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GOD AND PERSONALITY
BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES
DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF
ABERDEEN IN THE YEARS 1918 & 1919
FIRST COURSE
BY
CLEMENT C. J. WEBB
Fillow of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford
H •
25
/oi
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LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.
RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
First published April
Reprinted . . June 1920
(All rights reserved)
DEDICATED
IN AFFECTIONATE GRATITUDE
TO THE MEMORY OF
A GREAT THINKER AND A GREAT TEACHER,
JOHN COOK WILSON,
SOMETIME WYKEHAM PROFESSOR OF LOGIC
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
PREFACE
IN giving these Lectures to the public, I desire in the first
place to express my sincere thanks to the Senatus Aca-
demicus of the University of Aberdeen, who, by honouring
me with their invitation to fill a place which has been
filled in the past by men of my unworthiness to succeed
whom I am acutely sensible, have given me a welcome
opportunity of drawing together my thoughts, such as
they are— and I am very well aware of their inadequacy
—upon a subject of central importance in the Philosophy
of Religion, and of deep concern to many persons who,
while laying no claim to philosophical culture, are anxious
to form a reasonable judgment of the value to be attached
to the religious language and imagery with which they
are familiar.
In the second place, I have to thank my own College
in Oxford for generously granting me leave of absence in
term time to enable me to avail myself of the invitation
I had received from Aberdeen.
Lastly, I wish to acknowledge the manifold help which
I have received from my wife in the work of preparing
the Lectures alike for delivery and for publication.
A correspondent of an Aberdeen journal which did
me the honour of printing very full reports of my Lectures
quoted as a comment upon them and upon Gifford
8 PREFACE
Lectures generally the famous lines beginning ' Myself,
when young, did eagerly frequent/ I may perhaps take
occasion here to say that it never occurred to me that
such discussions as these could be other than ' about it
and about ' or could, under the most favourable cir
cumstances, be of service in the way of religion to any one
except by assisting towards the expression 01 defence of
a religious experience of which the hearer or reader was
already in possession.
I am greatly indebted to my friend and former pupil,
Professor Loveday, for his kindness in reading the proofs
of this book and for making a number of valuable
suggestions for its improvement.
SYLLABUS
LECTURE I
PAGE
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 17
Our subject to be Personality and especially the place
to be assigned to it in our conception of God. Individu
ality, but not Personality, has already been treated by
Gifford Lecturers. The distinction illustrated by the
difference of view between Lotze and Mr. Bosanquet, the
former attributing Personality, the latter denying Person
ality but attributing Individuality to the Absolute. Per
sonality in God to be discussed before Personality in
man. This order of treatment defended on grounds
historical and philosophical. The problem of Person
ality indicated by Dr. Merz as that to which we are invited
by the course taken by the history of thought during the
last half-century. Embarrassment alike of the scientific
and the philosophical movements of this period in the
presence of this problem ; which has also been raised for
many in an acute manner by the present war. The fact
that the history of the notion of Personality will compel
us to deal with the theological doctrines of Christianity
suggests a digression on the attitude to be adopted in
these Lectures towards those doctrines. Programme
of the following Lectures.
LECTURE II
HISTORY OF THE NOTION OF PERSONALITY IN GENERAL . 35
Persona in classical Latin. The modern meaning of the
word Person is conditioned by its theological use as equi
valent to i/TToorairie. Original meaning of {/Troorao-tc.
Substantia, though probably at first intended as a trans-
9
PAGE
10 SYLLABUS
lation of it, comes to be used render ovvia. History of
the philosophical use of viroaraa^ and its relation to
ovffla and vvoKtiptvov. Difference in meaning between
ovffia and vTTOffraviQ utilized in the formulation of the
Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Substantia being
already appropriated to represent ovvia in Latin, another
word was required to correspond with v7r<Wa<ne and was
found, probably by Tertullian, in persona; of which
TrpowTTov, in its theological use, seems to be a translation.
The words persona and {/TTOOTCKTIC, as applied to the dis
tinctions recognized by Christian theology within the
Godhead, supplement one another, each suggesting some
thing which the other fails to suggest. The philosophical
use of Person begins in its theological use and is expressed
in the definition of Boethius, Persona est naturae ration-
abilis individua substantia. The attribution to the
Absolute of Personality by Lotze, and of Individuality,
but not of Personality, by Mr. Bosanquet, is partly ex
plained by the adherence of the latter to the juridical
associations of the word Person, which for Lotze do not
determine its meaning. The history of the notion of
Personality after the time of Boethius marked by the stress
laid successively on incommunicability (among the School
men), on self-consciousness (since Descartes), and on will
(since Kant), as characteristics of Personality.
LECTURE III
HISTORY OF THE NOTION OF PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO
GOD . 6l
The expression ' Personality of God ' of modern origin.
In Christianity, the only religion which has expressly
affirmed Personality to be in God, this affirmation was
until recent times made only in connexion with the doctrine
of the Trinity ; for even the Socinian assertion that God
is one person was originally brought forward merely as a
correction of the Trinitarian formula, not as the enunci
ation of an important fundamental truth. Influences
tending during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
to detach the thought of Personality in God from Trini
tarian associations, and so preparing the way for the now
familiar expression ' Personality of God.' An examina
tion of various accounts of the divine nature, undertaken
with the view of satisfying ourselves whether they could
be described as accounts of a ' personal God,' leads to the
SYLLABUS 11
result that only so far as personal relations are allowed to
exist between the worshipper and his God can that God
be properly described as ' personal ' ; and that such per
sonal relations are excluded alike by extreme stress on
the ' immanence ' and by extreme stress on the ' tran
scendence' of the object of worship. This conclusion is
illustrated by a review of certain great religious systems.
LECTURE IV
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY . 89
The Boethian definition being taken as a provisional
starting-point, the question is raised of the relation of
Personality to Individuality, which is there described as
a factor in it. All persons are individual but only rational
individuals are persons. The antithesis of individual
and universal is considered, and while certain ways of
thinking which appear to rest on a confusion of the two
are criticized, it is maintained that reality is throughout
and at every point both the one and the other. Persons
are individuals conscious of universality, such conscious
ness occurring only when Individuality has attained a
certain level of development or evolution. The thought
of a perfect Individuality, in comparison with which our
Personality is imperfect, raises again the question at
issue between Lotze and Mr. Bosanquet, whether such
an Individuality should be called ' personal.' It is found
that the answer will depend upon the rank assigned to
ethical predicates in the scale of values.
LECTURE V
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY • 109
Rationality the other factor in Personality beside Indi
viduality recognized in the Boethian definition. Yet what
is rational seems to be that in which personal differences
disappear, and we are apt to explain as especially personal
what is not rationally explicable in human conduct. This
' irrationality of the personal ' the chief inspiration alike
of the demand for a personal God and of the reluctance
of many to admit that demand to be legitimate. This
reluctance natural from the point of view of Natural
12 SYLLABUS
PAGE
Science, which treats the ' personal equation ' as some
thing to be discounted, of a philosophy which looks on
Natural Science as the type of true knowledge, and also
of such a philosophy as Fichte's, which represents the
supreme system of Reality as a ' moral order/ But a
philosophy like Mr. Bosanquet's, which does not so repre
sent it, will refuse to ascribe personality to the Ultimate
Reality, because it must transcend moral distinctions,
whereas Personality and Morality go (as we saw) together.
It is admitted on all hands that finite personality cannot
be ascribed to the Absolute ; but what is really meant
by the attribution of personality to God is the affirmation
that reciprocal personal relations may exist between the
worshipper and him ; and it is sometimes sought to
evade the difficulty of affirming this in the case of the
Absolute by distinguishing God from the Absolute and
allowing God to be a finite person. The next Lecture to
be devoted to the consideration of this suggestion.
LECTURE VI
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 134
It is sometimes thought that the doctrine of a Finite
God would satisfy the claims at once of Religion and of
Metaphysics. This conception appears in several forms.
Three of these we may conveniently associate with the
names of Mr. Bradley, Dr. Rashdall, and Mr. H. G. Wells
respectively. The second and third of these, it is con
tended, fail because they abandon the attempt to
identify God with the Absolute, and in so doing, abandon
what is essential to Religion when once the stage of
intellectual development is reached at which the question
of this identification can be raised. By Mr. Bradley, on
the other hand, this failure is admitted and the conse
quence proclaimed that Religion, like other forms of
experience, is bound to break down under metaphysical
criticism and stand convicted of involving a contradiction.
After a full examination of this view, which leads inci
dentally to a discussion of the antithesis of ' imma
nence ' and ' transcendence/ the conclusion is reached
that Religion implies a paradox but not a contradiction,
and that there is no necessary inconsistency between
the recognition that the object of religious experience
is the supreme Reality and the recognition that this ex
perience is an experience of personal relations with its
SYLLABUS 13
r/ivic.
object ; nor yet between a personal intercourse of the
worshipper with his God and the immanence of that God
in his worshipper. The difficulties encountered in the
course of this examination nevertheless press upon us the
problem of the best language for expressing the depend
ence upon the Divine Spirit of the finite spirits which
are conscious of standing in personal relations with him.
LECTURE VII
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION • J56
Of metaphors which may be used to express the relation
of the Divine Spirit to our spirits, that of creation empha
sizes the difference, and those of generation and emanation
the identity between the two terms of the relation. Thus
the first will be appropriate to a doctrine which lays stress
on divine transcendence. Such Scholasticism is said to
have been, and we see an extreme recoil from its position
in this respect in the philosophy of Signer Croce, which
does not allow Religion to be anything but an immature
form of Philosophy. An attempt to unite the advantages
of the metaphors of creation and procreation by the con
ception of a Mediator, who is the Son of God and so dis
tinguished from created spirits. Such a conception may
be objected to as (i) mythological, (2) logically leading to
an infinite regress.
1. It may be regarded as a myth, but in the sense
which Plato gives to the word, a sense in which myth
has a legitimate place in philosophy. As is shown
by the examination of Plato's usage, it is proposed to
employ it just where Plato would employ a myth, in
dealing with the nature of the Soul, which is the meeting-
place of Universal and Individual, of Philosophy and
History. The conception will be found apt to help us in
expressing our relation to God in terms which avoid
encouraging either an irreligious pride or an abject servility.
2. It need not lead to an infinite regress. Such a
regress only becomes inevitable when there is no ground
for introducing a middle term between two others which
is not equally a ground for introducing a further middle
term between the first middle term and either of the
extremes. But in the present instance this is not the
case. The Mediator represented as the archetype and
ideal completion of the nature found to exist imperfectly
14 SYLLABUS
PAGE
in finite souls. But a new complication is introduced when
the latter are regarded as not only imperfect but sinful ;
and we are constrained to pass on to the problem of Sin.
LECTURE VIII
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 184
A general discussion of the Problem of Evil not to be
attempted here, but only of the bearing of our conscious
ness of moral Evil or Sin upon our conception of Divine
Personality. It is true that what would be a criminal
act, if brought about by a person, is not blamed when due
to a natural force or the activity of an irrational animal.
But to extend this to an assertion that there is no question
of Evil in the world, if the cause of the world be not re
garded as personal, is a piece of illegitimate reasoning The
question of the significance to be assigned to our moral
consciousness in the formation of a general view of the
world cannot be put aside altogether. To a view which
assigns it no significance beyond the sphere of human
action the world must appear fundamentally irrational
and incoherent. Hence the denial of Divine Personality
does not enable us to rid ourselves of the problem of the
existence of Evil. On the other hand a religious experi
ence which implies a personal relation of our souls to God,
if it gives to the sense of Sin a peculiar poignancy, yet
provides it with a more intelligible setting than it has in
any other connexion. Those who, while attributing per
sonality to God, would relieve him of responsibility for
the evil in the world by refusing to identify him with the
Absolute, do so at the cost of denying him Godhead in
the true sense of the word. After a consideration of the
extent to which our consciousness of Sin must modify the
conception adopted in the last Lecture of the relation
between our spirits and the Divine Spirit, we pass to an
examination of Signor Croce's teaching with its extreme
doctrine of immanence and reach the conclusion that a
religious experience implying a personal relation of our
souls to God affords a clue to the solution of the antinomy
between a realized perfection and an eternal activity in
God, and that in the light of this experience the mystery
involved in that antinomy will be found not so much to
baffle reason as to enlarge its scope and opportunity.
SYLLABUS 15
LECTURE IX
FACE
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY . . . . . .213
The problem of Personality in God is at bottom the same
as that of the distinction of God from the Absolute, and
also as that of the relation of Religion to Philosophy.
Though Religion may exist apart from the affirmation of
Personality in God, yet the presence of an emotion of
reverence akin to that experienced towards persons is a
mark distinguishing Religion from Philosophy, which are
both of them concerned with the Supreme Reality ; for
although what is known to be less than this may receive
religious honour, only to that which is taken to be this can
the greatest religious reverence be paid in the end ; nor
acn the religious consciousness forbear the demand that
the Supreme God should be the Supreme Reality. On the
other hand, apart from the religious consciousness the
Absolute cannot be known as God. Hence Religion and
Philosophy are intimately connected, yet always distinct.
The Absolute being the ultimate principle of unity reached
in the search characteristic of Philosophy for the One in
the Many, we may inquire what light can be thrown upon
its nature by the study of subordinate principles of unity,
and how far it can be described in terms borrowed from
our acquaintance with any of these. It cannot be ade
quately described as the Universal or as Substance, or
even, despite the eloquent advocacy of M. Bergson, as
Life ; although this last description may serve a useful
purpose in purging from undesirable accretions what is
yet in the end the more satisfactory account of it as
Reason and Goodness in that close mutual union assigned
to them in the Platonic philosophy. Yet even this account,
as given by Plato, calls for a further development, which
is in principle supplied in the identification, established
with the help of religious experience on a Platonic
foundation by Christian theology, of the living God, who
in Plato's system is to the end less than the Good, with
the Good which is in that system the Supreme Reality.
Here we reach a definite contribution made by religious
experience to our conception of the supreme principle
of unity.
16 SYLLABUS
LECTURE X
PAGE
DIVINE PERSONALITY ....... 241
Religious Experience, on which it is rightly claimed
that theology should be based, is not to be sought only
in records of conversion or of mystical raptures, but in
the public theologies and ecclesiastical polities wherein
may be read " writ large " the normal religious experience
of the peoples among whom they have arisen. The
student of Natural Theology should seek to discover the
universal significance of the tradition which he himself
inherits ; and need not suppose that to classify religious
experiences as ' higher ' or ' lower ' is to abandon the
ideal of Natural Theology as expressing the outcome of
reflection on the whole religious experience of mankind.
He must, however, use for his classification a suitable
criterion ; which is to be found in the capacity of a religion
to encourage and be encouraged by moral and intellectual
progress in its votaries, yet only so far as this is done by
exhibiting the specific nature of Religion in a particular
manner. No historic religion has maintained and de
veloped itself in an atmosphere of higher intellectual
and moral culture than Christianity, which more than any
other has laid stress upon personality in God ; and this
stress is no extrinsic or accidental feature of this religion,
but the fuller development of a factor to some degree
present in all Religion, viz. the doctrine of divine tran
scendence. The recognition of personality in God adds
to the intelligibility and moral efficacy of such religious
ideas as those of Sin, Forgiveness, Justice, Sacrifice,
Union ; and although the language of Religion is always
metaphorical, we must distinguish the metaphor with
which it can dispense without danger to its claim to be
real experience and that which is its only means of de
scribing it. The difficulty of ascribing Personality to
God, arising from what we called in a former lecture ' the
irrationality of the personal,' met by the consideration
that Reason as manifested in the artist affords a better
analogy for use in that connexion than Reason as mani
fested by the mathematician or the moralist ; especially
if the notion of Evolution is to be taken seriously. The
Lecture concludes with some remarks on the relation of
this account of Divine Personality to that contained in
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
GOD AND PERSONALITY
LECTURE I
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED
IN these two courses of Lectures on the foundation of
Lord Gifford, I propose to consider the subject of Per
sonality and especially the place to be assigned to Person
ality in our conception of the nature of God, the know
ledge of whose nature and attributes is, according to the
will of the Founder, to be the theme of the Gifford
Lecturers.
In looking over the titles of previous courses of Gifford
Lectures I do not find the words Person or Personality
occurring, but I find more than once the words Individual
and Individuality. The remarkable series delivered at
Aberdeen by the eminent American philosopher, whose
loss we have since had to lament, Josiah Royce, dealt
with The World and the Individual I ; the distinguished
German biologist Professor Driesch discoursed in the
same University on The Science and Philosophy of the
Organism,* a topic which he subsequently resumed in a
work called The Problem of Individuality ; 3 while at
Edinburgh Dr. Bernard Bosanquet took for the subject
1 1900 and 1901. 3 1907 and 1908. 3 London, 1914.
2 17
18 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of one course The Principle of Individuality and Value,*
and of another The Value and Destiny of the Individual. 5
It is obvious that the topic of Individuality is near akin
to that of Personality, and in the lectures to which I
have referred the lecturers had certainly chiefly though
not solely in view those Individuals which we call Persons.
But I think that there is still room for a discussion of
Personality on its own account. For it would be readily
allowed that not all Individuals are Persons ; and, on
the other hand, we may speak of Personality as belonging
to beings which we should not naturally or unhesitatingly
call Individuals. Thus, on the one hand, some psycholo
gists speak of alternating personalities in one and the
same individual ; and, on the other hand, it is often
maintained that a community such as a State, though
consisting of many individuals, may be said to possess
personality.
Again, it may be observed that, while it would not
be disputed that only to individuals occupying a high
grade in the scale of existence would the title of persons
be usually given, yet some thinkers, such as Mr. Bosanquet,
would strenuously deny the applicability of that title to
the Ultimate Reality or the Absolute, while they would,
on the contrary, maintain that it is only of the Absolute
that Individuality in its full sense is predicable.6
Nor have we to do with a mere preference of one form
of words to another when we find a philosopher with
whose works Mr. Bosanquet is so familiar and in many
ways so sympathetic as Lotze saying, not of Individuality
but of Personality, just what Mr. Bosanquet says of
4 1911. 5 1912.
6 See Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 72 : "In the
ultimate sense there can be only one Individual."
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 19
Individuality, that it is properly attributable to the
Supreme Reality only. 7 In the difference between the
two ways of speaking there finds expression a profound
divergence of view between the two philosophers. While,
then, a discussion of Individuality and a discussion of
Personality must obviously to a considerable extent
occupy common ground, we shall find that, in consequence
of choosing Personality rather than Individuality as our
main topic, we shall be, as it were, moving over that
ground in a somewhat different direction from that
taken by those who have preferred to concern them
selves primarily with Individuality. In particular I shall
endeavour to keep in close touch with the problem sug
gested by the expression, now so familiar, ' a personal
God/ and shall make it my principal business to examine
what is involved alike in the demand for ' a personal God '
and in the rejection of that demand, and to arrive at some
conclusion as to the rights and wrongs of the controversy
between those who ascribe and those who refuse to ascribe
Personality to God. I say to God, not to the Absolute
or the Ultimate Reality ; for we shall find that there
are not a few who would allow or even insist upon the
ascription of Personality to God, but only if by ' God '
they may be understood to mean something other than
the Ultimate Reality ; while they agree with those who
would altogether repudiate faith in a ' personal God/
in denying Personality to the Absolute.
It might seem that I should be following the most
natural and convenient course for such a discussion as
I am proposing to undertake if I were to begin with an
examination of what we mean by Personality in ourselves
7 See Microcosmus, ix. 4,Eng. tr. ii. p. 688 : " Perfect Personality
is in God only."
20 GOD AND PERSONALITY
and to pass thence to an inquiry as to the legitimacy of
extending the conception to that in which we " live and
move and have our being/' We should thus, it may be
thought, be starting from the firm ground of that which
lies nearest to ourselves, and beginning with the primary
object of the conception we have set ourselves to consider.
To begin with God, however accordant with the custom
of antiquity or with the piety of Dogberry,8 might seem
an unpromising method of procedure for any one who hopes
to reach an assured and scientific conclusion. Neverthe
less I propose to devote my first course to the topic of
Personality in God and the second to that of Personality
in man, and must therefore endeavour to justify as best
I can the order which I have adopted.
My grounds for adopting it are of two kinds : historical
and philosophical. As a matter of fact it will be found
on inquiry that not only has the development of the
conception of personality been profoundly affected by the
discussions which were carried on in the Christian Church
concerning the mutual relations of the persons of the
Trinity and the union of the divine and human natures
in the person of Christ, but that philosophical discussion
of the nature of human Personality is posterior in time to
these theological discussions. Nay, it may even be said
that it was the religious and theological interest in the
Personality of Christ, conceived as being at once God and
man, which actually afforded the motive and occasion of
undertaking the investigation of the nature of Personality
in men generally. In placing therefore the considera
tion of Personality in God before consideration of the
Personality in man, I shall be, at any rate, following the
clue given by the history of thought. But there are
8 Much Ado about Nothing, Act IV, Sc. 2.
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 21
reasons of a more philosophical order which may be
alleged in support of my procedure. Personality is not
merely something which we observe in men ; rather it
is something which, though suggested to us by what
we find in men, we perceive to be only imperfectly realized
in them ; and this can only be because we are somehow
aware of a perfection or ideal with which we contrast
what we find in men as falling short of it. In such cases
we rightly begin with thinking out the ideal and then
considering the experienced facts in the light of it. We
deal thus even with such a notion as that of Straightness
in geometry, into our conception of which there does not
enter that element of value which is involved, for example,
in our notion of Justice or of Courage. It is, however,
to this latter class of objects of thought, the class of what
we may call ideals, that Personality belongs ; although
I should readily admit that it is not to be conceived with
the same definiteness and precision and consequently
with so large a measure of general agreement as Justice
or Courage.
Such a consideration of Personality as what it is in
itself, apart from what appear as obstacles and hindrances
to its full realization extraneous to its proper nature,
when thus undertaken prior to any consideration of
it under limiting and qualifying circumstances, quite
naturally assumes the form of a discussion of Personality
in God : and this is not to be distinguished from a dis
cussion of the place and value of Personality in the
universe. For the view that God, the Supreme Reality,
has personality, not only in the sense in which the Absolute
must possess all excellences which belong to any form of
reality embraced within its systematic unity, but properly
and pre-eminently ; and the view that it is possessed by
22 GOD AND PERSONALITY
a Being or Beings of far higher rank and more enduring
significance in the scale of existence than men, but cannot
be affirmed of the all-embracing Reality, within the unity
of which men and such a higher Being or Beings would
be distinguishable elements, factors or moments ; lastly,
the view that only of beings like men, the unstable product
of certain rare and transient conditions which are found
to have presented themselves in a certain region within
the infinity of Space, at a certain period within the infinity
of Time, can Personality be intelligibly affirmed : all
these views are at once replies to the question Is there a
personal God, and if so, in what sense ? and also to the
question, What is the rank or significance of Personality
in the universe ? I would also here take occasion to point
out that the order of treatment which I have chosen
does not necessarily commit him who chooses it to the
belief that Religion, as an attitude towards something
other than ourselves, has objective value. For one might
hold, with Feuerbach,9 that Religion is an illusion
in which we project as it were a shadowy image of our
selves upon the background of a world in which there
exists as a matter of fact no higher being than ourselves ;
but that this is the natural and only way in which we
can discover the structure of our own souls ; since a direct
vision of our own spiritual nature is to our minds as
impossible as is a direct vision of our outward form to
our bodily eyes ; so that only by means of a shadow or
a reflected image can we become acquainted with either
the one or the other.
The learned author of the History of European Thought
in the Nineteenth Century,™ Dr. Merz, has lately, in his very
9 In his book Das Wesen der Christenthums, which George Eliot
translated into English. « Edinburgh, etc., 1896-1914.
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 23
interesting essay on Religion and Science,™ indicated the
problem of Personality as the problem to the consideration
of which the course taken by the discoveries and specula
tions of the last age particularly invites at the present
time the attention of philosophers ; and this because,
whether we are exploring the nature of the world of
objects in the presence of which we stand or tracing to
its origin our consciousness of that world, we shall meet
at last confronting us in our path this mystery of Person
ality. For, on the one hand, it is only through Personality
— through our intercourse with persons quickening in
us a personal response — that (to quote the words of Dr.
Merz «) we gain in the earliest period of our earthly exist
ence that entry into a world of Reality which enables
us to distinguish our self from a not-self ; and, on the other
hand (to cite the same writer again), " Personality always
impresses us as the most powerful instance of individual
existence." I welcome this confirmation by so high an
authority of conclusions which I had independently
reached, and which the observations that follow are
intended to reinforce.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling in the Jungle Book has made
us all familiar with the picture of a human child stolen
by wolves in earliest infancy, brought up by and among
animals without any intercourse with other human beings,
yet arriving in due course at intellectual maturity and
the exercise of reason. What little evidence there is
concerning the fate of children thus stolen does not,
I believe, suggest that such would have been the history
of a real Mowgli ; and though one would not desire unduly
to discourage an adventurous imagination bent on recon
structing the past history of our species and the genesis
11 Edinburgh, etc., 1915. T1 Religion and Science, p. 174.
24 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of Reason upon earth, certainly intercourse with other
persons seems to be within our experience an indis
pensable condition of the development of Rationality
and Personality in human beings. J3
I think that Dr. Merz is calling attention to a fact
well worthy of our consideration when he points out that
knowledge of objects always begins within our experience
in a personal environment, and that it is probably through
personal intercourse that we come to that discrimination
of our selves from what is not ourselves which is involved
in knowledge. Nevertheless, even if we content ourselves
with saying that we have no conception of knowledge
except as a personal activity, we shall still be admitting
that in attempting to explore the nature of knowledge
we are confronted by the fact of personality as the pre
supposition of that which we are exploring. So, too, we
must agree with Dr. Merz that the progress of knowledge
itself must sooner or later bring us face to face with this
same fact of Personality as the highest form of life, and
that, as students of living nature are more and more
coming to recognize the impossibility of a merely mechan
ical or chemical account of life, we shall be no less com
pelled at last to admit that the study of life at a level
below that of Personality will not suffice to solve the
problem of Personality itself.
But while the progress of thought is thus forcing upon
our attention this problem of Personality, it is not too
much to say that both the scientific and the philosophical
speculation of the last age showed a marked tendency
to start aside (like Balaam's ass) when it found this
mysterious apparition standing in the way. In the case
'3 Cp. Reid On the Active Powers, Essay V c. 2 (ed. Hamilton,
ii. p. 641).
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED
25
of scientific speculation this is obvious, and is readily
to be accounted for. It is characteristic of Science
(as we now commonly use the word) to concern itself with
generalities ; and it is precisely preoccupation with the
individual that marks off the sphere of History from that
of Science. No doubt the data of Science are found in
the observation of individuals ; but the moment that the
observation has been made, if it is to be turned to scientific
account at all, the result is, so to say, stripped of its his
torical circumstances, and presented as true not of that
thing, but of anything of that kind. Who made the
observation, and upon what individual object it was
made, these are questions the answers to which are only
interesting to Science so far as they guarantee the correct
ness of the observation ; and that once assured, they may
be forgotten. History is primarily concerned with persons ;
Science, on the other hand, can treat them only as speci
mens, and the ' personal equation ' is important only as a
source of error to be discounted.
The embarrassment of Science in the presence of
Personality is thus not only easily explicable, but in view
of its special task legitimate. More remarkable u the
embarrassment of the very philosophy which during the
past century has made it its business to repress the over-
vaulting ambitions of Natural Science and to insist that
a method which necessarily abstracts from the spiritual
factor must be inadequate to the complete interpretation
of the experience of a spiritual being. Yet it is hard to
deny that the history of recent thought suggests em
barrassment in the presence of Personality on the part
of this philosophy as well as on the part of Science. The
reasons for this embarrassment will become more evident
at a later stage of this inquiry. I will at present confine
26 GOD AND PERSONALITY
myself to pointing out that, like the embarrassment of
Science, it was largely due to the task which this phil
osophy had set itself, especially as represented by its
illustrious progenitor, Kant, and by those British
thinkers who towards the end of the last century devoted
themselves to spreading the knowledge of Kant's work
and of developing his principles among the inheritors of
the tradition of the great British empiricists, Locke and
Hume.
This task may be said to have been that of combating
the scepticism of Hume by insistence on the principles
of construction or synthesis which, though neglected or
misrepresented by the empiricists, are really involved in
the process of the scientific understanding. The tradi
tional alliance between Natural Science and the empirical
philosophy had caused the real inconsistency between
them to be overlooked. Yet Natural Science implied
the existence of objects which, though they could be felt,
could not really be reduced to a combination of feelings.
Hence, it was contended, the mind which was capable
of Natural Science must be more than the mere aggregate
of sensations to which Hume had shown it must be reduced
if one were to be faithful to the implication of Locke's
theory of knowledge ; a theory which still, a century later,
was in essentials that in vogue among British men of
science. *4 The mind must possess in itself — independently
of any experience by way of separate sensations — those
principles of synthesis and construction, to which Kant
had given the name of categories. But Natural Science,
as we have already seen, takes no account of Personality
M Professor Gibson has well pointed out in his recent book on
Locke's Theory of Knowledge that Locke was himself much less of
an empiricist than he appears in Green's criticism of him, which
I was following in the text.
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 27
except as a possible source of errors in observation ; the
principles of synthesis and construction which it employs
are those which abstract from the difference of individual
minds from one another. Hence a philosophy mainly
concerned with the criticism of the procedure of Natural
Science will concentrate its attention upon the principles
of construction and synthesis of which Natural Science
makes use rather than upon o le which it can only recognize
as a disturbing factor whose influence must be discounted
before any trustworthy results can be attained.
But if, in tracing the recent history of thought, one
is thus struck by a certain failure on the part of at least
two representative groups of thinkers to come to grips
with the problem of Personality, we shall not be sur
prised to find also that this very failure has provoked a
marked tendency in other quarters to place this problem
in the forefront of philosophical debate. No represen
tative of this tendency, however, appears to me to have
so dealt with the problem as to render superfluous or
belated a further attempt to contribute to its discussion ;
though I cannot hope that that which I have to offer
will do more than, at the utmost, indicate some diffi
culties or suggest some considerations which have not
always been borne in mind by others who have turned
their thoughts in the same direction.
It is a profound saying of Tertullian's : Habet Deus
testimonia totum hoc quod sumus ct in quo sumus.*S Nothing
in ourselves, nothing in our environment can be utterly
irrelevant to the subject presented to these Lectures
by their Founder, the subject of Natural Theology. And
so I need, I think, make no apology if I advert to
the special circumstances in which these Lectures were
'5 Adv. Marc. i. 10.
28 GOD AND PERSONALITY
delivered and suggest that they also invite our attention
to the particular topic which I had chosen for my theme.
The great and terrible war in which at the time of the
delivery of these Lectures our country had been engaged
for nearly four years has, I think, modified very greatly
the attitude of thoughtful men, not especially occupied
with the study of philosophy, but inquisitive concerning
the great questions which life propounds to us all, towards
the problem of Personality in God and in men. The time
that preceded the war was a time in which even intelligent
people could seriously doubt whether there would ever
be another armed conflict on a great scale between civilized
Powers ; a time in which the whole story of war which
has filled so much of human history, with all its suffering
and all its heroism, all its brutality and all its sacrifice,
had become to many educated men among ourselves
something legendary, a tale of
. . . old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago. l6
In such a time a certain way of regarding Personality
had become familiar, which it is not too much to say
the war has for a great number of persons completely
reversed, making it seem important where it had seemed
insignificant, and insignificant where it had seemed im
portant. On the one hand the progress of scientific
discovery, opening up to the imagination new and over
whelmingly vast vistas of Time and Space ; the rapid
fading of beliefs which appeared to be bound up with
the discarded cosmology of the Middle Ages, and seemed to
appeal to the trustworthiness of traditions the authority
of which had been irremediably shattered by the advance
16 Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper.
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 29
of historical knowledge and criticism ; and lastly the
gradual loosening of ties which had largely depended for
their sanctity and binding force upon the validity of these
same beliefs : all these things had for multitude^ of our
contemporaries dwarfed into insignificance the ephemeral
life of the human individual upon this planet and obliter
ated his once ' sure and certain hope ' of another life
when that was over. On the other hand, the same changes
of outlook had made that very ephemeral life seem to him
who had to live it his one chance of happiness, of which
he wrould do wisely to make the very fullest use in the few
years allotted him. The realization of individual per
sonality had come to seem at once supremely important
as an object of human endeavour, and supremely unim
portant from the point of view of the universe, wherein
humanity itself was no more than the " child of a thousand
chances 'neath the indifferent sky." J7
Now for many the war has reversed all this. Men
who were believed by others — who may even have believed
themselves — to have asked from life no more than the
largest possible measure of happiness for their individual
selves, by whom the assertion that country and State
were sacred realities which could claim from them a
real devotion or self-sacrifice was felt to have about it
something romantic or theatrical — an echo of picturesque
but absurd times ' when knights were bold ' — such men
have not hesitated, nay, more, have after hesitation
deliberately resolved to risk everything they could call
their own — comfort, prospects, happiness, life — as of no
account when set in the balance against their country's
call. Death has become a familiar acquaint ane to us
all ; if we are to hold up our heads at all, we cannot afford
'7 Sir W. Watson, The Hop* of the World, § 7.
30 GOD AND PERSONALITY
to rate so high as we did the earthly life which death
cuts short, and the opportunity of happiness which it
holds for the individual. But this very depreciation of
the value to the individual of that separate personality,
to give which what seemed its solitary chance of full
development had been reckoned the one thing worth
caring about, has revived in the hearts of mourners
who have lost those in whom their own hopes were bound
up the old reluctance to believe that this life is all, the
old faith that Personality has a greater significance in
the universal scheme than accords with the suggestions
of physical science ; it has revived also both in those
who are fighting and those whom they have left at home
the old instinct of prayer and therewith the demand
even in unexpected quarters, for one who can " hear the
prayer " l8, for what we are apt to call a personal God.
No doubt it is possible to say that all this ought to make
no difference to a philosophic ' spectator of all time and
all existence.' Even this great war, what is it in the
immensity of the stellar universe but a very little thing,
" a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million million of
suns " ? X9 If before it began there was no proof of the
existence of a personal God who can hear our prayers,
no reasonable probability that consciousness survives
bodily death, the intensity of our private sorrows and the
recrudescence of ancient habits cannot alter the laws of
evidence. But I am not now concerned to defend the
change of attitude towards the problem of Personality
of which the war has been the occasion ; only to note it
as an additional reason for attempting at this time to
make up our minds what we ought to think about that
problem itself.
18 Psa. Ixv. 2. *9 Tennyson, Vastness.
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 81
In tracing this history we shall, as I have already
intimated, find ourselves compelled to take note of the
discussions of Christian theologians respecting two points
of central importance in Christian theology, the union
of the divine and human natures in the person of Christ,
and the coexistence of three persons in the nature of
God. It was the desire of Lord Gifford that the subject
of Natural Theology should be treated by the Lectures
on his Foundation without reference to or reliance upon
any supposed special exceptional or so-called miraculous
revelation. That I shall not be in any way contravening
the spirit of this provision in the will of the Founder
by giving a historical survey of views in support of
which their propounders would certainly have invoked
the authority of a special revelation, with the intention
of showing the influence exerted by these views on the
usage of the terms Person and Personality — this would
be, I imagine, readily admitted. But I do not think
that I shall be unfaithful to Lord Gifford's wishes, wishes
to which moreover he was with great wisdom careful
not to bind his beneficiaries too strictly, only intending,
as he says, " to indicate leading principles," if I take
seriously, as possible materials for the view of Personality
that I desire to recommend to you, conceptions suggested
by theological doctrines which will come before us in
the course of our historical survey. So long as they are
not treated as authoritative or as sacrosanct and immune
from criticism, there can be no more inconsistency with
a free scientific treatment of our subject in such a use of
them, despite the belief of those who first put them for
ward in their peculiar claim to be considered as revealed,
than there is in a like use of the doctrines of any phil
osopher, which we may find useful in guiding us to a
32 GOD AND PERSONALITY
conclusion of our own ; and we may be very sure that
Lord Gifford had no thought of requiring of his Lecturers
an impossible independence of all previous speculation.
I shall, therefore, not hesitate to seek in the conceptions
suggested by the dogmas of the Christian Church the
same kind of help as I should seek in those implied in the
systems of the masters of philosophy : and shall feel
my conscience in doing so quite free from any scruple
arising from Lord Gifford's desire that his Lecturers should
treat their subject " without reference to or reliance on
any supposed special, exceptional, or so-called miraculous
revelation." At the same time I must confess that my
view of the relation of Natural Theology to the historical
religions is probably not quite the same as that which
was taken by the Founder of these Lectures. I have
elsewhere20 given my reasons for holding that Natural
Theology is to be regarded not after the manner suggested
by certain expressions in Lord Gifford's will, as a science
consisting of truths reached altogether independently
of a historical religion, but rather as the result of reflection
on a religious experience mediated in every case through
a historical religion. Hence I do not think it possible
for our subject to be (in Lord Gifford's words) " considered
just as astronomy or chemistry is," and that because
it cannot, in my judgment, be rightly described, as Lord
Gifford seems to have thought that it could be described,
" as a strictly natural science." But I should not regard
the difference between Natural Theology and the ' strictly
natural ' sciences, such as astronomy or chemistry, as
consisting in the fact that in the former our thought is
not to be allowed free play as in the latter, but must be
exercised within the limits imposed by authority, or by
J0 Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 271.
THE SUBJECT PROPOSED 33
assumptions which are not open at any time to recon
sideration and criticism. I should rather regard it as
depending on a characteristic shared by Natural Theology
with such other subjects as Moral Philosophy, Political
Philosophy, and the Philosophy of Art. Wherever there
is found any one of the kinds of reflection which we describe
by these names, it cannot but originate in the special
moral, political, or aesthetic experience of a particular
people ; although, at the same time, the claim made for
such reflection to be a branch of Philosophy implies the
faith that every experience of the sort can ultimately
be placed in an intelligible relation with every other and
be shown to have its function as a member of the resultant
system.
So too I should hold that a definite type of religious
experience, expressed in a historical religion, is pre
supposed in every system of Natural Theology ; while
the ultimate goal of all human speculation which can be
so named must be a system which presupposes all the
religious experience of mankind ; an experience to which
indeed those who regard Religion as genuine experience,
and riot as mere illusion throughout, cannot surely deny
the name of Revelation.
From the history of the notion of Personality and of
the application of it to God I shall pass to a consideration
of the motives which have led to an attempt to find
Personality in God, and of the difficulties which such
an attempt encounters. We shall find ourselves in the
course of this investigation examining the conceptions
implied in such phrases as ' divine immanence/ ' divine
transcendence/ and ' a finite God/ Lastly I shall
venture to put before you certain conclusions to which
I have been led by my reflections on these motives for
8
34 GOD AND PERSONALITY
seeking Personality in God and on the difficulties involved
in such a search.
This programme will bring us to the end of the present
course. The following course I propose to devote to an
inquiry into the bearing of my conclusions, reached in
the former course, as to Personality in God upon the
view which we should take of Personality in men, as
exhibited in the various spheres of human activity — in
conduct, in politics, in art, in science, in religion ; and
also upon what, borrowing an expression from the title
of Mr. Bosanquet's Gifford Lectures, to which I have
already referred, I will call the question of the ' value
and destiny of the individual ' person.
My next Lecture will deal with the history of the word
Person and with the notion of Personality in general.
LECTURE II
HISTORY OF THE NOTION OF PERSONALITY
IN GENERAL
IT is a well-known fact that in its original use the word
persona was the designation of the mask worn by the
actor on the ancient Roman stage and came to be used
of the actor himself and his part in the play ; and hence
of the part that a man plays in social intercourse generally,
and especially those forms of social intercourse in which,
as in legal transactions or in the official relations of public
magistrates, a definite task is assigned, just as in a play,
to a particular man, to which all that he is or does when
not engaged in the performance of that task is irrelevant.
In classical Latin persona did not acquire that vague
use as equivalent to ' human being ' generally in which
' person ' is among ourselves so often employed. It is
possible no doubt to quote one or two passages even in
classical Latin which may seem to contradict this state
ment.1 But even in these I think we should be more
nearly correct in translating persona by ' party ' than
in translating it by ' person.' The word ' party/ even
when it was, as in old English (to use the expression of
the New English Dictionary], " common and in serious
use " for an individual person, had not wholly lost the
* E.g. Suet. Ner. § i ; Juv. Sat. iv. 15.
35
36 GOD AND PERSONALITY
meaning belonging to it in the legal or mercantile phrase
ology from which it was borrowed. It meant the man
or woman concerned in the transaction of which mention
was being made. When a reference of this sort to a part
played by the person in question in a definite affair involving
other parties is wholly absent, as when one speaks of ' an
old party ' or ' a stout party/ the expression is, except
as jocular, not recognized in educated English ; and it
is probably due to its undignified associations, as vulgarly
employed in such colloquialisms, that the use of the
word for an individual person in solemn and sacred
contexts, such as those in which the English divines of
the seventeenth century were not afraid to avail them
selves of it, has now become impossible.
If in classical Latin persona did not, on the one hand,
acquire the vague colourless sense which person has among
ourselves when we use it to mean no more than ' indi
vidual human being/ neither did it, on the other, come
to be expressive of what may be supposed to distinguish
the inner life of a human being from that of an animal-
self -consciousness, moral purpose, aesthetic emotion,
intellectual point of view. The possibility of such a
use of it— the philosophical use of it, as we may call
it_which we assume in such a discussion of Personality
as I am undertaking in these Lectures, lay no doubt in this,
that persona always implied that the being so designated
had a part to play in some kind of social intercourse, such
as is represented in a drama ; arid that of such social
intercourse no mere animal but only a human being is
capable. But the appropriation of the word to express
the dignity of the rational human being in his consciousness
of a special function and worth in relation to his fellow-
men would, though assisted by the juristic associations
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 37
of the term, probably not have taken root in the modern
languages of Europe had persona not come to be used by
the Latin-speaking theologians of the Christian Church
as the equivalent of the Greek vTroorao-tc.
This word vTrooracrie, which literally means ' a standing
under or below,' was in classical Greek used only of that
which has settled down at the bottom— dregs, that is,
or sediment ; or else of the position of one who lies in
ambush, standing concealed under some kind of cover.
But it came at a later period to signify what we may call
real concrete existence as opposed to a mere appearance
with nothing solid or permanent underlying it. There
can be little doubt that it was among the Stoics that this
usage arose ; but actual examples of its use by writers
of this School are lacking. The corresponding verb,
however, occurs in the great Stoic moralist Chrysippus
in a related sense * ; and the word itself is employed in
the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise de Mundo, which was
most likely written in the first century of oar era, and
in a passage of it which probably repeats the views of
the Stoic Posidonius, the master of Cicero, to express
the corporeal reality which comets, for example, have,
and mere effects of light, such as rainbows, have not. 3
About the same time the appearance in the letters of
Seneca of the Latin substantia, which must have origi
nated as a translation of urroarratne, to express real con
crete existence, testifies to the acquisition by the Greek
word of this signification in the preceding generation
at latest ; and it is interesting to note that the ecclesiastical
8 Plutarch, Moralia, 1081 F: \pv<rnnroQ . . . TO fje
rov \povov KO.I ru p.f\\ov oif\ vTrap^tv a\X' vfyerrrrjKtrai fyrjai. It is
noticeable, in view of the later history of the word vTroorao-ic, that
it is not the actual present for which v^eorqccVac is nere reserved.
3 4-395. a 3°- See Zeller, Phil, der Griechen, 3rd ed. III. i p. 644 f.
38 GOD AND PERSONALITY
historian Socrates has preserved for us the record ot a
protest made against its use in this sense as a barbarous
novelty by an Alexandrian scholar who may have lived
as early as the time of Augustus. 4
Neither Seneca nor Quindlian, who in the next generation
often uses substantia in the way to which I have referred,
regards it as corresponding to the Greek oi/<rm> which
signifies being in the widest sense. 5 But the latter employs
it in connexions where ovcria might have been used in
Greek 6 ; and it came afterwards to be the usual rendering
of that word, for which both the two Roman writers
just mentioned lamented the absence of a proper Latin
equivalent in common use.
