, 108, 109,
n4, 169, 178-94, 208, 248, 251,
272, 292, 293, 305, 396, 398, 433,

492

Index

449, 477 ; Empirical, see Empiric-
ism ; Hindu, i86; Idealistic, see
Idealism.

Phylogeny, 8i.

Physics, 94, 197, 218, 230-44, 292,

341-
Pindar, 288.

Plants, 217, 413, 455, 458.
Plato, 3, 31, 53, 109, 173, 286, 288,

371, 386, 396, 405, 435.
Platonists, the Cambridge, 6, 174,

312, 434-
Plutarch, 118, 289.
Pluto, 25s.

Poetry, 305, 306, 315; Elegiac, 330.
Poet(s), 129, 147, 164-6, 282, 286,

305-31, 432, 436; Lake, 7, 154,

312, 314-
Poincare, 206.
Pollock, 477.
Polytheism, 22, 25, 114.

Pope, Alexander, 63, 186, 310-12.

Positivism, 25, 44-7, 114, 199, 291,
381. 387.

Possibility (ies), 339, 340, 349, 353,
387, 399-

Postulates, 13, 277, 393-401 ; Defi-
nition of, 394.

Power, 16, 20, 24, 48, loi, 106-8,
116, 126, 129, 130, 131, 135, 140,
159, 189, 194, 205, 222, 294, 303,

313, 336, 341, 371, 379, 381, 387,
436, 448, 470.

Poynting, John Henry, 334, 341.
Practical life. Affirmation of,

280-3.
Pragmatism, 114, 169.
Praise, see Worship.
Pratt, J. H., 34.
Prayer(s), 19, 20, 21, 117-25, 309,

375; Conditions of, 122-5; Cure.

124 ; Efficacy of, for temporal

good, 117-25; National, 121; the

Lord's, 27, 122-4.
Preaching, 2, 8, 10, 12, 438, 446,

448.
Predictability of human actions,

337, 338.
Prel, Karl, Freiherr von, 226.
Proof (s) of God, 8, 10, 36, 37-148,

167, 176, 444.
Prophecy and Prophets, 7, 13, 32,

53, loi, 122, 133, 149, 172, 187,

252, 257, 287, 305, 306, 319, 321,

330, 378, 427, 436.

Providence, il, 192; Special, 119.
Psalmist, 11, 18, 53, 149, 157, 257,

380, 427, 428.
Psyche, 254, 455.
Psychology, 28, in, 170, 176, 228,

249, 271, 276, 351, 369; Newer,

271 ; Physiological, 207, 264-70,

332, 333, 351, 364, 373-
Punnett, R. C, 89.
Puritans, 154, 164.
Pythagoras, 58.

Quantity and Quality, 200-3, 205,

224, 225, 399, 403.
Quartrefages, 133.
Quimby, Phineas, 443.
Quinet, E., 248.

Radio-activity, 212, 230-44.
Ramsay, Sir William, 233, 234, 236,

405.

Rashdall, H., 263, 273, 475.

Rational constitution of the Uni-
verse, 404-6.

Rationality, 394-6. 456, 457.

Rayleigh, John William, Lord, 233,

405.

Rays, Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta
and X-, 230-44.

Reality, 35, in, 170, 171, 173, 196,
201, 307, 320, 377, 383-9, 396, 399,
400, 430, 434, 438, 452.

Reason, 7, 13, 16, 52, 100, 156, 157,
173, 175. 180, 205, 262, 279, 285,
296, 306, 330, 333, 336, 338. 376,
393-6, 430-4, 457 ; Practical. 127,
149, 376, 438; Pure or Specula-
tive, 127, 149, 281, 433, 438.

Recapitulation theory, 81, 83.

Reformation, 5, 6, 189.

Reid, Thomas, 183, 471.

Reinke, Johannes, 95, 206, 219.

Reincarnation, 20.