It is remarkable that the word essentia, which might
have seemed to be the natural representative for ovo-m
in Latin, although it could claim the great authority of
Cicero, and although other distinguished writers, Seneca
among them, attempted to introduce it in this capacity,
failed to establish itself until some centuries later, and left
the place in philosophical terminology which its patrons
intended for it, to be filled by substantial That sub-
4 See Socr. Hist. Ecc. iii. 7. The scholar in question was the
grammarian Irenaeus, otherwise called Minucius Pacatus. His
date, however, is not certain, and he has by some been placed as
late as the reign of Hadrian.
5 See Seneca, Ep. 58 § 6. Quintilian, Inst. Or. iii. 6 § 23.
6 See Inst. Or. ii. 15 § 34, iii. 6 § 39, ix. I § 8. We know from
Pseudo-Augustine Princ. Rhet. c. 5 that de substantia in the last
of these passages, as the description of a subject of legal investi
gation, corresponds to Trepl TTJQ oif arias in the terminology of the
rhetorician Theodorus of Gadara, who nourished in the reign of
Augustus.
7 See Seneca, Ep. 58 § 6 ; Quintilian, Inst. Or. iii. 6 § 23, viii. 3 § 33 ;
Sidonius Apollinaris prcef. ad. carm. 14 ; Quintilian (ii. 14 § 2, iii.
6 § 23) says that Plautus used essentia, but, if he did so, it is not
likely to have been in a philosophical context. Augustine (de
Moribus Manichceis ii. 2 § 2, de Trin. v. § 9) still speaks, in the fifth
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 39
stantia could fill this place implies a close approximation
in meaning between vTrooratnc and ouo-ta, making a
discrimination between them a task of some difficulty.
The first unquestionable extant example of the use of
VTTOVTCHTIV itself in a sense hardly distinguishable from
that of ouam is in the anonymous work of an author
who was probably younger than Seneca and older than
Quintilian, and who belonged, not to the cultivated
society of the capital, but to a people which more than
any other within the Empire resolutely held itself aloof
in religious isolation from the main stream of contem
porary life. This work is that which we call the Epistle
to the Hebrews.
At the very outset of this Epistle the Son of God is
described as the xapaKTrip rr}c wirocrracrfwci the " express
image of the substance" of his Father.8 Our Authorized
Version of the Bible, influenced by the technicalities of
the later theology, has person in this passage ; but the
Revised Version has replaced this word by substance.
We also find the word in another work of the same
age, also by a Jewish writer, the so-called Wisdom of
Solomon 9 ; the interpretation of it in this place is doubtful,
but, in the judgment of the Revisers of 1894, it refers,
as in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to the nature or being
of God. Another Hellenistic Jew, the Alexandrian
philosopher, Philo, certainly employs the cognate verb
with this reference.10 We may also note that the word
in the sense of subsistence or continuance— a sense which
would easily pass into the sense of nature or essence — is
century, of essentia as an unfamiliar word, and describes substantia
as the recognized Latin rendering of ovaia.
« Heb. i. 3. 9 xvi. 21.
1° Quod detenus potiori insidiari soleat, § 160 (ed. Cohn i. p. 294).
40 GOD AND PERSONALITY
already found in the LXX version of the Psalms,11 as well
as in less closely related senses in that of the Prophets.12
There is nothing but what is natural in a term which
would thus be familiar to readers of the Greek Old Testa
ment domesticating itself in the language of the Christian
Church ; and it was, as has already been observed, due
to its employment in Christian theology that it came to
be rendered by, and so to affect the usage of, the Latin
persona.
To make this episode in the caieer of the word vyrocrratnc
fully intelligible it will be necessary to look back for a
few minutes to an earlier period in the history of Greek
philosophical terminology and consider those difficulties
in determining the proper use of the word oi»<rm, being
or reality, with which Aristotle's discussion of its ambigui
ties makes us acquainted.^ It is easy to see that this
word might naturally enough be applied to the charac
teristic nature of a thing, by a description of which we
should answer the question ' What is it ? ' But as, if
this question were raised about several things of the
same kind, we might give exactly the same answer in
the case of each, the being or essence, as we may say,
of a thing might seem to be something common to it
with others, or, in the language of the logicians, a ' uni
versal/ On the other hand, it was argued by Aristotle
that nothing could be properly considered as an ovo-m,
or real being, which was not something existing, so to say*
upon its own account, something to which attributes
might belong, but which could not belong in this way to
anything else ; which was, in the phrase which had come
11 Psa. xxxviii. (xxxix.) 6 ; Ixxxviii. (Ixxxix.) 48.
12 Jer. x. 17 (r>]v v. <rov = ihy substance, i.e. thy property) ;
Ezek. xxvi. n (~ftv v. rij^ "uryvoQ o-ov = the support of thy strength).
'3 Metaph. Z. 1-3, cp. A 8.
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 41
to be appropriated to such a thing, a vTroKti/utvov, a
subject or substratum. Hence a mere ' universal ' such
as ' man/ which is no more what I am than it is what
you are or what you are than what I am, could not be
rightly called ov<r/'a, but only an individual being, this
or that individual man, for example Socrates or Callias, in
whom are met together the two mutually complementary
conditions of full reality, namely a distinguishable nature
of its own and that concrete independence which cannot
be ascribed to what is only an accident or attribute
of something else. But the term viroKti/mtvov, which is
used to indicate this latter note of a real being, could be
and was employed also as a designation of that abstraction
of indeterminate, unqualified potentiality which Aristotle
called vArj or Matter. Greek philosophy was haunted,
as it were, by the thought of this Matter, lying at the root
of whatever is susceptible of any kind of development ;
in itself without form 01 character of any kind, but capable
of receiving any and so becoming some particular thing,
qualified in some definite way. Matter, thus understood,
might be called the ultimate v-rroKti/jLtvov or substratum
of everything in this lower world. Now it was, I take
it, because this word VITOK^VOV might be thus used,
and so could not be restricted to the concrete individual
thing, in which some form or nature, describable in general
terms which are applicable to more things than one, is
realized in this or that instance, this or that man, this or
that horse, that there was felt in the post -Aristotelian
period of Greek philosophy to be room for a word appro
priated to this last signification only. Such a word was
found in uTrooratnc, a word involving practically the same
metaphor as VTTOKU^VOV, but without the associations of
\vith mere indeterminate Matter. Thus it
42 GOD AND PERSONALITY
is that VTTOGTCHJIQ comes into use as a philosophical term,
often equivalent to ovvia, which for Aristotle is most
properly used of the concrete individual of a certain kind ;
but of Aristotle's two notes of real being, its intelligible
character and its concrete independence, emphasizing the
latter, as oixria emphasized the former.
This difference of emphasis between the two words
ovaia and vTroo-rao-Ac sufficiently accounts for the use
made of them respectively by the Christian Church in
the eventual formulation of her theology. When con
strained to give systematic expression to the implications
of the divine Name of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the use
of which had been characteristic of Christianity at least
from the time of its first appearance on the stage of the
Grseco-Roman world as a claimant to universal allegiance,
she worked out a terminology in which ovata was appro
priated to the one Divine Nature, U7roara<nc to the dis
tinctions within it designated by the three titles, Father,
Son, and Spirit.
As is well known to students of theology, the settle
ment of this terminology was a long and controversial
process, The discrimination of ouorm from v7roora<T*c
was not readily accepted ; for, whatever difference of
emphasis there may have been between the two words,
they were at first, both inside and outside of the Christian
Church, generally considered on the whole as synonymous.
They were so both in the language of Origen, in whose
writings the description of the members of the Trinity
as three vTroorao-ae first occurs, and also in that of
his fellow-student at Alexandria, Plotirms. We should,
indeed, expect the associations of the word to be the same
for them both. The use of viroaramQ by Plotinus and
by the Neo-Platonic philosophers generally is a subject
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 43
which needs a fuller investigation than it seems yet to
have received. For Plotinus, so far as I understand him —
but he is a very difficult author and I make no claim to
more than a superficial acquaintance with his writings —
v7Toora<nc and the corresponding verb seem to signify
the concrete actuality of that to which they are applied.
Such a concrete actuality does Origen attribute to each
member of the Christian Trinity where he speaks of them
as three viroaTacrug J4 ; and Plotinus to each member of
his corresponding triad — the Supreme Good, Intelligence,
and the World Soul ; which, in the title of one of the essays
by him which his disciple Porphyry collected into the
fifth Ennead,J5 are described as the three ap\iKa\
{JTroorruo^c, primary or original realities.
The word ovtn'a, on the other hand, though, as we have
seen, generally regarded as synonymous with vvrocrraatc —
and so treated not only by Plotinus but by Origen— was
obviously more readily applicable to something which
was shared by several concrete actualities, but was itself
not actual apart from or outside of them. Hence, as we
have seen, in the final settlement of the terminology of
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity the divine oucna
was said to be one, the divine vrroffTaatis three. This
terminology was so far, however, not distinguishable
from that which might be used in discriminating the
one identical human nature of Peter, James, and John
from the individuality in which the three men differ each
from each. But, since the Christian Church had no
intention of surrendering the confession that " the Lord
our God is one," l6 which had been the characteristic note
of the faith of the parent community of Israel, out of
M In Joan. ii. 6. T5 Enn. v. i.
16 Deut. vi. 4 ; cp. Mark xii. 29.
44 GOD AND PERSONALITY
which she had aiisen and whose Scriptures she retained
as her own, it was in itself a defect in this part of her
theological phraseology that it did not, as it stood, more
decisively exclude the interpretation which would assimi
late the unity of the Godhead to the merely specific unity in
which three several men partake. Now it so happened
that a deficiency in the philosophical vocabulary of the
Latin-speaking as compared with that of the Greek-
speaking churches proved of service in helping to remedy
this defect.
We have already seen that substantia came to be regarded
in philosophical Latin as the representative of the Greek
owm, and that, despite the high authority of no less
a master of the language than Cicero, essentia, which
was afterwards to be found useful in this capacity, long
failed to obtain a sure footing in the language. Hence
arose a difficulty in rendering into Latin the discrimination
between oi/o-m and vTroaram^ necessary to the orthodox
expression of the doctrine of the Trinity. For substantia,
which would naturally have been used for uTroorao-fc,
of which it was the direct translation, was wanted to
represent ovaia ; what, then, was to stand for vTroo-rao-fc ?
It would seem to have been to Tertullian that the
currency — if not the discovery — was due of a word to serve
this purpose which was ultimately to take the place of
i/TTocrrao-fc in the theological phraseology of the Western
Church and to suggest a useful variant for it in that of
the Eastern. This word was no other than persona,1!
which, as we have seen, meant primarily a part played
in some form of social intercourse, and secondarily the
player of such a part. Though used in the connexion
of which we are now speaking to stand for u7roaracr*c,
*7 See Tert. adv. Praxean, cc. u, 12 (Migne, Pair. Lat. II, 167, C,D).
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 45
it had already a more nearly literal representative in
Greek, namely Trpuwrrov ; and this is not unknown
to Greek theology as a synonym of viroaraai^ when
employed in formulating the doctrine of the Trinity.
But there seems reason to conjecture that the introduction
of this latter word into Greek theological terminology
was due to the reaction of the Western usage upon the
language of the East. It first appears in its theological
reference in the writings of Hippolytus, who though he
wrote in Greek, was himself a Western, a presbyter of
the Roman Church, and to a considerable extent in theo
logical and ecclesiastical sympathy with his African
contemporary Tertullian.18 This is not the place to
discuss the question of the literary relation of Tertullian
to Hippolytus. If we could be certain that Hippolytus'
use of TrpoVwTrov was independent of Tertullian, or should
even suppose— what is not likely— that it suggested
Tertullian's use of persona, the evidence would still point
to the Eastern Church having borrowed the use of
irpowrrov from the Western, in which Latin (already,
no doubt, though Hippolytus still wrote in Greek, by
his time the medium of ordinary intercourse), became
with Tertullian the language of theological literature
as well.
In any case persona became the principal Latin repre
sentative of the Greek wrotrracnc in its theological
sense, and we shall see that the use of its more literal
rendering irpoauirov as an alternative expression for
v7TO(n-a(T<c in Greek balanced the suggestion contained
in the use of v-rrofrraats of a too complete distinction
of Father, Son, and Spirit within the Godhead, as complete
'* Hippolytus contra Noetum § 14 (ed. Lagarde, p.- 52) ; Ref. Haer.
x. 12 (ed. Duncker, p. 458).
46 GOD AND PERSONALITY
as that of three men within the human species, by a
suggestion of an exactly opposite kind. For irpowirov
had (principally, as one may suppose, because it had not
acquired the legal associations of persona) made still
less progress than persona towards the modern philosophi
cal use of person. Primarily, indeed, it meant the face,
not, like persona, the actor's mask (which was properly
in Greek Trpoo-wTraov). So far as it had come to be used
at all for an individual human being it was probably
rather through taking the 'face' to stand for the man,
as we speak of counting heads, than through being used
for a dramatis persona, although it is found also in this
sense. This being the history of the term Trpown-ov, we
are not surprised to find that even more than persona
did it suggest a mere aspect or role. Several such aspects
might be presented, several such roles discharged by the
same individual at different times. Thus Trpoo-wTrov,
used of Father, Son, and Spirit, might suggest, did one
but forget that one might also say uTroorao-te, that
the distinction between them was one of as superficial,
perhaps of as temporary a character as that between the
different aspects the same man may wear on different
occasions, or the different parts he may take in different
conversations.
Thus what we may call the philosophical use of person
in the modern European languages has been determined
by the use in the formulation of the Christian doctrine
of the Trinity of vTroaraais and persona as equivalent
expressions ; and we shall find that ambiguities derived
from the very different origins of the two words thus
associated together have left undeniable traces in the
treatment of the word person by different thinkers in our
own time. For the history of philosophical terms is very
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 47
far from encouraging the writer of philosophical books
in the belief that he can say with Humpty Dumpty in
Alice Through the Looking Glass that " when I use a word, it
means what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." *9
To Boethius at the beginning of the sixth century of
our era we owe the definition of persona which became
the standard definition for the writers of the Middle Ages
and which is still perhaps, take it all in all, the best that we
have. It occurs in his treatise — we will speak of it as
his, for, though his authorship has been doubted by good
scholars, the weight of the evidence is, I think, on the
whole in favour of it 20 — against Nestorius and Eutyches,
whose names were associated respectively with two oppo
site views of Christ's personality, reckoned by the main
body of the Christian Church as alike heretical.
This celebrated definition runs as follows : Persona
est natures rationabilis individua substantia 3I : the indi-
*9 C. 6.
10 In my Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 143, I ex
pressed a different opinion ; but I now doubt whether the Council
of Chalcedon is the assembly referred to in the preface ; and, if
it is not, the chief argument against the authenticity of the treatise
disappears. On the other hand, I cannot but think it possible
that in the Anecdoton Holdcri, to which Usener appeals as deciding
the question by the unexceptionable authority of Cassiodorus, the
copyist of the extract from the latter's letter may, as Nitzsch
supposes, have interpolated the names of works already ascribed
in his time to Boethius. Still, as it stands, the external evidence
is in favour of Boethius's authorship, while I do not feel so strongly
as Nitzsch the difficulty of supposing the writer of the Consolatio
Philosophies to have composed a Christological treatise which,
while abounding in learning and in the appreciation of intellectual
subtleties, gives no sign of a deep personal religious interest in
the doctrines expounded.
81 Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, c. 3. I take this opportunity
of correcting the statement of the definition in my Studies, p. 143,
where, through an oversight, the origin of which I cannot now
explain, the false reading subsistentia was printed instead of the
certainly correct substantia.
48 GOD AND PERSONALITY
vidual subsistence of a rational nature. Here what I
may call the double- facedness of the term is brought out.
For when we use the word person we describe that which
we so designate as an individual, not as a universal which
may attach to many individuals. Rational nature taken
by itself as a universal is not a person. On the other
hand, neither is any individual a person whose nature is
not rational : and this, if we consider , means an individual
which is not aware of itself as an instance of a universal.
Thus an individual stone is not a person, because, though
we recognize that there is a common nature which it
shares with other stones, the stone itself is not aware of
this ; nor is an animal, such as a dog or a horse, a person ;
for although it may possess (for example in the form ot
the attraction of sex) an instinctive awareness of the
presence in others of a nature common to them with
itself, yet we do not suppose that it reflects upon this so
as to form a general notion of this common nature. Nor
do we naturally apply the term person even to a human
infant which has not yet arrived at the stage of such
reflection. It is only to mature human beings that
within the sphere of our everyday experience we com
monly apply it ; for only in them do we find a full recogni
tion of his or her self as at once distinct from other selves
and as sharing along with other selves in a common
nature. It is true that a corporation may be a person
in law and may be treated like an individual man or
woman as a subject of rights and duties. This conception
of corporate personality I hope in my second course of
Lectures to examine more closely. But I think we must
admit that only with an apology or explanation should
we in ordinary discourse speak of a corporation or a com
munity of any kind as a person ; to call it so without
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 49
qualification would be felt to be unnatural and pedantic.23
It may seern strange that this should be so if, as appears
to be the case, we find in the earlier stages of civilization
not the individual but the community to which he belongs
regarded as the primary subject of rights and duties ;
the crime of the individual involving the guilt of his clan
or tribe, and the wrong done to the individual calling for
the infliction of vengeance by any member of his tribe
upon any member of the offenders. But the development
of civilization has on the whole been marked by a tendency
to transfer, at any rate in respect of a large part of the
field of human conduct, this position as the subject of
rights and duties from the community to the individual
member of the community. When the remark is made,
which we often hear nowadays, that Personality is a
comparatively late discovery, it is due to a perception
of this historical fact. For (to quote some words which
I have written elsewhere) 33 so long as Personality is found,
not mainly in the individual, but rather in the com
munity, so long Personality in our sense — the individual
subsistence of a rational nature — is not adequately recog
nized. On the other hand, so long as it is only
acknowledged in certain selected individuals, such as
a prince who, as in Hobbes's theory, absorbs the
personality of all his subjects, or a priest who is the
' parson ' or ' persona ' of the parish over which he
presides, so long there is an inadequate recognition of
the individual subsistence of a rational nature in
the multitude of which these are the selected repre
sentatives ; for the ordinary members of the multitude
are so far regarded as mere individuals, riot properly
" Cf. my Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 143.
*3 Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 144.
4
50 GOD AND PERSONALITY
persons in their own right, but only as such in and
through their representatives.
I would further call attention to the fact that the two
notes in the conception of Personality which are expressed
in the definition of persona given by Boethius may be said
to be emphasized the one rather by that word itself,
the other by what is its Greek equivalent in this sense ;
the rational nature rather by persona, the individual
subsistence by viroaracfiq. The word vTrooracnc does not
by itself convey any suggestion of a rational nature.
There was nothing in its etymology to forbid its applica
tion even to a merely material thing. We have already
seen that in one of the earliest. instances of its scientific
use, in the passage quoted above from the pseudo-
Aristotelian de Mundo, it is even used to distinguish the
solid corporeity of a comet from a mere effect of reflected
light like a rainbow. *4 But the later usage of the word
had tended to give to it dignified associations which made
it suggest a higher kind of reality than could be ascribed
to a mere inanimate thing. Boethius himself — if the
treatise be really his — asserts, in the context of the defi
nition of persona which I have been quoting, that the
Greeks do not use vTrooratne even of irrational animals but
only of rational beings. This is probably not true in the
unqualified form in which it is here asserted. But it
must have had some ground in fact ; and, if we take it
to proceed from Boethius, it must be allowed very con
siderable weight. A man so well read in Greek literature,
philosophical, scientific, and theological, as Boethius
certainly was — he had translated into Latin Plato, Aristotle,
Archimedes, and Euclid, as well as written on the chief
theological controversies of the day — would scarcely
»4 De Mundo 4, 395, a. 30. See above, p. 37.
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 51
have made such a statement had it not held good in a
notable majority of instances. We have already observed
that not only was it the word used by the Christian theolo
gians of the Father, Son, and Spirit whom they worshipped
as one God, but it was also employed by Plotinus to desig
nate the three members of his Trinity — the Supreme Good,
the Intelligence, and the World-Soul — a Trinity suggested
by the Timaus of Plato, and despite important differences,
presenting a certain correspondence with the Trinity of
the Christians. The use, then, of uTrooratnc to denote
the members alike of the Neo-Platonic and of the Christian
Trinity suggests that Boethius was justified in calling
attention to this association of special dignity with the
word as characteristic of Greek thought as a whole during
the period in which it had been used as a technical term of
philosophy.
But if wTTooramc, despite the absence of any suggestion
of the kind in the etymology of the word, had come to
imply the individual subsistence not of any nature, but
only of a rational nature, persona was from the first
obviously inappropriate to any but a rational nature.
Only a rational being could be an actor in a play or a
party to a suit or contract. On the other hand, as has
already been pointed out, there was lacking in persona
(and perhaps still more in its Greek representative
TTpoffuirov) any decided suggestion of a permanent,
inalienable, fundamental individuality. Rather did it
carry with it the associations of an occasional, temporary,
voluntary activity, although no doubt also of one which
distinguished him who exercised it from the mass of his
fellows and made him in some particular respect an out
standing figure. An individual man is not born a player,
a litigant, or an official ; when he ceases to act in any
52 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of these capacities, he does not thereupon cease to be,
nor while he is acting in them do they absorb the whole
of his existence.
I said in my first Lecture that when Lotze ascribes to
the Absolute Personality and Mr. Bosanquet Individuality
but not Personality, we have to do with something more
than a merely verbal difference. But though this is true,
the difference between them in this respect is a difference
upon which the history of the word Person will be found
to throw some light. We shall have at a later stage of
our inquiry to consider the deeper significance of it ;
at present I desire to call attention to its verbal aspect.
Mr. Bosanquet is true to what may be said to be the Hege
lian tradition, for which the legal associations of persona are
what on the whole determine the use of the words Person
and Personlichkeit.2$ A person, to be a person, must stand
in relation to other persons, and it is where this relation
is of a merely judicial or legal character that the expres
sion is especially in place ; for in the higher kinds of such
relationship — in marriage or in the State — the parties
to the relation tend to lose their separate personality and
become factors in the inclusive personality of the family
or of the State, which can then be treated as persons,
just because they stand over against other families or
other States with claims and counterclaims upon them,
such as the several men and women who constitute them
have upon one another when they are not conscious of
a higher unity superseding their mutual independence.
When Personality is viewed from this angle, it is intel-
25 Hegel's use of ' person ' is perhaps not quite consistent. Thus
he sometimes says that all living beings are subjects but that only
some are persons (Phil. d. Rechts § 35, Werke, viii. p. 71), some
times that the person becomes a subject when passing from legality
to morality (ibid. § 105, p. 144).
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 58
ligible that it should seem an attribute wholly inapplicable
to the Absolute, which cannot stand in an external relation
to anything else. On the other hand, just because all
relations must fall within it, the Absolute alone can from
this point of view be called in the strictest sense an indi
vidual ; beings like ourselves who are persons are for
that very reason possessed only of a quasi-individuality ;
we are aware of ourselves as, in the phrase of Descartes,*6
res incomplete, beings whose nature cannot be fully
described without bringing in the mention of beings
other than ourselves, our relations to which constitute
what we ourselves are. To the all-inclusive reality of the
Absolute personality is inapplicable, but individuality is
its prerogative ; we, on the other hand, just because we
are persons, can only be called individuals in a qualified
sense and, as it were, by courtesy.
The way in which Lotze looks at Personality is quite
different. For him,2? though each of us may only be able
to think of his self as contrasted with what is not self,
yet one may experience one's self " previous to and out
of every such relation " and " to this is due the possi
bility of its subsequently becoming thinkable in that
relation." That to which Personality can properly be
ascribed is an " inner core, which cannot be resolved
into thoughts" *8 ; of this "inner core" we know the
meaning and significance " in the immediate experience
of our mental life " and " we always misunderstand it
when we seek to construe it."
We will not at present pursue further Lotze's account
of Personality, to which we must hereafter return. But
26 Medit. iii. sub fin.
J7 See Microcosmus, ix. 4 § 4, Eng. tr. ii. p. 680.
>s Ibid. p. 682.
54 GOD AND PERSONALITY
what I have quoted from it is sufficient to explain why
he, unlike Mr. Bosanquet, can ascribe Personality to the
Absolute, and indeed in the strictest sense to nothing
else. For only an Infinite Being can be supposed con
sciously to possess its whole nature in the manner in
which we consciously possess that part of our experience
which we feel to be most intimately our own. The con
siderations which determine Lotze in appropriating Per
sonality to the Infinite are closely akin to those which
determine Mr. Bosanquet to a like appropriation of Indi
viduality to the Absolute. But that it is Personality
which he can thus appropriate is due to the fact that
with Lotze the legal associations of the word do not, as
with Mr. Bosanquet, dominate his conception of its
meaning, and that for him it corresponds more closely
than with Mr. Bosanquet, faithful as he is to the Hegelian
tradition of insistence on those legal associations, to
uTroo-rao-tc as employed by the Greeks whose usage Boethius
reports to us.
The general history of the word Person with its deri
vatives in philosophical terminology may be said to have
moved on the whole throughout on lines determined for
it by the process whose result is summed up in the Boethian
definition of persona. Within these lines there has been
a continual oscillation, according as the thought, em
phasized by the Greek word viroaraaig, of independent
and fundamentally unchangeable individuality, or the
thought of social relationship and voluntary activity,
suggested by the Latin word persona, has been upper
most. But it will be convenient, before leaving this
general history of the word and the notions corresponding
to it for a more particular consideration of the history
of its application to God, to advert to certain aspects
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 55
of Personality which, although they may be brought
within the scope of the Boethian formula, were not so
much emphasized in the earlier discussions which have
chiefly occupied our attention hitherto as they have been
in later times. I shall not attempt to discuss them
exhaustively, but shall only conclude this Lecture by
indicating them in a brief and summary manner.
Three such aspects of Personality may be noted. We
may label them as inc ommunic ability , self-consciousness,
and will respectively. Stress was already laid upon
the first of these, incommunicability , in a passage of the
twelfth-century mystic Richard of St. Victor, which was
often quoted by later Schoolmen ; and to dwell upon
this feature of Personality was congenial to the tendency
which from the middle of the thirteenth century mani
fested itself in mediaeval philosophy towards preoccupation
with the problem of Individuality. It is obvious that,
in emphasizing the incommunicable nature of Personality,
the writers whom I have in mind were attending to
that side of the conception of Personality, as denned
by Boethius, which is expressed by the words individua
stibstantia and suggests the Greek word wroVradte, rather
than to that expressed by the words natura rationabilis
which remind one more of the original associations of the
Latin persona. It became the custom to use in defining
persona phrases which, like suppositum, or ens completum,
called attention chiefly to its concrete individuality,
though of course with some such epithet as intellectual
to distinguish persons from supposita (concrete indi
viduals) of a lower rank ; and this practice still persisted
among the philosophical theologians of the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries. 29
*9 See Richard of St. Victor, de Trin. iv. 6, 8, 21, 22, 23, 24 (Migne,
56 GOD AND PERSONALITY
As we should expect, the new direction given to specu
lation by Descartes was not without its effect upon the
way in which the subject of Personality was approached.
It is well known that Descartes, after attempting to
carry doubt as far as it would go, had found one thing
which he could not doubt, namely the existence of his
own thinking self ; since even to doubt he must think,
and to think he must exist ; and that, starting from this
sole ultimate bedrock of certainty, he worked back to
assurance of the existence, first of God and then of the
world of objects. Now in following this procedure and
treating the mind of man as the one indubitable reality,
he broke away from the conviction, which the philosophy
of the Middle Ages had inherited from antiquity, that
the existence of something real other than the mind of
man was beyond question, and introduced into European
thought that pyschological bias, if I may so describe
it, the presence of which in so much of the speculation
of the last three centuries perhaps more than anything
else differentiates it from that of the preceding ages.
The change of point of view due to the introduction of
this bias is marked by the changes in philosophical ter
minology to which it has led. Thus subjective formerly
meant what belonged to the existence of things as they
were in themselves, independent of our perception or
Pair. Lai. cxcvi. 934 seqq.); Durandus a Sancto Porciano in Sent.
iii. n, 2 § 10, ii. 3. 2 § 5 ; Duns Scotus in Sent. (Op. Oxon.) I dist.
23, qu. i. 4 ; Ockham in Sent. i. dist. 23, qu. i. Richard of
St. Victor held that the Boethian definition as it stood was in
sufficient to distinguish the divine persons from the ' undivided
substance' of the Trinity.
See also Melanchthon, Loc. Theol. de tribus Personis Divinitatis ;
Turretinus, Inst. Theol. (1679) loc. III. qu. 23 §§ 4, 8; Bellarmine,
de Christo, ii. 4 ; Sherlock, Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity,
p. 69.
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 57
knowledge of them, objective what belonged to them as
presented to or apprehended by consciousness. But now,
since for Descartes the only thing whose existence was
directly and indubitably certain was the conscious mind,
this conscious mind has arrogated to itself the designation
of Subject par excellence and subjective has come to mean
what belongs to it, objective what is in any particular
connexion contrasted with it.
There was another famous term, very similar in origin
and history to Subject : I mean Substance. Subject of
course originated as a rendering of VTTOKU^VOV and
Substantia as we have seen of uTrocrramc, and I have
already touched upon the early relationship of these two
Greek terms.
Now the term Substance was for the philosophers of
the age inaugurated by Descartes a fruitful source of
embarrassment, just because the thought which it was apt
to call up of an unperceived foundation, concealed under
neath those immediate objects of our consciousness of
which we are actually aware, was not easily harmonized
with a philosophy which found in awareness or conscious
ness itself what is surest and deepest and most abiding.
No wonder, then, that the notion of Personality was pro
foundly affected by this new set of the currents of thought,
and that self-consciousness, that is consciousness of self,
came to be considered the essence of Personality.
The expression ' self-consciousness ' probably originated
in England, where we find it used by Locke 3<> and other
writers of his time and playing a considerable part in the
Trinitarian controversy which agitated the learned of
so Essay ii. 27 § 16 (cp. ibid. §§ 23, 26) ; Sherlock, Vindication, p. 49 ;
South, Animadversions upon Dr Sherlock, London, 1693, pp. 70
foil.
58 GOD AND PERSONALITY
that country at the end of the seventeenth and the begin
ning of the eighteenth century. But it afterwards seems
almost to have disappeared from the English language.
As a philosophical term it was brought back into it in the
nineteenth century by British thinkers who wrote under
the influence of German idealism, as a translation of the
German Selbst-bewusstsein, which itself may not im
probably have been at first a rendering of the old English
term.
Although Self-consciousness had no doubt been always
implied in the definitions which spoke of a " naturae
rationabilis individua substantia " or of a " suppositum
intellectuale" yet the changed attitude towards the old
problems led to emphasis on what in those definitions was
adjectival, almost or quite to the exclusion of what in
them was substantive. When Christian Wolff, the
Schoolman of the Enlightenment, defines Person as
Ein Ding das Sick bewusst ist,il a thing that is conscious of
itself, the words might stand as a translation of Ockham's
suppositum intellectuale ; yet the balance of the phrases
is characteristically different. In Wolff's definition as
compared with Ockham's the substantive is the vaguest,
most colourless word which could be found, instead of
one implying a whole metaphysical theory ; while the
adjectival clause describes in terms which at any rate
seem unambiguous the activity which in the older formula
is merely designated by a conventional epithet that might
well be thought to stand itself in need of explanation.
Since the philosophical revolution which we associate
with the name of Descartes, one other remains to be
31 Vernunftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt, und der Seele (Halle,
I75I) § 924» P- 57°> God (ibid. § 979, p. 603) sich seiner bewusst ist ;
but the word Person is not applied to him.
PERSONALITY IN GENERAL 59
mentioned as having affected in an important degree
our way of regarding Personality. The name which we
connect with this revolution is that of Kant. Although
Descartes had broken away from the tradition of ancient
and mediaeval thought in treating our own mental activity
as the one unquestionable fact of experience, he had
remained faithful to what had been the main (though
not the sole) tradition of the earlier schools in recognizing
the primacy of cognition among the forms of that activity.
It was Kant 32 whose proclamation of the primacy of the
practical over the theoretical reason gave the chief impulse
to the tendency, apparent in much recent speculation,
to find in will rather than in cognition the most funda
mental characteristic of the experienced mental activity,
wherein rather than in anything underlying experience,
called ' substantial soul ' or the like, the modern world
had come to seek the essence of Personality. It will not,
however, escape the notice of the practised student of the
history of thought that an emphasis on will rather than
on cognition may easily lead to the search for the true
sources of mental activity below (to use a now familiar
metaphor) ' the threshold of consciousness,' and thereby
to a reinstatement of something strangely like the
mysterious underlying substance or suppositum of the
older Schools, which the philosophy of experience believed
itself to have exorcised.
I have in the last few paragraphs of this Lecture very
briefly and summarily indicated movements of thought
3* But Leibnitz already defines persona thus : " Persona est cuius
aliqua voluntas est, seu cuius datur cogitatio, affectus, voluptas,
dolor." This definition (which I have not been able to find) is
quoted by Wallace, Essays on Moral Philosophy VI (Lectures and
Essays, p. 273), without a reference to the work from which it is
taken.
60 GOD AND PERSONALITY
the accurate description of which would require a much
more extended treatment. But perhaps what I have
said will be sufficient to form a background to our later
investigations. And for the present I pass from the
general history of the notion of Personality to the his
tory of its application to God. This history will form
the topic of my third Lecture.
LECTURE III
HISTORY OF THE NOTION OF PERSONALITY
AS APPLIED TO GOD
As in the last Lecture, so in this, it is a historical investi
gation which will engage our attention. Having out
lined the history of persona as a philosophical term, a
history in tracing which we have often had to advert
to its use in the formulation of theological dogma, I have
now to invite you to a more particular consideration of
its use and that of its recognized equivalents as applied
to God.
It is so often taken for granted nowadays that the
Personality of God is a principal tenet of Christianity
that it is not without surprise that we find this expression
not only entirely absent from the historical creeds and
confessions of the Christian Church, but even, until quite
modern times, in the estimation of all but the minority
of Christians who reject the doctrine of the Trinity, re
garded as unorthodox. Nevertheless it is beyond question
that historically it was in connexion with the doctrine
of the Trinity that the words ' person ' and ' personality '
came to be used of the Divine Being ; and that God was
first ' described as ' a person ' by certain theologians of
» But see p. 68 n. below for an anticipation of this language by
Paul of Samosata in the third century.
62 GOD AND PERSONALITY
the sixteenth century not so much by way of positively
asserting an important truth of theology as by way of
denying that he was rightly said to be three persons. The
most influential of the anti-Trinitarian divines of the
Reformation period, Faustus Socinus, was followed by the
compilers of the Racovian Catechism (the official standard
of the first organized Church since the Reformation to
profess Unitarianism) in expressly stating that, though
God may rightly be said to be one Person, since in the
case of an intellectual being numerical (as opposed to
merely specific) unity is not to be distinguished from per
sonality, yet belief in the unity of his Person is not neces
sary to salvation ; for those who hold that he exists
in three Persons, however absurd their view, may obey
his will as revealed by Christ, and so may be saved.2
It would be interesting to ascertain the first occurrence
of the expression ' Personality of God ' as we are accus
tomed to find it used now, apart from any reference to
the Christian doctrine of a Trinity of persons in one Divine
Nature. There can in any case, I think, be little doubt
that it should be sought among the writers of the eighteenth
century, and in the period which historians of philosophy
sometimes describe as that of the enlightenment. 3 I
3 See Socinus, Christiana Religionis Institutio (Opp. ; p. 652) :
Catech. Racov., de Cognitione Dei c. i (ed. Lat. 1609, p. 29). Serve-
tus, on the other hand, called Christ, who in his view existed from
the beginning of the world as the archetype of humanity, the
' person of God.' Nee est alia Dei persona nisi Christus, non est alia,
Dei hypostasis (de Trin. erronibus ed. 1531, p. 112). His disciple,
Valentinus Gentilis expressly denied the propriety of applying the
term persona to God the Father (Brevis Explicatio, 1567, p. 3).
3 On Wolff see above, Lecture II, p. 58. Kant, who defines
Person (Rechtslehre : Werke, ed. Hart. vii. p. 20) as a being dessen
Handlung einer Zurechnung fdhig sind, could not have held the term
applicable to one who was sovereign and not subject in the ' king
dom of ends.' I do not actually know of any instance of the use
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 63
may be allowed to indicate certain characteristics of the
thought of this period, which would have assisted an
expression with Unitarian associations, though not, so
far as I know, employed by Unitarian writers (Priestley,
for example, appears to avoid it) to escape, even in quarters
where the Trinitarian theology was not abandoned, the
suspicion which would have attached to it on that account
in the preceding age. On the one hand several of the
influences then most potent in the world of thought
tended to draw away attention from Trinitarian specu
lations and to fasten it upon the unity of the Divine Nature.
Such was the great progress made by mathematical and
mechanical science in the period illustrated by the names
of Galileo and Newton, revealing as it did with ever
increasing clearness the unity of the material system, and
thereby impressing with ever increasing force upon the
mind the unity of its Cause, but at the same time en
couraging an abstract and unhistorical mode of thinking,
to which a doctrine like that of the Trinity, which seeks
to construe the Highest in terms of a life of love, could
make but little appeal. Such, again, was the movement
in philosophy inaugurated by Descartes with its pref
erence for ' clear and distinct ideas ' such as are especially
afforded by the sciences to which I have just referred.
To those in whom this preference was strong the mysterious
and enigmatic character of the doctrine of the Trinity
rendered it naturally uncongenial ; while there are per
haps at any time but few who, following the celebrated
of ' the Personality of God ' in our sense before Schleiermacher's
Reden iiber die Religion II (Gberdas Wesender Religion), but bespeaks
as though the expression were already known and by some insisted
upon. Its currency in England is, however, most probably to be
attributed to its appearance in Paley's Natural Theology, the
23rd chapter of which is devoted to ' The Personality of the Deity.'
This work appeared in 1802.
64 GOD AND PERSONALITY
counsel given to Priestley 4 by Bishop Horsley, to read
the Parmenides, have learned from Plato that the con
ception of unity is also not without grave difficulties of
its own.
Such, once more, was the philosophy of Locke, with
its cautious resolve to plant its feet upon the firm
ground of experience and to abjure excursions into
regions with the knowledge of which our happiness
or misery has nothing to do ; and to the temperament
characteristic of that age the regions of speculative
theology which had exercised the subtle wits of
Platonists and Schoolmen in earlier times were apt
to appear regions deserving so to be described.
On the other hand, the view of St. Thomas Aquinas
(which is now authoritative in the Roman Catholic Church)
that, while Reason could demonstrate the unity of God,
Revelation alone could make known to us the trinity of
persons therein, had come to prevail among the adherents
of tradition ; a view which relieves a theology claiming
to be Natural or Rational from any obligation to trouble
itself with a doctrine which is declared by its defenders
to be of necessity altogether beyond its sphere.
When we consider the direction taken by these various
currents of thought, we shall not be surprised to note
in the philosophical theology of the eighteenth century,
even among those who had no intention of abandoning
the traditional doctrines, a marked tendency towards
the Unitarian conception of deity, nor to find coming into
use among theologians of all schools a phrase like ' the
Personality of God,' which, in days when sensitiveness
to the points of Trinitarian controversy was greater,
4 In his fifteenth letter to Priestley. See Horsley's Tracts in
Controversy with Dr. Priestley (Dundee, 1812), p. 287.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 65
would have committed him who used it to a downright
denial of the dogma of the Catholic Church. Accordingly
we find Schleiermacher in the last year of the eighteenth
century referring to it as an expression familiar to his
hearers and Paley in the third year of the nineteenth
devoting a chapter of his Natural Theology to the ' Per
sonality of the Deity.' But even after this, it is sur
prising to find how little in use the phrase seems to
have been at any rate among English divines until the
nineteenth century had run more than half its
course.
We have, then, as historians, to note this fact : that,
while the affirmation of Personality in God has been
a characteristic of Christian theological terminology
since the third century of our era, the great majority of
Christian theologians down to quite modern times have
not affirmed in so many words the Personality of God.
I am not, of course, asserting that the majority of Christian
theologians, and indeed of Jewish and Mohammedan
theologians as well, to mention no others, have not
ascribed to God attributes which it may plausibly be
argued can belong only to persons. At present I am
concerned only with the actual ascription of Personality
itself to God.
We have seen that the word persona was first used in
theology to describe the respective bearers of the three
names, Father, Son, and Spirit, the use of which, not
alternatively but in combination, the Christian Church
had early come to regard as necessary to express the
fullness of the Godhead as apprehended in her worship ;
and that only long afterwards did it begin to be employed
of the Godhead as a whole. We have seen also that
the application of the word to the members of the
66 GOD AND PERSONALITY
Christian Trinity owed its currency to, if it was not
originated by, Tertullian, the first of the great Christian
theologians to write in the Latin tongue. Professor
Harnack, to whose labours all students of the history of
Christian dogma owe so great a debt, now admits that in
his earlier discussion of the circumstances which may have
recommended this word to Tertullian for use in this
connexion, he laid an exaggerated stress upon its
legal associations. 5 These must certainly not be left
out of account ; but I think we should be nearer the truth
in seeking our principal clue to the theological meaning
of the term in the sense which it had come to bear and
still bears in grammar, when we speak of the first, second,
and third persons in the conjugation of a verb. A study
of Tertullian's language will, I think, tend to show that
what he had most often in his mind was the fact that the
Scriptures contained passages of colloquy wherein both
addressing and addressed, and sometimes also the subject
of their discourse, were alike treated as divine.6
Now no doubt this uncritical use of Scripture texts
as authoritative and unquestionable sources of informa
tion with respect to the Divine Nature, though not so many
years since it seemed to most of our own forefathers
quite fit and reasonable and is by no means even now
extinct among our countrymen, may perhaps appear
nowadays to a cultivated and academic audience to take
away from the speculation which finds its starting-point
therein any but a purely archaeological interest. But to
neglect that speculation altogether on this account would
be unwise. For the thoughts of sincere and active minds
are never fairly to be judged by a mere inspection of the
J See Dogmengeschichte, 4th ed., i. p. 576^.
6 See Tertullian adv. Praxean, c.c. n, 12.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 67
form in which their reasonings are expressed. This form
may often betray the presence of prejudice, illusion, or
error, and we do well to be on the watch to detect any
infection thereby of the substance of the conclusion ;
and yet that substance may itself prove to be in part,
even in great part, sound and unaffected by the false
opinions of the thinker.
And so in the present instance, when, in respect of
Tertullian's reliance on his proof-texts from the Bible,
one has made all allowances for his ignorance of Hebrew
and of the history of the old Testament, for his bondage
to the letter of the old Latin translation, and for his readi
ness to treat, in Matthew Arnold's famous phrase, ' litera
ture ' as ' dogma/ there still remains in the discussions
to which I am referring a solid foundation with which
we have to reckon. This solid foundation is the pro
found impression made by the attitude towards God
attributed in the Gospels to the Founder of the Christian
religion and the inference to which it had led that the
personal relation — I use the term advisedly — of loving
sonship in which Jesus Christ was there represented as
standing towards his Father in heaven was the revelation
of a permanent and essential feature of the divine life,
further testimony to which it was then only natural that
Christians should seek, and not surprising, considering
their intellectual environment, that they should have
been over-easily satisfied to find, in writings which they
had always been taught to regard as verbally inspired.
It was only to express that which distinguished one
from another of the members of the Trinity acknow
ledged by the Christian Church to exist within the unity
of the Godhead that the word ' Person ' was regularly
employed in theology down to the period of the Reforma-
68 GOD AND PERSONALITY
tion.7 During that period, even when the doctrine of
the Trinity was disputed, the use of this word ' Person '
as applied to God was so closely associated with that
doctrine that those who altogether rejected the doctrine,
or at least desired to let it fall into the background, either
avoided the word altogether or employed it merely in
denning their attitude towards the traditional system.
But in the course of the last two centuries, under the
influences which I have indicated, the expression ' Per
sonality of God/ apart from reference to the doctrine of the
Trinity, has come into general use, and in what remains
of the present Lecture I will endeavour to ascertain what
is really intended by those who attach importance to
maintaining the truth of that which they describe by this
phrase.
This can perhaps most conveniently be done by con
sidering certain representative accounts of the Divine
Nature and making up our minds how far God as described
therein can be considered as a ' personal God.'
It would be readily admitted, I suppose, on all hands
that the God of Spinoza is not a ' personal ' God. But
it will be worth while to spend a few minutes in asking
ourselves what it is in the Spinozistic theology that
7 Where the unipersonality of God is suggested at all, it is merely
as a negative to the doctrine of his tripersonality. Thus, to take
examples from two authors belonging to two very different epochs,
we find the heresiarch Paul of Samosata in the third century quoted
as saying that God is one Person and his Logos, TrpovioTrov tv TOV
SEOV a/ia rip Xoyw wg avOpwov Iva. /ecu TOV aorov \6yov (Frag. X. I.
See Journal of 'Theological Studies, Oct. 1917, pp. 37 ff). And in
the fourteenth century Durandus a Sancto Porciano, who opposed
the view common in his day, and which of course had etymology
upon its side, that persona must always imply a relation, observes
that if, sicut Gentiles imaginantur, there be not a Trinity in the
Godhead, then God would be a person, illi naturcz vere competeret
ratio per sonce (in Sent. i. dist. 23, qu. i, § 15).
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 69
satisfies us of this. For the doctrine of the great Jewish
thinker may stand as the most highly developed and
therefore most adequately representative form assumed
by one widely diffused type of thought concerning the
nature of the Ultimate Reality — that type of thought
which may be conveniently designated by the popular
if ambiguous name of Pantheism.
No doubt, if by a Divine Person one were compelled
to mean, in accordance with strict historical propriety,
one of a plurality of beings within the Divine Nature,
the God of Spinoza could not be called ' a Person,' for
by God Spinoza undoubtedly means the absolute and all-
inclusive Reality. This, however, is not by itself enough
to show that Spinoza's God ought not to be called personal.
For the God of Catholic Christianity is also, as we have
seen, not ' a Divine Person ' and it would seem strange
to deny that the God of Catholic Christianity is personal,
although he is not thought of as one Person but as three.
It is easy, however, to discriminate the Spinozistic con
ception of God in this respect from that of Catholic
Christianity. Spinoza cannot, indeed, be said to admit
no distinctions in God. On the contrary he admits, as
is well known, what he calls ' Attributes ' of God, in each
of which, just as, according to Catholic Christianity, in
each Person of the Trinity, the whole Divine Nature is
expressed.8 Of these only two, Thought and Extension,
are within the sphere of our knowledge ; but we have
no reason to suppose but that there is an infinite number
of others besides. 9 But the relations of these Attributes
to one another are in no sense personal relations.
* See esp. the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council, c. 2 (Mansi
xxii. 983). Cp. Turretinus Inst. Theol. III. 27 § i. Unaqucsque
persona habet totam diiiinitatem ; John of Damascus, de Fide, iii. 6.
9 Eth. i. def. 6, prop 10 ; cp. Ep. 66 and see Joachim, Study oj the
Ethics of Spinoza, pp. 39 ff.
70 GOD AND PERSONALITY
However, as we have seen, the expression ' a personal
God ' is now often used without any thought of admitting
a plurality of beings within the Divine Nature standing
to one another in personal relations, whether after the
manner of polytheism, wherein they are thought of merely
as sharing in the Divine Nature just as all of us here share
in the human, or after the manner of Catholic Christianity,
in which the mutual unity of the three Divine Persons
is of course regarded as of an infinitely closer and more
intimate kind. When, however, the expression a ' personal
God ' is thus used, without reference to any plurality
within the unity of the Divine Nature, what is really in
the minds of those who so use it is, I think, always the
possibility of personal relations — of worship, trust, love
—between oneself and God. Now here again, so far
from Spinoza denying the possibility of anything of
this kind, it is well known that for him the supreme happi
ness of man is amor Intellectually Dei,10 the love of God
which comes of knowledge. But — and here is the crucial
point at which any theology which is concerned to ascribe
personality to God must take leave of Spinoza — it is abun
dantly clear that there is in this amor intellectually Del
no question of reciprocation. According to Spinoza God
neither " first loves us " nor does he return our love.11
And it is just this impossibility of a reciprocation of love
which makes it — despite the religious joy and peace
which we cannot for an instant doubt that Spinoza experi
enced in his contemplation of the eternal and unchangeable
nature of the Universe — impossible to speak of him as
teaching the personality of God.12
10 Eth. v. prop. 33. " Eth. v. prop. 19.
12 There is an ironical reference to the theological use of the word
in Cogitata Metaphysica, ii. 8 § i.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 71
In modern times it has become usual to contrast divine
immanence with divine transcendence . We shall have
occasion at a later stage to examine this antithesis more
closely ; but at present I am content to refer to it as one
familiar to all who are acquainted with contemporary
theological literature.
Now it might seem, from what has just been said, that
it is because Spinoza regards God as immanent or rather
as immanent only, that he cannot allow him to be personal
As to this suggestion, since we are still in this Lecture
dealing with the history rather than with the validity
of the conceptions under discussion, 1 will at this point
only make the following observation. There are views
of God as immanent and as immanent only, for which,
although they would probably not in popular discussion
be treated as affirmations of a personal God, it might be
easier to make out a case that they are really such. I am
thinking of such a view as finds expression in a striking
sentence of the elder Pliny, Deus est mortali adjuvare
mortalem '3 : ' This is God when one mortal helps another ' ;
or again such as is offered to us by the Religion of Humanity
inaugurated by Auguste Comte. Here it is in personal
relations— relations of persons to persons— and in such
relations only, that the Divine Nature is regarded as con
sisting. A God of this kind it is hard to say is not personal.
Yet most people would be inclined to hesitate. Pliny
indeed, as the context of the words I have quoted shows,
meant little more than that, since there was nothing more
divine than a man who helps his fellows, a ' saviour of
society ' might be properly regarded as a God. And such
a deified man might seem to be beyond question a personal
'3 Hist. Nat. ii. § 18. See Prof. Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of
Greek Religion, p. 139-
72 GOD AND PERSONALITY
God. But the phrase used taken by itself may suggest
a thought for which one might find a still better expression
in more familiar words : " God is love, and he that abideth
in love abideth in God and God in him." J4 So we read
in the New Testament. Here it is plain from what goes
before that the writer is thinking of the mutual love which
should exist between the members of the Christian
brotherhood, and which he does not hesitate to identify
with the Divine Nature. Did we possess this passage as
a fragment only, and were ignorant of other aspects of
the author's religion, we might suppose that we had to
do with a theology for which God was merely immanent.
But should we not in that case hesitate to describe such
a theology as the doctrine of a ' personal God ' ? And,
when we turn to the Great Being of the Comtist faith, we
should certainly be disposed to say that Humanity,
though consisting wholly of persons standing to one
another in personal relations, is not itself a Person with
whom oneself or any other human being can be in personal
relations. One is only in personal relations with some
other human being whom, in relation to oneself, one
would not call God. According to the language of
Catholic Christianity on the other hand, every Person
in God is himself God ; and we finite persons, who are not
ourselves God, may stand in personal relations with these
Divine Persons. Our later discussions may perhaps lead
us to doubt whether full justice has been done to the
views to which I have just been referring in the account
here given of them. But I have been intentionally
describing them according to their most obvious purport,
in order to show that, while of some doctrines which
make God immanent only one would hesitate — as one
M i John iv. 16.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 73
would not in the case of Spinozism — to say that they
did not make God personal, yet, on the whole, a God
consisting of persons, each of whom is not entitled to be
called God, and with whom as a whole we finite persons
cannot stand in personal relations, is not what is generally
called a personal God.
Thus, on the whole, we should not speak of a personal
God, unless we supposed that we could stand in personal
relations with him. And for those who conceive God as
merely immanent, this would be impossible. But so it
would be also for some who do not conceive God as
immanent at all. This we may illustrate from the theology
of Aristotle. If one meant by calling God personal no
more than to ascrile to God a self-conscious individuality,
we should certainly have to call the God of Aristotle a
personal God. And yet I think that no one who is familiar
with Aristotle's theology will deny that to do so would
be to give a very misleading description of his teaching.
Between the religion of Aristotle and that of Spinoza
there is a close kinship. In both it is the splendid flower
of a pure passion for knowledge, and in both it has nothing
to do with relations between persons, such as the mutual
love in which the New Testament writer whom I lately
quoted finds the very essence of God. And so, though
in a certain sense their theologies are diametrically opposed,
that of the ancient thinker being an extreme doctrine of
transcendence, and that of the modern an extreme doctrine
of immanence, they are alike in this, that both may be
said utterly to exclude such a possibility of personal
communion between God and his worshippers as the
expression ' a personal God ' at once suggests. Both
philosophers, indeed, speak of a ' love of God.' By this
expression Aristotle means not so much a conscious emo-
?4 GOD AND PERSONALITY
tion (though man may doubtless be conscious of it in him
self) as an instinctive movement by which everything in the
universe which is not the supreme good is drawrn towards
it, as a lover towards his beloved ; for Spinoza it is indeed
a personal activity of thought, amor intellectualis Dei ; but
by both philosophers alike the possibility of reciprocation
on the part of God is entirely excluded. That this is
expressly explained by Spinoza I have already observed ;
and, so far as regards Aristotle, the only activity which
he held to be attributable to a being perfect and in need
of nothing beyond himself, such as he conceived God
to be, was the activity of knowledge ; and the only object
which, according to him, was not unworthy of God's know
ledge was his own eternally perfect nature. The God
of Aristotle is not, indeed, like Spinoza's, an immanent
God. For Spinoza our understanding or knowledge of
God is a part of God's infinite understanding or knowledge
of himself, and our intellectual love of him a part of the
infinite love wherewith God loves himself.^ Thus he
can even speak of a love of God for us, although this does
not mean something other than our love for God. It
is a part of God's love for himself. This includes what
can be called in a sense a love for us, since our minds and
the thoughts which constitute them, so far as we think
clearly and thoroughly, are parts of that one eternal
system of thought which is, in Spinoza's language, God
viewed under the attribute of Thought ; just as our
bodies are parts of that eternal system of mattei in motion
which is God viewed under the attribute of Extension.
The love of God for us, thus understood, is no reciproca
tion of our love for him, and so does not warrant us in
describing the relation between us and God as a personal
relation.
*5 Eih. ii. prop, n, v. prop. 36.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 75
But Aristotle does not and could not speak of a love
of God for us in any sense. God, according to the prin
ciples of Aristotle's theology, can know and love nothing
less than himself, and his being does riot, like that of
Spinoza's God, include our being within itself. He is
utterly transcendent, and beyond the reach of personal
communion. It is very instructive to study the modi
fications which Aristotle's faithful follower, St. Thomas
Aquinas, has to introduce into his master's notion of God,
in order to make room for the providence of God for man
and the communion of man with God which his religious
faith and religious experience demanded.16
Thus, though Aristotle's theology is an extreme doctrine
of transcendence, while Spinoza's is an extreme doctrine
of immanence, neither is a doctrine of a personal God ;
and this agreement between them is closely connected
with that likeness between the religious temperaments,
if I may so speak, of the two philosophers which strikes
at once those who are acquainted with the writings of
both.
No doubt it would be possible to stand in genuine
personal relations with such a ' saviour of society ' as those
whom Pliny, in the passage to which I referred earlier
in this Lecture, and other Romans of his age were ready
to salute with the title of God, as one reserved for them
after they were dead, and sometimes even as earned
already in their lifetime.1? But plainly it would be out
of the question for these personal relations to be at all
intimate except for a very few, and even for them they
would only exist during the term of the natural life of
16 See Summa c. Gentiles, i. 44 seqq. ; Summa Theol. p. I. qu. 14
cp. Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 246.
'7 Cp. W. Warde Fowler, Roman Ideas of Deity, c. 5.
76 GOD AND PERSONALITY
their object. Nor probably was it in the design of those
who at various times have inaugurated or promoted the
deification and worship of men who " exercise authority
and are called benefactors " l8 that the devotion which
was to find expression in it should have much or anything
to do with the deeper emotions of the worshipper's personal
life. A ' god ' of this kind, although certainly a person,
is riot the kind of God to satisfy those among ourselves
who would most earnestly proclaim their need of a ' per
sonal God/ For not only would he probably seem to them
unworthy to be called God at all, but he would have too
slight and external a connexion with the personal life
of his worshippers to meet the demand which a ' personal
God ' is supposed alone capable of supplying.
We turn to the claim to be considered as a personal
God of such a deified hero, when conceived as after his
death raised above the vicissitudes of mortal life, hence
forth to be related to his fellowmen no otherwise than as
the recipient of their worship. It must be borne in mind
that I am not now speaking of a sage or prophet or founder
of a religious community, whom his followers honour as
a God, but only of the ruler, the conqueror, or the pioneer
of civilization, who is reverenced in gratitude for external
benefits which he is understood to have conferred upon
posterity. If the departed giver of these good gifts is
realized in any fullness by the imagination, he will enter
the company to which the gods of the various pagan
mythologies belong ; although we may not share the belief
of Euhemerus that these were all originally real men who
had been deified after their death.
No other nation known to us has placed at the service
of religion for the construction of such a mythology so
18 Luke xxii. 25.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 77
powerful a creative imagination linked with so sound an
understanding and so fine a sense of form and beauty
as have found expression in the poetry and sculpture of
the ancient Greeks. Thus it is from a consideration
of the Gods of Greece that we shall best learn whatever
a mythology may have to teach us respecting the meaning
of Personality as applied to an object of worship.
Now the contrast between two types of God acknow
ledged by the Greeks, that of the ' mystery God ' repre
sented by Dionysus and that of the Olympian represented
by Apollo, is familiar to modern students of classical
antiquity. Already recognized by Hegel,T9 it has more
recently been made by Nietzsche, in his essay on The
Birth of Tragedy, the basis of a whole philosophy of art.
A very few words will serve to explain the nature of
this contrast sufficiently for our present purpose. The
' Olympian Gods ' are described in the well-known words
of Coleridge w as " the intelligible forms of ancient poets,
the fair humanities of old religion." They are human
forms of superhuman beauty and majesty, revealed
through the sculptor's or the poet's art to the admiring
contemplation of their worshippers but abiding them
selves in their glorified existence above the " smoke and
stir " 2I of mortal life. On the other hand, the ' mystery
God ' is human rather as an influence intimately felt in
the emotional fellowship of an initiated company, who
are swayed and rapt out of their separate everyday selves
by a common enthusiasm, in which they put on the attri
butes of the divinity who inspires them and perform in
their own persons superhuman acts— as when the Bacchae
of Euripides rend asunder the cattle upon the hills in
'9 Phdnomenologie d. Geistes E b (Werke, ii. pp. 522 ff).
" Piccolomini, ii. 4. 2I Milton, Comus 5.
78 GOD AND PERSONALITY
their frenzy.*2 The 'mystery God/ though not incapable
of apparition as a glorified man or of representation by
an image in human shape, yet makes his presence more
characteristically known in the sacramental food or drink —
Dionysus, for instance, in the fruit of the "grief-assuaging
vine " *3 by participation in which his worshippers are made
one with him — in the sacred plant or animal, or again
in the celebrants of his mysteries, who, as they accom
plish his rites, are changed from their own likeness into his.
I am not here concerned to examine this contrast of
the Olympian and the mystery God, or to inquire how far
it is actually illustrated by the history of Greek religion.
It is enough to say that we certainly find in Greece and
elsewhere the two distinct attitudes towards the object
of religious worship to which we have just called attention,
and to point out that the consideration of the difference
between them is instructive in regard to the meaning of
the demand often made in the interest of Religion that it
should be directed towards a ' personal God/
For we can scarcely fail to observe that, while the
Olympian God seems to be regarded as possessing ' per
sonality ' in himself more properly than the ' mystery
God/ just because of his remoteness and distinctness from
his worshippers, it is rather the ' mystery God ' the re
lations of the worshippers to whom possess that intensity
of warmth which makes us ready to describe their religion
as ' personal religion/ His personal relation to them
is all the closer in that he is not, like the ' Olympian/
distinct from them ; because in the communion of his
holy things they become one with him arid he with them.
32 Euripides, Bacchce, 735 seqq,
*3 Tr)VKCLVffi\vTrov &pire\ov, Eur. Bacch. 772. The English epithet
is that in Professor Murray's translation.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 79
Now whatever the origin of an Olympian God may
have been, he has already, as Olympian, ceased to be a
purely tribal deity. Whatever the special claim which
a particular city or family may have upon him, he is
thought of as a power belonging to all mankind, so that
it is natural to identify with him any God, even though
he be the God of a quite alien people, to whom like functions
are attributed. The very fullness with which the per
sonality of the Olympian God is imagined tends to make
personal sympathy and, still more, personal intimacy
out of the question between the worshipper and such a
different kind of person from himself as the God he
worships. The revolt of Euripides against the inhumanity
of these Gods of his people was the direct consequence
of the full humanity with which the poetical imagination
of that people had invested them ; for it was this that
made it possible to judge of the deeds related of them in
legends handed down from ancient and barbarous times,
as though they were the actions of real men, to which
the standards of a more civilized age could be plausibly
applied. The like treatment could not have been meted
out, for instance, to beings without a definite human
personality, such as were the divinities of the Roman
State before the Latin poets had identified them with the
Gods of Greece and told of them the stories previously
attached to the names of the personages of Hellenic
mythology.
Thus we see that faith in a ' personal ' God is not (as
is sometimes hinted) merely another name for anthropo
morphism in theology ; for a thorough-going anthropo
morphism may have the effect of removing the God thus
conceived far from the possibility of exhibiting the personal
sympathy and attracting the personal devotion the need
80 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of which makes men demand a ' personal God ' to worship.
The Epicurean Gods, splendid beings dwelling in the
intermundane spaces, the effluxes from whose majestic
forms strike upon our senses in sleep, who care nothing
for us, know nothing of us — these Gods are the direct
descendants of the Olympians. The only worship which
could be directed to them was not prayer, for in no sense
do they control our destinies, but the willing tribute of
admiration paid to beings so greatly superior to ourselves.
And, however far we may rightly rank the Aristotelian
conception of Godhead as Perfect Intelligence above
the Epicurean notion of it as a peculiarly fortunate and
enduring combination of atoms, yet the only reason for
worshipping Aristotle's God would be of the same kind
as might be alleged for worshipping those of Epicurus
— the disinterested admiration of what is supremely
beautiful and excellent.
We may apply to worship paid for such a reason those
words of the poet : —
The worship the heart lifts above
And the heavens reject not ;
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow. 2*
But we must remember that, if the heavens reject it
not, it is because they know nothing of it ; though certainly
a disinterested worship of this sort proves the worshipper
to be of no ignoble spirit, yet it is not what those have
in mind who insist that religion at its best demands a
' personal God/
If we turn from the ' Olympians ' to the ' mystery
»4 Shelley, ' To .* (" One word is too often profaned.")
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 81
Gods ' we find indeed that, as we have seen, they offer
greater opportunities of personal religion, just because
the God does not remain so remote from his worshipper,
but also that there is present in this kind of religion an
opposite tendency, which may be said to be present also
in every kind of mysticism, a tendency to lose the per
sonality of the God in that of his worshipper. In the
language of the popular theological antithesis of trans
cendence and immanence to which I referred above, the
Olympian God is too transcendent, the ' mystery God ' too
immanent, to be precisely what is meant by a ' personal
God.'
Where, then, shall we look for an example of what is
really meant by a ' personal God ' ? We shall plainly
be most likely to do so with good hope of success in the
one historical religion of which, as we have seen, Personality
in God (though not, until quite modern times, ' the
Personality of God ') has been a recognized tenet — that
is to say, in Christianity. I think it must be admitted
that here it has been found easier than elsewhere to secure
what may be called a ' personal religion ' without a
mystical dissipation of the personality of its Object
and to attribute personality to that Object without
removing it to a distance from the worshipper too great
to admit of genuine sympathy and devotion.
I can only indicate here very briefly how in my judg
ment this result has been obtained. It is due, as I take
it, in the first place to the fact (for a fact I do not doubt
it to be) that the Christian Church has worshipped as
God a real historical person, of whose life and character
it has preserved a genuine record ; and that, as presented
in this record, he is one beyond question able to make
upon men of various races and belonging to various types
G
82 GOD AND PERSONALITY
and tenets of civilization an impression of moral and
spiritual supremacy so united with an extraordinary
personal charm as to arouse in them a genuine sentiment
of personal love and devotion. The control exercised by
the record upon the imagination on the one hand has
prevented particular groups or generations of Christ's
followers from so fashioning or refashioning his figure in
their own likeness that it should be irretrievably lost to
those of another habit or temper of soul ; and on the other
hand the conviction of real objective individuality which
it has imposed has hindered for the most part, even among
the many mystical schools which have from time to time
appeared in the Christian Church, the loss of all sense
of his distinctness from and transcendence of the souls
which he has notwithstanding been held and felt to
indwell.
To say what I have just said is to say that the success
of Christianity in maintaining a doctrine of Divine Per
sonality is due to its peculiar doctrine of Divine Incarna
tion ; for, though there are many doctrines of Divine
Incarnation beside the Christian, it will be found to be
on the special features which distinguish the Christian
doctrine from others that the characteristic Christian
view of Personality in God depends : and these features
are recognizable in the everyday piety of Christians as
well as in the theology of the Christian schools. In con
tradistinction from the doctrine of the Incarnation the
doctrine of the Trinity has often, no doubt, been by
unspeculative Christians rather reverenced as a sacred
formula than felt to be part of their own faith as indi
viduals. Yet this doctrine has also been instrumental in
assisting the sense of Divine Personality even in the
religious life of ordinary Christians ; for it has enabled
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 83
the personal relation between Christ and the God whom
he called his Father, with which the Gospels have familiar
ized them, to be regarded as a relation within the life of
God himself, yet without sanctioning at any rate the
tendency observable in most doctrines of Divine Personality
— for it cannot be denied that this tendency has at times
made itself felt even in orthodox Christian Churches —
to introduce into the Godhead a clash of moral attributes
fatal to that whole-hearted devotion to a single ideal of
life which monotheism is especially concerned and qualified
to promote.
But although, as we should expect, it is from the one
historic faith which has insisted on the importance of
affirming the presence of Personality in God that we can
best learn what is meant by a ' personal God/ it is, of
course, as we ha/e already indicated, not the only faith
whose adherents would usually be considered, and would
in some cases consider themselves to be, in the same sense
as Christians, worshipping a ' personal God.' I am now
thinking only of faiths professed by civilized men to-day.
Concerning the meaning of the expression as applied
in these I will venture to add a few words, although I am
profoundly sensible how difficult it is to feel at all sure
that one has not missed the significance which religious
and theological language may bear to those to whose
traditions and fellowship one is oneself a stranger ; a
difficulty of which we are constantly reminded by the
mistakes made by others in their discussion of beliefs
and practices with which any of us chances to be ac
quainted from within. Even the most learned student
of religions other than his own must experience this
difficulty ; and I, to whom Hebrew and Arabic, Sanskrit
and Pali are unknown tongues, have no claim to be called
84 GOD AND PERSONALITY
a student of Judaism or Mohammedanism, Hinduism or
Buddhism. I do not indeed suppose that it is necessary,
in order to enter into the spirit of a religion, that one
should be able to read its Scriptures and its doctors in
their original languages. A man may be a very good
Christian without Greek or Hebrew, and a very bad
Christian with both. But for the merely external study
of a religion it must be a serious disqualification to be
constantly driven by ignorance of the idioms used by its
chief interpreters to second-hand sources of information
concerning it.
The religion most closely akin to that Catholic Christi
anity to which my recent observations referred is, no doubt,
Unitarian Christianity. Here the Personality of God
(and not only Personality in God) is certainly held and
insisted upon. God is worshipped as the Father revealed
by Jesus, and the attitude of Jesus towards God is taken
as the great example of true religion. God is thought
of as a Being having the ethical character attributed
to him by the tradition of Christendom, to a share in
the inheritance of which Unitarian Christianity regards
itself as possessing a legitimate claim ; and if certain
features of this character — that, for instance, of an extreme
severity to sinners which does not shrink from their
eternal punishment — are frankly discarded, it is held
that the retention of these is inconsistent with the main
trend of the teaching of Jesus and with the general im
pression made upon the reader of the Gospels by the record
of his life, which is thought of as the grand illustration
of the type of life acceptable to God. We are not, of course,
here concerned with any differences between Catholic
and Unitarian Christianity except such as relate to the
doctrine of Divine Personality. In respect of this doctrine
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 85
we see that both conceive of God as a Being with whom
personal relations are possible : but that for Unitarian
Christianity such relations are not as for Catholic
Christianity rooted in a like relation within the Godhead
itself ; and the historical personality of Jesus not being
itself an object of divine worship, the control which the
record of that personality exercises in Catholic Christianity
over the religious imagination is only exercised indirectly
in so far as the thought of God actually present to the
minds of Unitarian Christians is one inherited from pre
decessors who with less qualification or hesitation sought
their clue to the divine character in that attributed in
Scripture to the Founder of their religion.
In the next place one naturally thinks of Judaism,
which stands in the direct line of descent from the religion
out of which Christianity sprang, and with which it
preserves a more complete and obvious continuity than
the sister creed. Though Jewish theology has never, I
believe, made use in describing God of any word exactly
corresponding to Personality, and has ever offered a
resolute opposition to the Christian doctrine with which
the term as employed in theology was at first associated,
of a plurality of Persons in God, few would hesitate to
describe Judaism as a religion with a personal God.
Long before the rise of Christianity the prophets of Israel
had succeeded in a task which the Greek philosophers
had failed to accomplish, or indeed had scarcely attempted.
They had maintained a close connection between the
universal and spiritual religion to which they had attained
and the religious institutions of their nation. The per
sonal relation of the tribesman to his tribal God was
preserved as the basis of piety towards the one God of all,
who had chosen one family out of all the families of the
86 GOD AND PERSONALITY
earth to be his prophet to the rest.25 This piety, in which
the piety of Christianity is rooted, is the treasure of Judaism.
The tendency which existed at one time among the Jews,
a tendency of which Christian theology itself is to a great
extent an outcome, towards a doctrine of a plurality of
persons within the divine nature, met, after the develop
ment of Christianity had rendered it suspect, with re
pression, and ultimately with extinction.26 The fear of
' making God too much a man/ 27 a fear stimulated by
aversion to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation,
combined with the influence of Aristotle on the thought
of mediaeval Jewish thinkers, such as Maimonides, in
emphasizing the distance between God and man, may
have imposed a greater restraint upon developments
of personal religion, which in Christianity were at once
encouraged and directed by the ascription of Godhead
to its historical Founder. But it would be absurd to
deny that a religion has a personal God which has ever
taken as its ideal the great Lawgiver to whom his God
' spake face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend.' 28
Of Mohammedanism, the other great religion of the
world belonging to the same historical group as Christi
anity and Judaism, I take it that one might more reasonably
hesitate before answering the question whether it conceives
God as personal or no. It is certainly true that anthropo
morphic language is used of the God of Islam and that
25 Cp. Problems in the Relations of God and Man, pp. 208 foil.
26 See Jewish Encyclopedia, s.v. 'Elisha ben Abuyah'; Oesterley
and Box, Religion and Worship in the Synagogue, c. ix.
27 M. Arnold, Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ' Obermann,'
Nov. 1849 ; of Goethe : ' For he pursued a lonely road, His eyes
on Nature's plan, Neither made man too much a God, Nor God
too much a man.'
28 Exod. xxxiii. IT.
PERSONALITY AS APPLIED TO GOD 87
in the teaching of the Arabian prophet he is certainly
not conceived pantheistically or as immanent in his
worshippers. But it would seem that the tendency of
that teaching is to reduce the personal relations which
can exist between man and God to the lowest terms, to
those, namely, which may exist between a slave and a
master of absolutely unlimited power. Still this is a
personal relation, and on the whole it would seem best
to describe the God of Mohammedanism as a personal God,
while remembering both that Personality is not expressly
reckoned among his attributes and that, when the Moslem
aspires after a more intimate kind of piety than his
canonical scriptures suggest, he seems to pass at once to
a pantheistic mysticism wherein the personal distinction
between the devotee and his God tends to disappear
altogether. But in speaking at all of Islam, I occupy
the room of the unlearned and speak subject to correction
by those better informed.
Concerning the great religious systems of the farther
East I will only here make one or two remarks with
an apology for their inevitable superficiality. It would
seem, speaking generally, that while the European
mind is apt to associate with the word ' person '
and its derivatives the thought not only of distinct
individuality but even of a mutual exclusiveness be
tween persons— a mutual exclusiveness, however, which
as existing between God and his worshipper is in every
profound religious experience found to have been done
away— by Indian thought distinct individuality is com
paratively little emphasized. Hence to the European
Indian conceptions of the Supreme Being seem to lack
the definite personality which is suggested by the ordinary
religious language of Christians, Jews, or Mohammedans
88 GOD AND PERSONALITY
about God. On the other hand, religious emotion or medi
tation probably plays a far larger part in Indian life than
in European ; and this is certainly personal religion. So
that if we may say that the God of much Indian worship
is not what we should usually call a ' personal God/ we
must take care not to imply by this that the Indian's
religion is not his personal concern, for nothing could be
less true. Moreover the important and widely prevalent
type of Indian piety known as bhakti is admitted to be
devotional faith in a personal God 29 : while Buddhism,
which originally perhaps acknowledged neither God nor
soul, has produced in the worship of Amitabha, the
' Buddha of the Boundless Light/ the ' Lord of the
Western Paradise/ a form of piety which has seemed
to some scholars too similar to the Christian to have
originated except under Christian influence. 30
With these observations I bring the historical portion
of my course to a close, hoping that it may have pre
pared us by a study of what has been actually meant by
Personality when applied to God to inquire further into
the reasons for so applying it, to discuss the difficulties
which beset the application, and to form a judgment as
to its validity.
Before entering on this inquiry, however, it will be
desirable to endeavour, by asking ourselves how we should
distinguish Personality from certain related conceptions,
to make as clear to ourselves as is possible what we have
in mind when we employ the word. It is this problem
which will occupy us in the next two Lectures.
29 See G. A. Grierson's article on ' Bhakti-marga ' in Hastings'
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics; cp. J. N. Farquhar, The Crown
of Hinduism, p. 332.
3° See A. Lloyd in Transactions of Congress for Hist, of Religion.
Oxford, 1908, vol. i. pp. 132 ft.
LECTURE IV
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY
MY purpose in the present Lecture is not, as in the two
preceding, to examine the past history of the word Person,
but to ascertain the meaning which it now bears for us
by trying to answer the question how we should distin
guish the conception for which it stands from certain
others to which it would seem to be closely related. With
this end in view we shall find it convenient to orientate
ourselves, as it were, by taking as our starting-point a
provisional definition ; and I know of none better adapted
to this purpose than that old one attributed to Boethius,
to which in my survey of the word's history I have already
so often referred : Persona est naturcz rationabilis individua
substantia. It would be generally allowed, I think, that
by a person we mean a rational individual, or, if we prefer
to put it so, a concrete individual mind. I have chosen
this latter phrase as leaving open an alternative of which
many would embrace one side and many the other. If
we think that, in order to be concrete— that is, to exist
upon its own account and not as a mere characteristic
or attribute of something so existing— a mind must be
embodied, then we shall think that a person must be an
embodied mind ; if, on the other hand, we think that a
mind can thus exist upon its own account unembodied
90 GOD AND PERSONALITY
then we shall think that a person need not have a body.
Thus those who are persuaded that the departed after the
dissolution of their bodies continue to exercise mental
activities undoubtedly regard these discarnate spirits as
persons, and as the same persons that they were when
we knew them in the body.
It may, indeed, be noted here in passing that some who
have believed that individual souls survive the dissolution
of the body have held that a disembodied spirit is not a
complete person, so that only when soul and body have
been reunited at the resurrection is the personality to
be restored which was suspended at death. This is, for
example, the view of St. Thomas Aquinas.1 Nevertheless
it would probably be true to say that those who maintain
this view think of the life of the disembodied soul after
death as a personal life and are ready (e.g. in their invoca
tion of the saints) to address them as persons.
I am of course aware that to some the very admission
of the possibility that a mind, personal or other, could
exist apart from a body will seem to involve so groundless
and improbable an assumption as to put any one who
makes it out of court. I hope in the second series of these
Gifford Lectures to take an opportunity of describing
more fully my attitude towards the problem of the relation
of Personality to what may be variously regarded as its
physical basis, condition, expression, or vehicle. But for
the present I shall content myself with the following
observations. In view of the fact that, within that part
of our experience which no one regards as illusory, Per-
1 See Summ. Theol. I. qu. 29, art. i and qu. 75 art. 4. The
Master of the Sentences (iii. 5 § 5) held that the disembodied
soul was a person : but this was one of the points upon which his
authority was not generally followed.
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 91
sonality is normally associated with a material organism,
we are, I think, bound to ask ourselves whether there
may not be grounds for supposing this association to be
necessary in every case. But I do not think that the
grounds which may be alleged in support of this supposition
are so overwhelmingly strong as to make the counter-
hypothesis unworthy of consideration by reasonable
men, and I therefore hold myself justified in adopting
at this stage a description or provisional definition of
Personality which leaves the question open.
A person, then, is, by our definition, individual ; but it
would usually be held that not all individuals are persons.
That it is no easy matter to say what we mean by an
individual will not be disputed by any one who recollects
the controversies which have been carried on in the
schools of philosophy about the principium individuationis,
the principle of individuality, or the notorious difficulty
which biologists have found in deciding what constitutes
an individual organism. The remarks which I am about
to offer for your consideration have no aim so ambitious
as would be that of attempting to solve these celebrated
problems. They will do little more than indicate some
outstanding facts as to the use of the word ' individual '
as well in common speech as by philosophers, especially
in relation to and in distinction from the word ' person/
' Atom ' and ' individual ' represent the same Greek
word ; but the former (when used with any strictness)
is usually taken to imply an impossibility of physical,
the latter an impossibility of logical division. Thus there
is nothing in the traditional way of using the word ' indi
vidual ' which is inconsistent with admitting that an
individual may be composite in origin, or susceptible
of disruption into several individuals ; but these then
92 GOD AND PERSONALITY
would not be instances of the original individual, they would
only be several individuals, whether of the same or of
any other kind from the first, taking the place of one
which had ceased to exist. Nor is there anything to
prevent an individual being made up of distinguishable
individuals of a different kind — e.g. an individual nation
of individual men, or an individual organism of individual
cells, or an individual river of individual drops of water.
The general term ' man ' is not the name of an individual,
because there are many men, each of whom is a man ; but
* Socrates ' is the name of an individual because there
are not and cannot be in this way several Socrateses,
each of whom is a Socrates. Of course there may be several
men called Socrates, but they do not constitute a class
characterized by participation in a common ' Socrateitas,
as the Latin Schoolmen said, of which each would afford
an instance. In the technical language of elementary
logic it is only equivocally that the name is applied at
once to the philosopher and to the ecclesiastical historian.
A ' person ' is by our definition not only an individual
but an individual substance. That is, we should not call
anything which exists only as an attribute of something
else a person, in the sense we are now trying to fix. No
doubt there are senses of the word ' person/ and those
earlier senses than the one we are studying, in which it
signifies something which is not a substance but an acci
dent — for example, an assumed character or a legal quali
fication. But in the sense in which ' person ' is equated
with uTroorao-fc a person must be a substance, not an attri
bute, and moreover an individual substance. For a per
sonal name, such as Socrates, is not the name of a kind
of substance, whereof there may be many instances, but
of an individual substance of which there can be no
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 93
instances. Here a certain temptation to sophistry offers
itself, which we shall do well to note as we pass and so
to avoid yielding to it. ' Person ' itself (it may be objected)
is after all a common term ; it is therefore the name of
a kind of substance and applies to many such substances.
I am a person as I am a man, or a lecturer, an instance
of the universal ' person ' of which every one of my hearers
is an instance too. And on the other hand a man or a
lecturer no less than a person must be an individual
substance. Is there anything to distinguish ' person '
in this respect from such other appellations as I have
mentioned ? I am of course assuming that by ' person '
we mean a rational individual or an individual mind. If
Person were a mere synonym for ' human being,' of course
it would be a common or general term like any other, but
I think that it is not usually employed as a mere synonym
for ' human being,' and that we could not substitute
it for this latter term on all occasions, but only in certain
special contexts.
Now if everything real is individual, and if every
description (as distinct from a mere designation) of a
thing must be in general terms, it follows that, unless we
carefully bear this in mind, we shall be at the mercy of any
sophist who says either that, since we can only know what
is real, there must exist an individual corresponding to
every description that embodies knowledge, or that,
since every description must be in general terms, what is
described must always be what logicians call a ' universal/
The former type of sophism has been so often discussed
that we are more likely to be on our guard against it than
against its fellow. It may take the form either of ascribing
an individual existence to a universal in abstraction from
its particular instances, or of denying to the universal
94 GOD AND PERSONALITY
the common nature or character which individuals share,
any reality except as a name on our lips or a thought
in our minds. I need not dwell on the difficulties into
which such views must bring us ; they are sufficiently
indicated by a reference on the one hand to the celebrated
argument of the ' third man ' brought in antiquity against
a crude statement of the Platonic theory of Ideas 2 ; and
on the other to the question which Plato represents
Parmenides as asking of the young Socrates when the
latter had suggested that the universal was perhaps a
notion in the soul : ' Is it a notion of nothing ? ' 3
But the fellow-sophism to this is, as I said, less familiar
and therefore perhaps more dangerous. I will therefore
deal with it at somewhat greater length.
Just as there is a temptation to take that which is not
individual either for an individual or for a figment, so
there is an opposite temptation to treat that which is
individual, because described in general terms, as a uni
versal. And we may yield to this temptation, as to the
one before mentioned, in two distinct ways. We may
point out that such words as ' individual/ ' person/ ' self '
and so forth are themselves common predicates ; that as
Socrates and Plato are alike men, the one no more or no
less than the other, so they are both alike individuals
and persons and selves. Thence we may be induced to
attempt a short cut to idealism, by way of the reflection
that the object of knowledge turns out on inspection
at close quarters to be nothing but thoughts ; since
universals, if not mere thoughts of yours or mine, at least
exist as such only in the medium of thought. This short
cut is not unfamiliar to students of philosophy — I will
» See Alex. Aphrod. on Aristotle, Metaph. A. 990 b 15 seqq.
3 Plat. Farm. 1323.
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 95
admit that I once thought it would take me whither I
wanted to go— but I am convinced that he who trusts
himself to it will have cause to remember the proverb
' More haste less speed.' This is one form of our sophism.
The other is this : We ask what seems more undeniably
real, substantial, impenetrable than the individual, and in
particular than the individual that each of us knows most
intimately, I myself. Yet you call yourself / as justly
as / do ; self means you just as well as me : and in the
end ' self ' will turn out to me a mere appearance, like
the gleam upon the water or the rainbow's end which
shifts " for ever and for ever when " we " move," 4 so
that we can never come up with it and grasp the bright
thing which to a child's inexperienced eyes it seems so
easy to suppose that we shall reach, if we do but walk
steadily forward in a certain direction.
It is no part of my intention in these remarks, as some
of my hearers may perhaps suspect, to suggest that there
is some being inaccessible to thought ; still less that in
such an impenetrable shrine is concealed what is of highest
and most enduring worth. Such a view would be entirely
alien to my own way of thinking. However imperfect
what we call our knowledge may be, I should contend
that it is, so far as it goes, an apprehension of Reality ;
not merely an apprehension of something with which
Reality puts us off, as it were, while remaining in itself
inaccessible to us. No doubt we may often find ourselves
in presence of something which we cannot describe, because
the description of it would exceed our actual powers of
comprehension and expression ; but the mere fact that
we can say nothing about a thing does not for me
4 Tennyson Ulysses.
96 GOD AND PERSONALITY
imply that it passes all understanding ; it may be only
that there is nothing about it to say.
It was not, then, because I wished to insinuate a doctrine
of the Unknowable that I spoke of the necessity of guarding
against the sophism which would turn the individual
into a universal no less than against that other sophism,
with the exposure of which we are all familiar, which turns
the universal into an individual. It was rather because
I desired to insist that reality is throughout individual
and universal ; not in part one and in part the other ;
but both alike throughout and at every point. In words
of Goethe which Hegel quotes to emphasize this truth : —
Natur hat weder Kern noch Schale,
Alles 1st sie mit einem male.
Nature has neither kernel nor shell,
She is all at once one and the other as well ! 5
Everything that is real, then, is unique, this thing and
no other. But just because it is thus unique, it fills a place
of its own in a system of Reality in which it has its being ;
it is describable by way of relation to and distinction from
other things, other elements in that Reality : so that a
full description of it would state its relation to and its
distinction from every other such element or part of the
whole. This double aspect which belongs to all that is
real is manifested most conspicuously and unmistakably
in persons. The person, the rational individual, is not
only recognized by others, but recognizes himself as unique
and individual, just because he is aware of something
beyond himself, however vaguely conceived, a background
against which he himself is, as it were, set alongside with
5 Goethe, Gott und Welt (Jubildums Ausgabe, ii. p. 259). Quoted
by Hegel, Werke, vi. p. 276.
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 97
what is not himself ; an encompassing world within which
he and other things from which he distinguishes himself
are alike included. This background or encompassing
world is potentially infinite since, however we may
attempt to envisage or picture or describe it, as soon
as it is thus envisaged or pictured or described it is at
once found to be itself embraced within something yet
more comprehensive, and so on for ever. We may see
this truth illustrated by all those myths of the origin or
creation of the world which tell of a transaction requiring
a world already made in which it could take place, and so
provoke the further question, Whence came the beings
or things, whatever they may be, which are represented
as taking part in the transaction ? a question which in
its turn leads on to some further story and yet further
question, in a series to which only the exhaustion of the
myth-maker's fancy can set a period.
At this point a question of some importance suggests
itself for consideration. When we say that the double
aspect of all that is real is most unmistakably manifested
in persons, which are individuals conscious of themselves
as such, is this because the individuality of persons is an
individuality more perfect than that of individuals which
are not persons, or only because here and here only is
there revealed to us who are persons what is in fact the
true and inward nature of all individuals whatsoever ?
With regard to this question I shall here content myself
with a reference to the doctrine of Leibnitz. It is well
known that in the view of this philosopher the reality
of the world consists in an infinite multitude of ' monads '
or individual substances which, as he picturesquely put it,
" have no windows " — that is to say, admitted no influences
from without ; so that all that is done by, or happens
7
98 GOD AND PERSONALITY
to, any monad is part of the necessary development of
its own nature ; although among all these coexistent
lines of development there is what he called a pre-
established harmony, the effects of which we are apt to
mistake for the effects of mutual interaction among the
monads.6 It is not, however, of the ' windowlessness '
of the monads or of their ' pre-established harmony '
that I wish to remind you now. It is rather of the fact
that, although Leibnitz, while considering all souls to be
monads, did not consider all monads to be entitled to the
designation of souls, yet it was undoubtedly the personal
soul as apprehended by itself that served him as his
starting-point in construing the nature of the monads.