Relations, Between animals, 361 ;
Between God and Man, 302, 313,
371 ; Between persons, 137, 262,
263, 285, 293, 362, 364, 370, 371,
396, 399-401 ; Between things,
382, 394, 397-9, 433. 452 ; Qualita-
tive, 399, 453; Quantitative, 202,

399, 453-
Religion, 3, 24, 36, 107, 118, 131,
168, 208, 246, 248, 262, 281, 300,
301, 305, 306, 384, 389. 396; Com-
parative, 18, 247; Defense of,

Index

493

see Apologetics; Definitions of,
i8; Primitive, ig, 49, loi, 134;
Origin of, see Origin; Univer-
sal, 19, 23, 25, 36.

Remorse, 165, 166, 277-9, 367, 369,

Renaissance, 189.

Renouvier, 273.

Renan, E., 22, 290, 301.

Repentance, 279, 349, 367.

Reproduction, 218, 411.

Reptiles (s), 73-6, 82, 83, 91, 95,
129.

Responsibility, see Moral Obliga-
tion.

Retribution, 252, 256, 287, 2S8, 370.

Revelation, 3, 13, 16, 31-3, 176, 287,
330, 378, 443-6, 450.

Reverence, 141, 160, 377, 426, 437.

Reville, A., 18, 19.

Riahle, 20.

Ribot, 265.

Richter, Jean Paul, 261.

Right, the, 176, 349, 358, 370, 374,
390, 433, 436.

Righteousness, 107, 141, 159, 164,
17s, 258, 284, 287, 301, 302, 321,
360, 369, 371, 386, 387, 390, 434-

Ritschl, Albrecht, 378.

Ritschlian theology, 30, 38, 438.

Ritter, Heinrich, 103.

Robertson, F. W., 7, 292.

Rogers, Arthur Kenyon, 477.

Romanes, G. J., 10, 22, 34, 47, 57,
65, 107, 142-4, 147, 227, 273, 384,
414.

Romans, 22, 118, 249.

Romanticists, 154.

Rose, John Holland, 291.

Rothe, Richard, 273, 274, 451,

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 129.

Roux, Wilhelm, 93.

Royce, Josiah, 185, 201, 226, 434,

471, 475, 477-
Ruskin, John, 306, 427.
Rutherford, E., 231, 232, 234.
Ryder, J. A., 88.

Sachs, Julius von, 219.
Sacrifice (s), 20, 21, 24, 30, 118, 148.
Saisset, Emile Edmond, 477.
Salmond, S. D. F., 478.
Sandeman, G., 219.
Sanderson, Burdon, 215.
Saul, 252, 254.
Savage (s), 251, 286,

Scepticism, xv, i, 2, 3, 10, 11, 38, 41,
176, 183, 307, 316, 357, 411, 438.

Schelling, 439.

Schiller, Johann C. Friedrich von,
7, 312.

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, D. E.,
176, 378, 440, 441, 447.

Schmidt, G. C, 231.

Schneider, Karl Camillo, 219.

Scholasticism, 6, 189, 435.

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 67, 107, 108,
165, 169, 424-

Schurman, Jacob Gould, 478.

Schwarz, Hermann, 274.

Science, xvi, 12, 45, 56, 58, 108, no,
117, 124, 131, 154, 162, 163, 170,
196-207, 209, 210, 216, 221, 270,
281, 293, 297, 314. 320, 321, 333,
339, 373, 384, 386, 393, 396, 399,
403, 408, 432, 448, 455-8; Author-
ity of, 199.

Scientific Method, 46, 170, 196-207 ;
Spirit, 6, 10, 117, 196-207, 317,
321.

Scott, 86.

Scripture, E. W., 365.

Scriptures, see Bible.

Secretan, Charles, 169, 273, 435.

Secularism, 131.

Selection, Natural, 65-7, 76, 79,
84-7, 93-5, 156, 411, 412, 416, 424;
Physiological, 95, 155.