That there could be beings possessing the genuine indi
viduality which the personal soul attributes to itself
and yet not exhibiting that consciousness which is the
characteristic activity of the personal soul — this became
intelligible to him by means of the experience which the
soul has of the continuity of its own development through
and across periods of subconsciousness and unconsciousness,
during its continuance in which we can attribute to it
no activity but that of petites perceptions 7 which do not
rise, in the metaphorical phrase familiar to us in modern
psychology, above the threshold of consciousness. I
think we may borrow from Leibnitz here an answer to
the question upon which I have just touched. What the
personal soul is conscious of being in itself, this it is
conscious of being because it is it to a certain degree
of perfection ; were other individuals this to the same
degree, they would be also conscious of being it, and so
would be self-conscious individuals or persons. There
is, then, a genuine identity between the individuality which
6 See his Monadologie. 7 See Nouv. Ess. ii. i, § 13, Monadol. § 21.
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 99
is self-conscious and which we call personal and that
which we, who are persons, recognize in other things to
which we do not give the name of ' persons/ It is that
kind of identity to which we give the name of development
or evolution ; where we recognize the same nature or type
under a succession or series of forms so related that each
exhibits the nature or type in question more adequately
than its predecessor.
Individuality from the first is characterized by inde
pendence — relative independence at least — of other
individuals ; but, as it appears to us in things, we find
ourselves in every case tempted to ask whether it is not
something which we are attributing to them, which is
defined by our purposes only, and which another spectator
might define quite otherwise. We desire to correct our
view of it by a view of it which shall be the thing's own ;
but this, just because the thing is not conscious, and
therefore has no view of itself, we cannot do. In the
case of organisms which we should not dignify by the
name of persons we find something more like what we
are looking for ; but it does not satisfy us ; for, as the in
dividuality of the mere thing seemed to need in order to
determine it a mind which it did not itself possess, so
does even that of the organism. For although in its
action and (in the case of animals) in its feeling it affords
a principle of determination other than our purposes, it
still does not determine itself as we determine our own
individuality by our own self-consciousness. In the
case of a person, the individual may be said to determine
himself by his thought of himself. If even here the principle
which has guided us so far does not seem to be completely
realized ; if we are liable to self-distractions out of which
we can only imperfectly recover ourselves by the effort
100 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of self -consciousness ; if our power of grasping in thought
what we are seems limited on the one side by physical
conditions, which we find already given, and on the other
by an ideal of which we are conscious that we fall short
— all this is only to say that such ' personality ' as ours is
not the highest form of individuality possible, although
higher than any we attribute to beast 01 plant or inanimate
body. Our inquiries have brought us up against a con
troversy intimately connected with our main subject in
this course of Lectures, a controversy on the terminology
of which I have already commented, but the further
examination of which I expressly postponed. I refer
to the difference between Mr. Bosanquet and Lotze which
is expressed by the former's ascription of Individuality
and denial of Personality to the Absolute, as contrasted
with the assertion of the latter that Personality belongs
unconditionally only to the Infinite.8
Let me before going further take note of an historical
circumstance which may prove of some use to us as a
guide-post in the mazes of the inquiry upon which we
are entering. Most readers of the two philosophers I
have named, Lotze and Mr. Bosanquet, if suddenly asked
which of the two stood nearer in this matter of the indi
viduality and personality of the Absolute Reality to the
position of historical Christianity, would probably reply
without hesitation that it was Lotze. I do not say that
we may not ultimately see reason to endorse this opinion.
But at first sight we may well hesitate to do so.
For, so far as the terminology goes, it is not Lotze but
Mr. Bosanquet that agrees with the tradition of Christian
theology in calling God an individual but not a person 9 :
s See above, Lect. I, pp. 18 f. ; II, pp. 52 ff.
9 The agreement of Mr. Bosanquet with the traditional theology
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 101
that God is individual in the logical sense, as man (for
example) is not, so that there cannot be several individuals
of Christendom would not end here, if we were able to assume (as I
think we may) his agreement with Mr. Bradley's pronouncement
(Appearance and Reality, p. 528) that "it is better, on the whole,
to conclude that no element of Reality falls outside the experience
of finite centres," and could then argue that the supreme experi
ence must be possessed and the supreme activity of thought exer
cised by persons ; since certainly no ' centres ' less than such as
(to use Mr. Bradley's expressions) ' imply ' or ' entail ' personal
souls can be supposed capable of possessing that experience or
exercising that activity. But I do not doubt that both Mr. Bradley
and Mr. Bosanquet would reject this inference from their premises.
The very ' fmitude ' attributed to the ' centres ' outside of whose
experience, it is held, no element of Reality can fall is inconsistent
with attributing to them such possession and such exercise. The
Absolute, though appearing in finite centres, and probably only
there, is itself neither a finite centre nor an aggregate of such ; for
all ' finite things' as Mr. Bradley says (A. and R. p. 529) " are there
transmuted and have lost their individual natures." I have
thought it worth while, however, just to mention a possible misuse
of the principles of these two philosophers to establish a position
which they would repudiate, because I feel that nothing in their
writings presents greater difficulty than their language concerning
an ' experience ' which, though it is the supreme Reality, yet belongs
to none of those ' centres of experience ' in which alone it is described
by Mr. Bradley, usually indeed as 'appearing,' but sometimes as
' realized,' as though it were not infinitely more real than they.
It is no doubt true that Mr. Bradley, at any rate, often insists that
the appearance of the Absolute in finite centres is ' inexplicable '
— a phrase which suggests not merely that it is an ultimate feature
of Reality, but that it is one which excites our surprise, so that
we do not rest in it as being the most natural thing in the world,
but desire an explanation and are baffled by our failure to find
one. Is it possible that in their anxiety to point out the inadequacy
of our religious and theological phraseology to express the ultimate
truth of things (an inadequacy which no one would deny) both
Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet have done less than justice to
the contribution made towards the revelation of the nature of the
supreme Reality by the religious experience to which that language
owes its origin ? See esp. Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality,
pp. 226, 527 ff. ; Truth and Reality, pp. 349 ff., 420 ff. ; and Mr.
Bosanquet's Principle of Individuality, pp. 303 ff. ; Value and
Destiny, pp. 253 ff.
102 GOD AND PERSONALITY
who are all alike Gods as there are many individuals who
are all alike men ; as also in the sense that there cannot
be said to be any act of his in which only a part of him
is concerned — this would be affirmed by any accurate
exponent of Christian doctrine. And, as we saw in the
third Lecture, the personality of God (as distinct from
the acknowledgment of persons in God) is affirmed by
no Christian creed or confession of faith which has not
so far departed from the normal type as to abandon the
doctrine of the Trinity in Unity.
No doubt Mr. Bosanquet and Mr. Bradley also have
been at pains to make clear that they do not consider the
Absolute to be another name for God.10 The God of
religion, they say, is or may be thought of as standing
in a personal relation to his worshipper ; and they would,
1 think, be inclined to add that there are aspects of
Reality which of comse fall within the Absolute but are
ignored by religion or, if not ignored, are regarded by it
as antagonistic to God. We shall have to return to the
question of the relation of these two conceptions, God
and the Absolute. But for the present I do not think
it affects what I have said above about Mr. Bosanquet 's
agreement with Christian theology. For he would prob
ably be quite ready to concede that in the theologians*
account of the Trinity in Unity we have less a description
of God as the Christian worshipper conceives him in the
actual practice of his religion than a description of a philo
sophical speculation (though one no doubt suggested by
the history of religious experience within the Christian
Church) concerning the nature of the Supreme Reality
or, in Mr. Bosanquet's own terminology, of the Absolute.
10 See Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 445 ff. ; Truth and
Reality, c. 15 ; Bosanquet, Value and Destiny, pp. 255 f.
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 103
What is it, then, we may ask in the respective views of
Lotze and of Mr. Bosanquet which causes this closer
agreement of the latter than of the former with the tradi
tional theology of Christendom to strike one as something
which one would not have expected ? The answer to
this question will, I think, throw light upon that con
ception of Personality the application of which to God,
the Supreme Reality, we have proposed to ourselves to
discuss.
For this answer is to be found in the ethical implications
of this conception of Personality : and of these we have
not as yet spoken, except incidentally.
Now in the first place, if we cast back our thoughts
to that history of the word person which 1 traced in a
previous Lecture, we shall see that the original associations
of the word were with the performance of functions in
social intercourse. We see this alike in the case of the
persons in a drama and the persons at law who are the
subjects of rights and duties. We do not wonder, then,
that the thought of Personality cannot easily be dis
connected from that of social conduct or, in other words,
from the sphere of Morality.
We shall, I think, bring this fact home to ourselves
if we raise the question whether a self-conscious indi
vidual supposed to stand altogether outside that sphere
could naturally be called a person. Let us take two
instances to illustrate what I mean : one from a con
temporary novelist, the other from an ancient philosopher.
The adventurous fancy of Mr. Wells has, in the
' Martians ' of his romance The War of the Worlds, familiar
ized his readers with the picture of a rational and scientific
animal who is imagined as sharing the intellectual but
not the moral nature of mankind. A Granger to the
104 GOD AND PERSONALITY
desires and pleasures of sex and of nutrition, the Martian
is equally a stranger to the moral emotions which, in their
simplest and most universal shape, are connected with
the satisfaction of those desires and the enjoyment of
those pleasures.
Now we may not unreasonably doubt whether, if the
Martians were wholly without morality, they could have
organized the invasion of this planet which is the theme
of Mr. Wells's story. That there must be ' honour among
thieves ' if they are to form successful gangs, is the familiar
teaching both of proverbial philosophy and of the
Republic of Plato.11 And the same line of thought
would suggest that Mr. Wells's Martians must after all
have had at least those rudiments of a moral sense which
were necessary to ensure their efficient co-operation.
But, however this may be, I think that we should in
speaking of one of the Martians as described by Mr. Wells
hesitate to call him — or it — a person. For with such a
being what we call personal relations would be impossible
for us ; and it is by the possibility of such relations that
we judge of the presence of personality in others. It
is just what constitutes the nightmare-like ghastliness
of these creatures of Mr. Wells's imagination that they
have some of the attributes we associate most closely
with personality, and yet, for lack of that moral com
munity with us which makes personal relations possible
are not really persons. The horror which they inspire
is an intensified degree of that which in real life is excited
in us by the maniac who has not indeed, like the fabled
Martians, the intellectual capacity of a human being, but
at any rate presents (as they do not) the outward form of
man, and yet not withal the opportunity of human fellow-
11 Plat. Rep. i. 351 c.
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 105
ship which that form seems to promise. And the maniac
it would certainly seem unnatural to describe, except
with some apology, as a person.
To my other — very different — instance of a self-conscious
individual who is thought of as standing outside of the
sphere of morality I have already referred in an earlier
Lecture I2 ; and so I will do no more now than mention
it. It is God as described by Aristotle. To God, according
to the express statements of that philosopher, ethical
predicates are inapplicable. He enters into no reciprocal
relations with other beings, although the desire to attain
to his supreme excellence is the cause of the movement
of universal nature ; for he himself, by reason of his very
perfection, can have no concern with or knowledge of
anything that is less perfect than himself — and all things
except himself are that.
We saw before that such a being is not at all what those
who attach importance to the recognition of a ' personal
God ' are thinking of when they use that phrase : for
since there is no possibility of personal relations with him,
he is not in any natural sense a person, any more than
the maniac or the Martian. The denial of personality
is in these three very various cases based upon the same
negation which may be made about them all, namely
that they are outside the sphere of morality, which is
the sphere of personal relations ; so that personal rela
tions with them there cannot be and persons they cannot
properly be called.
Now the Absolute of Mr. Bosanquet's and of Mr
Bradley 's philosophy also transcends the sphere of
Morality, although in a somewhat different sense from
the God of Aristotle. For in the view of Mr. Bosanquet
« See above, Lecture III, pp. 73 ft-
106 GOD AND PERSONALITY
and Mr. Bradley the moral life of human beings and of
any other beings (if such there be) who progress from a
more imperfect to a more perfect state of existence under
the impulse of aspiration after an ideal which is not yet
realized, does not fall altogether outside of the Absolute
Experience ; on the contrary, it is wholly comprehended
within it, although only as transmuted, one may say,
beyond all recognition. For, whereas Morality is un
fulfilled aspiration, we have here satisfied fruition.^ And
whereas Morality involves external relations to other
beings to whom the moral person owes duties, and from
whom he claims rights, there is nothing beyond the
Absolute. Thus in this philosophy the Absolute transcends
the sphere of Morality, and therefore cannot be called
a Person.
On the other hand, Lotze does not deny Personality
to the Infinite because he holds that what we are com
pelled to regard as the highest conceptions, of which
conceptions the Good (that is, the morally good) is one,
lose all reality and become empty abstractions except as
referred to a Person ; while to him the description of the
Supreme Reality as a " Living Love that wills the blessed
ness of others," X4 does not, as to the English thinkers
with whom I have contrasted him, appear inconsistent
with that freedom from all want or dependence which
must belong to that Supreme Reality. Rather, so he
thinks, it satisfies a deep-seated demand in our nature
to find that what has supreme reality has also supreme
value ; and this he would certainly have refused to find
in an Absolute like Mr. Bosanquet's, our conception of
*3 See Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 201 f., and pp. 436 ff.;
Bosanquet, Value and Destiny, pp. 138 ff.
14 Microcosmus, ix. 5 § 7, Eng. tr. ii. p. 721.
PERSONALITY AND INDIVIDUALITY 107
which is reached by the application of a criterion the
" proper name " of which is non-contradiction.^ For the
present we will bring to a close this account of the differ
ence between Lotze on the one hand and Mr. Bosanquet
on the other which expi esses itself in the attribution to
the Ultimate Reality of Personality by the former, and
by the latter of Individuality bat not of Personality. We
have compared with both a third view, namely, that
embodied in the traditional theology of Christendom.
This theology agreed, as we saw, with Mr. Bosanquet
as against Lotze in affirming individuality but not per
sonality of the Supreme Being : and in finding Personality
included within the nature of the Supreme Being, but not
predicable of it. On the other hand, Lotze is at one with
this same theology in his teaching, which Mr. Bosanquet
would be unable to endorse as it stands, that the Supreme
Being is a " Living Love that wills the blessedness of
others," although he does not carry his agreement so far
as to represent this will to bless others as rooted in an
eternal activity of love between persons who are not
other than the Supreme Being, because their distinction
from one another falls within its unity, and yet are not
(like the persons who in Mr. Bosanquet's doctrine also
fall within the unity of his Absolute) transitory and
finite manifestations of an eternal and infinite Reality.
On the problems suggested by the comparison and
contrast of these views there remains of course much to
be said : and I hope to return to them hereafter. But
what I have said will perhaps be sufficient for our
immediate purpose, which was only to illustrate the
*5 The expression occurs in a review by Mr. Bosanquet in Mind
(October 1917) of Prof. Pringle-Pattison's Idea of God. See Indi
viduality and Value, pp. 44 ff. (cp. Bradley, Appearance and Reality,
P- 537)-
108
GOD AND PERSONALITY
distinction of the notion of personality from that of
individuality and the relation of the one to the other.
In the next Lecture I shall pass to the distinction of
the notion of personality from and its relation to another,
to which as well as to individuality, of which we have
just been speaking, reference is made in the Boethian
definition of person, namely the notion of rationality.
LECTURE V
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY
IN my last Lecture I took as a provisional definition of
Personality the celebrated formula found in the Christo-
logical treatise traditionally attributed to Boethius :
Naturce rationabilis individua substantia ; and I en
deavoured to give some account of the relation of the
notion of personality to that of individuality, which enters
into this description of its essential nature. I now desire
to fix your attention upon another notion which also
appears in the same description as an element in Per
sonality, that namely of reason or rationality. As we
previously inquired in what respect the individuality of
a rational being differs from that of any other, so now we
will attempt to discover how reason is modified by being
manifested in a personality. But I do not desire by using
this expression to commit myself to the implication that
Reason in fact exists except as the activity of personal
minds.
This inquiry will lead us straight to that part of our
discussion in which we shall be concerned with the motives
that can be alleged for and the objections that can be
brought against ascribing Personality to God. For in
examining the discrepancy which we shall presently have
to consider between what, as rational and common to
109
110 GOD AND PERSONALITY
all persons or rational beings, takes no account of the
distinction of persons, arid what on the other hand dis
tinguishes one person or rational being from another, we
shall find ourselves dealing with a fact which is the princi
pal inspiration at once of the demand for a personal God
and of the reluctance of many — especially among philo
sophers — to admit the legitimacy of this demand. This
I will describe for the moment by a name which, as I hope
eventually to show, is in truth inappropriate, but which
will notwithstanding serve better perhaps than any other
to suggest at the outset the problem which I have in mind.
I will call it ' the irrationality of the personal/
It will, I think, be found most convenient in dealing
with this subject not to draw any hard and fast line
between the general treatment of it and the special investi
gation of its bearing on the question of Divine Personality,
which is the principal topic of these Lectures.
It will not be denied that many instances may be given
of the use of the word ' personal ' in our ordinary speech
— and it is never safe for the philosopher to neglect the
testimony of ordinary speech — to express what, at least
in contrast with something else to which in the context
it is opposed, we regard as irrational. Thus we may
speak of a ' personal prejudice ' which prevents a man
agreeing to some plan or approving of some appointment
against which he can bring forward no argument based
on grounds of reason. No doubt such a ' personal preju
dice ' is always susceptible of an explanation ; it may,
for example, be due to some unpleasant association, some
instinctive physical repugnance, or what not ; but we
should not consider these to be in the proper sense reasons
for rejecting the plan or refusing to sanction the appoint
ment ; though they may be the causes of the prejudiced
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 111
man's acting as he does. On the other hand, we might
say quite naturally that it was a reason for not appointing
So-and-so to a certain post that he would not get on with
some colleague who had a personal prejudice against him.
But the reason here would not be the man's who had the
' personal prejudice,' but somebody else's who was taking
that prejudice dispassionately into account.
One can without any difficulty find many similar
instances of the use of the word ' personal ' for what is,
in some particular connexion, to be discounted (like the
' personal equation ' in a scientific observation or experi
ment) before a result can be attained which is fit to form
part of the common stock of experience which we call
science in the widest sense of this word. We sometimes
contrast History with Science as dealing with individuals
and for the most part with persons — while science is con
cerned only with universals, classes, generalities, and so
forth. But historians are constantly attracted by the
aim of making History scientific and so adding it to the
common store of which I have just spoken. The attempt
to do this necessarily tends towards the subordination
of the personal element or its resolution into what can
be represented as intelligible from principles applicable
to any person under the circumstances of this one. Thus
to the generalizing reason, which is the very breath of
what we call Science, Personality is, as it were, a surd ;
it can at best be represented by a series of characteristics
which can never be completed, so as to constitute that very
person, and not merely a person of just that kind.
But one may go further. Not only does there thus seem
to be something in Personality which refuses to be rational
ized by what one may call the scientific understanding
with its method of generalization ; there may even seem
112 GOD AND PERSONALITY
to be something in it irrational from a more strictly philo
sophical point of view. In my first Lecture, when I was
attempting to describe the circumstances which just now
specially invited to an investigation of the notion of
Personality, I described the embarrassment caused by
that notion to the philosophy of an important school of
thought, which in recent times has predominated in this
country ; and I promised that the true reasons of this
embarrassment would become more evident at a later
stage of our discussion. It is to these reasons that I
desire now to call attention.
It was, as I said before, the peculiar task of the school
in question to expose the failure of the empirical philo
sophy which it found in possession and to give such an
account of the human mind as would render intelligible
its capacity for the very kind of knowledge regarded by
that philosophy as the authentic type of genuine and
valuable knowledge — that knowledge, namely, which goes
by the name of Natural Science. It recalled attention
to the relations or principles of synthesis which Kant
had designated as ' forms of sensibility ' and ' categories
of the understanding/ and showed that, apart from these
relations or principles of synthesis, the objective validity
of which, since the knowledge of them could not be
traced to sense-perception, the empirical philosophy-
could not consistently affirm, there could be for us no
nature and therefore no natural science at all.
To recognize this was to acknowledge a unity of con
sciousness, a ' spiritual principle/ as Green called it,
apart from the presence whereof to them all the several
sensations, which the empirical philosophers had held
to be the sole constitutents of our experience, would
each have vanished for ever before another came and so
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 113
could never have given rise to the perception even of a
single object, much less of a world of objects.
There is more than one problem concerning the nature
of such a ' spiritual principle ' as this which might be
raised. But there is only one which I now desire to discuss.
And that is the problem of the relation of such a ' spiritual
principle ' as Green, for example, contended that we must
recognize in knowledge to what we call personality.
At first sight, indeed, it might seem that it was just of
our personality that Green was speaking. I am a person,
not a thing nor yet an animal ; for an animal, although
conscious, lacks (as we suppose) the capacity to distinguish
itself as a permanent consciousness from what to us who
observe it are its successive sensations. And it is just
because I am thus not a thing, nor merely an animal, but
a person that I am aware in myself of this enduring self,
which has sensations but is not any one of them nor all
of them together, but something of quite another nature
than theirs, which is for ever establishing for itself con
nexions between sensations, and so exhibiting them as
factors in its own perception of an enduring world.
But, as one looks closer, it is plain that what Green
is thinking of is not personality as I distinguish my
personality from that of any of you, but rather the activity
which goes on in all minds that think or reason and which,
so far as they perceive and reason correctly, must be the
same in all. And this does not seem to be what we com
monly mean by personality. It seems, indeed, to be a
principle of unity in experience, as personality also is, but
a different principle, combining experiences in a different
order and dividing them into groups on a different plan.
Of these two principles one is the principle which
combines premises with the conclusions which follow from
8
114 GOD AND PERSONALITY
them, the thought of causes with the thought of their
effects, the members of series with what comes next to
them in mathematical or logical order. It distinguishes
logical priority from temporal, mere sequence from
necessary connexion, one kind of subject or department
of knowledge from another, and so forth. It holds together
in one system the experience of all rational beings ; one
such being has no more right in it than another, though
one may, so to say, through greater or less vigour of
mind, or more or less abundant opportunity, be able to
make more or less use of it than his fellows. It
is this principle of which Green is, I take it, usually
thinking when he speaks of his ' spiritual principle ' in
experience. No one would deny to this principle the name
of Reason.
The other principle combines and disjoins experiences
on quite a different plan. It combines all sensations,
perceptions, thoughts which I call mine together, as
mine, no matter how little logical or generally intelligible
connexion they may have with one another. It divides
all sensations, perceptions, thoughts of yours from all of
mine, no matter how closely they may resemble mine.
If, by communication through speech or writing or other
wise, my thoughts are conveyed to you, or yours to me,
according to this principle they must be reckoned twice
over, as yours and as mine, although their content be
identical. Now we must not ignore the fact that a person's
thoughts and actions are at any rate no less personal
when they are guided by reason, and from grounds which
all thinking men would understand and approve, than
when they are most whimsical and capricious or depend
upon considerations of purely private concern. But
we are apt to use the word personal most often as an
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 115
epithet for motives or interests which are merely personal
— that is, where the explanation of them lies in connexions
determined only by the second of the two principles I
have just described and not in connexions established
by the former.
It is with the word personal here as with the phrase
' association of ideas.' When we reason we may of course
be said to ' associate ideas/ though to explain reason
by the association of ideas, as a famous school of thinkers
attempted to do, is to put the cart before the horse.
But a quite natural instinct has tended to appropriate
the phrase to those cases where the ' association ' of ideas
implied by an action is not what we should usually call
rational, but depends upon some individual habit or
private memory, as when (to take a trivial instance) a
man waking in the night at an hotel feels for the switch
of the electric light not where he had found it when about
to turn it off on going to bed, but in the place corresponding
to that of the switch in his bedroom at home. Here, to
account for what he does, he must revert to an ' association
of ideas ' which is not rational ; and it is in the same
way just for what is not rational in men's proceedings
that we often use the word personal, because we seek the
explanation of them in their personal history and not in
any system of connexions to be found in the great world
which is common to us all — in mundo majore sive communi,
as Bacon quotes from Heraclitus.1
In this way there springs up an antithesis of the personal
and the rational, which will deserve our close attention.
But in attending to it we must constantly bear in mind
1 Novum Organum, i. 42 ; the original saying of Heraclitus is
quoted in Sext. Emp. adv. Math. vii. 133 (Heraclitus, Frag. 92,
ed. Bywater, Diels Vorsokratiker, p. 66).
116 GOD AND PERSONALITY
that it will mislead us if we forget that only in the minds
of persons do there take place movements of thought from
ground to consequent, from cause to effect, from pre
mises to conclusion or vice versa, such as are determined
by principles of reason ; that it is only minds in which
we suppose such movements of thought may take place
that we should describe as personal ; and lastly, that the
world wherein we trace the connexion which we call
rational is a world of which persons are a part and, to
us at any rate, the most interesting part. Thus, as I
hinted before, the expression ' irrationality of the personal '
upon which I fixed as conveniently suggesting the problem
with which I am now concerned is not really an appro
priate one. For it is persons only that reason, and reason
ing beings only that are persons ; and Reason is not
unconcerned with persons though it is not concerned
with persons only. Yet the personal principle of unity
or organization in experience does appear to be distinct
from the rational ; and in cases wrhere the latter affords
no ground for a particular connexion, but we find one in
the former, we come to institute a contrast and opposi
tion between them which suggests that irrationality is
characteristic of what is merely personal.
This contrast and opposition we have next to observe
at a higher level of experience than that to which we
have so far been going for our examples. We have now
to observe it as it appears in the sphere of Morality. And
here we shall have the great advantage of seeing it em
phasized in the ethical systems of two great philosophers,
by whom moreover it is so exhibited as to display those
theological bearings for the sake of which we are now
studying it. These two great philosophers are Kant
and Fichte.
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 117
It is, as is well known, the doctrine of Kant that nothing
can be morally right but what can be regarded as law
universal, as obligatory, that is to say, upon all rational
beings. This does not, of course, mean that every one's
duty is the same as every one else's ; that what is right
for the judge is right for the criminal, what is right for
the parent right for the child, what is right for the
physician right for his patient. But it does imply that
eveiy one's duty is always what would be any one else's
under those circumstances. Every personal interest and
personal preference must be discounted in ascertaining
what is right. The presence of a personal inclination to
what is right makes it possible that what seems to be a
morally right action is after all due merely to this inclina
tion and not to the consciousness that it is our duty.
Thus the absence of inclination or the presence of positive
repugnance to a certain course which is notwithstanding
adopted becomes the one certain test of genuine morality :
for the consciousness of duty alone could have moved
us to act thus clean contrary to our liking. And so Kant
comes sometimes to use language such as could provoke
the celebrated epigram in which the poet Schiller laughed
at the notion of our never fulfilling the moral law except
when we do so with horror.*
Now in Kant's use of the words personal and personality
there is certainly an ambiguity ; or perhaps it would
be more correct to say that he does not clear up an am
biguity involved in our ordinary use of the words, now
for what is private and peculiar to this or that individual,
now for knowledge and morality, which distinguish
human beings not only from inanimate things but from
the lower animals ; for these, although they possess life
* Die Philosophen (Sdkular-Ausgabe, i. p. 268).
118 GOD AND PERSONALITY
and consciousness, we do not call persons because they
lack that capacity. Hence he sometimes calls by the
name of Personality that very rational nature in virtue
of which we can will to do what we see to be right for all
who share that nature, whether we as individuals, with
private feelings and interests unshared by our fellows,
chance to like it or not ; sometimes, on the other hand,
that from which in ascertaining the universal laws of
morality we have to abstract is called by him ' the personal
distinction between rational beings/ 3 It is the use of
the word personal in this second connexion which corre
sponds with that employment of it of which I spoke before
which contrasts the personal with the rational ; although
every one would allow that rational beings within our
experience are personal, nor should we call any beings
personal which we did not take to be rational.
The ambiguity which, as we have just seen, was left
in Kant's use of personality in respect of ourselves, re
appears in his theology. The representation of moral
duties as commanded by God he approves,4 although we
are always to remember that we can only legitimately
regard them as commanded by God because we are
independently conscious of their obligatoriness ; we can
not otherwise ascertain them to be commanded by God,
and then regard ourselves as in consequence obliged to
perform them. Nor does his approval of this way of
representing them appear to be merely a concession to
the demand for an imaginative representation of what
3 Grundlegung der Metaph. der Sitten, 2 Abschn. (Werke, ed.
Hart. iv. p. 281). For the use of Personality to mean the
rational nature see Kr. der pr. Vern. i Th. i B. iii. H. pts. (Hart.
v. p. 91). Cp. Rechtslehre (Hart. vii. pp. 20, 36).
4 See Rechtslehre (Hart. vii. pp. 24, 137) ; cp. Die Religion inner-
halb. d. Gr. d. bl. Vern. Vorrede zur i Ausgabe (Hart. vi. p. 100).
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 119
is strictly unimaginable For he holds that reverence,
which is our proper attitude towards the moral law, can
only be felt towards per sons, 5 and this would seem to
suggest that the representation of moral laws as divine
commands may be something more than an imaginative
personification. Nor do I suppose that to Kant himself
it was no more than this. But he could have scarcely
developed the theistic implications of the sentiment of
reverence as, for example, Martineau does in his Types
of Ethical Theory and its sequel A Study of Religion.**
For the principles of the Critical Philosophy, which
debarred the human mind from any knowledge of things
as they are in themselves, combined with that stern
aversion from the least compromise with sentiment in
matters of conduct which was so characteristic of Kant's
moral temperament to hinder him from admitting the
legitimacy of that personal intercourse with God in the
experience of which — or at least in the desire for it — the
affirmation of Personality in God is founded. Hence,
although while he could not in mature life bring himself,
except when it was his official duty as Rector of the
University of Konigsberg, to take part in public worship 7
he could nevertheless allow of it as the expression to one
another by the members of the congregation of a common
resolution to order their lives according to the Moral
Law 8 ; for private prayer as distinct from such a resolution
5 Kr. der pr. Vern. I.e. (H. v. p. 81).
6 Or as my lamented and honoured teacher, the late Professor
Cook Wilson, did in a paper of marked originality, which made a
great impression on those who heard it read at Oxford, and which
I hope may hereafter be made public, when the return of peace
shall have set his literary executors free to cany out the pious
task of giving to the world what he has left behind him.
7 See Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 354.
8 Die Religion, etc., Allg. Anm. (H. vi. p. 297).
120 GOD AND PERSONALITY
on the individual's part, to which when alone he would
not need to give outward expression, he could find no
room at all. He held that a man who was properly
instructed in the nature of Morality — as bound up with
the autonomous freedom of the individual will, which yet
in willing made no account of its individual distinction
from other rational beings — could not but be ashamed
to be found by a stranger upon his knees alone. 9 Such
an attitude would imply at once a superstitious neglect
of the limits of human experience, as though God could
be sensibly present, and an immoral attempt to claim
divine aid in the performance of our duty otherwise than
by the right attitude of will which alone could deserve
such aid. Nor was there a place left in Kant's religion
for any love of God other than the cheerful performance
of his commandments ; any more than in his ethics he
could ascribe moral value to any love of our neighbour
other than the practical love shown in the cheerful per
formance of our duty towards him.10
We find thus that Kant ascribes moral value solely
to the Good Will, which, although the capacity for exercis
ing it constitutes the essence of our personality, yet
abstracts altogether from the features that distinguish
one person from another, and belongs in common to all
rational beings. We find also that, in close connexion
with this aspect of his teaching, he eliminates from his
theology everything suggestive of the possibility of a
communion with God that could bring into play any part
of our nature except this same Good Will, which wills
only what can be law universal for all rational beings,
9 Die Religion, etc., Allg. Anm. (H. vi. p. 294 «.); cp. Tugendlehre,
l B. i Aboh. i H. pts. iii. Art. § 12 (H. vii. p. 243).
10 Kritik der prakt. Vern. i Th. i B. iii. H. pts. (H. v. pp. 87,88).
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 121
and takes no account of what is peculiar to this or that
individual, save as an external circumstance affecting the
special mode in which the Good Will is exhibited in a
particular instance.
But it is in Fichte that we find this same point of view
adopted with a full realization of its paradoxical results
and a vehement insistence on the necessity of accepting
them which are absent from the elder thinker.
Thus he says : " The utter annihilation of the individual
and submission thereof in the absolute and pure form of
reason, or in God, is most certainly the final end of finite
reason." " It is true that he admits that this end cannot
be attained in any finite time, and that it is the error of
mysticism to treat it as though it could be. ' I am never
to act," he says again, " without having first referred
my act to this conception " of duty. " Hence there are
no indifferent acts at all." " It is absolutely immoral,"
he tells us, " to take care of our body without the con
viction that it is thus trained and preserved for moral
activity— in short, for conscience' sake. Eat and drink
for the glory of God. If any one thinks this morality
to be austere and painful we cannot help him, for there is
no other." I3 Like Kant, he insists that the 'love of our
neighbour ' which is a duty cannot be a love of the feelings.
He adds, indeed, that it would be wrong to suppose that
therefore it requires no internal affection, but merely
» Sittenlehre, § 12 ; Werke, iv. p. 151 (Eng. tr. p. 159)-
» Sittenlehre, §§ 13, 18 ; Werke, iv. pp. 155, 216 (Eng. tr.
pp. 164, 227). Signer Croce agrees with Fichte in holding that
from the moral point of view there can be no indifferent acts ; but
he gives to what he calls the ' economic ' character of all actions an
independent value always distinguishable from, though always pre
supposed by the ethical. See Wildon Carr, Phil, of Croce, pp. 128 f.
Kant, Tugendlehre, Einleitung, § 10 (Werke, ed. Hart. vii. p. 213),
admits the existence of adiaphora.
122 GOD AND PERSONALITY
external conduct towards him, for no act can be moral
which does not proceed from an inner disposition. It is
not sufficient to act, for example, as if we loved our enemy,
no matter how much we may hate him in point of fact.
' I must love him : that is to say, must believe him
capable of reform." J3 Now, whether or no it is possible
to love an enemy whom one does not believe capable of
ceasing to be one's enemy, it is surely hard not to feel
that to believe a man capable of reform is a very different
thing from loving him in any natural sense of that word.
It is only the logical sequel to such statements as I
have quoted that God should become for Fichte nothing
else than the Moral Order of the universe, beside which
there is no God.^
Now I do not wish to deny — I would rather insist upon
— the attraction of this vigorous type of ethical doctrine,
exemplified by the two great thinkers of whose teaching
I have reminded you, to any one who has at any time
heard in the depths of his soul with a full understanding
of its unconditional claim upon his obedience the august
voice of Duty, and has cried with all his heart to that
' stern daughter of the voice of God ' in the words of the
poet :—
The confidence of Reason give,
And in the light of Truth thy bondman let me livens
If, as Fichte implies in one of the passages which I
have just cited, and as " the spirit of self-sacrifice," of
which Wordsworth speaks in the same poem, may suggest
to generous and enthusiastic souls, any appeal for a fuller
X3 Sittenlehre, § 24; Werke, iv... p. 311 (Eng. tr. p. 326).
M Ueber den Grund unseres Glaubens an eine gottliche Welt-
regierung (Werke, v. pp. 186 if.).
'5 Wordsworth.. Ode to Duty.
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 123
recognition of a claim for consideration on the part of
what we should call the personal feelings of individuals
were but a declension from the true standpoint of Reason,
at which it is our privilege as persons to be able to take
up our position, we could scarcely without shame allow
ourselves to join in such an appeal. But we may with a
good conscience so join, if we do it in the profound con
viction that these ' personal feelings ' have themselves
an intrinsic worth to which the rigorism of Kant and
Fichte does not do full justice ; that it is this intrinsic
worth of what is sacrificed to duty which makes the value
of the sacrifice — as the hand cut off, the eye plucked out,
in the Gospel saying,16 are things not contemptible but
most precious ; and that a Moral Order in which persons
are sacrificed to what is itself impersonal is really robbed
of that claim to reverence which only when envisaged
as God, as a Being with whom persons can stand in personal
relations, it can in full measure possess.
Moreover when we ask ourselves whether we could be
content with the ideal which Fichte, while admitting it
to be unattainable in any finite time,1? confesses to be in
his view the ideal to which our moral aspirations point,
must we not hesitate to reply in the affirmative ? Must
we not admit that the picture of a moral character which
should be the mere embodiment of indifferent Reason
would be unlovely and unvenerable ? Morality, though
claiming to be the rule of life according to reason, when
it is thus set in sharp opposition to all that is personal,
tends itself to assume a strange resemblance to what we
call mechanism. Now mechanism, though the work of
Reason, is merely mechanical just because Reason does
'6 Mark ix. 43, 47.
'7 Sittenlehre, § 12 ; Werke, iv. p. 151 (Eng. tr. p. 157).
124 GOD AND PERSONALITY
not any longer live in it, so that for any fresh initiative
we should have to resort to a new act of Reason from
without, and take the watch back to the watchmaker.
Thus, if it is the element of seeming irrationality in
what is personal that makes it difficult, as we see from
the example of Fichte, to attribute Personality to God,
it is the absence from Reason, when divorced from
Personality, of what makes Reason a possible object of
religious reverence which excites our discontent with
the representation of God as an impersonal Reason.
Now it is precisely because, as Fichte points out, Morality,
conceived as he conceives it, implies an ideal proposed
to a finite being which is yet unattainable in any finite
time, that later thinkers have objected to Fichte's view of
Morality as the essential feature of the supreme system
of Reality. They hold the absence of contradiction to be
our one criterion of the fitness of any features of our
experience to persist unchanged as an element of that
supreme system.18 And so in their view neither Morality,
which, by the admission of its great champion, has a
contradiction at its heart, nor yet Personality, which as
the subject of Morality is always in Morality striving to
be that which yet it cannot be without ceasing to be
Personality, can assert a claim to final and ultimate
reality. X9
Such is the position taken up, for example, by Mr.
Bosanquet. The Absolute of Mr. Bosanquet's philosophy
may be said to be, like Fichte's, an order or system which
determines the true mutual relations of all things, and
therefore, among the rest, of all persons, but which is
18 See Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 136 and passim ;
Bosanquet, Individuality and Value, p. 46 and passim.
9 See Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 173 ; Bosanquet,
Value and Destiny, pp. 136 ff.
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 125
not itself a person or persons. It differs from Fichte's
in that it cannot be called a moral order ; since it is not
in Morality that its true nature is most perfectly exhibited.
The " proper name " of the principle or spirit of this
system is, as Mr. Bosanquet tells us, ' non-contradiction/ 20
The name of a Moral Order might indeed seem to be
a more inspiring designation for it than this negative
and highly abstract phrase. But, on the other hand,
it is easier to translate ' non-contradiction ' by Love
than so to translate ' Morality ' which seems at first, as
is shown by the interpretations placed by Kant and
Fichte upon the Gospel precept to love one's neighbour,
to leave no room for much that the word Love must natu
rally suggest. Thus Mr. Bosanquet can represent his
philosophy of life as fundamentally the same with that
of the great poet of mediaeval Christendom. But though
this identification, to which he often recurs, is plainly
very near to Mr. Bosanquet's heart, I find it impossible
not to think that there is really a wide difference between
Dante's view of the world and his own, a difference which
is very closely connected with the absence from Mr.
Bosanquet's theology, if theology we may call it, of the
notion of Divine Personality.
Mr. Bosanquet would probably regard the obvious
unlikeness between the two as due rather to the use by
Dante of a traditional phraseology and imagery which
for us of the modern world has no longer the significance
that it had for him, than to a real divergence in his own
view from the fundamental convictions which found
expression in the Divine Comedy.
I think myself that some of what Mr. Bosanquet would
« See a review by Mr. Bosanquet of Prof. Pringle Pattison's Idea
of God, in Mind (October 1917).
126 GOD AND PERSONALITY
thus consider to be unessential to the deepest meaning
of Dante belonged in fact to the substance of Dante's
faith, and that the failure to recognize this is the cause
of what I venture to regard as Mr. Bosanquet's mistake
respecting the relation of his own philosophy to the poet's.
But upon this I shall not dwell at present ; we shall find
ourselves returning to the subject later on in other con
nexions. For the present I am concerned only with
Mr. Bosanquet's account of the true system of Reality
which makes it more than a merely moral order, but which
still leaves it, though embracing persons and determining
those mutual relations in and through which they possess
their personality, yet itself without personality of its
own. And here I would call your attention to a remark
able passage in the Gifford Lectures on The Principle of
Individuality and Value which, unless I am greatly mis
taken, reveals, as it were by accident, the defect in this
account. " We might "—so we find Mr. Bosanquet
saying—'' compare the Absolute to ... Dante's mind
as uttered in the Divine Comedy. . . . The whole poetic
experience is single and yet includes a world of space
and persons." ** Is it not clear that this analogy would
naturally lead up to the conception of a personal Absolute ?
For the mind of Dante to which the Absolute is here
compared is certainly a personal mind. No doubt it is
not fair to press too far an analogy admittedly introduced
only to illustrate a particular point. And so I will resist
the temptation to do more than ask whether in Dante's
introduction of himself among the characters of his
Comedy we may not find an analogue to that personal
intercourse with human souls which Religion ascribes
to God, but which it seems to philosophers of Mr. Bosan-
« Individuality and Value, p. xxxvii (in abstract of Lecture X).
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 127
quet's school impossible to ascribe to the Absolute, because
human souls are included within the Absolute. And no
doubt one would not even have been tempted to put this
question if Mr. Bosanquet had happened to choose the
mind of Shakespeare instead of the mind of Dante for
his comparison. But in that case, too, the inclusive mind
would still have been personal, although in none of his
plays is Shakespeare himself a dramatis persona.
The denial of personality to the system within which
we finite persons are included, not only as respects some
particular aspect of our being, but wholly and throughout,
wherein, to use familiar words, ' we live and move and
have our being,' 22 in such accounts of its nature as we
have just been reviewing, presupposes in truth that
contrast or antithesis of Personality and Reason to the
consideration of which this Lecture has been devoted.
Just because the supreme system, which the authors of
these accounts are endeavouring to describe, is to be
the complete expression of Reason, it can include but
cannot itself possess Personality. Reason is indeed the
characteristic constituent of Personality ; but there is
always in Personality something which falls short of the
universality of Reason, and therefore it cannot without
self-contradiction be ascribed to the universal Reason ;
for so to ascribe it would be to speak in effect of a particu
lar universal. Particulars must always be particulars of
a universal ; but the universal itself is by definition not a
particular.
On the other hand, a rejoinder may be made to this
argument, and this rejoinder will presuppose the same
antithesis as did the argument to which it is a reply.
The thought of the universe as a whole, as a single system
« Acts xvii. 28.
128 GOD AND PERSONALITY
wherein we " live and move and have our being," pri
marily presents itself, both in the history of mankind at
large and normally in that of the individual, as a religious
thought, and is associated with the characteristically
religious emotions of awe and reverence.^ Such thinkers
as those I have instanced in this Lecture as denying
Personality to this Supreme System, Fichte and Mr.
Bosanquet, have certainly no intention of dissociating
these emotions from that thought. But I am not satisfied
that such dissociation is not in the long run inevitable,
unless our relation to the universe is conceived as essentially
of the same nature as our relation to a person ; and that
it is not in fact merely postponed by the circumstance
that the language in which the philosophers who deny
personality to the Absolute find themselves driven to
speak of it is permeated by the suggestion of that which
they explicitly deny.
It will no doubt be said that, when such thinkers deny
Personality to the Absolute, they do not intend to assimi
late it to what is confessedly less than personal — for
example, to a force like electricity — but to emphasize
the necessity of regarding it as free from the limitations
of finite Personality, as more than personal. And I should
most certainly not hesitate to allow that, if we may
ascribe Personality to God, it must be only in a sense
which will admit of a great difference between what we
call Personality in ourselves and what, for want of a
better term, we call Personality in him. What, however,
I think even the most cautious maintainers of Divine
Personality must assert against such a critic of their
view as Mr. Bosanquet is the capacity of finite persons
23 Cp. Royce, Problem of Christianity, ii. 8, and my Group Theories
of Religion, pp. 188 f.
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 129
for what can only be called a personal relation to the
Supreme Reality — and therefore the presence in the
Supreme Reality of whatever is necessary for the exist
ence of such a relation thereto.
It will throw, unless I am mistaken, some light upon
this matter if we inquire why the man in the street is
disposed, if told of the idealism of Berkeley, to dismiss
it with a kind of incredulous contempt as a visionary
paradox, while a report of the speculations of physicists
as to the electrical constitution of matter he is ready to
receive with surprise indeed, but yet with respect. I
think that this difference of attitude towards two doctrines
which might at first sight seem to be equally subversive
of ordinary preconceptions is to be thus explained. Berke
ley seems to treat our everyday experience of a material
world as an illusion, while the physicist is taken to be
merely telling us that, while genuine enough as far as it
goes, this same everyday experience has brought us but
a very little way in the knowledge of what we are dealing
with ; so that, if we knew more about it, we should find
it to be something very different from what it strikes one
as being at first sight. I am of course well aware that
Berkeley insists that he is denying nothing to which the
senses bear witness ; and on the other hand, I do not
forget the difficult problems which may be propounded
about the relation of the theories of physicists to the sensible
facts on which they are supposed to be based. But I
am now speaking only of the impression made by these
two types of speculation upon the ordinary man on his
first acquaintance with them. I do not think that it can
be denied that it is on the whole such as I have described.
It is then because, rightly or wrongly, Berkeley is thought
to aim in his argument at proving that we are mocked
9
130 GOD AND PERSONALITY
in our deep-seated conviction of being constantly, as we
say, ' up against ' a world of bodies which are there,
independently of us, whether we are aware of them or
not, while the physicists, without casting any doubt upon
the reality of this world, do but concern themselves with
the discovery of further facts about it, with which we
have no particular business, that the teaching of the
former is at once repudiated, but that of the latter accepted
without demur.
This difference of attitude on the part of the ordinary
man towards Berkeley and the physicists respectively
in regard of the material world, may help us to understand
a like difference of attitude on the part of the ordinary
religious man toward two distinct kinds of theological
speculation which agree in proclaiming the inadequacy
of the anthropomorphic imagery implied in the common
language of religious devotion. The ordinary religious
man, at any rate among ourselves, is, one may say, per
fectly willing to allow that the nature of God must infinitely
transcend the reach of his understanding, and that any
description he can give of it undoubtedly falls so far
short of what it truly is, that from the standpoint of a
fuller knowledge, it would seem scarcely to convey any
information at all. Hence if, on other grounds, he is
disposed to accept, for example, the doctrine of the
Trinity set forth in the Athanasian Creed as authoritative,
he will not be deterred from doing so and regarding it
with veneration merely by the fact that it very likely
conveys to his mind no distinct idea, or by inability to
say what difference it would make to his conduct or to
his religious feelings if he had never known it. But, if
a view like Mr. Bosanquet's were put before him, I feel
little doubt that he would interpret it as dissolving what
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 131
he had taken for an experience of reciprocal intercourse,
as with another person, between himself and God into
illusion, and would regard it as leaving him no real
God at all, just as the Berkeleian philosophy is commonly
interpreted as leaving us no real material world at all.
On the other hand, just as the physicist is taken, even
where his speculations seem most remote from our every
day apprehension, to be merely telling us that the real
material world is very different, when you come to know
it better, from what it seems at first sight, so a theology
like that of the Athanasian Creed may discover as many
mysteries as it pleases in the nature of God so long as it
does not deny that God is real, as a person is real with
whom we may enjoy a reciprocal personal intercourse.
It is upon the possibility of this reciprocal intercourse
that the whole question turns. A child will offer sweets
from its pocket to an elder friend with the intent to give
him the pleasure the like offer would give to the child
himself. He may feel disappointed that his sweets are
not appreciated, or baffled by the inexplicable pre
occupations which divert the attention of his elders from
his own concerns ; but, whatever momentary distress
these things may cause, he is sure that he has to do
with a real person, who, however strange his tastes and
pursuits may be to the child's apprehension, can answer
the child and understand him and perhaps care for him.
It would be a very different thing if he came to find that
there was not really any person there at all, that he was
no more in communication with any one other than him
self than when talking to himself and consciously
' making believe.'
So too, in the course of the religious development of
our race, we may not only come to say ' No ' to the question
132 GOD AND PERSONALITY
put by the prophet in God's name, ' Thinkest thou that
I will eat bull's flesh and drink the blood of goats ? ' 24 but
may even doubt whether we can suppose that the thanks
giving and vows which the Psalmist would have us offer
in their place will be accepted by God exactly as a mighty
king might accept them. Yet it is fallacious to infer
that because there is in one sense no limit to the process
in which we lay aside in turn every imaginary picture of
God as inadequate to his infinite perfection, therefore a
transformation which leaves no Being to whom we can
intelligibly ascribe a reciprocation of our personal address
to him is but a further extension of this same process.
There was after all a true instinct in the tradition which
saw in Spinoza, ' God-intoxicated ' as he has been called
(and only a very unsympathetic reader of the last book of
his Ethics can deny his claim to the epithet), the great
standard-bearer of atheism. For when he said that,
while we could have an intellectual love of God and God
could love himself in our love of him, yet God could not
be said to love us, he did, after all, condemn the religious
man to the doom of Ixion, who found in his embrace not
a goddess but a cloud.
No, it will be replied, this similitude does not do justice
to those whom you are criticizing. Ixion's cloud lacked
all that made the goddess desirable ; but in the Absolute
Mr. Bosanquet would have us acknowledge all that piety
seeks in God and more. I do not know whether I am right
in detecting a certain distinction here between the views
of Mr. Bosanquet and Mr. Bradley. It appears to me
that on the whole Mr. Bosanquet, though holding that
to think of a God with whom we could be in personal
relations is to think of a merely finite being and not of
*4 Psa. 1. 13.
PERSONALITY AND RATIONALITY 133
the Absolute, yet finds in the contemplation of the
Absolute the satisfaction of his religious aspirations,
while Mr. Bradley dwells rather on the thought that
philosophy must recognize the God to whom religious
devotion is directed to be not the Absolute but, like all
else in our experience, an appearance of the Absolute.
God, he would say, the object of religion, must be finite,
and therefore cannot be the Absolute ; but Religion
is a real experience ; there is an intercourse between
oneself and God ; yet neither in oneself nor in God can
one find ultimate reality ; both are appearances of that
which is ultimately real, but it, the Absolute, trans
cends them both. We have here suggested to us the
thought, which is urged upon us also by writers of a very
different school to Mr. Bradley, of a ' finite God.' By
recognizing that God is finite it has seemed to many
that we can escape from the difficulties which came to
light in considering the relations of Personality to the
supreme system of Reality. God is a person, so that
personal relations with him are possible ; but he is not
the supreme system of Reality ; for he and we are alike
included within it. It is to the consideration of this
suggestion that I propose to devote my next Lecture.
LECTURE VI
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD
THE subject of this Lecture was, it will be remembered,
to be the conception — now so frequently in one shape
or another brought to our notice — of a finite God, which
it is sometimes thought will satisfy the claims at once
of Religion and of Metaphysics. For a finite God, we are
told, can be a person, in personal relations with ourselves ;
but since he is admitted, as finite, not to be the Infinite
and all-inclusive Reality to which philosophers have in
recent times given the name of the Absolute, the diffi
culties of ascribing personality, with its implication of
finitude, to the Absolute, which by definition is not
finite, are at once removed. This conception appears,
as I have said, in several forms. To one — which I may
conveniently associate with the name of Mr. Bradley —
I referred toward the close of my last Lecture. Here
God is not the Absolute, but (like every separate object
of experience) an appearance of that Reality which, when
we speak of it not as it appears but as it is in its undivided
harmonious unity, we call the Absolute. We may in
the end find this the most intelligible form of the doctrine
of a finite God ; but it is not the form of it which to most
people the phrase would immediately suggest.
More familiar perhaps is a form of the doctrine in
134
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 135
which the all-inclusive Reality, however designated, is
regarded as an aggregate of spiritual beings, fundamentally
and ultimately distinct from one another, to one or
more among whom is ascribed a vast superiority over
the rest, which fits it (or them) to be worshipped by the
rest. A single Supreme Being of this sort may even
be considered — as by Dr. Rashdall, who has in several
of his works x elaborated a view of this kind — as the
original source from which all the other beings derive
their existence. Such a God is said to be finite, as being
limited both by the other beings who through his own
will have come to coexist with him and also by the
necessities of his own nature, which is described, after
the analogy of what we call our own original and natural
endowment, as something which he finds given, and as
setting to his activity a bound which it cannot pass.
Other writers — for instance Professor Howison 2 — would
make the other beings beside God not merely coexistent
but coeternal with him ; and here too we must, I think,
suppose the world in which he and they coexist to have
a nature of its own which determines that of the beings
which it includes ; this nature could, however, not be
described as the nature of that " firstborn among many
brethren " 3 who is called God rather than as the nature
of any other member of the universal society.
One of the most brilliant of contemporary novelists
has lately presented to us 4 as a ' new religion,' challenging
the allegiance of all who desire to prove themselves equal
1 See Personal Idealism, pp. 369 ff. ; Contentio Veritatis (1902),
pp. 34 ff. ; Theory of Good and Evil, ii. pp. 238 ff. ; Philosophy and
Religion (1909), pp. 101 ff.
* Limits of Evolution and other Essays, p. 359.
3 The phrase is used of Christ, Rom. viii. 29.
4 In God the Invisible King, by Mr. H. G. Wells.
136 GOD AND PERSONALITY
to the demands of our time, yet another version of the
doctrine of a finite God. The God of Mr. Wells is an
object of personal loyalty and devotion. He is also
in some sense, as the phrase goes, ' immanent ' in us,
and not merely another than we, standing in external
relations with us. But he is not the all-inclusive and
ultimate Reality. He is not one with that ' Veiled Being/
nor does our knowledge of him throw any special light
upon its nature. There is a genuine religious experience
open to individual human beings of which this God is
the object ; but such experience has merely a racial not
a cosmic significance. I venture to think that the chief
interest of this latest Gospel lies not in its philosophical
value, nor even in its capacity of exerting a practical
influence on men's lives, but in the appeal of its author
to certain personal experiences of his own, as authenti
cating the creed of which he has proclaimed himself the
apostle. I would therefore call attention to a fact of
some importance about these personal experiences as
described by Mr. Wells, which ought not to be overlooked
in passing judgment upon the doctrine which they are
alleged to support.
It is an essential feature of this doctrine that the God
whom it invites us to accept as our ' invisible king ' does
not in any way claim to be the author or indwelling Spirit
of Nature. But the book in which the new religion is
propounded is not, as it happens, the first in which its
prophet has related the personal experiences in which
his God revealed himself to his soul. They had already
been described in an earlier confession of the author's
faith, published under the title of First and Last Things.
But the account of them there given leaves no doubt
that Mr. Wells was then without suspicion that it was
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 137
any other being than the Spirit immanent in Nature
with whom he had enjoyed communion. It is clearly
only as the result of subsequent reflexion upon difficulties
which (as he is well aware) are no novelties in the history
of theology that he has come to hold a different opinion ;
although it would seem that, by a common psychological
illusion, his later judgment has coloured his memory of
the original experiences. 5 Mr. Wells is not unconscious
of the kinship between his speculations and those of the
thinkers of early Christian times who distinguished the
Author of Nature as a being of wholly different character
from the Author of the Gospel. In the light of his earlier
record of the mystical experiences upon which he founds
his belief, we may see in these experiences a confirmation
of the contention which is the theme of Tertullian's great
treatise against one of those thinkers — the celebrated
Marcion — the contention that, whatever the difficulties
of reconciling the moral attributes of God with the pheno
mena of nature, we can never consistently mean by God
less than that being whose witness is, in words which
1 quoted in another connexion, in my first Lecture, totum
quod sumus et in quo sumus : our whole selves and our
whole environment.
I feel convinced that when once a stage of intellectual
development has been reached at which the question
of the relation of God to the Absolute would arise, no
conception of God which takes him for less than the
5 See First and Last Things (1908), p. 50. In a revised edition
of this work, published 1917, Mr. Wells adds the significant note :
"So in 1908. Since then I have cleared up a certain confusion
between God as the Master of the Scheme and God as the Presence
in the Heart. That is the chief intellectual difference between
this and its successor in 1917, God the Invisible King/' I had
not seen this note when I wrote the words in the text.
138 GOD AND PERSONALITY
ultimate Reality will satisfy the demands of the religious
consciousness. And this is so because it is, I think, in
principle true from the first that what men have sought
in religion is always communication with that which is
supposed or suspected to possess within itself the secret
of our life and of our surroundings, and therefore to
exert over us and them a mysterious power which we
shall do well to enlist upon our side.
Wherever this hidden power may be conjectured by
primitive men to reside — in whatever queer-shaped stone,
or totem animal, or initiated wizard, or vanished founder
of their tribal customs — it is dislodged from one abiding
place after another as knowledge is increased and the
horizon of the worshippers' interests widens, and at
last we discover that it is after nothing less than
the ultimate Reality wherein " we live and move and
have our being " 6 that we are inquiring ; this which
we have been seeking throughout. Now it is, I suppose,
precisely because in Religion we seek to place ourselves
effectively in touch with what nevertheless must, it would
seem, already include us within itself that a philosopher
like Mr. Bradley can find in it a necessary and essential
contradiction which forces us, when we apply the
criterion of non-contradiction, to regard it as, in the end,
appearance only. The other forms of the doctrine of a
' finite God ' fail, I will venture to say, just because they
abandon the attempt to identify God with the Absolute,
and in so doing abandon the quest which is Religion.
But what I have called Mr. Bradley's form of the
doctrine invites a more detailed discussion, for here we
find what we miss in the rest, a clear recognition that to
abandon that quest must be in the long run the ruin of the
6 Acts xvii. 28.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 139
very thing which it is intended by this strategy of retreat
to save from destruction at the hands of Philosophy.
It is indeed true that all genuine religion involves a
paradox, even if we do not care to call it a contradiction.
On the one hand religious worship is ever full of the
insistence upon the vast distance between the divine
majesty and the worshipper who humbles and prostrates
himself before it ; and yet, on the other hand, it is of the
essence of Religion that this vast distance is annihilated ;
that the worshipper comes to live in God and God in him ;
so that it is not to himself but to God in him that he
attributes the acts wherein he expresses the life which
through his religion he is thus enabled to live.
It is true also that it is not Mr. Bradley's intention
by his formula that in Religion we have only Appearance
to reduce Religion to an illusion. For in the language
of his philosophy every object of experience is ' appear
ance/ so that it is in its appearances that the Absolute
Reality lives, moves, and has its being. Religion can,
I think, have no interest in maintaining that it can estab
lish communication with a Reality which does not appear ;
and certainly the Christian Religion, which is committed
to the doctrine of a Logos, which was in the beginning
with God, and was God,7 cannot deny appearance to be
essential to ultimate Reality.
Thus with Mr. Bradley's philosophy of Religion indeed,
especially as it has found its latest expression in the
chapter ' On God and the Absolute ' in his Essays on
Truth and Reality, I should, for my own part at any rate,
feel that I am in essential agreement. Nevertheless
certain doubts of its complete adequacy remain in my
mind. The nature of these will appear from some further
7 John i. i.
140 GOD AND PERSONALITY
comments which I propose to offer upon it, in the course
of which I shall also point out what I take to be the relation
of Mr. Bradley's philosophy of religion to that of Mr.
Bosanquet. For, near to one another as these two eminent
thinkers are, not only in their general view of the world
but also in the terms which they employ in speaking of
the relation of Religion to the Absolute Experience, yet
I think that on a near inspection there will be found to
be between their respective attitudes toward Religion
an important difference which will repay our study.
These discussions will bring us to close quarters with
the antithesis of Divine Immanence and Divine Trans
cendence which has played a considerable part in recent
theology, and to which I promised in my first Lecture
that I would call attention.
I will begin the observations which I wish to make on
Mr. Bradley's philosophy of Religion by quoting the
following passage from the essay ' On God and the Abso
lute/ to which I have just referred.
' Whatever ideas," says Mr. Bradley, " really are
required in practice by the highest religion are true. In
my judgement their truth is not contradicted by meta
physics, so long only as they will not offer themselves
as satisfying our last intellectual demands. And exactly
how religious truths are to be in the end supplemented
and corrected, I would repeat that, as I understand the
matter, metaphysics cannot say. Within the outline
which it takes for real there is room for all truth and all
truth assuredly is completed. But the answer in concrete
detail is beyond the finite intellect, and is even beyond
any mere understanding." 8
I do not think there is anything here said with which
8 Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 433.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 141
I should not agree. If any objection can be taken to
Mr. Bradley 's statement, it would not come, I take it,
from the theologians who insist on what they call the
' personality of God ' as a religious truth, and whose
position, in the context of the passage I have quoted,
Mr. Bradley is criticizing. They would be probably in
most cases quite willing to admit that in our most inti
mate communion with God our vision of him must still be
proportioned to the measures of our creaturely nature,
which, however highly exalted, must remain creaturely
and other than the uncreated nature. They would, at
least if they were Christian theologians, find no fault
with the wonderful stanzas with which the Paradise
of Dante ends ; yet whoever will place the words of Mr.
Bradley which I have just quoted by the side of those
stanzas will, I am convinced, be surprised to see how
closely the thought of the philosopher echoes that of
the great Christian poet :—
Veder voleva, come si convenne
L'imago al cerchi6, e come vi s'indova.9
In my third Lecture, when I was dealing with the history
of the application of the word ' person ' to God, I showed
that this application was first made in the theology of
Catholic Christianity, wherein the personal communion
with God which found expression in the recorded language
of a historical person, Jesus Christ, was affirmed to belong
to the eternal nature of the Supreme Being. This being
so, the problem which Dante has in mind in the lines
which I have just quoted, the problem traditionally
known as that of the two natures in Christ, involves the
problem which Mr. Bradley is considering in the passage
9 Par ad. xxxiii. I37"8-
142 GOD AND PERSONALITY
I cited above. So far as the demand that God should
be ' personal ' is a genuinely religious demand, it is the
demand for an assurance that the possibility of such a
relation to God as is exemplified in the Godward attitude
of Jesus is no vain dream, but is rooted in the funda
mental structure of ultimate Reality.
Dante could not see what he wished without a flash
of supernatural illumination : —
Ma non eran da ci6 le propice penne
Se non che la mia mente fu percossa
Da un fulgore, in che sua voglia venne.10
So, too, Mr. Bradley ends his essay on God and the
Absolute with the confession that we need a new religion,
which philosophy has it not in its power to supply, though
he doubts whether any religious doctrine will be " able
in the end to meet our metaphysical requirement of
ultimate consistency." JI What we want is "a religious
belief founded otherwise than on metaphysics, and a
metaphysics able in some sense to justify that creed."
Whether a ' new ' religion is really required for such
justification of this demand, or only a more thorough
and courageous acceptance of an old one is a matter on
which much might be said, but wrhich cannot be discussed
here : for apologetic is not the business of a Gifford
Lecturer.
I have already observed that there seems to me to be
a certain difference in the attitudes towards Religion
taken up by Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet respectively,
and have suggested that we should find it instructive to
note where it lies. Mr. Bosanquet does, unless I mis-
19 Parad. xxxiii. 139-41.
11 Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 446.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 143
construe him greatly, conceive it possible to make the
Absolute the object of religious devotion. In this I
should so far be in sympathy with him that I should even
insist that the object of religious devotion cannot, when
once the question is raised, be held to be less than the
Ultimate Reality.12 But Mr. Bradley seems to imply that,
not only for the less philosophical, but even for those
who share his own metaphysical convictions, there is still
room for an ' exoteric ' religion which may involve the
consciousness of a personal God. His words suggest
that the absence of a generally recognized religion which
might fill this place without being in flagrant contradic
tion with those convictions is to him a matter for regret.
How far I am right in interpreting his attitude thus I
am not sure. But should it turn out thus, then I should
find myself more in sympathy with his philosophy of
religion than with Mr. Bosanquet's, in so far as it
evinces a keener perception of the permanent and universal
value of elements in the religious consciousness, with
which it appears to Mr. Bosanquet, unless I greatly
mistake his meaning, comparatively easy to dispense ;
and consequently a greater sense of the grave loss which
may attend the inevitable depreciation of these in view
of their failure, in the judgment of both philosophers
alike, to satisfy the metaphysical test for admission to
a place in the system of ultimate truth. A kindred
difference between the two thinkers in their respective
» I do not know how far this impression may be due to the fact
mentioned by Mr. Bosanquet in the Preface to Individuality and
Value (p. vii) that in his first course of Gifford Lectures he has
not " sharply distinguished between God and the Absolute." But
I think that he could scarcely have found it possible to forbear
doing so were there not some truth in what I have said of his
attitude in the text.
144 GOD AND PERSONALITY
attitudes toward the question of a future life will engage
our attention when I come, as I hope to come in my
second course of Lectures, to the consideration of that
question as part of the problem of finite personality.
According to Mr. Bradley the " belief in God as a
separate individual " seems to many (though not to all)
religious minds to be required for practical religion.
" Where truly that belief is so required," he says, " I
can accept it as justified and true ; but only if it is supple
mented by other beliefs which really contradict it." J3
With this statement, again, I should certainly have no
quarrel ; for I am sure that the consciousness of standing
in a personal relation towards God, however we may
picture it, is never, at any rate where it is the form of
a genuine experience, the consciousness of standing in
such a relation towards a ' separate ' individual There
is ever present a sense at least of God's privity to the
thoughts and intents of our hearts which we could not
admit in the case of a truly ' separate individual ' as
tolerable, even if conceivable. *4 In Mr. Bradley's treat
ment of the subject there sometimes seems to be too little
distinction drawn J5 between two contrasts : the contrast
of a ' personal God ' with the Absolute — that is, the ultimate
system of Reality, within which God and his worshipper
and everything else that is real must be embraced — and
the contrast of a God personally distinct from his wor
shipper with a God who is ' the indwelling Life and Mind
and the inspiring Love ' l6 both of the universe which he
makes and sustains and also of the finite soul. But the
*s See Truth and Reality, p. 436.
M See Problems in the Relations of God and Man, pp. 147-8.
15 See, however, p. 436 n.
16 Truth and Reality, p. 436.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 145
two contrasts are not, I think, the same contrast, and
should be discussed separately.
For of the former contrast it seems sufficient to say
that in no religion that I know of is the nature of God
held to be exhausted in a personal relation to his wor
shipper. Religion may demand that this relation be
regarded not as merely figurative or illusory, but as real,
and as no less real than the worshipper's own personality
or than his personal relations with his fellow-men ; this,
however, is not to say that there is in God nothing beyond
his relations to us. Indeed, to suppose this would surely
be highly unsatisfactory to the religious emotions, which,
on the other hand, respond readily to that profound saying
of Anselm X7 that God is not only that than which no
greater can be conceived, but is also greater than anything
which can be conceived.18 "If I am forced to take
reality," says Mr. Bradley, " as having . . . only one
sense . . . nothing to me in this sense is real except the
Universe as a whole : for I cannot take God as including
li Proslogion, c. 15.
18 It is noteworthy that the traditional theology of Christendom
has described God as wholly personal (for there is no God beside
the three persons of the Trinity), but has not treated personality
as the primary attribute of the Supreme Being. I do not think
that it can be said of any standard expression of this theology,
whatever be the case with certain modern Christian theologians,
that it " takes personality as being the last word about the Universe "
(see Bradley, Truth and Reality, p. 451). I venture to think that
Mr. Bradley's observation about ' polytheism ' on p. 436 confirms
a suspicion to which other passages in his writings have given
occasion, that he has allowed a certain impatience to hinder him
from doing justice to the real significance of the doctrine of the
Trinity. I do not of course at all suggest that, had this not been
so, he would have found it solve all difficulties ; and probably the
inconsiderate assertions of certain theologians to this effect have
had a powerful influence in deterring him from a more careful
study of it.
10
146 GOD AND PERSONALITY
or as equivalent to the whole Universe. . . . But if ...
I am allowed to hold degrees in reality . . . God to me
is now so much more real than you or myself that to
compare God's reality with ours would be ridiculous/' X9
I will confess that, in the sense in which we may rightly
speak of degrees of reality, and of God's reality being
greater than yours or mine, I should not attribute a
higher degree of reality to the " Universe as a whole " than
to God ; for it is, as I take it, only in God that the Universe
is a whole. I will content myself with saying that among
the ideas which (to quote Mr. Bradley) " are required
to satisfy the interest and claim " of the religious con
sciousness, and therefore must be true, I am compelled
to reckon that of the ultimate reality of its object ; but
that this does not for me mean that in the personal relation
to that object, which is another ' idea ' (if we are to use
this phraseology) required for the same purpose, we
apprehend the whole of its nature ; nor is it, I believe,
an ' idea ' in any way required by the religious conscious
ness that we do so apprehend it.
I pass to the other contrast, that between a ' separate
individual ' and an indwelling Spirit. As I said before,
this contrast seems to be insufficiently discriminated by
Mr. Bradley from that last mentioned. He does, indeed,
recognize that they are distinct by pointing out that
even a ' higher inclusive will ' than the will of an individual
human being, if it be one ' which can say " I " to itself/
such as that of the State or of some vaster society (no
matter how vast we imagine it) must still be " finite." 30
It seems to be implied in this remark that the Absolute
could not say ' I ' to itself ; no doubt because the Absolute
is not confronted by any thing that is not itself. I have
'9 Truth and Reality, p. 448, « Ibid., p. 436 n.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 147
already reminded you « of Lotze's criticism of this implied
view. My own criticism would take a somewhat different
form, but I will reserve it till a later and more constructive
stage of my argument. But certainly there is nothing
in the incompatibility of ' personality ' with absolute
reality, even though we should admit this, which involves
the incompatibility of ' personality ' with what is nowa
days often called ' immanence/ That there is an essential
contradiction between the two I do not admit, and should
appeal with confidence in support of my contention to
the religious consciousness, which, so long as the nature
of the absolute or ultimate Reality is reserved for the
cognizance of metaphysics, Mr. Bradley admits to be
in religious questions the final court of appeal. I do
not think that in religion God is ever regarded as having
a purely exclusive or separate personality ; wherever he
is regarded as a person, this is not felt to exclude his
indwelling. I could call here as a witness Mr. Wells,
who in his recent summons to thinking men to adopt
his new religion, insists that its God must be a person
without it ever occurring to him that this must exclude
his indwelling in his worshippers. But I would prefer
to point out that to no one who has been brought up
to think of the Holy Spirit as a Person should it seem
strange to regard the notion of a ' person ' and that of
an ' indwelling spirit ' as mutually consistent.
Of course it is not only in religion that we find our
selves in a difficulty, if we attempt to regard the complete
mutual exclusiveness of human souls " each in his hidden
sphere of joy or woe"" as of the very essence of
" See supra, Lect. IV. p. 106.
« Keble, Christian Year, Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity:
' Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe,
Our hermit spirits dwell and range apart/
148 GOD AND PERSONALITY
personality. Nowhere is there a fuller consciousness of
the Personality and of the distinction from one another
of the persons concerned than there is in love. Yet just
here, in proportion to the greatness and the depth of
the love, such mutual exclusiveness is transcended and
done away.
It wrould be of course absurd to suppose that this
thought is unfamiliar to Mr. Bradley. Few philosophers
have shown themselves more keenly alive to the lessons
to be drawn from this region of experience. Never
unregardful of the significance of poetry for metaphysic,
he has lately told us that he finds himself " now taking
more and more as literal fact " what he used in his youth
" to admire and love as poetry." 23 It is not for lack of
appreciation of the importance of the experiences of
saint or lover that he would regard the paradox of those
experiences as proving their failure to make good a claim
to ultimate reality. It is rather because of that principle
of his logic which has led him to call all ' relations ' un
intelligible because they are relations and not something
else. If one is not convinced by his reasoning upon that
subject, one may venture also to deny that any incon
sistency or contradiction is involved in saying that in
Religion we have communion with a personality which
is more perfect than our own, just because our person
alities do not exclude it as the personality of any one
of us excludes that of any other of our fellow-men.
The ' immanence ' of God, if we are to use this now
familiar expression, is certainly a doctrine with which
the religious consciousness cannot dispense. But the
same is, to my mind, true of the complementary doctrine
of his ' transcendence/ It is necessary, however, to
23 Truth and Reality, p. 468 n.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 149
scrutinize somewhat more closely the sense in which
this term is used.
There is a transition of thought — and, as it seems to
me, a fallacious transition of thought — in the philosophy
of Herbert Spencer of which we are reminded by an
unfortunate ambiguity sometimes to be found in dis
cussions of Divine Transcendence. Spencer starts, as is
well known, from the position which is called Realism.
He holds that the onus of proof lies upon any one who
denies to physical objects a reality independent of any
perception or consciousness of them by human or other
minds. But he ends by finding the ultimate and genuine
reality of things to be unknowable by any mind what
soever. Here what begins by being ' outside of ' or
' external to ' our minds, in the sense of having an exist
ence independently of our thinking or being aware of it,
gradually slips into being ' out of mind ' in the sense
which that expression bears in the proverbial phrase
'out of sight out of mind/ where it means in fact that
we do not think of it at all. But what is thus maintained
at the end is just the reverse of what was maintained
at the beginning. The physical world is not an idea in
our minds ; it is that which we perceive, of which we
think. Our perception, our consciousness gives itself
out, so to speak, as perception and consciousness of a
reality which, whether ultimately independent of mind
or no, is at least independent of the act of perception
or consciousness of it, since this act presupposes it.
Such is the first position, the position of Realism. On
the other hand, according to the final position, that of
Agnosticism as we may call it, the physical world is
really something of which we can never be aware as it
really is ; what we are aware of is always something else
150 GOD AND PERSONALITY
than what it really is ; for it is merely a ' phenomenon '
which, as it appears, is not independent of our con
sciousness.
I do not now propose to criticize the transition of thought
here involved, but only to show that what is in principle
the same transition has introduced a parallel difficulty
into theology. When God's transcendence is opposed to
his immanence, we sometimes begin by meaning merely
that in our religion we have to do with something more
than ideas or emotions of our own, which, whatever value
or practical efficacy they may possess, are not ideas of
anything or emotions excited by anything beyond our own
individual or racial life. We intend to deny that, so far
as we speak of a God or gods, we are merely personifying
certain moods or emotions, as poets personify passions
or virtues, to which they yet do not by any means intend
us to ascribe an independent being like that of another
real person, as real as ourselves. But we must be careful
not to let this kind of transcendence pass over under our
hands, as it were, into a transcendence which severs God
altogether from the religious consciousness, in and through
which alone we know him, and treats him as an unutterable
mystery, of which we can say nothing that is true. A
God thus transcendent has nothing to do with Religion.
That sense of something beyond the reach of scientific
knowledge, in which alone Herbert Spencer could recognize
a legitimate form of religious consciousness,^ can be called
Religion at all only in virtue of that last rag of intelligi
bility which is left to the Unknowable, when we describe
it as the ultimate ground of all that we can know, and
are (doubtless in company with Spencer himself) stirred as
«« Se.e First Principles, cc. 2, 5 ; see esp. p. 113 ; Ecclesiastical
Institutions, c. 16 ; see esp. pp 841 ff.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 151
we think of this by the characteristically religious emotion
of solemn awe.
I said just now that only in and through the religious
consciousness do we know God ; and I think that a dis
cussion of this phrase, the like of which is frequently to
be found in the writings of Mr. Bradley, will assist us
in defining the meaning of the transcendence which, if
I am not mistaken, is always ascribed to God in Religion,
and that even where God cannot be said to be conceived
as personal.
Si magna licet componcre parvis, I will here illustrate
this matter of our knowledge of God from our knowledge
of a poet or of a musical composer — of Shakespeare, for
instance, or of Beethoven. Would it not be true to say
that we could only know Shakespeare as a poet or
Beethoven as a musician in and through our poetical
or musical experience ? Had we no appreciation for
poetry, no ear for music, we could know nothing of Shake
speare as poet or of Beethoven as musician. We might
know a number of facts about them — the dates of the
chief events in their life, of the editions of their works,
or what not — we might even be learned in their auto
graphs or in their bibliography, but, if their poetry or
music waked in us no emotions, we should still be strangers
to the poet or the musician. Moreover, our knowledge
of the poet or musician could never go beyond our appre
ciation of his work ; for only by an aesthetic activity,
secondary no doubt and stimulated in us from without,
but still one which echoes, as it were, the mightier activity
of the creative mind whose works we study, can we
understand at all a work of art. Yet we know that this
activity is not the primary activity of creation, that it
is stimulated by and dimly echoes another ; we can make
152 GOD AND PERSONALITY
no mistake about that. It is easy to make the applica
tion of the parable. It is true to say that only in and
through a religious experience have we any knowledge
of God ; what are called ' arguments for the existence
of God ' will never prove to those who lack such an expe
rience the existence of God, but only at most the need of
assuming, in order to account for our experiences other
than religious, a designing Mind, or a Necessary Being,
or an Absolute Reality. But the religious experience is
ever an experience of a Reality distinct from and unex
hausted in the experience as mine. And where there is
religious experience present, the arguments which apart
from it prove the existence of something which is yet
not God are informed with a new significance.
No doubt here as elsewhere the parable will fail at
certain points. The aesthetic activity by means of which
we appreciate a work of art, though stimulated by that
work, is initiated by ourselves in each particular case,
and not by the personality of the artist, the existence
of which is notwithstanding presupposed in the whole
process. But, on the higher level of religious experience,
the initiation of our experience in every case is referred
to its object. Thus, to take an example, St. Paul, when
he speaks of his converts as having known God, corrects
himself at once — " or rather are known of God." 25 Again,
there are facts about Shakespeare and Beethoven which
may be said to have nothing to do with their art. Not
only do such facts fail by themselves to help us towards
the knowledge of what the men to whom they relate are
as artists, but, if we know those men as artists through
appreciation of their art, this knowledge of them as artists
throws no light upon these facts, which yet no doubt
25 Gal. iv. 9.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 153
may come to be interesting as associated with men who
have become so much to us in other ways. But, on the
higher levels of Religion at any rate, we cannot regard
anything as thus disconnected from God. To the religious
man the experiences which cannot bring the irreligious to
God are transfigured by his religion. The heavens, which
the irreligious astronomer can sweep with his telescope
and find no God there, are to the religious man telling
his glory and showing his handiwork.*6 He may not be
able to see God in all things, but he cannot but believe
him to be there. The statement, in which recent phil
osophers of very various schools in this country have
concurred, that ' God is not the Absolute ' must, I am
sure, if seriously taken, make nonsense of Religion ; and
the reasonings of Mr. Bradley, though they deserve, like
all that comes from him, the greatest respect and attention,
have not convinced me that a new religion could con
ceivably be found which could, if it knew itself to be the
neighbour of a metaphysic that openly made that state
ment, live alongside of it on any terms but those of
declared hostility.
So far as concerns the demand of the religious con
sciousness for an immanent God, a demand on the impor
tance of which I am wholly at one with Mr. Bradley, I
see nothing in this inconsistent with a demand for a God
with whom we can stand in personal relations. I would
express this latter demand thus rather than as a demand
for a ' personal God.' For I do not think that Religion
is concerned with the nature of the divine self-conscious
ness, except so far as this may be involved in the reality
of our personal relations with God : so long as these are
not regarded as figurative or illusory, we have no religious
*6 Psa. xix. i.
154 GOD AND PERSONALITY
interest in hesitating to confess without reserve that
God's thoughts are not as our thoughts nor his ways as
our ways.2?
Again, I am convinced that Religion cannot, when
once it has reached the stage at which the question has
become intelligible, give any but an affirmative answer
to the question whether God is the Absolute. I see no
more, if also no less, difficulty in allowing that the Absolute
may be the object of personal religious devotion than in
allowing that the Absolute may be the object of meta
physical speculation; and I should say that the exist
ence of Religion (in some of its highest manifestations),
and the existence of Philosophy prove that the Absolute
can be, because it is, both the one and the other.
But, just because neither Religion nor Philosophy can
consent to admit itself to be an illusion, both are bound
to recognize that the activity in which the Absolute is
known or worshipped is not and cannot be something
which falls outside of the Absolute, for if it were this, the
Absolute would not be the Absolute. Hence, philosophy
can use in the person of Apollo those words of the hymn
which Shelley puts into his mouth :—
I am the eye with which the universe
Beholds itself and knows itself divine. *8
And Religion— even, and especially, that very religion
by which the representation of divine worship as a per
sonal relation has been most seriously taken— can find
itself driven to recognize in the Spirit which expresses
itself in the worshipper's personal love and devotion to
^ Isa. Iv. 8. See Bradley, Truth and Reali y, p 4?6 n
* Shelley, Hymn of Apollo.
THE DOCTRINE OF A FINITE GOD 155
God as to a Father nothing less than an integral factor
in the very life of God himself.
This is by no means, however, as perhaps has some
times been too hastily assumed, an end of our difficulties.
If our worship of God is regarded as a divine activity,
where is there room for that sense of infinite distance
between the worshipper and that which he worships
which has no doubt predominated in certain forms of
religion more than in others — I suppose that Islam stands
especially for it among the great historical faiths — but
which seems to have a place in all higher religion, and may
give even to the profoundest consciousness of union
with God its keenest poignancy, as the adoring soul
measures by her own infinite unworthiness the infinite
love of the divine Bridegroom, who has so joined her to
himself that she and he are no more twain but one spirit ? 29
I shall pass in the next Lecture to the consideration
of the problem thus presented to us. We may call it
the problem of Creation. For the term ' creation ' calls
up the thought of the origination by God of something
outside of himself and of quite different nature ; it is
just in virtue of this thought that it differs from other
metaphors such as those of ' procreation ' or ' emanation '
which suggest rather a unity of substance between the
produced and the producer. Is there, then, I shall go
on next time to inquire, any reason for retaining the
metaphor of 'creation/ as expressing something which the
other metaphors do not express, but which needs ex
pressing, or should we do well to discard it as a relic of
anthropomorphic mythology, and one perhaps fraught
with danger to a right estimate of our spiritual dignity ?
It is to this problem that we must now turn.
29 See i Cor. vi. 17.
LECTURE VII
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION
AT the end of my last Lecture I said that our next subject
would be the problem of Creation ; not, however, the
problem of the creation of the material universe, but
that of the creation of spiritual beings. We were to
ask whether the relation of our spirits to God is better
described as creation or as generation or emanation. All
such phrases, as used in this connection, of course involve
metaphor ; the question is which of these metaphors
will best express what we want to express. The out
standing distinction is that between a metaphor which,
like that of creation, lays stress on the difference of nature
between God and our own spirits, whose relation to him
is compared to the relation of a manufactured article
to the craftsman who has fashioned it, arid metaphors
wrhich suggest rather an identity of nature such as exists
between the child and its parent, or the river and the
spring from which it flows.
Scholasticism, meaning by this name the philosophy
accepted by the Latin Church as providing a speculative
background for her theology and a terminology in which
she can approximately express it, has, I believe, been
compendiously defined by one of its critics as the phil
osophy which denies the divinity of the human spirit.1
1 I owe the knowledge of this epigram to Prof. J. A. Smith.
156
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 157
The intention of such a definition is of course to empha
size the difference between this way of thinking, which
represents the activity of the ' finite spirit ' even at its
highest and best as still to the end distinguishable from
that of God, and a way of thinking which is concerned
to insist rather upon the identity of human thought,
so far as it is free from error, with the divine. This
latter way of thinking may be conveniently illustrated
by the doctrine of Malebranche that we ' see all things
in God,' no less than by the absolute idealism of Hegel
and others in more recent times ; although Malebranche
would no doubt have subscribed to theological propo
sitions for which the contrasted view, attributed above
to Scholasticism, has usually been considered to afford
a more congenial setting.
We have in the last Lecture criticized the position
that recognition of divine immanence is inconsistent with
recognition of divine personality. The stress laid by such
representatives of idealism as I have just mentioned on
the identity of our spiritual nature with the divine tends
—though the tendency is not always prominent— to a
denial not only of Divine Personality but of any sort of
Divine Transcendence, except it be that of the part by
the whole. I will take as an emphatic statement of this
denial the following words of an eminent thinker of the
present day, Signor Benedetto Croce. It is noteworthy
that this writer finds the position of Hegel, with whose
general view he is much in sympathy, unsatisfactory in
that he has left an opening for an interpretation of his
teaching which would make it lend support to faith in
a God who should not be merely immanent in nature
and man. " We can well think God," says Signor Croce,
" in nature and man Dcus in nobis et nos, but certainly
158 GOD AND PERSONALITY
not a God outside or prior to nature." 2 I am not sure
that the expressions ' outside ' and ' prior ' here, with
their implication that they express the only possible
alternatives to Deus in nobis et nos, do not beg certain
important questions ; but I will not dispute about this ;
I will only take the sentence, as I think it is meant, for
an uncompromising repudiation of Divine Transcendence
in any form, unless indeed it be merely in that of trans
cendence of the part by the whole. The Italian phil
osopher does not shrink from the consequences of such
a repudiation. For we find him expressly rejecting the
claim of Religion to stand by the side of Art, Philosophy,
Natural Science, and Mathematics as an independent and
permanent form of the theoretical activity of Spirit.
It is, he tells us, to be resolved into Philosophy 3 ; and
Signor Croce is at pains to make it clear that this means
for him something quite different from the resolution
of Philosophy into Religion.
This view of Religion as in fact a rudimentary form of
Philosophy certainly follows naturally enough from the
repudiation of divine transcendence. But it is as impos
sible for those who know from within what Religion is
to admit this view of it as it would be for a poet to see
in his art, or a mathematician in his science, an activity
which will have done its work when it has detached the
soul from absorption in sensual pleasures or the mind
from preoccupation with particular sensible objects and
so prepared the way for morality in the one case or for
metaphysics in the other. I am far from denying the
= Saggio sullo Hegel (ed. 1913), p. 137 (Eng. tr. p, 201).
3 See The Task of Logic in Windelband and Ruge's Encyclo
pedia of the Philosophical Sciences, i. Eng. tr. pp. 210; cp. Estetica
I. c. 8 (Eng. tr. p. 104).
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 159
intimate connexion of Religion with Philosophy. I should
allow that it is normally in connection with Religion
that the interest in Reality as a whole, which is the char
acteristic interest of Philosophy, first takes shape in the
human mind. 4 I should hold also that this interest does
not obtain its full satisfaction while there is not found
in the whole that which Religion seeks there — that is to
say, while Philosophy and Religion are at odds or at
least not on terms of friendship with one another. But
I should insist that there are data of religious experience
which, while (like all data of experience) they are the
concern of Philosophy, and cannot rightly be withdrawn
from her criticism, have a distinctive and specific char
acter, and cannot be adequately described as a symbolical
or mythical representation of ideas which Philosophy—
at any rate in that intimate and indissoluble union with
History which is ascribed to it in Signor Croce 's system —
possesses more securely in a purer and truer form. Signor
Croce is accustomed, like Mr. Bradley, to use language
which suggests that it is especially the doctrine of a
' personal God ' which resists assimilation by Philosophy
arid must eventually be abandoned by any one honestly
desirous of understanding the world in which he finds
himself. But I venture to think that all Religion, and
not only that which asserts or lays stress on Divine Per
sonality, implies an object which is not merely immanent,
though it certainly also implies one not merely transcen
dent, and must therefore reject the formula accepted by
Signor Croce, Deus in nobis et nos, when explicitly offered as
a sufficient description of that with which it has to do. It
4 See Royce, Problems of Christianity, ii. 8, and my Group Theories
of Religion, pp. 188 f. Cp. supra, Lect. V, p. 128; and infra, Lect. X,
pp. 214 ff.
160 GOD AND PERSONALITY
would be of course desperately untrue to history to deny
that faiths which, in our common way of speaking, may
be said to lack a ' personal God ' are notwithstanding
fully entitled to be called forms of Religion. Yet, as
the third Lecture of this course will have shown, I am
disposed to regard the express affirmation of Personality
in God as something quite other than a survival of the
crude anthropomorphism of primitive religion. It is
rather the correlative, whether we call it the cause or the
effect or both at once, of a fuller development in the
believer of a sense of his own individual personality.