Self, see Personality of Man ;
Consciousness, lOO-iii, 152, 212,
259-72, 357, 370, 426.

Semites, 22, 24, 30.

Seneca, 186, 310.

Sensation (s), 100, 105, 154, 333.

Sensationalism, 6.

Senses, 32, 345.

Sequence, 42, 44.

Sermon on the Mount, 188, 291.

Seth, James (Pringle-Pattison),
169, 171, 273, 357,.477-

Shakespeare, William, 109, 130,
131, 145, 273, 307, 327, 349, 460.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 165, 166,
312, 3"^ 3, 330.

Sheol, 254-8.

Sidgwick, H., 276, 280, 321, 471.

Signatures, Doctrine of, 104.

Sigwart, Christoph Wilhelm von,
43, 44, 113, 171, 214, 227, 271.

Sin, 4, 25, 32, 131, 137, 139, 142,
164, 165, 167, l8s, 193, 194. 249,

494

Index

256, 277, 278, 280, 287, 307, 327,

351. 352, 357. 371, 401, 448, 450.

Smith, John, 6, 174.

Smith, James Perrin, 95.

Smith, Robertson, 24, 134.

Smyth, Newman, 458, 476.

Society. 270, 276, 280, 285, 353, 374;
Primitive, 364.

Sociology, 176, 354.

Socrates, 53, 55, 59, 152, 405, 427.

Soddy, F., 234.

Solar System, 1^7, 373-

Solidarity. Human, 142, 351, 458.

Sophists of Greece, 375.

Sophocles, 288, 289.

Sorley, W. R., 478.

Soul, 3, 4, 34. 35, 53, loi, 118, 165,
173, 207, 211. 264, 267. 268, 272,
296-9. 308, 314, 345; 440. 448, 455 ;
Sources of the belief in, 259-83;
Universal belief in the, 246-58.

South, R., 353.

South Sea Islanders, 21, 133.

Space, 109, 169, 191, 215, 260, 295,
313. 379, 382, 393, 395, 397, 398,
436.

Spalding. 364.

Species. 77, 78, 83, 85, 88. 91. 93;
Origin of, see Origin of Species.

Speech. 70. 104, 108, 115, 212, 246,
270. 272, 344. 393. 433, 455-9. 470.

Spencer, Herbert, 22, 23, 27, 45, 47,
48. 55. 62, 79, 88, 92, 102, 105, 107,
108, 205, 207, 213. 214, 219, 264,
272, 333, 346, 361-5, 372, 381-7,
393, 397, 430. 451-3, 478; Meth-
ods of, 471 ; His theory of origin
of religion. 28-31.

Spinoza, Baruch. 64. 108, 113, 179.
185, 186, 228, 279, 356, 37';. 407-
9. 435, 439. 477-

Spinozism. 179-80, 356.

Spirit, 100, 106, 123, 162, 167-77,
181, 209, 281, 302, 304, 333, 352,
358, 455; Holy, 5, 7, 100, 117,
139, 167, 190, 222, 230. 314, 371.
390, 425. 433, 447, 448, 455; Of
Man, 28, 29, 153. 162, 164, 174.
205, 247-58, 261, 296, 348; Wit-
ness of the, 5. 149, 167-77.

Spiritualistic position in psychol-
ogy, 268.

SportCs), 85.

Sproat, 19.

St. Hilaire, Geoffroy, 87.

Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, Dean. 7.

Star(s), 109, 128, 161, 163, 189,
227, 237.

Statistics, S37, 338.

Statius, 24.

Stearns, L. F., 475.

Stephens, Leslie, 346.

Stern. 273.

Sterrett. J. M., 477-

Stigmatizatioii. 226.

.Stillingfleet, Edward, 6.

Stirling, J. H., 41.

Stirling, John, 299.

Stoicism, 194. 387, 439.