This is sometimes concealed from us by a misinterpre
tation of the fact that in our part of the world it has often
been among the highest minds — great poets and great
philosophers — and among those of lesser calibre most
sensitive to the movement of thought around them — that
we observe a tendency to rebel against belief in Divine
Personality and to fall back upon a conception of the
Object of Religion from which this feature is eliminated.
This fact points to the danger which lies for religion
in a onesided development of an aspect the appearance
of which is itself a mark of progress. It will be, I think,
found that in India, where there has been less progress
in this direction, but where, on the other hand, the com
plementary sense of divine indwelling has been less thrust
aside by the impact of material interests, what may be
called advanced religious thought shows on the whole a
theistic bent. Thus we note in liberal movements origin
ating among men bred in Hinduism a tendency towards
sympathetic approximation to Unitarian Christianity —
that is to say, to the very form of European religion
which, as we saw, is historically associated with the
doctrine not merely of Personality in God, but of the
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 161
Personality of God ; or, to put it another way, in which
the ascription of Personality to God is not blurred or
balanced (whichever may be thought the more appropriate
word) by the confession of three Persons within the unity
of the Divine Nature. There are of course other cir
cumstances of a more external kind, which have favoured
the approximation of which I have been speaking ; but
I do not think my diagnosis of its deeper significance
is wholly mistaken. And if it is not, it will confirm my
previous statement that a certain tendency on the part
of advanced religious thought in Europe to minimize
the doctrine of Divine Personality is to be explained not
so much by anything intellectually unsatisfying or un-
philosophical about the doctrine itself as by the sense
of a need for reaffirming other elements in Religion which
are in danger of disappearance in the hurry and com
plexity of our civilization. Yet it may be in truth a no
less urgent necessity of our spiritual well-being that in
our religion the self-assertive individual personality in
ourselves should shock and clash against another per
sonality than that we should be able from time to time to
go on leave, as it were, from the fighting line of our every
day life into the refreshment of a mystic reverie, where
what makes up the greater part of our daily life is left
behind and forgotten as though we had passed into
another world.
The interest for our purpose of the thoughts suggested
by Signor Croce's rejection of any transcendence in God
other than the transcendence of the part by the whole,
together with his consequent denial to Religion of any
independent place in human life by the side of Phil
osophy, whereof it is, according to this view, no more than
an immature form, has led us to stray somewhat aside,
11
162 GOD AND PERSONALITY
though not, I hope, altogether unprofitably, from the
main theme of my present Lecture, namely, the problem
of the best metaphor — creation, generation, or emanation
— to use in expressing the relation of our own spirits to
the Divine Spirit. What has been said, however, may
suffice to indicate the inadequacy of such a doctrine of
God as Signor Croce gives us, which makes him merely
immanent. We shall do violence to deep-seated instincts
of our nature and deprive of significance a whole
range of religious experience no less if we suppress that
sense of a distinction of nature between God and our
selves which finds expression in the metaphor of ' creation '
than if we are deaf to those lofty claims and aspirations
of the human spirit which find utterance in the counter
affirmation of kinship with the Highest made in such
words as that Greek poet's whom St. Paul is said to
have quoted to the Athenians, "row jap KOI ytvos io/icv":
" For we are also his offspring." 5
Now I think it may fairly be said that, of the metaphors
which lie ready to our hand for expressing the relation
of the Divine Spirit to ours, that of creation harmonizes
best with the sense of a distinction of nature between
ourselves and God, those of generation or emanation with
the sense of a community of nature, a kinship, between
us and him. Of the two latter generation would seem
so far preferable to emanation for the purpose which
either might serve, in that the latter suggests a process
more wholly unconscious and involuntary than the former.
We are thus left with two metaphors, creation and gene
ration, and they seem both to be required in order to
express the complex relation involved in our religious
experience.
5 Acts xvii. 28.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 163
A combination of the two, in which they are not merely
used alternately with one another but an attempt is made
to unite in an intelligible manner the two aspects of
religious experience which they respectively express, is
found in the doctrine of a Mediator, which, though it is
more important in Christian theology than in that of
any other religion, and certainly assumes in Christianity
its most highly developed and probably its most defensible
form, is yet by no means a doctrine peculiar to Chris
tianity. While it is no doubt true that the identification
with the Mediator of the historical Founder of that religion
has powerfully contributed to keep the doctrine alive
and effective in Christianity as it has not been kept alive
or effective elsewhere, it is perfectly possible to maintain
it apart from that identification. We may here recall
Gibbon's celebrated gibe that the doctrine of the Logos
was " B.C. 200 taught in the School of Alexandria, A.D. 97
revealed by the Apostle St. John "6 an(j the often-quoted
passage in Augustine's Confessions which tells how,
before he had accepted Christianity, he had learned
from the books of the Platonists the same doctrine as
is contained in the Prologue to the Fourth Gospel con
cerning the divinity and the creative and illuminating
agency of the Word, but did not find it there taught
that " the Word was made flesh/' 7 It is interesting to
compare Coleridge's statement 8 that he held this
doctrine philosophically " while in respect of revealed
religion'1 he "remained a zealous Unitarian." These
references, indeed, are all to Neo-Platonic speculation.
But, though it is true that the use there made of the
notion of a Mediator is more nearly akin than what can
6 In the table of contents prefixed to the Decline and Fall.
7 Confess, vii. 9. » Biog. Lit. c. 10. (ed. Shawcross, i. p. 137.
164 GOD AND PERSONALITY
elsewhere be found to the Christian dogma, over the
presentation of which of course the speculations of the
later Greek philosophy exerted no small influence, it
would not be difficult to illustrate the notion from other
quarters. Our present concern, however, is with the
notion itself. In this way of expressing the matter,
identity of nature with God, and therefore the metaphor
of sonship which aims at suggesting this, is appropriated
to the Mediator ; the difference of nature and the corre
sponding metaphor of creatureship to the individual human
spirit. The relation of the Mediator to the individual
human spirit may be said to be that of archetype.
The individual human spirit is conscious, especially,
though not exclusively, in its religious experience of its
incompleteness ; and it can only find satisfaction in a
larger spiritual life than that which it can as an individual
call its own. This larger spiritual life is at first that of
a society, of which the individual feels himself to be
a member ; but no function in a finite society can ulti
mately exhaust the infinite capacities of which he is
aware in himself, and which he can only conceive to be
fulfilled in the infinite and absolute life of God.
It is just in this point that St. Paul's conception of our
membership in the body of Christ " in whom dwelleth
all the fullness of the Godhead bodily," 9 goes beyond
that contained in the exposition by Plato in his Republic I0
of the necessary identity of structure between the Soul
and the State.11 The principle there laid down by Plato,
a principle, I am convinced, of fundamental importance,
is restricted in its application by Plato's envisagement
of the society which is the Soul writ large under the forms
9 Col. ii. 9. I0 See esp. Rep. ii. 368 c. ff. ; iv. 435 c. ff.
11 Cf. Problems in the Relations of God and Man, pp. 227 foil.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 165
of a Greek city-state. St. Paul, no doubt, in his turn
had his attention concentrated on the moral and religious
activities of the human spirit to the comparative neglect
of others. But the principle on which he was insisting,
rather indeed as a preacher than as a philosopher, with a
freer use of metaphor and much less of argument than we
find in Plato — the principle that the larger inclusive Spirit,
whose traits are seen, as it were, in miniature in those
of each human Soul, is no other than the one Divine Life
— this principle may rightly be regarded as the comple
ment of Plato's, though indeed it is implicit in Plato's
requirement that the rulers of his state should behold
" all time and all existence " in the light of the one supreme
Idea, the Idea of the Good.12
But it is not this aspect of St. Paul's teaching about
the ' body of Christ,' in which it supplements the Platonic
doctrine of the identity of structure in Soul and State,
to which I now specially wish to call attention. To
this I shall return in my second course of Lectures, in
which I hope to deal with human personality in the light
of the theological conclusions reached in the present
series. The feature of the Pauline theory which primaiily
concerns us now is its introduction of a Mediator. The
body of which those ate figuratively described as
' members,' who do what in the apostle's judgment all
men are called upon to do — this body is called the body,
not of God, but of Christ. It is of course beyond question
that, in the view of St. Paul himself, it was of the very
essence of his message that the Christ of whom he speaks
had actually appeared as a man among men in the person
of his elder contemporary, Jesus of Nazareth. It was
in virtue of this fact, as he took it to be, that he had a
" See Rep. vi. 4848, 486A, 5040, ff.
166 GOD AND PERSONALITY
gospel to preach, and not merely a theological theory
to propound. But for the moment it is not our business
to examine into the truth of Paul's belief in the exalted
nature of Jesus ; we have to do at present only with the
conception of the ' body of Christ ' altogether apart
from any doctrine of the Incarnation of the Mediator
in a particular historical person.
The thought of St. Paul (and I am especially thinking
of the Epistle to the Colossians, and taking it to be his)
seems to be that though the larger and inclusive life in
which that of any individual man or woman must find
its completion is the life of God (and for St. Paul there
can certainly be no more than one God), yet it can only
find this completion in the divine life when that life is
poured out, so to say, into a person who, while thus
sharing the divine nature, is yet distinguishable from
God. The distinction from God which Religion implies
remains to the end ; but the difference of the created
nature from the divine is transcended through the in
timate union (symbolized by that of the members of a
body with its head) with a Spirit essentially one with
God, though distinguishable from him, the archetype of
the created spirits, who obtain in their union with this
Spirit what is described as a sonship, not, like that Spirit's
own, by nature, but by adoption. X3 I think that this is
a true account of St. Paul's meaning in its upshot, but it
must of course be remembered that we are not here inter
ested in the question, important enough in its own place,
how far St Paul himself had thought out the issues of
his own view. In the above analysis the subsequent
dogmatic development of the Pauline speculations has
been borne in mind, and on the other hand I have deliber-
X3 See Rom. viii. 15, Gal. iv. 5.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 167
ately neglected their historical relationship to ideas which
were current in the intellectual environment of the apostle
himself, but have to a great extent lost their significance
for us to-day.
I do not, however, reckon among these obsolete ideas
the doctrine of a Mediator. I consider it, on the con
trary, a contribution of permanent value to our under
standing of the nature of the spiritual world.
Two possible criticisms of this view may probably
occur to my readers : one that to seek light from this
doctrine is to fall back from Philosophy to Mythology ;
the other that any doctrine of mediation, if seriously
taken and consistently followed out, will break down,
because involving us in a regressus ad infinitum.
In order to meet the former of these criticisms, it will
be desirable to consider somewhat carefully what we
mean by Mythology, and what service Mythology of any
kind can render to philosophy. The latter criticism will
be discussed afterwards. The question at present before
us is not whether myths may not be used for what we
may call rhetorical purposes in philosophical as well
as in other kinds of literature ; for there can surely be no
reason for debarring the philosophical writer from the
employment of this kind of device on occasion ; but
whether myths are ever, and if ever, under what con
ditions, the appropriate vehicle for philosophical reflection
which could not be better expressed in some other
form.
There is a celebrated observation of Aristotle M that
the lover of myths is in a sense a lover of wisdom or
philosopher : o (/>tAo^u0oc </><Ao<ro<£oc TTWC «<mv. Another
reading of this saying was formerly current, which ran
M Metaph. A. 982 b. 18.
168 GOD AND PERSONALITY
thus : (^i^ojuvOog 6 ^tXoo-o^oc TTWG £<mv : " The lover of
wisdom is in a sense a lover of myths/' There can be
no doubt that the former reading is correct, and that
Aristotle regarded Mythology as an immature form of
Philosophy, wherein the same impulse to wonder which
at a more advanced stage of intellectual development
sought satisfaction in such speculations as his own con
tented itself with an infantine diet of marvellous stories.
But the false reading, according to which the philosopher
himself is still a lover of myths, though it does not agree
with the context of this passage, may nevertheless bear
a good meaning of its own. It was probably in a recol
lection of the myths of Plato that the misunderstanding
of Aristotle's remark originated ; it might well seem
natural enough that the pupil in philosophy of one who
had interwoven so many immortal tales with his philo
sophic discourse should mention the love of tale-telling
as characteristic of the philosopher.
What relation, we shall find it profitable to ask, did
the myths of Plato bear to his philosophy ? I will ask
you to allow me to state dogmatically the answer which
I should be disposed to give to this question. I think
that with him the myth is not concerned, strictly speaking,
with the same subject-matter as Philosophy, but rather
takes the place of History, where a historical question
is asked, but the materials for an historical answer are
lacking.
How did the world come into being ? How did society
begin ? What will happen to our souls after death ?
It is to such questions as these that Plato offers replies
in the form of myths. Philosophy cannot answer such
questions, any more than it can tell me where I dined this
day last year or where I shall dine this day next year.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 169
For an answer to the former of these two inquiries I
should consult my personal memory or my journal ; and if
I wished for information about something that happened
before I was born, I should seek for it in the history books.
But if what I want to know must have happened at a
time whereof there is no record extant, what can I do ?
The best I can do, says Plato, is to frame a myth, a story
which, if not the truth, will at any rate be like the truth. J5
But this cannot merely mean that it is to be like what
actually occurred, for ex hypothesi I do not know what
did occur, and hence cannot tell what would be like it
and what not.
What it means for Plato, however, is not doubtful.
It means that the myth is to be in accord with those
conclusions as to the general nature of things which I
derive not from History but from Philosophy. Just as
you could not tell me where and on what I dined this
day last year, but could confidently assert that it was
not in fairyland and not on nectar and ambrosia, so too
we are sure that whatever took place in the unrecorded
past must have been consistent with what we know to
be the eternal nature of Reality ; whatever we have
reason to think is incompatible with that eternal nature
of Reality we have reason to think did not occur in the
past and will not occur in the future. Thus when Socrates
in Plato's Republic has to lay down a law for the stories
of gods and godlike men which can be tolerated in his
model State, he rules out all such as violate the philo
sophical axiom that only what is good can be divine.16
Stories, on the other hand, which attribute good actions to
the gods may be told, for such, though perhaps not true,
are like the truth ; whatever was done by God must have
'5 See Rep. ii. 3820. «6 See Rep. ii. 379 ff-
170 GOD AND PERSONALITY
been good, whether it was just that particular good
action or another. So, too, the myth of Er at the end
of the same Dialogue is frankly fiction as to its details ;
but it is, in Plato's judgment, ' like the truth ' in so far
as it represents the good and evil in human characters
as working out their consequences in a rise or fall respec
tively in the scale of being. That life is and always must
be the scene of moral judgment, of this Plato is convinced ;
and therefore if we would weave stories about the future
which is hidden from us (perhaps for the reason that it
is not yet made) we must not allow ourselves to suppose
things governed by any other principle, or we shall
assuredly be disappointed.
A philosophic myth, then, after the fashion of Plato,
is a story told about individuals, where memory and
history and prophecy (if such a thing there be) have
failed us, so that we do not know from these, the only
possible sources of information about individual facts
in the past and future, what was or what will be the fate
of the individuals about whom we are curious. It is a
story thus which is quite likely to be untrue — nay, even
quite unlikely to be true in detail, but which is in the
Platonic phrase ' like the truth/ because it is controlled
by our knowledge, obtained through Philosophy, of that
fundamental nature of the universal system which any
particular event falling within it must of necessity exem
plify. It thus illustrates our philosophical knowledge
without adding to it, and gives the outline of the his
torical fact, which is unknown in detail, because it belongs
either to a forgotten past or to an unforeseen future (I
do not here inquire whether the future can ever be fore
seen) or again, to a present beyond our ken.
But, if this be a true account of the part played by
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 171
myths in the Platonic writings, there is another feature
of the myths actually found there which deserves our
attention. All the principal Platonic myths may be
said to relate to the Soul. Some concern the past or
future of particular souls — such are those in the Phcedrus
and in the last book of the Republic ; while of others the
theme is the origin of the World Soul (as in the Timceus)
or (as in the Protagoras or in the third book of the
Republic) of the community, in which, as we may learn
from the second book of the latter Dialogue, we find writ
large the same story as is set forth in lesser characters
in the souls of its members.
Now why is it that the philosophical myth as employed
by the thinker who has made most use of it, and who is
also the greatest thinker that has ever made use of it,
is so closely associated with the Soul ? We shall find that
the answer to this question will help us to see why we
should not be surprised to find a conception useful to us
in our present inquiry — such as that of a Mediator —
lending itself to illustration by a myth, and will also
perhaps throw some light on our main problem of
Personality.
The Greek word which we translate Soul, the word
i//ux*y, is certainly not equivalent to Personality. It
has a much wider range of denotation, and is used of
life in plant and animal and of the universal Life which
' rolls through all things " '7 no less than of the intel
lectual and moraHife of human beings.
At the same time it may, I think, be said that, so far as
regards Plato at any rate, it is to the human soul, to which
we should attribute personality, that he goes for his clue
to the nature of Soul elsewhere. We need not accept
17 Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey.
172 GOD AND PERSONALITY
too literally the account in the myth of Er of the rebirth
of human souls in the forms of those animals which ex
hibit the qualities that had distinguished them in their
lives as men and women ; but I do not think we can be
wrong in taking it to hint at least at a fundamental kinship
between all forms of life, which will justify us in tracing
everywhere within the world of living beings the likeness
of what we know more intimately as it appears in our
fellow-men and in ourselves.18 And it is distinctly taught
in the Philebus J9 that, just as our outward frames are built
up out of elements which are found on a larger scale in
the world around us, whence the stuff whereof they are
made was originally taken and is during life constantly
replenished ; so also our reason testifies to the presence
of a vaster reason " in the nature of Zeus/' the divine
Soul of the World, whence alone we can suppose ours to
derive its origin and maintenance. Thus to say that all
the Platonic myths relate to the nature of the Soul is to
say that they relate to a nature which we know most
intimately in a personal form, and are thus almost con
strained to construe elsewhere on the analogy of our own
personal life.
Moreover in Plato's philosophy it is Soul which is the
source of all motion, the active principle of the whole
cosmic process.20 The Idea or Form of the Good is indeed
the supreme principle of explanation, in the light of
which it is the aim of the philosopher to view all reality
as one harmonious system ; but it is in and through Soul
that this and all the Ideas, Forms, or eternal natures,
among which the Idea or Form of the Good is pre-eminent
as the sun among the lesser lights of heaven, initiate and
18 Cp. Nettleship, Lectures on Plato's Republic, pp. 333, 364.
J9 See Philebus, 2QA ff. 2° See Phcedrus, 245 D, E.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 173
carry forward the creative process which is the history
of the world. Not that the Ideas are (to quote
Berkeley in his latest and most Platonic mood) " creatures
of the soul of man "—or, we may add, of any super-human
soul conceived on the analogy of the soul of man. Rather
they are, as the same philosopher goes on to tell us,
" innate and originally existent therein, not as an accident
in a substance, but as light to enlighten and as a guide to
govern "— " not figments of the mind, nor mere mixed
modes, nor yet abstract ideas in the modern sense, but
the most real beings, intellectual and unchangeable and
therefore more real than the fleeting, transient objects
of sense." 2I
I added just now to my quotation from Berkeley the
words ' nor of any superhuman soul conceived on the
analogy of the soul of man/ because I think it important
to remember that, if we find it unsatisfactory to regard
Goodness, Beauty, and Truth as ' mere ideas ' in our
modern sense, inhering in the mind, ' as an accident in
a substance,' it will not be less unsatisfactory to regard
them as ideas of this kind in God's mind, so far as we
take the Divine Mind to be related to its thoughts and
notions no otherwise than as our minds are related to
our thoughts and notions. This difficulty is recognized
by the scholastic theologians, who attempt to obviate
it by the help of their doctrine that whatsoever God is,
he is that not in virtue of a nature which he possesses
or in which he shares, but in his own right and, as it is
put, substantially. Thus Socrates may be wise and good,
but we could not say that he is wisdom and goodness,
only that he has some share of them. He may, indeed,
not always have been wise and good, he may not
» Sim, § 335-
174 GOD AND PERSONALITY
always remain so, but wisdom and goodness are still
what they are whether he or another order his ways
according to them or not. On the other hand, when we
call God wise and good we mean more than this. We
mean that he is himself the wisdom and the goodness of
which we are speaking ; there is no wisdom or goodness
beyond him in which he shares. We cannot conceive
him apart from wisdom or goodness, nor, if we believe in
him at all, can we think of wisdom and goodness apart
from him.
It is probable that Plato did not identify God with
the Form or Idea of the Good, but rather regarded him
as a Soul, informed by that Idea, which was the source
of all the glorious order and harmony which we find in
the universe ; but, as a great Platonic scholar, Professor
Burnet of St. Andrews, has lately observed, it was in this
distinction of Plato's between God and what was acknow
ledged to be the Highest, a distinction which the modern
theist does not make (though Mr. Bradley, it is true,
holds that he cannot become a philosopher without
making it), that we must seek the principal source of those
controversies which the Church Councils of the fourth
century of our era were summoned to decide.22 1 feel
myself convinced that the maintenance of the Platonic
distinction can never prove in the long run satisfactory
to the religious consciousness. The God whom we worship
must be the Highest, mast be what Plato called the Idea
of the Good, but this Good must not, as in the Platonic
tradition (which Plotinus also followed), be something in
its innermost nature above and beyond even the most
exalted kind of Soul. The best Soul, the divine Spirit,
which moves and works in the world, and is the source
« Burnet, Greek Philosophy from Thales to Plato, § 255, p. 337.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 175
of what is good in the human souls, which derive their
origin from it, must be essentially one with the Highest ;
even in its innermost nature the Highest must possess
that spiritual life of which our personality is but a faint
and imperfect likeness.
I have been dwelling on the teaching of Plato respect
ing the Soul, since it was in speaking of the Soul that,
as we saw, he found himself led to that use of myths in
connexion with philosophical speculation which is so
characteristic of his writings. But I should not have
dwelt on that teaching at such length did I not in the
main accept it and hold that he was right in recognizing
the doctrine of the Soul as the meeting-point of the
Universal and the Individual, of Philosophy and History,
where therefore Philosophy requires to be reinforced by
History, and therefore, failing genuine history, by Myth,
which, as we have seen, is in Plato's view the surrogate
of History, showing what the historical fact might have
been, within the limits imposed by that eternal nature
of things the outlines whereof Philosophy has ascer
tained.
Now this sphere, in which the philosophical myth is
in place, is also the sphere of Religion. In teaching
Greek philosophy one has often to bid one's pupils beware
of allowing the religious associations of the word ' soul,'
as employed in our everyday language, to confuse them
in studying what the Greeks have to say of ^VXH. Never
theless those very associations of the word ' soul ' with
Religion, which may in certain circumstances prove mis
leading, have their roots in the fact that it is just in the
experience which we call religious that we become most
intimately aware of the nature of the Soul, as the meeting-
point of the Universal contemplated by Philosophy
176 GOD AND PERSONALITY
with the Individual which is the subject-matter of
History. In Religion we are not content (and I believe,
though I cannot now go in detail into the reasons for
my belief, some of which I have attempted to give else
where,^ that this discontent is most strongly marked
in the highest forms of Religion) to treat what is historical
as a mere illustration of the universally valid, or again
the universal as a, mere abstraction from the historically
real. Nor are we even content, with some who would do
neither of these two things, to keep the eternal truth of
Philosophy and the individual fact of History for ever
apart, as the concave and the convex in the circumference
of the circle are apart, never meeting though for ever
inseparable. It is indeed possible to follow a distinguished
philosopher of our own day, to whose sentiments on this
subject I have already referred, and whom I had in mind
in what I have just said, I mean Signor Benedetto Croce,
in treating Religion on this very ground as no genuinely
distinct form of spiritual activity but as a naive con
fusion of the infinite with the finite, of the universal with
the individual, from which Philosophy, in substituting
itself for it, has withdrawn all reason for existing. But
this view, which sees in Religion nothing but an imperfect
and inferior kind of knowledge, does not, as I have already
said, stand in need of refutation for any one who knows
for himself from within what Religion is. It would be
as idle to seek a valuable account of Religion from a
man who does not know this, even though he be as acute
a thinker as Signor Croce, as it would be to go for a theory
of art to a certain person— an able and in some ways
highly cultivated man — who professed himself unable to
see what excellence could be attributed to portraiture
»3 See Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 30
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 177
besides that of such a likeness to the original as we are
content to look for in a photograph.
It is, then, where we can least afford, while contem
plating the universal form and nature of Reality, to
dispense with considering it in relation to the historical
and individual Reality whereof it is the form and nature,
that the philosophical myth may provisionally take the
place of a history which we have not at hand in memory
or on record. This will be where the Soul (which must
certainly here be personal Soul, for only personal Soul
can philosophize) is occupied in the task which was
prescribed to it long since by the Delphic oracle,*4 of
investigating its own nature. And not only in ancient
Greece, but here and everywhere, it is the influence of
Religion which most often drives us to undertake such
an investigation.
It is easy to see that a genuine ' revelation/ in that
legitimate sense of ' revelation ' in which it is used of the
historical and individual element in religious knowledge
as contrasted with the element which is rather philo
sophical and universal (for in another sense we must
acknowledge all religious truth to be a revelation), *5 would
render the device of a myth unnecessary here.26
I have dwelt so long upon the nature and function of
the philosophical myth because there can be no doubt
that the conception of a Mediator is one which certainly
lends itself to embodiment in such a myth and hence may
be too hastily dismissed as merely mythological.
It seemed, therefore, worth while to make an attempt
to show, by means of the discussions we have just
*5 Cp. Problems in the Relations of God and Man, pp. 48, 58 ff.
»6 Cp. Plato, Phado, 850.
12
178 GOD AND PERSONALITY
completed, that conceptions which call for a myth to
bring out their significance for the life of individual souls
are not to be ruled out of court in such an investigation
as that upon which we are now engaged. What I under
stand by the doctrine of a Mediator, apart from any
mythical elaboration, is this, that religious experience
in its most complete form piesupposes a twofold relation
of the soul to God, to which the phraseology of that
doctrine gives a more satisfactory expression than any
other which we can find. We may most conveniently
illustrate this by comparing that phraseology with other
language that has been employed in describing the impli
cations of the religious consciousness. To one factor in
that consciousness, the sense of kinship with the Highest,
the lofty language of Stoicism gives an utterance which
may sometimes rise into sublimity ; but there is another
mood which at least alternates with this in Religion, to
which the unqualified claim to divinity which that language
makes is repellent and even absurd. This mood some
times takes its revenge even in Stoicism itself by intense
and sometimes even morbid scorn of that side of humanity
which is akin not to God but rather to the beasts that
perish. On the other hand, there is a language of grovel
ling self-abasement in which this mood itself is found
sometimes to pour itself out. which is no less repugnant
to souls that cannot forget " that imperial palace whence "
they " came " 27 and feel that servility does not become
the " children of the Most High." 28
Where the conception of a Mediator is introduced and
the individual human being conceives himself as created
by God through the instrumentality and in the likeness
37 Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality.
28 Psa. Ixxxii. 6
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 179
of the Mediator, and as adopted to be God's child, not
in his own right, but only as united with the Mediator,
who is God's Son by nature, it is possible to reconcile
and combine the two religious moods of which we have
spoken and which may be said to occupy the opposite
poles of the religious consciousness. The consciousness
of nothingness before God is justified as befitting the
creature in the presence of the Creator, but is redeemed
from servility and baseness by the consciousness of divine
sonship ; while the unlovely pride which tends to spring
up in one who holds, like the Stoics, that God has no
advantage over the wise and good man except in his
longer continuance,^ is checked by the sense of devout
gratitude for the free gift of adoption, both towards the
Father who adopts, and towards the Son the Mediator,
in and through whom the adoption takes place.
In all this, even if the play of imagination be not further
encouraged, there is metaphor and even myth employed ;
but the conception of our relation to God, in accordance
with which the metaphors are selected and constructed,
is one which (if I am not mistaken) satisfies better than
any other which can be suggested the competing de
mands of the religious consciousness. Herein lies its
justification as a religious doctrine ; and it is a sufficient
justification. It is scarcely necessary to add that, if the
interpretation put by the Christian Church on certain
occurrences should be admitted, genuine history would
then to a certain extent supersede myth in this case ;
but it would be to a certain extent only, for it is obvious
that, to use for the moment Christian phraseology, the
pre-existent and the ascended life of Christ could not be
*9 See Seneca, Ep. Ixxiii. § 13, de Providentia, i. § 5. Cp. Zeller,
Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics, Eng. tr. p. 254.
180 GOD AND PERSONALITY
described except in a mythical fashion. No doubt, as
I have suggested above, the conviction that one is here
availing oneself not merely of myth but of genuine
history, has caused a conception by no means peculiar
to Christian theology to persist in that theology with an
intensity and practical efficacy to which it could scarcely
otherwise have attained.
I shall dwell at far less length on the second objection
which I mentioned earlier in this Lecture as brought
against the notion of a Mediator, in addition to that of
being mythological. This was the objection that if once
we admit a mediator, we shall find ourselves committed
to a regressus ad infinitum. I must reply to this that
here, as in some other instances in which this objection
has been alleged to be subversive of quite indispensable
notions (I am thinking especially of Mr. Bradley's criticism
of Relations) 3° it will prove on closer inspection to be an
unsubstantial phantom. Where there is a significance
in mediation between two terms which cannot be found
in any further mediation between the mediating term and
either of the extremes there is nothing to drive one to
continue mediation ad infinitum ; and in this present
instance this would seem to be the case. The conception
of a Mediator corresponds, if there be anything in what
I have just put before you, to a genuine demand of the
religious consciousness, which does not repeat itself ad
infinitum. I am of course aware that there are certain
facts in the history of Christian dogma which might
appear to contradict this assertion. Into the detailed
consideration of these I cannot now go, but must content
myself with the following observations. In the case of
some of these we have to do with fallacious subtleties
3° Appearance and Reality, c. 3.
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 181
corresponding in the sphere of religious speculation and
devotion to the subtleties which in logic have sometimes
arisen from the vain attempts to explain indispensable
conceptions in terms of something else. In the case of
others, again, I should admit that there may be and cer
tainly is mediation elsewhere in the religious life than in
the fundamental relation of the soul to God (for example,
the truth about this or any other matter may be com
municated to one man by another), but that here again
in these genuine cases of mediation there is no need
whatever to proceed ad infinitum.
The doctrine of a Mediator has, then, supplied us with
a means of uniting the thoughts which were respectively
symbolized by the metaphors of creation and of generation
as descriptions of the origin of our spirits from God. In
their separateness and in their actual finitude they are
creatures of God and not sharers in his nature ; but in
their totality and ideal completeness, in their archetype
(as we may say), they are sharers in it, they are ' begotten
of God,' 31 and in their historical development, through
an identification of themselves with the archetype which
comes to pass in time (and which need not always take
the form of an explicit acceptance of such a formula as
we may find the best for expressing the facts), they become
conscious of their divine nature as belonging to them
not in their own right but as mediated through their
archetype. Every soul which thus becomes conscious of
her divine nature at all will express it in terms which, at
least in part, may be called mythological. But we must
remember that what we find taught in these matters in
the writings of thinkers who avoid obviously mytho
logical language very often differs from the teaching
3* i John v. 18.
182 GOD AND PERSONALITY
which we find in religious creeds not by being less
mythological but only in being more prosaic.
The description and mutual reconciliation of those
facts of religious experience which I have described as
at first sight mutually inconsistent and so requiring to
be harmonized by the help of this conception of a Medi
ator will, I think, be found to involve, when worked out
into a theological doctrine, the recognition of a twofold
Personality in the Divine Nature. For we have to express
a consciousness of personal communion with God felt
on the one hand to be a communion of spirit with kindred
spirit, of Son with Father, and yet on the other to belong
as such not to the individual in isolation and imperfection,
but in the ideal and archetype of his nature, as completed
in a society of which he may be a member not only in
respect of a part of his capacities but of his whole being.
Here the personal communion itself, as belonging to the
true nature of God — and in nothing less than this can
the aspiration of the religious consciousness find satis
faction — implies a personal distinction within that nature ;
while the individual further distinguishes his own separate
and imperfect personality from the ideal personality
which is thought of as eternally distinguishing itself
from God in the communion which is the consummation
of the religious life. No doubt such a belief as that of
Christianity in the incarnation of this ideal personality,
this divine Logos or Mediator, in the historical Jesus,
if it introduces certain not inconsiderable difficulties of
its own, also gives to these thoughts a content on which
the mind and heart can feed, which is lacking while they
remain in the region of speculation or are associated
with figures purely imaginary, or again with spiritual
realities which do not possess full personality, such as a
THE PROBLEM OF CREATION 183
Nation, a Church, or a Law. It is thus easily explicable
that the doctrine of a Mediator should be more prominent
in Christianity than elsewhere, and might easily be mis
taken for a mere inference from a certain interpretation
of historical facts which cannot here be assumed. But
in truth it is, as was said before, a doctrine which may
appear, and has appeared, in contexts other than Christian ;
while it must not be forgotten that Christianity itself,
in its identification of the Logos or Mediator with Jesus,
sees in his earthly life as a man among men no more than
one stage of the manifestation of the Son of God, who is
known by his Church in her theology and her worship
" not after the flesh" 3* but after the spirit as risen and
ascended and as the head of his ' mystical body/ the
ideal society of redeemed Humanity.
So far, in distinguishing the individual soul from that
in which it seeks completion, and which may be described
in religious language as the eternal Son of God, I have
spoken merely of the individual soul as imperfect, not
as evil or sinful. The consciousness of Sin introduces a
new complication of our problem. For the existence of
evil, and in particular of moral evil or sin, is held by some
to be the greatest of all difficulties in admitting the presence
of Personality in God, by others as a proof that God must
be distinguished from the Absolute. To the considera
tion of this most difficult topic I shall turn in my next
Lecture.
3» 2 Cor. v. 16.
LECTURE VIII
THE PROBLEM OF SIN
AT the end of the last Lecture we found ourselves con
fronted with the fact of our consciousness of Sin, which
seems to make it impossible to regard our souls as
differing from the divine Spirit merely as parts differ
from the whole, or even as the lower grades of one nature
differ from the higher. Even the metaphor of Creation,
which was invoked to express one pole of our religious
consciousness, is not entirely adequate to describe the
sense of alienation from God which we call the conscious
ness of Sin. We are, in the phraseology of Christian
theology, not creatures only, but fallen creatures. There
is that in us which cries out not merely for improvement
and completion but for correction and forgiveness. This
consciousness of Sin may not be, and is not, equally vivid
in all men, or at all times, or under all circumstances. It
may be intensified and fostered by a tradition which
makes much account of it, weakened and discouraged
by one which ignores it. But no one who has really
known it can be content with theories which confound
it with the consciousness of incompleteness or finitude,
such as may be present where there is no thought of self-
reproach, and where to entreat forgiveness for our lack
184
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 185
of what it in no way behoves us to possess would seem
inappropriate and absurd.
This distinction between the consciousness of Sin and
that of incompleteness or finitude is not to be treated
as negligible because there is a possibility of mistaking
even in ourselves particular instances of mere incomplete
ness for instances of Sin and particular instances of Sin
for instances of mere incompleteness. We can distinguish
blue from green well enough, although we may sometimes
be in doubt whether a particular shade of colour is green
or blue.
It is by no means my purpose in this Lecture to enter
upon a general discussion of that which Carlyle has called I
" a vain interminable controversy touching what is at
present called Origin of Evil," a controversy which, as
he adds, " arises in every soul since the beginning of the
world ; and in every soul that would pass from idle
Suffering into actual Endeavouring must first be put
an end to." I am only concerned here with the question
of the bearing which the consciousness of Sin, of moral
evil, in ourselves may be thought to have upon the
conception of Divine Personality.
As I hinted at the end of my last Lecture, it may be
argued in two ways from two opposite points of view
that this consciousness is not really compatible with the
recognition of Personality in the infinite and absolute
Being. This is contended in one way by those who would
deny Personality to the Supreme Being, in another by
those who attribute Personality to the God of Religion,
but refuse to identify the God of Religion with the
Absolute or Ultimate Reality.
I will first call your attention to the former way of
1 Sartor Resartus, ii. 9.
186
GOD AND PERSONALITY
stating the difficulty and ask you to examine the supposed
incompatibility of the existence of Evil with the affirma
tion of Personality in a Being who is conceived to be the
Cause of the Universe.
There is no doubt that, in the ordinary course of events,
if something has taken place which we think ought not
to have happened, and it seems probable that it is due to
human activity, we ask : ' Who is to blame for this ? '
This would be our first question did we find a corpse with
marks indicating that death was due to violence. If,
however, on further investigation it is found that the cause
of death was not a murderous assault by a human being
but a stroke of lightning, we cease to inquire who is to
blame. There was in that case no personal agency con
cerned in bringing about the sad occurrence ; and with the
elimination of personality there is eliminated also all
possibility of praise or censure. If death from lightning
could be considered as in literal fact what it is called in
the language of English law, an ' act of God/ moral
predicates would become applicable to it, and, the world
being such as we find it, if the whole course of events is
to be attributed to a person or persons, we must, it is
said, consider that person or those persons as deficient
either in goodness or in power. But if we refuse to
suppose personal agency concerned at all in the production
of that great majority of events which cannot be referred
to human volitions, we get rid (so it is sometimes supposed)
of any need to assign blame for the presence of Evil in the
universe at all ; and the controversy about the origin of
Evil falls to the ground.
I question, however, whether we are not here in danger
of slipping into the very common error of taking for
granted that an argument valid within a restricted field
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 187
must of necessity be no less valid when extended to the
whole universe of reality. For the purpose of the coroner's
jury it is sufficient to have ascertained that a person
found dead was not killed by any one within the juris
diction of the law of the land ; so that, even though the
death were undoubtedly due to human agency, it may no
further concern the law, if that agency — suppose it that
of a belligerent enemy — is uncontrollable by any power
at the disposition of the court. Hence we see ' the act
of God and of the King's enemies ' often coupled together
in legal documents. The judicial chronicler or historian
has a less restricted range ; his judgment is not limited
by a jurisdiction, and he will appraise human agency
wherever it is found. But where he finds none such—
where an event is traceable to the activity of irrational
animals or to the forces of inanimate nature — there he
recognizes a limit to his function of distributing praise
or blame. Yet this no more debars a further question
arising about these events, if there be reason to think
a personality other than human to be concerned in their
production, than the necessary silence of the law of any
country respecting the responsibility of that country's
enemies for their acts of war renders those acts immune
from moral censure.
And, do what we will, such further questions must
inevitably arise. We may be rightly on our guard against
transferring in a naive and uncritical fashion predicates
applicable to members of a society of human beings to
the ultimate Ground of all existence. But in the long
run we cannot avoid the question of the significance to
be assigned to our moral consciousness in the formation
of our general view of the world. It has been an unfor
tunate circumstance that what is known as Kant's moral
188 GOD AND PERSONALITY
argument 2 for the existence of God — upon which that
philosopher relied as a sufficient basis for Religion after
the overthrow of the old metaphysical proofs which he
believed himself to have brought about by the discussions
in his Critique of Pure Reason — was expressed by him
in an awkward and unimpressive form which has led
to less than justice being done to the thought which under
lies it. No one of course has insisted more strongly than
Kant that absolute disinterestedness is the very hall
mark of genuine morality ; and when we find him going
on to contend that there must be a Moral Governor of
the Universe to award happiness to the virtue which
deserves it, it is easy to think that he has fallen, perhaps
in consequence of a timid deference to established tradi
tion, from the height of his great argument to the level
of a crude theological utilitarianism like that of Paley.
But in fact the more we emphasize the independence of
the moral consciousness upon considerations of private
advantage, the more we exalt the " manifest authority "
(to use Butler's famous phrase 3) of the Law which speaks
in us by the voice of conscience, the more difficult is it
to find intellectual satisfaction in regarding that voice
as one crying in the wilderness of an alien world, whose
course is in continual contradiction with what we should
expect in a realm wherein its authority should be recog
nized and obeyed.
We may appreciate to the full the heroic temper which
inspired Huxley's doctrine of ' ethics ' as running counter
to ' evolution/ 4 and which has since found eloquent
» See Kritik der praktischen Vernunft I. Th. II. B. II. Hpts. V.
(Werke, ed. Hart. v. pp. 130 ff.) ; Kritik der Urleilskraft, § 87
(Werke, ed. Hart. v. pp. 461 ff.).
3 Second Sermon on Human Nature.
4 In his Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 189
utterance in Mr. Bertrand Russell's description of the
" free man's worship." 5 Who can but admire the spirit
of men who thus resolve, like Louis Stevenson's " old
rover with his axe " 6 to enlist in defence of a cause acknow
ledged to be noble with clear foresight of its inevitable
defeat ? We may even acknowledge that perhaps only
by means of such Promethean defiance of the powers
that be could Religion be purified from the spirit of the
facile — one may even say the smug — acquiescence in the
arrangements of Divine Providence which had charac
terized much of the popular and some of the philosophical
theology of an age against which we are still in revolt,
though its heyday is now long past. But surely we
must yet admit that a world which can produce a hunger
and thirst after righteousness and yet nowhere contain
the means of satisfying them is a world fundamentally
incoherent and irrational. If, then, we pass a moral
judgment upon the world to the extent of seeking a solution
of the problem of the existence of Evil therein, we are
not merely carrying out the consequences of a previous
assumption, which we need not have made, that the Cause
of all things is personal and so liable to be judged as such.
We are asking a question we must needs have asked
even though that assumption had not been made at all.
Thus I do not think that we can get rid of the burden of
the problem of the existence of Evil, especially of moral
evil or Sin, simply by denying personality to the Supreme
Being.
If this be our conclusion, and if our religious experience
be found to imply as its foundation a personal relation
5 Reprinted in his Philosophical Essays (1910) and in Mysticism
and Logic (1918).
6 In his Fable of ' Faith, Half-Faith, and No Faith at all.'
190 GOD AND PERSONALITY
to God, we may perhaps be led to think that a view which
gives due recognition to this relation is so far from espe
cially finding the existence of Evil a stumbling-block that,
if it imparts to the sense of Sin a peculiar poignancy, it
also provides it with a more intelligible setting than any
other view. The whole cycle of ideas which we connect
with such words as Probation, Judgment, Atonement,
Repentance, Forgiveness, may perhaps be expressed
in terms which avoid the acknowledgment of a personal
relation between the individual sinner and that (however
we may describe it) by which he is tested and put in his
place, with which he may know himself to be in harmony
or out of harmony, and upon whose resources he must
draw for any recovery or improvement. But they will
gain infinitely in significance, will strike home with a
vastly increased sense of reality, when they are translated
into the language of a personal relation to a Spirit wherein
" we live and move and have our being/ '7 and yet in the
drama of our existence distinguish ourselves from it, in
order to be able to unite ourselves again with it by an
act of free and voluntary self-surrender. The possibility
of Sin is after all involved in freedom to choose the good ;
and it would seem meaningless to find a new problem in
the reality of what is already understood to be in a true
sense possible.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I would here repeat
that I am only attempting to meet the objection to the
admission of Personality in God which is drawn from the
existence of moral evil. I am not pretending to discuss
the whole problem of Evil ; and I am quite well aware of
many points in what I have just said on which the critics
might join issue with me. Thus one critic might challenge
7 Acts xvii. 28.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 191
my reference to freedom as begging the question so long
debated between the partisans of Liberty and Neces
sity ; another my assumption that the sense of Sin is
not an irrational survival of primitive superstition, alto
gether without the value in the interpretation of Reality
which I have attributed to it. Others, again, might
dispute my right to take for granted that even in the
ultimate Reality, in the Absolute, the discords and seeming
contradictions of the world of appearance are laid to rest ;
while, on the other hand, the followers of Mr. Bradley or
Mr. Bosanquet might contend that I had overlooked
the failure of Morality, when tried by the criterion of ' non
contradiction,' 8 to make good a claim to ultimate reality.
In reply to such strictures I can only say at present
that I am by no means insensible to the importance of
these various issues which I may seem to have left on one
side ; where I have by implication taken a side in any
one of them, it is because I conceive that side to have
the better arguments in its favour ; and further, that I
do not think that a different judgment upon these matters,
while it might well have altered my view of the importance
of the whole question, would have affected the special
point at issue. That point is merely this : that the
recognition of Personality in God harmonizes better
than any other conception of the Supreme Reality with
the experience for which the problem of Evil reveals
itself in its acutest form, namely with the experience
which may be described as that of ' conviction of Sin.'
We may now turn to the other way in which the same
question we have just been examining may be expressed
from an opposite point of view by those who, holding to
Divine Personality, think that in the existence of Evil,
8 See above, Lecture V. p. 125.
192 GOD AND PERSONALITY
and in particular of moral evil, they have the strongest
possible argument for distinguishing God, the object of
Religion, from the Absolute, the all-comprehending
Reality. Only thus, they think, can God be relieved of
responsibility for the evil in the world ; and only if he
be relieved of that responsibility can he be a possible
object of our unqualified reverence. This, however, he
may be, if he be not the all-comprehending Being, but a
Being comprehended in one universe along with other
beings of whose existence either he is not the cause at
all, or, if he is the cause of it, is so only under conditions
due to a necessity to which he himself is subject, and to
the limitations imposed by which he must perforce submit.
He is, on this showing, not a Being of boundless power ;
but he may be a Being of boundless benevolence. Only
the effects of his benevolence are determined within certain
bounds by the eternal nature of things, himself included.
To this way of thinking, however, there appears to me
to be one fatal objection. It relieves God of the responsi
bility for the evil in the world only at the cost of depriving
him of Godhead. I do not say that such a Being as the
champions of this view describe under the name of God
would not be a Being whom we could venerate, with the
veneration which we pay to the saints and heroes of our
race, though, if you will, indefinitely increased. But
what he would not be, is what, when once we have come
to mean no less than this by God, we cannot, I feel sure,
cease to demand in whatever is offered to us under that
name. He would not be, in a word, the ' Supreme
Being/ He would not be, so to put it. at the back of
everything. There would be for him as for us a myste
rious background. It seems to me a point in which the
theology of Mr. Wells's ' new religion ' has an advantage
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 193
over that of some who agree with him in affirming their
God to be finite, while demurring to his distinction of
God from what he calls the ' Veiled Being,' that it recog
nizes this consequence of the view in which he and they
are at one.
The dogmas of no religion are to be taken by us here as
authoritative. But religious dogmas may prove suggestive
to us, just as do other speculations which have appeared
in the course of the history of thought upon these subjects.
And so it may be worth pointing out that, in affirming
the tond of unity between all who share mediately or
immediately in the Divine Life to be a Spirit not inde
pendent of, but ' proceeding from ' both Father and Son,
a Spirit whose concrete reality is neither greater nor less
than that of those from whom it proceeds (so that it is
called a person just as they are), the Christian Church
has decidedly taken up a position adverse to the view
which sets God against the background of a necessity
which limits from without, as it were, the eternal pro
cess of love wherein the Divine Life is conceived by the
Christian religion to consist.
What I have attempted to show in these last observa
tions is that the existence of Evil, though it must always
present itself as a problem for the Philosophy of Religion,
does not, as is urged from two opposite quarters, so
especially affect the acknowledgment of Personality in
God as to put us to a choice between denying to God
either personality or that, infinity ' (if we are so to call
it) without which, unless I am completely mistaken, he
cannot really be at all what a philosophically cultivated
theology can mean by God. But we have still to ask
ourselves whether the consciousness of Sin in ourselves
must modify that conception of the relation between
13
194 GOD AND PERSONALITY
our spirits and the divine Spirit which we saw reason
in the last Lecture for adopting, and, if it must, then in
what way.
A young English theologian, Mr. Oliver Quick, has
lately dwelt in an interesting manner upon the important
fact that the problem of Sin cannot satisfactorily be treated
by sinners as a merely speculative problem. 9 In so
far as we are not concerned to fight against Sin and over
come it we are not really conscious of it as sin. We are
only conscious of a certain kind of action, which, under
certain circumstances, done thus, here, now, and so
forth, is sinful, but under other circumstances would be
nothing of the kind. This is a fact well worth bearing
in mind, when we approach the question how our spirits,
conscious as they are of sin, can be taken up into the
divine life, and share in that intercourse of love the
presence of which therein we hold to be presupposed
in the personal relation to God whereof we have experi
ence in religion. We are all familiar with a solution
of this problem expressed in the form of a myth (if we
are to call that notion of a Mediator, the value of which
we saw in the last Lecture, by this name of ' myth/
remembering, as we use that word, the dignity of its
Platonic associations rather than the common custom
of contrasting it with the ' truth '). The mediator may
be viewed not merely as the Perfecter but also as the
Redeemer ; and the religious spirit may be led to a satis
faction in the whole process which can find utterance in
those bold words of the famous hymn for Easter Eve : —
O felix culpa, quae tantum et talem meruit habere Redemptorem.
It is not altogether surprising that to some there has
9 Essays in Orthodoxy, p. 78 ff.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 195
seemed to be an utter incompatibility between a genuine
sense of the evil of Sin and the contemplation, suggested
by those words, of such a transcendence of sin as to
permit of satisfaction in its mediation of an ultimate
good higher than without it could (for what we know)
have been attained. On this subject, however, I will
not dwell further, except to point out that (as I have
elsewhere tried to show I0) the thought implied in the
hymn which I have just quoted should not really lead,
as its critics would doubtless insist that it is logically
bound to lead, to regarding sin as no sin. For since sin
can only be done away by atonement, and the indispensable
condition of an effective atonement is repentance, there is
no room for the antinomian attitude, as we may call it,
in which one could say ' Let us do evil that good may
come ; ' IJ an attitude which might attempt to justify
itself by an appeal to the sentiment of the apostrophe
0 felix culpa ! Only through repentance can a sinful
will pass into a good will : and " the repentance which a
man could intend while sinning would be no real repent
ance at all. Real repentance could only supervene
through a complete change of will upon the state in which
a man should set out to sin with the intention of repenting
and then obtaining something better than innocence." I2
Yet I do not think that Religion can finally acquiesce
in the view that, as it has been put in Christian language
by a modern mystic (the originality of whose genius
deserves more recognition than it has received) : "If
God had really known all from the beginning, he would
not have allowed such circumstances to arise as would
10 Problems in the Relations of God and Man, p. 274 ff.
« See Rom. iii. 8.
IJ Problems, loc. supra cit. Cp Dante, Inferno, xxvii. 118 ff.
196 GOD AND PERSONALITY
make the Passion necessary." Rather it must assure
itself that, in the words of the same writer, " God does
not merely get out of evil by a wonderful device, leaving
the evil as a thing that had better not have been." *3
In my last Lecture I ventured to suggest that Signor
Benedetto Croce had by his observations upon Religion
shown himself but indifferently well qualified for forming
an adequate estimate of the contribution made by religious
experience toward our knowledge of Reality. But it has
perhaps for this very reason been easier for him than for
one better equipped in this respect to elaborate what
in the phraseology of modern theology may be called a
doctrine of mere immanence ; for we have seen reason
to think that Religion can never dispense with tran
scendence, although it can dispense with the representation
of its transcendent object as personal. The importance
assigned to History in Signor Croce's philosophy gives
to it an advantage over that of Spinoza, who, as we saw
in an earlier Lecture, also put forward an extreme doctrine
of immanence. But I think that a comparison of the two
systems will suggest that our contemporary's philosophy
is, after all, even a more extreme doctrine of immanence
than his predecessor's ; and that this is not unconnected
with the fact that, while the great Jewish thinker found
a religion in his philosophy, Signor Croce (however he may
sometimes claim to have done the like) has only found
his philosophy enable him to dispense with a religion.
Nevertheless we shall find it instructive to consider
briefly in relation to our topic of Divine Personality the
principle involved in Signor Croce's theology of immanence.
It is, I think, the same principle which is expressed in
Hegel's doctrine that the Absolute cannot be understood
J3 R. M. Benson, Spiritual Readings for Advent, p. 286.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 197
except as a ' result/ M to the knowledge of which there
can be no shorter way than that of patiently tracing out all
the stages of the evolution in which its very life and being
consist. The principle is also perhaps related not very
distantly to James's repudiation of a ' block-universe/ X5
It is the principle that there is not to be sought beyond
the Reality which lives and moves and develops around
us and within us, whereof we ourselves are a product
and a part, some other yet more real Being complete in
itself apart from that living process which is the history
of the world, a process that is going on still and is never
finished. In accordance with this principle Signor Croce
will not hear of a God " before the world was or of a
Last Judgment to be passed, superfluously enough, upon
a world which has already come to an end and is no more.16
The divine transcendence which he is concerned to deny
is a transcendence of the historic process of which our
lives are an integral part and which is for him the one
and only Reality.
Now I think we need have no hesitation in admitting
that, whatever obligation members of particular religious
communities may sometimes have considered themselves
to be under to the letter of their sacred books, Religion
has no real interest in maintaining (in accordance with
the theology of the Wandering Jew in Shelley's Queen Mab)
that God awoke " from an eternity of idleness " '7 to
create the world, nor yet that he is to relapse into
inactivity after the destruction of the world which he
M See Phdnom. des Geistes, Vorrede (Werke, ii. p. 15).
'5 The phrase is used by James in A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 310,
328.
16 See Saggio sullo Hegel (ed. 1913), p. 13? (Eng- tr. p. 201) ;
Filosofia della Pratica, pt. i, s. I, c. 6, p. 65 (Eng. tr. p. 93).
'7 Queen Mab, § 7.
198 GOD AND PERSONALITY
then created. The religious experience of communion
with God is an experience of communion not with a
prehistoric or post-historic Being, but with a living God.
Again, all philosophy to which the supreme Reality is
Spirit — and Signor Croce's is such a philosophy — even if,
like Signor Croce's, it repudiates any suggestion of a
Reality transcending the unbeginning and unending
series of acts which constitute the history or evolution
of the world, makes affirmations concerning the nature
and character which is manifested in this perpetual
process. According to Signor Croce l8 himself, we may
even describe this process as directed by a Providence,
but by a Providence which only " becomes actual in
individuals and acts not on them but in them." " This
affirmation of Providence," he goes on to declare, " is
not conjecture or faith but evidence of reason." But
what is this evidence ? He goes on to tell us. " Who
would feel in him the strength of life without such an
intimate persuasion ? Whence could he draw resignation
in sorrow, encouragement to endure ? Surely what the
religious man says with the words ' Let us leave it in God's
hands ' is said also by the man of reason with those other
words ' Courage and forward.' ' There seems to me,
indeed, to be so great a difference between the temper of
these two exclamations that I cannot but consider one
who, with Signor Croce, sees no more in the former than
in the latter as thereby showing himself a stranger to
genuine religious experience. But it is not upon this
point that I would dwell here. I would rather ask whether
such a persuasion as the Italian philosopher here speaks
of, while I should be the last to deny it to be the voice
of Reason within us, is not just what has usually been
18 Filos. della Pratica, pt. i, s. 2, c. 5, pp. 178 f. (Eng. tr. p. 257)
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 199
meant by ' faith ' ; for example, in the famous definition
by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews : " The assur
ance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen " J9
things not seen because, if Signor Croce be right, they are
not yet made. It is a reasonable faith indeed, though
not what the rationalistic philosophy which is dominant
in popular thought would recognize at once as Reason ;
but Signor Croce is ready to admit that there is sometimes
more philosophy in Religion, " troubled by phantoms " 20
though it be, than in crude Rationalism.
It is a cardinal point in Signor Croce's philosophy
that mystery is to be found only in History, the future
course of which cannot be foreseen and the detail of
which must be first enacted before it can be known ; in
Philosophy, which is exclusively concerned with uni-
versals, there is no place for mystery. But it is precisely
the presence of the same eternal and universal Spirit
at every point of the historical process which enables
Signor Croce to affirm the infinite progress of man,21
though for him neither man nor God can know the concrete
forms that progress will assume. And it is this presence
that I should describe as a mystery, and a mystery in
Philosophy ; and this is made not more but rather less
obscure in the light of the religious experience of a personal
relation of our individual spirits to the Spirit " which
worketh in us both to will and to do." 33 The confidence
which Signor Croce has in the nature and character of
this Spirit is of a kind which we can hardly describe
except in terms which are most properly applied to the
kind of confidence which we have in a person ; and it
'9 Heb, xi. i.
20 Filos. della Pratica, pt. ii. s. 2, c, 2, p. 314 (Eng. tr. p. 450).
" Ibid. Eng. tr. p. 260. « Phiilipp. ii. 13.
200 GOD AND PERSONALITY
cannot be justified except by such a view of the relation
of this Spirit to our individual spirits as is expressed in
religious language and realized by our individual spirits
in their religious experience. I do not deny, I rather
desire strongly to emphasize, that religious experience
differs from the experience of acquaintance with finite
persons in that it is freed from what is merely casual and
empirical in the latter 23 ; just as, on the other hand, it
differs from the knowledge of universals, principles, or
laws by the presence therein of that peculiar rapport
(I know no English word so fitting to express my meaning)
which elsewhere exists only between two persons in
intimate mutual intercourse. The condescending, not
to say arrogant, language held by Signor Croce towards
those who, though not without pretension to philosophy,
are yet not ready to leave Religion behind them as " a
creed outworn " 24 which for the philosopher has already
accomplished its work and is now ready to vanish away,
ought not to divert our attention from a mystery which
he has after all failed to banish from his own philosophy,
and our only reasonable attitude to which is what we
call Religion.
I said just now, perhaps somewhat too hastily, that
Signor Croce had rather considered himself as dispensed
by philosophy from the need of a religion than had, like
Spinoza, found a religion in his philosophy. For after
all there is religion in Signor Croce's philosophy, which,
indeed, he admits will, when it has absorbed Religion,
" have the value of true and complete Religion " 35 and if
it does not utter itself in religious language and religious
23 Cp. The Notion of Revelation (Pan- Anglican Paper), p. 4.
*4 Wordsworth's sonnet, '.' The world is too much with us."
3 5 See The Task of Logic in Windelband and Ruge's Encyclopedia
of the Philosophical Sciences, Eng. ed. p. 210.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 201
practice, that is only on account of a prejudice against
the associations of such language and practice which is
very evident in Signor Croce's writings, but which one
need not share in order to profit by what is of permanent
value in his speculations.
What can better deserve the n#me of a mystery than
that contradiction in its own nature which perpetually
distracts and baffles the human soul when it realizes that
it is " haunted for ever by the eternal Mind " 26 and unable
to set limits to the range of its thought or the scope of
its concern, and yet notwithstanding is at the very same
time hurried along without pause by the ever-rolling
stream of Time, " never continuing in one stay," 2? but
each moment leaving something of its past self behind
and always beset with intimations of mortality ?
No doubt the name of a mystery is misapplied when
no more is meant than that some fundamental feature of
our experience cannot be explained in terms of something
else. The relation of the Particular to the Universal
is not a mystery because it is not a case of the relation
borne by a copy to its archetype or by the part of a body
to the body of which it is a part. We understand quite
well what it is ; and, if we did not, the simplest con
versation would soon become unintelligible to us. In
like manner the conception of Time involves at once the
evanescence of its successive moments and the persistence
of its continuous course ; and the relation of the former
to the latter factor in so familiar and indispensable a
notion is not the less understood because any attempted
comparison of it to something else will prove to be in some
respects inadequate. To the contemplating mind Universal
*6 Wordsworth, Ode on Intimations of Immortality^ § 8.
>? Burial Service : " Man that is born of a woman," etc.
202
GOD AND PERSONALITY
and Particular, or again the permanence and the lapse
of Time, are mutually correlative, each understood in
its relation to the other, and neither otherwise intelligible
or real. We may justly say that there is no ' mystery '
here, properly so called.
But the case is otherwise when the Soul turns back
upon itself and reflects upon its own nature, as a particular
aware of itself as a particular, as transient but conscious
of its transiency ; and as, in that awareness, that conscious
ness of its transiency, apprehending its universal and
eternal nature as its own, yet not its own ; as its unrealized
and perhaps unrealizable ideal, its unattained and
perhaps unattainable perfection. I cannot persuade
myself that the word ' mystery ' is not applicable here,
just as Signor Croce admits it to be applicable to the
anticipation of a future the detail of which, because it
does not yet exist, cannot from the very nature of the
case be foreseen by the anticipating mind.
Professor Alexander, in his Gifford Lectures at Glasgow,
has just been contending that the religious consciousness
witnesses to the reality of such an ideal, yet not to its
actuality. The world is (he tells us) pregnant with deity,
and in Religion we are aware that it is so, but God is not
yet born. We may, indeed, learn from the sacred stories
of Buddhism and of Christianity 28 that the thought of
worship paid to a divine Lord while yet in his mother's
womb has nothing in it uncongenial to the temper of
religion ; but the context, legendary and doctrinal, of
these same stories testifies not less unequivocally to the
impossibility of resting in the thought of the object of
worship as not yet actual. The future Buddha as soon
as born miraculously proclaims his own greatness and is
28 See Luke i. 43 ff.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 203
adored by a venerable sage and by his own father ; and
he is further described as descending into his mother's
womb from an assembly of glorified beings, the presidency
among whom he is said in some later forms of the story
to have left to the being who is to be the Buddha of the
next age, and who even now receives prospectively the
veneration of Buddhists in that capacity.29 So too the
belief of the Christian Church in the pre-existence of her
Founder is already manifest in the New Testament in
the writings of St. Paul and of the author of the Fourth
Gospel.3<> I nnd it therefore difficult to believe that, as
Professor Alexander thinks, the embryo^c deity of which
he tells us will satisfy all the demands of theism.
I will, then, venture to assert, in opposition to Professor
Alexander, that the religious consciousness demands not
merely a prospective but an actual God, already possess
ing all to which we can aspire. And yet at the same
time it is no less true that it is not content to regard
the worshipper's own religious life— which is certainly
not yet complete — as without significance for God.
Hence it comes about that the religious imagination
tends to represent God to itself as being already before
hand " all " (to use an expression of Green's 3') " which
the human spirit is capable of becoming " : and then
making us with the intention that we shall become what
he already is. This representation may be criticized as
reducing our religious activity to a process of copying.
We seem to have presented to us here a theological
analogue of that ' copying theory of truth ' with protests
>9 Warren's Buddhism in Translations, pp. 42, 49 ; Rhys Davids'
Buddhist Birth Stories, pp. 64, 69; Bigandet, Legend of Gaudama,
Eng. tr.; pp. 27, 41.
30 E.g. 2 Cor. viii. 9 ; Philipp. ii. 6 ; John i. i ff, xvn. 5-
31 Prolegomena to Ethics, iii. 2 § 187, p. 198.
204
GOD AND PERSONALITY
against which we have in late years become so familiar in
discussions of the nature of Knowledge. We can under
stand why a philosophy deeply interested in maintaining
the creative activity of the mind that thinks in us must
be inevitably hostile to a scholasticism which, by reducing
that activity to a mere reproduction of a reality to the
constitution of which it makes no difference, " denies "
according to an epigram I quoted before, 32 " the divinity
of the human spirit " ; and why such a philosophy is
even suspicious 6f Religion, since it seems as though
Religion cannot be satisfied with any other system than
one which condemns the human spirit to walk for ever
in a vain show, and disquiet itself 33 in order to do over
again less well what has already been done perfectly.
How are we to solve the antinomy with which we are
thus confronted ?
I spoke just now of the ' copying theory of truth.' This
phrase means, as I understand it, an attempt to explain
what knowing is by describing it as a kind of copying.
We may recall how Bacon says that templum sanctum ad
exemplar mundi in intellects, humano fundamus,^ a model
of the universe in the human understanding. There can,
of course, be no objection taken to the occasional employ
ment of such a metaphor, but there is a grave objection
to treating it as a serious explanation of that to which'
such words as ' copy ' or ' model ' are transferred from
their original significance. It is just because it is so
treated in a ' copying theory of truth ' that such a theory
is rightly to be condemned. Knowing is not copying ; it
is quite as familiar an experience as copying ; some degree
of it must indeed precede any copying, as in its turn
32 See above, Lecture VII, p. 156.
33 Psa. xxxix. 6. 34 Nov. Org. i. 120.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 205
copying a thing may become a help towards knowing it
better.
Those who have in recent times been most severe upon
the ' copying theory of truth ' have been, I think, specially
inclined to insist upon the point that it reduced the real
world to something finished and done with, beyond our
mending — a ' block universe ' — and condemned our
intellectual activity to a mere barren repetition, in the
course of which nothing substantial is added to the
universal stock. And of the defenders of any form of
what is often called Realism, which asserts the indepen
dence of the object of knowledge upon the mind's
activity in knowing, even though it may not vainly
attempt to elucidate the meaning of knowledge by
a reference to copying, it may very well be asked :
What difference, on your view, does being known make
to a thing ?
Now it seems to me clear that in regard of the lifeless,
so far forth as it is lifeless, it makes no difference. This
is why the doctrine of a Naturalist like Huxley that
consciousness is a mere ' epiphenomenon ' and that of
an Idealist like Green that it is not a part of nature-
doctrines which, though advanced in opposite interests,
make the same point— are irrefutable, so long as in
speaking of nature or phenomenon we are thinking, as
both Huxley and Green were thinking, of a mechanical
and not a spiritual system ; and if in speaking of know
ledge or science we are thinking of the kind of knowledge
which we have in the sciences of physics and chemistry. 35
But when we come on the one hand to spiritual being
and specially to that grade of spiritual being which we
designate as Personality, and on the other to that sort
35 See above, Lecture I, pp. 26 f.
206 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of knowledge which we have in personal intercourse with
our fellow-men, here it is no less evident that to be known
makes a very great difference to the person known. The
knowledge which we call ' acquaintance ' cannot be one
sided. What has more to do with making us what we
are than the knowledge others have of us, their attraction
towards us or repulsion from us, their agreement or dissent,
their approval or disapproval, their hatred or their love ?
Holding, as I do, with the Realists that it is to contradict
the very notion of Knowledge to suppose its object
created by the subject in the act of knowing it, I would
at the same time insist that the mutual independence
of subject and object is at its maximum in the lowest,
at its minimum in the highest kinds of Knowledge. It is
where the knowledge makes least difference to the thing
known that the knower is least interested in the existence
of the thing known outside of his possible experience of
it. In what may be called (if we ignore for the moment
the knowledge of God in Religion) the highest kind of
Knowledge, the knowledge which we have of our fellow-
men in social intercourse with them, we find that such
intercourse makes all the difference to those who are
parties to it, and also that we are profoundly interested
in the independent existence of our friends ; indeed in
proportion to our devotion to them the greater will be our
concern for them, even apart from the maintenance of
their relations to ourselves. 36
If we accept the testimony of religious experience to
the possibility of a knowledge of God which can be in
any way likened to our personal knowledge of the fellow-
men with whom we are acquainted, we shall find here
also this insistent interest (all the more insistent for the
3<> Cp. Problems in the Relations of God and Man, p. 37.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 207
absence of that sensible verification which can be
had in the case of our human friends) upon the exist
ence of its object. It is in vain that certain schools
of thought have attempted to evade the difficulties
raised by this insistence by laying stress on the value
which may be ascribed to religious emotion or reli
gious imagination whether or no God exists indepen
dently thereof. I do not deny that such schools
of thought have supplied a much-needed correction of
the mistake committed by those who have sought for
' proofs of God's existence ' apart from religious experi
ence. For this is as great a mistake as it would be to
hope to demonstrate the existence of Beauty apart from
an esthetic experience. Nevertheless the common de
mand for certainty that God exists, that there is a God,
however it may often express itself in forms which betray
a misconception of the kind of proof which could avail
to satisfy it, proceeds from a sound instinct. Religion
has a genuine interest in the assurance of the existence
of God as no mere " vision of fulfilled desire " 37 or creature
of the imagination.
But can we say here, as we ought to say if our analogy
is to hold, that we believe our devotion to God to make
a difference to him even greater than our friendship makes
to our friends ? We feel a natural hesitation in answering
in the affirmative. It is characteristic of Religion to
shrink from such an assertion, and to make God so far
the predominant partner in our intercourse with him,
that even our knowledge of him is ascribed to his own
activity in us. He reveals himself to us and in us ; only
so far as he does so can we be said to find him either
in the world or in our hearts. The initiation, the
37 Fitzgerald, Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm, § 67 (srd ed.).
208 GOD AND PERSONALITY
action, and the success are all to be referred to him. He
" worketh in us both to will and to do." 38
Nevertheless, if we are to do justice to all sides of our
religious experience, it is certain that there is present
in it also an element which seems to meet the expecta
tions which our analogy with other levels of experience
had led us to form.
There is the consciousness of an insistent demand upon
us for our worship. It is easy to see in this no more than
a survival from a primitive theology which envisaged
its God as a despotic chieftain, greedy of his subjects'
abject submission. And of course such a conception of
God may have left traces in our religious phraseology ;
though even this conception was not, when it was alive,
the base thing that it seems when opposed in rivalry to
the nobler thought inspired by a later teaching. But
probably only those with little religious experience of
their own will be content to dismiss it thus. We shall
do more wisely to recognize the splendid flower sprung
from that apparently unlovely seed in the passionate
experience which has found immortal utterance in the
greatest religious poem of our own age and country —
the poem in which Francis Thompson has told us of his
soul's unavailing flight from her " tremendous Lover,"
the Hound of Heaven.
In such an experience the consciousness of an imperious
summons of the worshipper to a complete surrender of
himself is fused with the consciousness of an " unchanging
love " which can say, " Can a woman forget her sucking
child that she should not have compassion upon the son
of her womb ? Yea, these may forget, yet will I not
forget thee." 39 It cannot be denied, then, that there
38 Philipp. ii. 13. 39 Isa. xlix. 15 ; Cowper's i8th Olney Hymn.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 209
is a phase of religious experience in which the devotee
is conscious of his devotion as ' making a difference ' to
God.
But how, then, can God be regarded as perfect from all
eternity if he can also be represented as needing and
desiring our worship and our love ? Are we not here in
the presence of an inevitable contradiction, such as must
compel us, with Mr. Bradley, to regard God, vthe object
of religious worship, as appearance only, and not as the
ultimate Reality, wherein all contradictions must of
necessity be harmonized ?
Now, as I have already said, there may be a sense in
which Religion need have no fear of this view. As Mr.
Bradley is himself fully aware, we have not to learn for
the first time from the philosophical critics of to-day
that God's ways are not as our ways nor his thoughts
as our thoughts, 40 or even that the distance between
them is so great that God's cannot properly be called
' ways ' or ' thoughts.' 41 Nor is there any novelty in the
doctrine that the Word, or (as we may in this context
quite legitimately translate, using Mr. Bradley's expression)
the Appearance, was in the beginning with God, and was
God. 42 The only thing, as I venture to think, that Reli
gion is here interested in repudiating, is an attempt to
undo the work of those Christian theologians of the age
of creed-making who fixed their own community in the
faith that the Appearance and that of which it is the
Appearance are one undivided God, the only lawful
Object of worship, because the only one which will not
fail the worshipper when he endeavours to give a reason
able account of the faith that is in him. It is only in
«° Isa. Iv. 8. 41 Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 436*15
«' John i. i.
14
210 GOD AND PERSONALITY
so far as Mr. Bradley's distinction of God from the Absolute
may be thought to " divide the Substance "43 of which
these theologians affirmed the indivisible unity that it
endangers Religion. And I should not speak thus if
I considered that the danger was a danger merely to the
religion of one particular religious community — although
that community were the one of which I myself am a
member — if I did not hold that the community whose
explicit formula of faith is here directly threatened were
in this respect the defender of a fundamental interest
of Religion, the nature of which has been less fully realized
by other communities than by the Christian Church.
The difficulty which wre find in reconciling the divine
perfection with the divine demand upon us (both of which
are in my judgment what Mr. Bradley would call ' ideas
necessary to the religious consciousness/ and therefore,
in his view true, although not ultimately true) — a diffi
culty which we, as finite spirits, cannot, I think, so com
pletely overcome as to possess its answer in an experienced
fact — is an indication that we are here in the presence
of a problem beyond our powers to solve, and therefore
of one not less legitimately entitled to be described as a
' mystery ' than that of the detail of the future, to which,
as we saw, Signor Croce would allow the name.
But it is, I think, relevant to the main purpose of these
Lectures to point out that it is precisely in the instance
of personal character that we come nearest to understand
ing how perfection might not exclude the desire of self-
communication ; since in this instance the notion of a
self-sufficient perfection strikes us as displeasing, and
as really contradictory of our notion of what would be
perfect in that kind. And, as Plato says,44 speaking of
43 See the Quicumque vult. 44 Tim* 28 c, 29 E.
THE PROBLEM OF SIN 211
" the Father and Maker of the universe," in words which
were adopted by Athanasius 45 as an axiom of his theology :
" He was good, and therefore he grudged existence to
nothing." What I have called (using the word ' myth '
in its high Platonic sense) the myth of a Mediator has
been turned to account to express the problem before us.
For here the necessity of self-communication to a perfect
being is expressed in the representation of the eternal
Sonship as an intrinsic factor in the Godhead ; and the
part of finite and imperfect beings in this self-communica
tion is expressed in the thought of their archetypes or
patterns as included within the eternal nature of the
divine Son or Word. And here again we must note
that in the instance of personal character we seem to find
no incompatibility between the thought of a perfection
on which we can place entire dependence and that of a
living activity, whose course could by no means be
settled beforehand, but would afford to the spectator
the joy of anticipating ever new and unexpected mani
festations of power and wisdom and goodness. We may
here find confirmation for the view that the religious
consciousness to which intercourse with the supreme
Reality has the intimacy and passion of personal converse
is that which takes us farthest into the heart of that
Reality and gives most assurance of the solution of prob
lems which yet to us remain mysteries indeed, but
c joyful mysteries,' mysteries of .love, which may be said
not so much to baffle Reason as to enlarge its scope and
opportunity.
In the two remaining Lectures of this course I must
essay, however tentatively and modestly, the difficult
task of gathering together the suggestions which may
45 de Incarnatione Verbi, iii, § 3
212
GOD AND PERSONALITY
be obtained from the historical and critical discussions
which have in the main occupied us so far, into something
which may pass for a constructive account of the place
to be assigned to Personality in our conception of the
Supreme Being, whom we apprehend in Religion as God ;
bearing in mind that, in the memorable words of Lord
Gifford's will, " the true and felt knowledge — not mere
nominal knowledge — of the relations of man and of the
universe to him is the means of man's highest well-being
and the security of his upward progress."
LECTURE IX
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
THE preceding Lectures will have, I think, brought out
the fact that the problem of Personality in God is the
same as that which is expressed in asking " Is God the
Absolute ? " or again : " What is the relation of Philosophy
to Religion ? " It may at first sight seem as though the
undeniable existence of religions and even of great religious
systems which do not ascribe Personality to God were a
sufficient argument against this identification. It may
be remembered that in the historical portion of this
course I was so far from disputing the existence of Religion
apart from a doctrine of Divine Personality that I dwelt
upon the evidence that such a doctrine it was not easy
to find explicitly held outside of Christianity, and that
the expression " Personality of God " as distinguished
from " personality in God " will be sought in vain in the
authorized formularies (or at least in those of not quite
recent origin) accepted by any of that large majority of
Christian Churches and sects which has adhered to the
main Christian tradition by retaining the doctrine of a
Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead.1 Never
theless I think it will be found that it is just in proportion
as we interpret our relation to God as a personal relation
« See Lecture III.
213
214 GOD AND PERSONALITY
— and only in such an interpretation can I find a sound
basis for a doctrine of Divine Personality — that our
religious experience will prevent us from being overborne
by what we may call the dialectical difficulties, drawn
from considerations which abstract from the specifically
religious consciousness, that beset the attribution of
personality to the supreme Reality. It is the fact that
Religion is, in the words of Lord Gifford's will, a felt
knowledge of God, calling into play emotions unmis
takably akin to those excited towards our fellow-men
in intercourse with them — emotions of reverence and of
love — which differentiates it from Philosophy, and gives
meaning to the remark which comes naturally to our
lips in reading certain passages in the Metaphysics of
Aristotle and in the Ethics of Spinoza, that those great
men, who seem beyond most others of the famous teachers
of our race to move in a region of thought remote
from ordinary religious practices, have after all found in
their philosophy itself what is unquestionably a religion.
Perhaps I may be allowed to state what I take to be
the truth as to the relation of Religion to Philosophy in
words which I have already used elsewhere when dealing
with the same subject.
' When men have begun to put to themselves questions
of the kind in attempting to answer which Philosophy con
sists, and to ask what is the true nature of this mysterious
world in which they find themselves, how it comes to be
there and what is at the back of it all, they have never
approached these inquiries with a mind completely free
from prepossessions. In a far-distant past their fathers had
begun dimly to feel the presence of the mystery which en
compassed them on every side. With a fearful sense of its
strangeness to them, its weirdness and uncanniness, there
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 215
was mingled an anticipation of the possibility of establishing
a familiarity or of proving a kinship with it, which might
be the hope of a securer, freer, more powerful existence
for themselves than was possible under other conditions.
During a long course of ages such fear of the mystery and
desire of coming to terms with it, in combination with the
more disinterested emotions of awe and curiosity, had
everywhere given rise to some complicated system of for
bearances and actions, of ceremonies and stories, expressive
of the habitual attitude of a people towards the powers
that surround them and whose ways are not as theirs
—in a word, to a religion. Thus the philosopher, when
he begins to philosophize, is already accustomed to a
certain way of approaching the riddle which he desires
to solve, by which he cannot fail to be affected, whether
or no he be himself inclined to take it for a clue in his own
investigations. But it belongs to the very essence of
Philosophy that it should not so take anything for granted
as to refuse to test and examine it before admitting it as
true. And so neither the initiators of a new philosophical
movement nor an individual who is beginning philosophi
cal studies for himself can avoid in the first instance
taking up an attitude of independence towards religious
tradition, which, if the representatives of that tradition
do not tolerate it, may easily pass into hostility. The
opposition between Philosophy and Religion, which we
so frequently observe, is thus both natural and inevitable.
It arises from the fact that they are both concerned with
the same object.
" It does not, however, follow that Philosophy must
eventually take the place of Religion as a better
way of doing what Religion has tried to do in an
inferior manner. This might be so if the theories of
216 GOD AND PERSONALITY
the origin and course of nature which often form part of
a religious tradition constituted the whole or the most
important part of Religion.2 But this is not so. Rather
it would seem that men do not cease to find in the universe
that which evokes and " in divers portions and divers
manners " satisfies their instinct of reverence, their
impulse to worship. This experience can only find ex
pression in some sort of Religion. But, just because
Religion is a response to what is felt to be the innermost
heart of Reality as a whole, the whole nature of man
necessarily claims to take part in it. Hence a religion
when once the level of spiritual development is reached
at which Philosophy can come into existence, can no more
ignore or evade the criticism of Philosophy, without
abdicating its claim to express the response of the whole
man to the Divine, than Philosophy can in its turn
without self-mutilation ignore the testimony of religious
experience to the nature of that ultimate Reality which
it seeks to apprehend as it truly is." 3
Philosophy is from the first and throughout a search
for the one in the many, which, if successful, must issue
in the knowledge of a single ground of all things, or of
an all-inclusive unity — in other words, of ' the Absolute '
of modern philosophers. Now the aspiration after such
a knowledge has its original and constant stimulus in
that hope and promise of its fulfilment which the religious
experience supplies,4 so that I think it would not be too
much to say, not only that Philosophy could not have
* Thus Croce, who thinks that Religion is doomed to vanish in
Philosophy, states expressly that " Religion is nothing but know
ledge" (Estetica I, c. 8, Eng. tr. p. 102).
3 History of Philosophy in Home University Library, pp.
78-80.
4 Group Theories of Religion, p. 189.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
217
arisen, but that it can never long flourish, except in the
soil of Religion. 5
An industrious school of thinkers in France who lay
especial claim for themselves to the title of sociologists —
I regret that we have had within the last year to lament
the death of their distinguished leader, M. Emile Durkheim
— have contended that such elementary and, to science,
indispensable notions or ' categories ' as those of Time,
Space, Number, Causality, have their origin in the arrange
ments of primitive society, arrangements which excite
in the members of the groups to which they belong emotions
of the kind which we call religious. I have elsewhere
attempted to deal somewhat fully with this theory, which
has been presented by the writers of whom I have just
spoken in a form which appears to me to be highly mis
leading, and in connexion with a general view which I
take to be philosophically unsound. Nevertheless in
my judgment it contains, although mixed with some
error, a genuine truth of high importance.
This truth may be stated as follows. It is characteristic
of the human mind to concern itself with the All ; it is,
indeed, in virtue of this characteristic that it can properly
be called rational. But in thus concerning itself with
the All it always starts with its immediate social environ
ment. The measures of Time and Space used by primitive
man, the interest taken by them in certain numbers, the
ways in which they account for striking events in their
experience, although, since they presuppose the notions
of Time and Space, Number and Causality, they cannot
without a fallacy be described as the source of these
notions, yet are certainly determined by this immediate
social environment. Only gradually have men come to
5 Group Theories of Religion, p. 188.
218 GOD AND PERSONALITY
realize that their immediate social environment is not
the dominant fact in the universe. Only gradually has
their consciousness of the world, which at first was, as
we may put it, mediated to them through the consciousness
of their group, become the consciousness of a Reality
which cannot be identified with even the most compre
hensive of human communities. But, as ever wider and
wider horizons have opened to their view, the religious
emotion which was from the first excited in the per
formance of those actions whereby men shared in the
common life of their tribe has continued to attend the
consciousness of the all-embracing Unity wherein they
" live and move and have their being." 6 The French
sociologists whom I mentioned above are apt to speak of
the object of their religious consciousness as though it
were a merely subjective fact, the product of man's social
nature. But it would in my judgment be better to
acknowledge that the very social consciousness wherein
consciousness of the supreme Unity has from the first
been implicit is rooted in the spiritual nature of that
supreme Unity itself, which in the movement of man's
spiritual and social life has been carrying on that per
petual revelation and communication of itself which
belongs to its own innermost being.
Although it would no doubt be idle to contend that
whatever has at any time " been called God and wor
shipped " 7 has been explicitly conceived as a single
Ground of all existence or as an all-inclusive Unity, the
' Absolute ' of modern philosophers, yet I am persuaded
that no God that is explicitly distinguished from the
Absolute can prove a satisfying object to the religious
consciousness in any one who has attained to the level
Acts xvii. 28. 7 2 Thess. ii. 4.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 219
of intellectual development at which he can ask himself
the question what is behind and beyond the God whom he
worships. Anthropologists have been puzzled by the
' high gods ' of primitive peoples, who are but little
worshipped themselves but are thought of as older and
more venerable than deities more frequently in the thoughts
of their adorers. I suspect that these ' high gods/ what
ever the original application of the names given to them
(which may differ widely in different instances), reflect
an early and embryonic form of speculation upon that
one ultimate Ground of all existence which philosophers
call the Absolute, and which, as soon as it is distinguished
from " whatever gods there be," 8 at once appropriates
to itself the attributes of genuine and primary Godhead,
reducing all other objects of worship to a comparatively
lower grade. These lower gods may be more familiar,
more intimately known, more practically worth pro
pitiating ; but they are as Gods inferior to the Beings
who stand for the ultimate Reality at the back of every
thing in these rudimentary attempts at a metaphysical
system for the Absolute. Thus something less than
the Absolute, or what stands for the Absolute in any
particular system, may be and often is " called God and
worshipped " and may even be far more considered and
worshipped, and that, very likely, because more feared,
than that which does stand for the Absolute. But it is
to that which stands for the Absolute that in the end
the greatest reverence must be paid ; nor can the religious
consciousness forbear the demand that the supreme God
should be the supreme Reality, the Absolute and nothing
less. Over against this statement, however, must be set
another, namely, that apart from the religious conscious-
8 Swinburne, The Garden of Proserpine.
220 GOD AND PERSONALITY
ness the Absolute cannot be known as God. The former
statement indicates the intimate connexion, the latter
the distinction, never to be neglected, between Religion
and Philosophy.
When modern philosophers speak of the Absolute and
ask what is or stands for the Absolute in any particular
system of thought, what they have in view is the principle
of Unity which is reached at last by that search for a
' One in the Many ' upon which every philosophy is engaged.
But of course a search for a ' One in the Many ' may not
go further than the attainment of some subordinate
principle which claims to unify not the whole multitude
of appearances which make up the world of our experience
but only some restricted group of them. And we may,
I think, learn something to our purpose from a study of
some subordinate principles of unity, and of the light
which may be thrown by such a study upon the nature
of that more comprehensive principle with the discovery
of which we could be satisfied and find rest from our
labours.
A principle of unity in multiplicity which early attracted
the notice of philosophers is the Universal. We may
perhaps profitably ask how far the manner in which the
Universal unifies its particulars can be supposed to throw
light on the nature of the supreme principle of unity —
the Absolute.
A Universal, taken in its widest sense, is an identical
nature manifested in many instances each of which is,
as an instance of it, entitled to the common name. For
example, the common name ' horse ' is used with an equal
right of every animal which exhibits a certain nature
which we may call ' horse-ness.'
Now it is clear that we cannot regard the Absolute
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 221
as a ' universal ' in the sense that it is an identical nature
exhibited by many instances, each of which may bear
the common name and be called an Absolute. To speak
of many Absolutes would be self-contradictory. When
Mr. Bosanquet 9 insists that the Absolute is individual-
is, indeed, according to him the only genuine individual
— he is calling attention to that feature in any notion that
we can form of the Supreme Unity which differentiates
it from a logical ' universal.' On the other hand, the
expression ' universal ' is sometimes used (often, as I
venture to think, without sufficient care being taken to
indicate that we have here passed beyond the limits of
the meaning given to it above) for a ' systematic whole.'
It is not difficult to understand how this use is connected
with the former. The identical nature may appear
in each of its instances with a definite modification ; a
genus is a ' universal ' of this kind, and the species are
its ' particulars.' Where these species can be arranged
in a serial order and exhaust between them all the possible
alternatives of which the identical nature common to
them all is capable, there we may be said to have a sys
tematic whole which determines the mutual distinctions
and relations of all its parts. It is among the abstract
objects of mathematical science that one can most readily
find illustrations of an exhaustive series of alternative
species whose differences are determined by nothing but
the generic nature itself. It is thus that numbers must
be either odd or even, lines either straight or curved,
triangles equilateral, isosceles, or scalene, and so forth.
But of course for the construction of an ideal of a sys
tematic whole we should be far from finding an adequate
pattern in this region of mere abstractions. We should
9 See above, Lecture I, pp. 18 f.
222 GOD AND PERSONALITY
gain more from reflection on the nature of a complex
work of art, or of a rich and many-sided character. Such
wholes as these are (what ' number ' and the like are not)
eminently individual ; and the supreme Unity must
certainly be conceived as possessing in the highest degree
the attribute of individuality.
We may now turn to another principle of unity, that of
Substance : and in this case the attempt to construe the
Absolute in terms of it has been made, as is well known,
by one of the world's greatest thinkers. But the few
observations which I shall submit to you will make no
sort of pretension to be a general criticism of the philosophy
of Spinoza. It would be rash to take for granted that
by pointing out the inadequacy of the common account
of Substance as a description of the nature of the Absolute
one must be disposing of any system in the terminology
of which the word ' Substance ' happens to play an im
portant part. Words are, indeed, less amenable to dicta
tion in respect of their meanings than Lewis Carroll's
' Humpty-Dumpty ' I0 supposed: but as "customs," ac
cording to Shakespeare,11 " curtsey to great kings,0 so
do the usages of language to great philosophers.
The ancient contrast of Substance and Accident will
not, I think, help us in the present inquiry. It belongs
to the Aristotelian philosophy, in which substances coexist
with other substances as real as themselves. But the
Absolute cannot thus coexist with other Absolutes. Hence
we find the Schoolmen maintaining that in God there
are no Accidents ; and when Spinoza confines the term
' Substance ' to the Absolute, we find that its correlate
in his system is not Accident but Attribute. It is possible
1° Alice Through the Looking Glass, c. 6.