Stokes, Sir G. G., 62.

Stout. G. F., 204, 271, 276, 457. 475.

Strauss. David, 24, 182, 183, 229,
289, 389.

Strength, see Power.

Structures, Analogous and Homo-
logous. 71 ; Vestigial, 72.

Sturt, H., 263, 271, 273, 478.

Sublime. Witness of the, 149-66.

Sublimity, 149-66.

Substance, 179, 208, 271, 272, 398,
399. 406. 429.

Suffering, see Pain.

Sullivan, Miss (Mrs. Macy). 467-9.

Sully, J., 344.

SiiDimum Boiiion. 127.

Supernatural, 3, 210, 338, 361, 447,
450, 466.

Superstition, 33.

Survival of the fittest, 130. 367.

Swete, H. B., 475.

Symbol (s), 20, 21, 152.

Taine, H.. 226, 371.

Taylor, Jeremy. 6.

Teleology. 50^8, 76-8, 97-9, loi,
169. 295, 404, 407-9, 412, 438;
Moral, 438.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 2, 169,
190, 209, 300, 320-9, 330, 331, 374,
436.

Tertullian, 4. 55, 184. 189.

Theism. 13. 61. 64. 69, 77, 102, 108,
187, 228, 229, 230, 315, 384. 388,
437. 443, 449, 475: Ethical, T48,
169: Alethods of study, 17; Phi-
losophy of, XX.

Theology, xvi, 12, 13, 16, 108, 109,
112, 135, 198, 212, 316. 329. 438;
Christian. see Christianity;
Fundamental, xx, 13; Greek,

Index

495

153, 355; Natural, 6, 7. 38, 59,

100.
Theo-morphic, Man is, 34, 102.
Theophilanthropy, 290.
Theophilus, Bishop of Antioch, 3,

54.
Thesis. Antithesis, Synthesis, 182.
Thompson, Maurice, 147.
Thomson, J. A., see Geddes and

Thomson.
Thomson, James (1700-1748), 311 ;

(1834-1882), 351.
Thomson, J. J., 231, 235, 236, 239-

42, 478.
Thomson, W. Hanna, 228, 283, 459.
Thought, 40, 181, 184, 207, 222-8,

246, 264, 295, 298, 333, 351, 357.

386, 393. 394, 396. 400. 406, 430,

457; Greek, 152, 153; Mediaeval,

153 : Spiritual, 311.
Tierra del Fuegians, 21, 27.
Tiele, C. P., 19.
Time, 69, 109, 169, 186, 215, 260,

295, 307, 310, 313, 379, 382, 393-8,

436.
Tichener, E. B., 226, 364.
Tompkins, George, 442.
Tongans, 251.
Transcendence, Divine, 188, 191,

210.
Transformation, Genetic process

of, 75; Of energy, 342, 455.
Transmigration, 20, 250.
Transmutation of elements, 233,

237-
Trichotomy, 455-7.
Truth, 141, 175, 176, 199, 281, 305,

319. 333, 369, 374, 376, 379, 389,

436-
Tschermak, E., 89.
Tylor, E. B., 19, 471, 478.
Tyndall, John, 198, 219, 278, 435.

Uniformity of Nature, 114-25,

202, 449, 450.
Unity, t68, 229. 270, 399; Organic,

80; Philosophic. 176, 187, 230,

335-7; Psychological, 266, 269,

270, 271, 273.
Universality, 175, 395, 396; Of

causation, 335.
Universe, 39. 50-9, yy, 100, 109,

113, 116, 1T7, 152, 163, 171, 191,

204, 259, 262, 279, 281, 314, 365,

376, 387, 408, 432, 438; Rational
constitution of, 50-9, 404-6.

Unknowable, The, 107, 382-7.

Use, Extrinsic and Intrinsic, 62.

Utility, 154, 155, 303, 360, 363, 414.

Value, Ethical, 193, 204, 403 ; Men-
tal, 270.

Variation, 70, 78, 85, 88, 91-3, 352,
411, 412, 416, 417; Concomitant,
42, 92; Congenital, 352; Definite,
77, 78, 84, 94; Discontinuous, 84-
6, 91 ; Fluctuating, 84, 93 ; For-
tuitous, ys, 76, 78; Germinal, 87;
Kaleidoscopic, 84.

Vedas, 30, 250.

Venous system in man, 71.

Verworn, Max, 216.

Victorian Age. 311, 315, 427.

Villa, Guido, 276, 344, 403, 478.

Virchow, R., 170, 216, 221.

Virtue, 127, 286, 292, 301, 351, 366.

Vitalism, see also Neo-Vitalism,

97, 98-
Vogt, Carl, 207, 223.
Volition, see Freedom.
Voltaire, 2;^, 63.
Vortex theory, 213, 409.

Wace, Henry, 478.

Waggett, P. N., 475.

Waitz, Th., 19, 26, 27.

Wallace, Alfred R., 77, 99, no,

147, 156, 409, 457. 458, 476.
Wallace, William, 477.
Ward, James, 171, 228, 268, 271,

273, 475, 477. 478.
Ward, W. G., 316.
Washington, George, 109.
Watch, 65, 191, 201.
Watts, Isaac, 109.
Wel)b, Clement C. J., 475.
Weber, Alfred, 67, 477.
Welsh Triads, 249.
WcUgeist, t,(>7-
Weismann, A., 67, 86-8, 96, 352,

365, 420.
Wcscott, Brooke Foss, Bishop, 451.
Wesley, John, 312.
Westminster Confession, 5.
Wettstein, V., 95.
Whateley, Richard, Archbishop, 7.
Whewell, W.. 471.
Whichcote, Benjamin, 6, 170, 174,

312.

496

Index

White, Chas. A., 76.

Whitman, C. O., 80, 95.

Whittier, J. Greenleaf, 328, 331.

Whymper, Edward, 146.

Wiesner, Julius, 95.

Wigand, A., 417.

Will, 13, 41, 45, 47, 49. 52, 70, lOl,
102, 104, 107, 108, 1 1 1-29, 169,
176, 187, 192, 194, 211, 212, 222,
244, 246, 272-83, 306, 322, 323,
329, 336, 342, 347, 352, 36s, 385,
398, 449, 459-70; Consciousness,
Aspects of, 273-6; To be, 67,
169 ; To believe, 1 1 ; To the
good, 169.

Williams, C. M., 360, 361, 478.

Willich, Frau von, 440.

Willison, 95.

Wilson, E. B., 80, 216, 218, 219.

Windelband, W., 477.

Wisdom, 98, 116, 122-4, 159, 298,
302, 314, 404, 430, 431-

Wittmer, 226.

Wolff, C, 95, 219.

Woodbridge, T. E., 265.

Word(s), 107, 459-70; Of God, 5,
II, 32, 173, 311, 431.

Wordsworth, William, 131, 165,

190, 311-13- , ,, ,

World, Ethical, 35, 339; Mental,
294, 336; Unseen, 35, 77, 171,
323, 370, 396, 427, 451; Visible,
77, 99, 171, 259, 307, 336, 358,
404, 407, 433, 451.
Worship and Praise, 19, 20, 36,
124, 160, 162, 247, 304, 375, 384,
389; Ancestor, 28, 29, 30, 249;
Of Heaven, in China, 30.
Wundt, W., 44, 208, 226, 266, 270,
276, 336, 346, 364, 477-

Xenophanes, 102.

Yainavalkya, 440.
Yebus, 21.

Zeller, E., 27;^.
Zeitgeist, 181, 182, 450.
Zenghis Khan, 367.
Zeus, 255, 288.
Zoroastrianism, 249, 257.
Zulus, 134.
Zwingle, 189.

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