« Henry V, Act V, Sc. 2.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 223
to speculate on the possibility of a Substance existing
without Accidents ; but a Substance is nothing apart
from its Attributes, nor Attributes apart from the Sub
stance to which they belong ; thus only bodies can
gravitate, and gravity can only belong to bodies. It may
seem that an ultimate principle of unity, such as we seek
under the name of the Absolute, would not be what we
are looking for, if it were not a unity of this type — if the
detail of the Universe were not in the last resort such as
could only belong to this Universe or (to express the same
thing in other words) if the Universe might have equally
well been differently constituted. But here serious diffi
culties seem to threaten us. Can we, and especially can
our religious consciousness, acquiesce in what would
appear to be a system of rigid determination throughout,
wherein nothing can be otherwise than it is and whatever
is is at once the best and the worst because the only thing
possible ? It is just because of these difficulties that so
many have found themselves unable to subscribe to that
famous doctrine of the Absolute Substance to which I
have already referred, and that the religious world in
particular, both in Spinoza's own day and long after,
could see in him, though he wrote as one to whom God
was all in all, the very prince of atheists.
The inadequacy of the notion of Substance as a guide
to the nature of the Absolute is seen most obviously in
this, that it is no less applicable to the inanimate or
material than to Life and Spirit. Since, however, the
Absolute manifests itself in Life and Spirit as well as in
lifeless Matter, a notion which abstracts from the differ
ence between these two spheres of being cannot be the
adequate ground and principle of both a*nd also of the
distinction between them. And that universal deter-
224 GOD AND PERSONALITY
minism which strikes so terrible a chill to the heart does
so because what it at once suggests to the mind is not
a spiritual activity, such as we know in our own thought
and will, but rather some kind of blind mechanical process,
the discovery of the universality of which would make
our thought and will themselves a mockery and an illusion.
Can we, then, find in Life the clue we desire ? Life too
is a principle of unity with an infinite variety of mani
festations. In our own day the imaginative genius and
persuasive eloquence of M. Bergson have been lavished
on a brilliant presentation of Life in the character of the
Absolute.
In this philosophy of ' creative evolution ' we are offered,
in place of the determinism associated with the doctrine
of the Absolute as Substance, a theory which, denying
that the road yet to be traversed by Life is determined
beforehand either after the manner of the regular working
of a machine or after that of a plan directed to a pre
destined end, leaves, in M. Bergson's striking phrase,
" the gates of the future open " I2 ; a theory which
has seemed to many to be an inspiring call to adventure
and a message of hope. Yet after all perhaps it is only
to cheerful and sanguine temperaments that we can fairly
expect it to be a message of hope ; for to persons of a
timid and apprehensive disposition the thought of those
open gates might become rather a source of fear and
trembling in the presence of a boundless uncertainty.
I am convinced that we should do better to follow M.
Bergson in representing to ourselves the Absolute as a
universal Life than to think of it as a lifeless Mechanism
12 Devant revolution de la vie . . . les portes de I'avenir restent
grandes ouvertes (L1 Evolution creatrice, p. 114). Cp. Bosanquet,
Value and Destiny of the Individual, Lecture X.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 225
And, before indicating what notwithstanding seems to
me wanting even in this representation of it as Life, I
will dwell briefly on some especial advantages which it
may be held to possess, not only over any attempt to
conceive the Absolute after the analogy of a lifeless
mechanism, but even over views which seek for a clue
to its nature rather in Thought or Will than in mere Life.
These advantages consist mainly in this, that animated
nature, when studied apart from any metaphysical or
theological presuppositions, appears to present the spectacle
of a constant effort after adaptation to environment,
not such as to indicate some determinate end in view to
which we could give a name and could fancy it as established
beforehand by some external designer, but rather such
as to suggest- in the case of each species of organism an
instinctive desire to preserve and perpetuate itself, without
any regard to the interest of other species ; and also
what we can hardly describe otherwise than as a wonderful
ingenuity displayed in the gratification of this desire,
although at the same time an ingenuity divorced from
any appearance of those processes of discursive reasoning
and calculation which we associate with ingenuity in the
case of human beings.
Now it has always been the grand obstacle to the
adoption either of a theistic theory of the universe, or
even of a pantheistic theory which would emphasize the
unity and goodness of the immanent Spirit, the Soul
of the ' one stupendous whole ' (to quote the poet Pope's
classical expression of this kind of view),*3 that the
world of living beings is revealed to our most careful
inspection as the theatre of a vast conflict, ' a struggle
for existence,' wherein pain and self-seeking (the typical
*3 Essay on Man, Ep. i. 9.
15
226 GOD AND PERSONALITY
instances of physical and moral evil respectively) are
indispensable conditions of the result achieved, and in
which there occur not only success and victory, but also
failure and defeat. Can we not, it may plausibly be asked,
avoid these difficulties by frankly admitting that in con
templating Life, the impulse manifested in this great
movement with its general upward tendency attested by
the actual evolution of reason and civilization, science
and morality, but also with its patent indifference to the
standards by which we judge of individual human conduct
we are face to face with the general character of the ulti
mate Reality ? And we must not overlook, in estimating
the attraction of such an admission, the appeal which
it is found to make to the poetical or artistic temperament.
The possessor of such a temperament is quick to see interest
and beauty in situations from which the moralist turns
away with disgust and condemnation, and is accustomed
to rely rather upon intuition than upon reasoning. It is
here interesting to note, though I do not propose to examine
the affiliation by M. Bergson of artistic intuition to
the ' instinct ' which is most strikingly exhibited in bees
and ants rather than to the ' intellect ' characteristic
of human beings alone among the living inhabitants of
this planet.
To one more point in favour of this representation of
the Absolute after the fashion of an all-pervading Life
I must call your attention. It undoubtedly is capable
of meeting, to a certain extent at least, the demands of
the religious consciousness.
' Half a beast is the great god Pan ' J4 ; yet he is a
great god too. The felt presence of that mysterious Power
has at all times availed to call forth from the hearts of
J4 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Musical Instrument.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 227
men the sentiment of solemn awe, in intimate fusion,
however, with the sensuous excitement proper to the
mood of abandonment to impulses which are the very
vehicles and instruments of Nature's divine fecundity. X5
Nay, to tell the truth, religious emotion is perhaps more
easily to be found in such worship as this than in one
paid to a God conceived mainly as a Supreme Reason and
Goodness ; although no doubt at what we are accustomed
to call higher levels of religious experience there is found
in exceptional cases a mysticism like that of the " un
daunted daughter of desire," l6 which, although dis
associated from the satisfaction of animal instincts, is
for all its " large draughts of intellectual day " at least
no less passionate than any that the most orgiastic rites
of nature-worship could show.
In passing from the description of this mode of con
ceiving the Absolute to the criticism of it, I would
emphasize the point that it is not the positive side of it,
the importance attached to Life as a manifestation of the
ultimate Reality, but the negative side of it, the deprecia
tion in comparison of Reason and Goodness, which seems
to me open to objection. The Reason and Goodness for
which a claim can be made with any hope of success
to be regarded as characteristic of the Supreme Being
will certainly be a living Reason and an active Goodness,
no mere stereotyped formula or rule for thought or action
such as is (it would appear) suggested to some minds by
the mention of these words.
I will do no more than mention in passing that those
X5 I borrow the expression from the title of an essay by the late
George Tyrrell, read to the Philosophical Society at Oxford very
shortly before his lamented death ; see Essays on Faith and Immor
tality, pt. 2, c. 14
16 Crashaw, The Flaming Heart (of St. Teresa).
228 GOD AND PERSONALITY
who conceive the Absolute on the analogy of Life, no
less than those who conceive it as Mind or Spirit, may be
challenged to give an account consistent with their view
of what we call the material world, which is not alive,
and yet is commonly regarded as indisputably real.
Attempts to explain material things as no more than
' ideas/ in the sense of modifications of the spirit or soul
that ' perceives ' or ' conceives ' them, will be uncon
genial to thinkers to whom part of the attraction of the
notion of Life as that which will bring us nearest to the
nature of the ultimate Reality is certainly its compre
hension of subconscious and unconscious processes along
with such as rise, in the phrase now so familiar, ' above
the threshold of consciousness/
M. Bergson, whom I have already taken as the chief
representative at present of the mode of thought which
I am now considering, sees in inert matter only the living
movement around us observed from the point of view of
one particular living and moving individual, or perhaps
it would be more strictly in accordance with the spirit
of M. Bergson's philosophy to say, an individual life and
movement ; for there is for this philosophy no individual
substance of which movement and life are states alterna
tive to rest and death. Just as from a train in motion
another train moving alongside at an equal speed appears
to be standing still, so to us as individuals the movement
of life around us presents the appearance of motionlessness
and gives rise to the notion of an inert matter existing,
where in fact there is a life going on no less real than that
of which we are aware in ourselves.1? I will candidly
confess that this account of Matter has never struck me
*7 See L'dvol. cveatr. p. 273. I follow the interpretation of
Dr. Wildon Carr, Henri Bergson, p. 30.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 229
as illuminating ; but rather as an example of a certain
tendency, characteristic of M. Bergson, to disappoint
his readers by offering a vivid picture of a familiar object
as the explanation of something else of a quite different
nature which we find it difficult to understand. I think
that this objection to M. Bergson's account of Matter
would hold even if one were able to admit more fully
than I could admit the principle of his philosophy to
which it is accommodated, namely that there are in
very truth no moving things but only movement itself,
not, strictly speaking, even many distinct movements;
but only one continuous indivisible movement, which
needs no substance in which to inhere and is itself the only
Reality, itself at once the World and Life and Time.
It is not, indeed, necessary that all partisans of the
claim of Life to be our sufficient clue to the nature of the
Absolute should adopt this particular theory of Matter
which we find in M. Bergson. But it is, as I have said,
worth noting that they will in any case be in no better
position in this respect than the defenders of other views
which are not naturalistic. The fact that Life may seem
to be, so to speak, more deeply immersed in matter than
Spirit does not enable us any the more to explain Matter
out of that which we contrast with it, whether that be
Spirit or whether it be Life. In either case Matter is
within our experience, the medium of its manifestation,
the instrument of its communication, the treasury of its
past gains. We may not unreasonably suppose that it
exists for its sake and in order to its service. But this is
no less reasonably to be supposed in the case of Spirit
than of Life, no more capable of demonstration in the
case of Life than of Spirit. The assertion must in both
cases rest upon a judgment of value which declares the
230 GOD AND PERSONALITY
subordination in some such fashion as has been suggested
of Matter to Spirit or Life, as the case may be, to be
preferable to that of Spirit or Life to Matter as a mere
by-product of the latter. For, as the history of the
Cartesian philosophy proved long ago, a theory which
makes them quite independent of each other will never
be found tenable in view of their intimate mutual relations,
especially in the case nearest and most interesting to
ourselves, that of the union of body and soul in human
beings. I am in no way inclined to dispute the judgment
of value in question ; but it is quite as necessary to the
position of the thinker who envisages the Absolute as
Life as it is to him who envisages it as Spirit.
Nor can I feel satisfied that there is not in the tendency
to emphasize Life rather than Spirit or Reason or Goodness
as the highest category under which we can consider
Reality a risk of taking refuge from certain difficulties
which beset the adoption of these rival claimants in
what is after all an evasion rather than a solution of the
problems raised. That Spirit is more than Life and that
in Spirit we have made explicit what in Life was only
implicit it would be hard for any one to deny who was
influenced in his preference for Life as the most important
characteristic of Reality by such notions as have been
described above. But if so, must it not be in Spirit rather
than in Life that we shall find the secret even of the latter ?
Again, while it has seemed sometimes as though Life
would afford a satisfactory mean between mere Mechanism,
which seems plainly inadequate to our purpose, and Reason
or Intelligence, to which the facts of experience seem to
be inadequate, are we sure that this is not only because
we have not made up our minds as to whether Life is in
truth Mechanism or Intelligence and willingly leave it
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 231
to be taken for either or both and so avoid the responsi
bility of decision ? For my part I suspect that the words
used in a remarkable article on Mechanism, Intelligence,
and Life contributed some time ago to the Hibbert Journal l8
may contain the truth on this subject. " It will, I think,
appear," says Mr. Joseph in this article, " that the real
antithesis to Mechanism is Intelligence, and that Vitalism
assumes in living things activity such as nothing known
to us except Intelligence can show."
Lastly, if we study the language used of Life by its
devotees, we shall, unless I am much mistaken, discover
a singular oscillation in this view of it as respects its
relation to Goodness. On the one hand they seem to
regard it as a point in its favour that it is, so to say, indif
ferent to our values, whether ethical or economic (to use
a distinction brought into use by Signor Croce). On the
other hand, they sometimes appear to find in this very
indifference something of greater worth, and more apt to
stir us to awe and reverence— something, in fact, in the
widest sense better, at the heart of things, than would be a
puritanically rigorous Moral Law or a Providence solici
tous of our private comfort. We are thus led to wonder
whether we can really get away, under cover of accepting
Life for the Supreme Reality, from that search for Reason
and Goodness as the ultimate moving principle of the
Universe in which the classical tradition of philosophy
from Plato and Aristotle downwards has found the true
business of the would-be ' spectator of all time and all
existence.' :9
Yet perhaps the attempt to set up Life as the true type
of Absolute Reality may serve a useful purpose in counter
acting a tendency to interpret too narrowly the words
»8 Of April 1914. I9 See Plato, Rep. vi. 486 A
232 GOD AND PERSONALITY
' Reason ' and ' Goodness ' as designations of the object of
our search. We have seen that this attempt makes a
special appeal to the artistic temperament ; and it may
be that theists have too often, especially in their argu
ments for the existence of God, shown a disposition to
represent the Divine Intelligence too exclusively after
the pattern of a philosopher rejoicing in the faultless
concatenation of his inferences ; of a judge dispensing
rewards and punishments according to exact desert ; or
of a skilled mechanic adapting means ingeniously to ends ;
forgetting that not only in such as these, but also in the
creative passion of the artist (of whom we are more
reminded by the study of Nature), we have an image of
the eternal Love " che move il sole e 1'altre stelle." 20
' The world/' it has been said, in scornful rejection of
what seemed to the author of the epigram an ignoble
optimism — " the world is a tragedy, and not a pudding."
The saying expresses in a striking way a sentiment
which is probably widely spread among cultivated men
to-day. But does not it point to the fact that a view
of the world which ignored the tragedy in it or was
content to suppose it merely abolished as if it had not
been, would not be a veritable optimism ?
The great religious poet of Italy had such happy thoughts
of the ultimate issues of universal experience that he could
call the pilgrimage in the course whereof he imagined
himself as entering into all its phases not a tragedy but
a comedy. Nevertheless, it was certainly for him a comedy
which enclosed a tragedy within itself, yet a tragedy
of which he could ascribe the authorship to no less than
la somma sapienza e il primo amore.21
20 Dante, Paradiso, xxxiii. 145. 2I Inferno, iii. 6.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 233
I am far from saying that there may not be in the details
of Dante's exposition of his tremendous theme much
which as it stands one could not accept ; that we may
not miss in his mood some strains of feeling which we might
think of too high worth to be thus missing without grave
loss. But at least he bears impressive witness to the
power of the religious consciousness to recognize the supre
macy of Reason and Goodness in the world, while in no
way failing to appreciate the place of tragedy therein.
It is, I think, from Plato that we shall best learn the
possibilities of a view which finds in Reason and Goodness
that supreme principle of unity in the search for which
Philosophy may be said to consist. I speak here of
Reason and Goodness together, for the intimate connexion
of the two is fundamental in his teaching. He has told
us " of the disappointment which his master Socrates
expressed with the work of Anaxagoras wherein after
the promise, which had seemed to Socrates so full of hope
that he would account for the order of the world by Reason,
he fell back in every particular case on merely mechanical
explanations and did not give the kind of answer which
his announcement of Reason as the grand principle of
explanation had led his readers to expect. For when
we ask the reason of a man's, of a reasonable being's
actions, we look for a statement of his motives — that is,
for an answer to the question : ' What is the good of
doing that ? ' If we ask why Socrates does not escape
from his prison, as his friends urge him to do, we do not
give a reasonable reply if we simply describe the mechanism
of his limbs which make it impossible for him to move
while he is sitting still ; but we do give a reasonable reply
if we allege his conscientious objection to disobeying his
» Phcedo, 97 B ff.
234 GOD AND PERSONALITY
country's laws. The famous doctrine of the Idea or
Form of Good in the Republic of Plato is but the
expansion of this Socratic thought.
In that dialogue 33 we are shown how the soul comes
to distinguish among the objects of perception by the
senses a solid body from what seems at first to be a solid
body, but proves, on the application of the rational prin
ciple that what is real cannot be self-contradictory, to
be only the reflection or shadow of a solid body. Then
we watch the same principle applied even to these real
objects of sense, as we may call them, and find that they
too are found to be full of contradictions, if we essay to
treat them as objects of Knowledge or Science properly
so called.
The line A is long compared with the line B, but short
compared with the line C ; this act is just done here and
now, but unjust done there and then ; we may be mis
taken about the straightness of a visible track, or the
courage of a particular man ; but what straightness is,
and what courage is, we know ; and, if we did not, the
question whether this road is straight or this man brave
would be as idle as the celebrated riddle propounded at
the mad tea party about the raven and the writing desk.24
It is with the ' Ideas ' or ' Forms,' the eternal natures
which are single and permanent in all the shifting multi
tude of instances, that Knowledge in its various depart
ments is concerned. But the impulse to seek the one
in the many must drive us farther yet. We must ask the
reason why the different orders of reality stand, as it were,
side by side, the science of each resting upon its own
peculiar principles, yet in the world wherein we find our
selves intricately intermingled. We may think — I do
*3 vi. 509 c ff. 24 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, c. 7.
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 235
not here pretend to be closely following my Platonic text—
of the indifference of the mechanism of Nature to con
siderations of Beauty or of Duty, while yet the worlds
which it is the business of the artist or the moralist to
explore rest upon the foundation of the physical order
and presuppose it at every point. We may note that,
as Lotze 25 has well pointed out, except in a world of
necessary connexion, wherein the issues of actions may be
depended upon, the freedom of the will could have no
scope for exercise. Yet to seek to subordinate the laws
of one kind of science to the principles of another — for
instance, to deduce mathematical truths from moral
premises or vice versa — can only lead to sophistry and
confusion. Everything, in Butler's often-quoted phrase,26
is what it is, and not another thing. The only hope of
reaching an ultimate satisfaction of that aspiration after
unity which is the very mainspring of Reason and to
which the sciences which we already possess themselves
owe their origin, must lie, I am persuaded, in the direction
which Plato has indicated to us, when he speaks of the
vision of an Idea or Form of the Good, in the light whereof
all the orders of Reality should be exhibited as good,
because filling a place in one supreme system, which would
not satisfy us were any of them missing from it. Should
we not readily allow that with the absence of any of them
the world would be worse off ? And if we could, like the
Creator in the Book of Genesis,2? see the whole world to
be ' very good,' would not that give satisfaction to our
reason, so that we should not feel constrained to ask
any further ' Why is this, or wherefore is that ? '
It will be evident from what I have just said that, in
as Philosophy of Religion, c. 7 § 61, tr. Ladd, p. 102.
*6 Preface to the Sermons. 3? Gen. i. 31.
236 GOD AND PERSONALITY
speaking of the Reason and Goodness in which our search
for an ultimate principle of unity in the world of our
experience could come to rest, we must not suppose our
selves to have to do with some restricted type of the one
or of the other. It would be wholly in vain to ask, for
example, that a reason should be given for everything,
if by reason we mean a syllogistic premise or a mathe
matical axiom. We see quite clearly that neither syllogism
nor mathematics can from their own resources account
for, say, poetry or patriotism or self-sacrifice. Nor,
when I speak of Goodness as the supreme principle, have
I in view merely the right conduct of men in society.
Great art has no moral nor has exact science. Yet these
things are most certainly good. On the other hand, we
have not to do with a mere verbal equivocation, for, in
speaking of Reason and Goodness as the goal of our
inquiries, we do not lay aside what we have learned of
their nature in the narrower field of mathematics or of
morals. In thus meaning by Reason and Goodness, when
regarded as one supreme principle, at once far more than
the reason used in mathematics, or than the goodness of
human conduct, and yet as that for the contemplation
of which the soul is educated by the mathematical sciences
and by the discipline of social life, I am, as all who recollect
his Republic will perceive, merely repeating what we find
in Plato's account of the methods and aims of the philo
sophical life, an account which on the whole has, I think,
not been bettered by any of his successors.
But, while we acknowledge the profundity of Plato's
insight into the intimate connexion of Reason with Good
ness, and the significance of the assertion that Goodness,
as the satisfaction of Reason, is the supreme principle
of unity in the world, we have to observe that he does
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 237
not give so clear an answer as we might desire to the
question which we may naturally raise as to the relation
of this supreme principle of Goodness or the Good to God.
This may seem surprising if, as Professor Burnet says,*8
it was no other than Plato that first made Theism a
philosophic issue. But, when we turn to the treatment
of this theme in the tenth book of the Laws, we find that
what Plato is there concerned to maintain is that the
movements of the heavenly bodies attest the existence
of a Soul or Souls, having every sort of excellence, by
which these movements are directed. Yet the " visible
gods," the stars with the sun as their chief and centre,
or rather the intelligences or souls which guide these in
their courses, are not for Plato the supreme and ultimate
Reality. This is to be found in the eternal Ideas or
Forms, forming a single system under their unifying
principle, the Form or Idea of Good, which is the Sun of
the intelligible universe.^ It is no doubt of this highest
reality of all that he is speaking in a figure when he says
in the Timaus 3° that the Maker and Father of the world
is hard to discover, and to speak of his nature to all men
impossible. But it is only in a figure that he is here
speaking. Where he speaks of God plainly, it is of a
Soul most excellent that he speaks, not of the Good which
is no Soul but a Form or Idea. Professor Burnet has
well pointed out (as I have already observed 3') that the
controversies determined at the Council of Nicaea have
as their philosophical background the problems to which
this Platonic distinction of God from the Good neces-
>« See Greek Philosophy, Thales to Plato, § 254, p. 336-
*9 Cp. Studies in the History of Natural Theology, p. 94-
30 Tim. 28 c.
3' Lecture VII, p. 174. See Burnet, Greek Philosophy, Thales *<
Plato, § 255, p. 337-
238 GOD AND PERSONALITY
sarily gave rise. We may put it thus, that the religious
consciousness of the Christian Church (whose thinkers
were at that time trained for the most part in Platonic
traditions) could not find satisfaction in an object of
worship which, however exalted, was less than the Highest ;
and hence was driven to affirm an absolute equality between
the Logos, the Word or Manifestation of God, and the
Supreme Father, whose manifestation and utterance
he was acknowledged to be. Apart from this affirmation
we may say that an impersonal Goodness is left beyond
and above the personal God — the divine Being with
whom personal relations are possible. According to this
affirmation, on the other hand, the Highest is personal.
He is not, indeed, a person, because the highest personal
activities, those of knowledge and love, demand an inter
course of person with person ; and yet the Highest (it
was thought) could not be dependent for what is intrinsi
cally necessary to its nature upon beings less exalted.
But there is nothing impersonal above and beyond the
Persons to whom the supreme Good belongs, or rather
who in their eternal mutual intercourse are that supreme
Good.
The view thus outlined is one which it is quite possible
to criticize. Especially perhaps is this the case with
respect to the insistence implied in it upon the transcendent
self-sufficiency of the Divine Being. But it is not to this
that I now wish particularly to call attention. It is rather
to the following two points. In the first place, though we
certainly do not conceive that Goodness is no more than
an affection of this or that good person ; for we may
recognize the imperfection by which every good person
falls short of the ideal in virtue of his approximation to
which he is called ' good ' at all ; yet on the other hand an
RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 239
impersonal Goodness seems something incomplete and
abstract. " There is none good but one, that is God," 3*
because none other is Goodness, the Good. But if not
even God is that, then there is no exception to the state
ment that none is in the fullest sense good ; and where in
that case is this Goodness really after all ? In the second
place, we see the peculiar contribution of the religious
experience to the metaphysical problem of the ultimate
principle of unity in its consciousness of a personal inter
course therewith, which will not be content to regard
itself as consciousness of a personal intercourse with
anything less than ultimate Reality ; though it welcomes
the conviction that this personal intercourse is not some
thing accidental, as it were, to the essence of that ultimate
Reality, but is an admission to participation in what is
from all eternity its inner activity.
It is a familiar reflection that in the activity of right
thinking or knowing we take our thought to be just what
must be in any mind that is occupied with the same objects,
so far as it is thinking aright, or genuinely knowing.
We have no such sense of a private property in knowledge
as we may have in opinions in respect of which we may
agree to differ. It belongs, we may say, to the nature of
Mind as such so to think. If we care to introduce the
mention of a Divine Mind, we may put it that we are
rethinking the thoughts of God ; or we may prefer the
expression that God is thinking thus in us. In Aristotle's
theology the Divine Life is conceived as nothing else
than an activity of knowledge ; and our highest intellectual
activity is represented as not distinguishable from God's
except by being temporary and intermittent, while his
is eternal. 33 Just in the same way does the religious
3» Mark x. 18. 33 Eth. NIC. x. 8. 1178 B 25 ff.
240 GOD AND PERSONALITY
experience which has expressed itself in the dogmatic
system of Christianity recognize its consciousness of
personal intercourse as nothing less than the consciousness
of an eternal process within the Godhead.
We have now reached what appears to be a definite
contribution made by the religious experience to our
conception of the supreme principle of unity. As the
aesthetic experience reveals in Nature a spirituality which
apart from that experience cannot be shown to be there,
so does the religious experience reveal in the ultimate
Reality something which apart from religious experience
is not there discoverable. This may be properly called
Personality, for it is revealed in and through an experience
of personal intercourse. It will be my task in the con
cluding Lecture of the present course to dwell more in
detail upon the implications of the revelation in such
experience of this aspect of the Divine Nature,
LECTURE X
DIVINE PERSONALITY
THE claim that Theology should be based upon Religious
Experience has in our times become very familiar to those
interested in such matters. But it is a thought of which
little use can be made, unless we possess a fairly clear
conception of the nature and scope of that which we
describe by the name of Religious Experience. To the
important part played in drawing attention to the subject
in this country by the well-known Gifford Lectures of
the late Professor William James on the Varieties of
Religious Experience is perhaps to a considerable extent
due the fact that this expression is apt to suggest too
exclusively either the emotions and excitements associated
with what is called ' sudden conversion ' or the extra
ordinary states of consciousness so often described in the
biography of those to whom the name of ' mystics ' is
commonly applied.
The prominence of these types of religious experience
in James's treatment of his theme is easily explicable.
In the first place the facts collected and classified Dy
Professor Starbuck r which formed the basis of James s
induction were drawn almost exclusively from accounts
1 In his Psychology of Religion (2nd ed. London 1901), to which
James contributed a Preface.
16 z»
242 GOD AND PERSONALITY
given by members of American Protestant communities
accustomed to require proof of a definite individual
change of mind in their younger adherents as a condition
of admission to full religious privileges. In the second
place the individualism characteristic of American religion
and encouraged by this traditional tendency in certain
churches to lay so great a stress on the importance for
spiritual life of individual feelings was thoroughly con
genial to the bent of James's own mind ; while his interest
in abnormal psychology naturally directed his attention
to those phenomena which pass by the name of mystical,
and which may also be said to belong rather to the private
than to the corporate aspect of religious life. This latter
aspect seems to have appealed to him but little, and his
comparative neglect of it was the proximate occasion of
his friend and colleague Josiah Royce's striking reassertion
of its significance in the last book that he wrote, The
Problem of Christianity.'2'
But, though the records of conversions and of mystical
raptures are by no means to be neglected by the student
of religious experience or ignored in the construction of
a theology claiming to interpret such experience, it is, I
am convinced, a great mistake to forget here, or indeed
in the investigation of any form of human experience,
the lesson taught us in Plato's Republic,! that we shall
find it easier to read what in the individual soul is written
in letters hard to discern, if we turn first to their repro
duction on a larger scale in the institutions of society.
In the public theologies and ecclesiastical polities of
mankind we have the best expression of the normal
religious experience of the peoples among whom they have
arisen. This is by no means to say that they merely
a New York, 1913. 3 ii. 368 D.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 248
represent the feelings and desires of average and common
place individuals. The founders of religions and of
churches, without whom they would not have come into
being, have, for the most part, been prophets — that is
to say, men of original religious genius ; and the same
is true to a considerable extent of the organizers and
reformers through whom these religions and churches
have assumed their present form ; but these prophets
have themselves sprung from and have exhibited in its
most highly developed form the general religious type of
their nation or community ; and in the creeds and institu
tions which have taken their rise from their teaching
we have a mirror of their activity, so far as it has proved
effective in stimulating and raising the level of spiritual
life around them, and in maintaining it at the height to
which it has thus been lifted. Without wishing to deny
that the ' questionnaire ' may sometimes extract informa
tion of value even in this region of inquiry, one rnay not
unreasonably suspect that the characteristically religious
sentiments of reverence and awe may make it an instru
ment of investigation peculiarly unfit for wholesale em
ployment in the field of Religion. No doubt there is
a risk, to which we do well to be alive, of forgetting that
the language or behaviour which has become traditional
in religion may often reflect rather the thoughts and feelings
of those who first introduced them than of those who
at present use them. Nevertheless we are more likely
to discover what men's thoughts and feelings are from
the language and behaviour in which they are at any
rate content to acquiesce, and under whose influence their
religious life has unfolded itself, than from answers given
or refused in a cross-examination to which they are not
accustomed, and which may, by its apparent lack of delicacy
244
GOD AND PERSONALITY
-in touching on the most sacred intimacies, reduce them
at once to an indignant or obstinate silence.
I have already, in the first Lecture of this course 3
expressed my general view of the relation of the religious
experience embodied in historical religions to the Natural
Theology which Lord Gifford chose to be the theme of
the Lectures appointed under his will. I said there
that, in my judgment, while every actual system of Natural
Theology presupposes a definite type of religious experience
expressed in a historical religion, the ultimate goal in all
speculations must be a system which shall presuppose
the whole religious experience of mankind. Of course
the speculations which 1 am offering in these Lectures
make no pretence to be at any but a very remote distance
from that goal. Nevertheless no one can claim in dealing
with this subject to be in touch with the general move
ment of the civilized thought of to-day who does not
extend his view beyond the boundaries of a particular
system of organized religion and does not keep before his
mind the ideal of a universal religion and a universal
theology whose shrine and school shall be " neither in
this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem " but " in spirit and
in truth." 5
So long, however, as the personal experience of any one
engaging in the pursuit of this ideal is inevitably of a
character far from comprehensive, he will do well to
guide himself by two considerations.
In the first place he will recognize it as his special task
to discover, so far as he may, the universal significance of
that particular tradition whereof he is by his training
and convictions an inheritor, the contribution which it has
to make toward any final synthesis. In the second place,
4 P. 31 if. 5 John iv. 21, 23.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 245
he will frankly acknowledge that in classifying religious
traditions or experiences among themselves as ' higher '
or ' lower,' although he may very possibly be often mis
taken as to the particular rank to be assigned to a particular
tradition or experience, he is in no wise disloyal to the
ideal mentioned above, which does not and cannot
require that all religions be placed upon one level, or
that the student of these should hold himself debarred
from preferences resting not upon mere prejudice, but
upon a deliberate application of a suitable criterion.
But what is a suitable criterion ? I think that there
is one, but that it is easier to apply than to formulate it.
Two statements, however, about it I would venture to
make, which may at first sight appear to contradict one
another. One of these statements will be that we
may rightly test a religion by its success in encouraging,
and being itself encouraged by, moral and intellectual
progress among its votaries. The other statement will
be that the only true test of the rank of one religion
as compared with another is to be sought in the
greater or less extent to which it exhibits the specific
nature of Religion, and not that of Science or of
Morality as distinguished from Religion. How these
two apparently inconsistent positions can be recon
ciled may be perhaps most conveniently suggested
by an illustration from a different region of ex
perience. We should most of us readily admit that in
ranking Venus and Adonis and Love's Labour's Lost below
Hamlet and King Lear we were taking into account the
greater moral and intellectual interest of the latter as
compared with the former. Yet we should not consider
ourselves bound upon that account so to judge of poetry
by the excellence of its ' moral/ or by the correctness of
246 GOD AND PERSONALITY
the scientific or historical information imparted in it,
as to run into danger of placing Mrs. Turner's Cautionary
Stories above Romeo and Juliet or the well-known doggerel
verses which give the dates of the Norman Conquest or
the Fire of London above the Mneid or the Divine Comedy.
What we should ask about a poem would be, not ' What
conduct does this advise ? ' or (as the legendary mathe
matician is reported to have asked about Paradise Lost)
' What does this prove ? ' but rather ' Does this express
emotions consistent with moral arid intellectual self-
respect in the mind of him who entertains them ? '
Yet it may be objected that this question too is surely
one which only a prig would put to himself, at any rate
in this explicit form ; and in dealing with this objection
(which has my full sympathy), we shall, I think, discover
by the way an important difference between the sphere
from which I took my illustration, the sphere of Art, and
that which is at present our chief concern, the sphere of
Religion.
When we are enjoying the nonsense of the Walrus and
the Carpenter, the exciting incidents in the New (or for
that matter in the old) Arabian Nights, or even the
delightful society of the ladies and gentlemen whose
doings Jane Austen has chronicled for us, we should without
hesitation reply in the negative to any one who should
ask us the question whether we should be content if
literature never penetrated further and deeper into the
mysteries of life, never took a more comprehensive view
of the world than we find in these charming works of
fancy and imagination. But we are content to refresh
ourselves with these, to spend a holiday with them without
impairing our moral and intellectual self-respect — even
feeling, indeed, that to keep an eye all the time on the fact
DIVINE PERSONALITY 247
that we are not impairing it is somehow to fail in the true
holiday spirit of enjoyment and to write ourselves down
as prigs.
But in Religion we are directly concerned with the whole
of life and experience ; hence while we may no more
estimate the rank of a religion by the application of a
non-religious standard,— as though Religion were (as it
has sometimes, indeed, been held to be) merely a means
to morality or to intellectual culture,— than we may apply
non-aesthetic standards in the criticism of works of art ;
yet we may here speak not merely of a negative con
sistency with the spiritual atmosphere of a high morality
and of a disinterested search for truth, but of a positive
harmony with such an atmosphere as a consideration
which may determine us in calling one form of faith
higher or lower than another.
I now come to the use which I would make for my
present purpose of these general considerations. It
falls under two heads. In the first place, if we compare
the religions of the world on some such principle as I
have just indicated, we shall, I think, have no difficulty
in acknowledging that there is none which has shown
more capacity for maintaining and even developing itself
in the atmosphere of what would be generally admitted
to be the highest moral and intellectual culture to be found
at present in the world than the religion which, as we have
had occasion to see,6 has more than any other laid stress
on the presence of Personality in God. This will justify
us in attaching especial importance to the witness of
Christian experience ; and this is also, as it happens,
the only form of religious experience of which I myself
can claim that intimate knowledge which training and
6 See above, Lecture III.
248 GOD AND PERSONALITY
conviction alone can impart. And, in the second place,
so far as a greater stress on Personality in God than is
elsewhere to be observed is characteristic of Christianity
among the religions of the world, it can, I think, be shown
that this is no merely extrinsic nor accidental feature of
that religion, but the fuller development therein of a
factor in some degree present in all religion.
This factor is, as those who have followed the course
of our discussions will have divined, no other than what
passes under the name of ' divine transcendence.' Religion
can never, as we have seen, 7 be content with a merely
immanent object, though it is also no doubt true that it
can never be satisfied with one merely transcendent. It
is indeed in its discontent with either of these alternatives
that it reveals itself as essentially concerned with nothing
but the whole, the ' Absolute ' of modern philosophy.
But while nothing seems to possess beyond question the
character which, under the name of Transcendence,
Religion has been shown to require in its object, the
character of a reality fully equal to that of the subject,
except what can claim to be, like the subject itself,
personal, it would also be difficult to deny that even
where there is no explicit assertion of Personality in the
object of Religon, the religious relation is on the whole
thought of as exhibiting an emotional quality of the
sort especially associated with personal intercourse,
whether hostile or friendly. We shall moreover, I think,
find that the more definite ascription of personality to
the object of Religion will generally correspond to a
fuller realization of his own personality by the wor
shipper. I shall not dwell upon this correspondence
at present ; for it will fall to be more fully considered
7 See Lecture VII, p. 159.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 249
in my second course. But it goes along with the other
circumstances which I have mentioned immediately above
to justify my assertion that the express affirmation of
Personality in God, though made, strictly speaking, by
one alone of the great historical religions of the world,
is the natural culmination of a tendency traceable in all
Religion, and therefore deserving of especial attention
from any one desiiing to construct a theology upon a
broad basis of religious experience.
It will, I think, be not unprofitable to point out how,
in the case of some of the principal religious conceptions
— I will take for consideration those of Sin, Forgiveness,
Justice, Sacrifice, Union— the acknowledgment of Per
sonality in God does actually add both to their intelli
gibility and to their moral power.
It must not be supposed that the conception of Sin
cannot or does not exist except in connection with the
thought of an offended personality. The history of
Religion shows that this is very far from being the case.
Among primitive peoples it is probably more often imagined
as a kind of uncleanness or infection which can by some
act such as expectoration, imposition of hands, or what
not, be transferred to some other person or thing and so
got rid of. The terrible consequences which it is thought
to entail are represented as ensuing upon it rather after
the manner of direct physical effects than after that of
punishments inflicted by a person whose displeasure it
has incurred. On the higher levels of religious develop
ment it may still be regarded as working out its baleful
issues after an impersonal fashion, as we find it regarded,
for example, in ancient Greek tragedy or in the Indian
doctrine of Karma, rather than as bringing them about
only through the intervention of a divine Judge It
250 GOD AND PERSONALITY
may even be contended that this view of the matter is
a higher one, because assimilating the moral order of the
universe to the august likeness of inexorable natural law
instead of using language which may appear to aim at
introducing into it the arbitrary element of personal
feeling.
In opposition to this suggestion, I can but declare my
conviction that to regard Sin as an offence against a
personal authority, and still more to regard it as an affront
to a loving Father, is a more intelligible and a more
ethically significant way of thinking about it than it is
to conceive it after the analogy of a physical defilement
or an automatic mechanism. It is no doubt true that
in our experience of the personal action of human rulers
or parents there is present not only an element which,
in Kant's famous phrase, is fit to be law for all rational
beings, and is recognized as such by our common reason,
but also an element which depends on the idiosyncrasies
of the individual's peculiar temperament. But, even
allowing for the moment that the latter element is un
questionably something of inferior worth, and that nothing
corresponding to it is to be sought in a divine personality,
should we be doing any more violence to our imagination
in representing the divine character to ourselves as a
personal character wherein desire and will are completely
coincident with the requirements of Reason than in
supposing an impersonal order which should yet be capable
of inspiring in a supreme degree the veneration and the
confidence which we render in varying measure to wise
and good persons ? It seems to me clear that the former
presentation does but take for real a perfection our
comprehension of which is implied in the very contrast
with it of the imperfection of human personality, whereas
DIVINE PERSONALITY 251
the latter unites by a merely verbal device characteristics
which cannot really be thought together, while secretly
cancelling the inconsistency by indulgence in an emotional
attitude which presupposes a quite different, indeed a
personal, object.
We may, however, before leaving this subject, consider
a little more closely what may for the moment be called
the impersonal view of Sin, with a view of bringing it
into a more detailed comparison with that which inter
prets it as essentially a personal offence. It may be
thought, indeed, that to speak of any view of sin as
' impersonal ' must be misleading, since Sin must be re
garded as at any rate committed by if not against a deter
minate person. But we may here recall the significant
fact that Buddhism, while adopting the doctrine of Karma,
which is characteristic of Indian religion in general,
eliminated Personality by its denial of the existence
of any substantial soul, and thereby gave an interesting
illustration of the close connexion which always exists
between a religious doctrine of Personality in God and a
genuine concern for Personality in man.
The experience of mankind has not confirmed the belief
in a detailed dependence of the course of nature upon the
social conduct of men which is often found in the earlier
stages of religious development. The prevalence of sexual
irregularity among a people does not lead, as primitive
men sometimes suppose, to the blighting of its crops;
and however true as a general rule it may be that a virtuous
life conduces to the maintenance of physical health and
a vicious life to its decay, yet moral goodness and bodily
vigour are far too often divorced from one another to make
possible an identification of the rules of hygiene with the
law of holiness. Thus that ancient view of Sin which
252 GOD AND PERSONALITY
assimilates its connexion with its penalty to a natural
sequence of cause and effect, and does not greatly, if at
all, interest itself with the question against whom it is
committed, seems destined to disappear with the advance
of knowledge and the consequent subversion of the
sanctions by which the avoidance of it was formerly
secured. The doctrine of Karma, indeed, is not necessarily
involved in the ruin of this view, for it cannot be sub
jected to the same empirical tests, since it is only from
the observed fates of individuals in one life that we can
ascertain the moral quality of those deeds done in other
lives which, according to this doctrine, have entailed those
fates. But those who share the conviction expressed
above, that the recognition of a personal relation in the
sinner to God makes the whole conception of Sin more
intelligible and more ethically significant than it can be
without such a recognition, cannot but hold that the
lack of it is a serious drawback to the doctrine of Karma,
as well as to cruder views of Sin which resemble it in
dispensing with a God against whom Sin is committed
and by whom it is judged.
It would, however, be unfair to pass over altogether
without comment an argument which is not infrequently
met with and which challenges the morality of introducing
the notion of personal displeasure into our view of Sin,
by pointing to its consequence in the doctrine of a. forgiveness
of sins, a doctrine which is (it may be alleged) of a dis
tinctly immoral tendency. This is a challenge to be
taken up, especially as this doctrine is one which, while
it is intimately associated with the conception of Sin as a
personal offence, very specially distinguishes the religious
from the merely ethical view of the world. On the general
question of the mutual relations of Morality and Religion
DIVINE PERSONALITY 253
I do not here propose to dwell, because we shall encounter
it again in the course ot the discussions which I have
reserved to my second series of Lectures. But. on this
particular matter of the morality of the Forgiveness of
Sins it will be in place to say something at this point of
our investigations.
Insistence upon the importance of the Forgiveness of
Sins is obviously connected with the peculiar horror of
Sin which is a mark of Religion rather than of Morality
when considered apart from Religion. Yet this religious
horror of Sin need not be combined with a faith in a pro
vision for its forgiveness. The doctrine of Karma is a
religious doctrine resting upon and expressing a profound
sense of the seriousness of Sin, but it leaves no room for
the forgiveness as distinct from the expiation of Sin. While
therefore the objection which is sometimes raised from
the side of ' mere Morality ' to the religious view of Sin
as diverting the mind from positive activity in well-doing
to gloomy meditation upon the ill-spent past may be
brought (I do not say that it would be justly brought)
against the doctrine of Karma as against doctrines embody
ing a similar view of Sin under other religious systems,
the disciple of that doctrine may be tempted to join with
the exponent of a Morality divorced from Religion in
charging the believer in the Forgiveness of Sins with
weakening the sense of the gravity of those inevitable
consequences of ill-doing which no change of mind on the
part of the doer or of any one else can undo.
Nevertheless I think it may be shown that only if a
doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins falls short of being
what it professes to be does it deserve this reproach ; and
that, when it is what it pretends to be, it possesses an
ethical depth and value beyond that of rival doctrines
254 GOD AND PERSONALITY
which may at first sight present an aspect more awe-
inspiring in their uncompromising disregard of human
weakness, their vigorous enforcement of the melancholy
lesson of the ' vanity of human wishes/
Here, however, I can only attempt a very summary
indication of the way in which this claim on the part of
the doctrine of the Forgiveness of Sins may be maintained.
In my second course of Lectures I hope to deal at greater
length with the problems upon which at present I can do
no more than touch.
A genuine forgiveness of sins must imply a thorough
recognition, both by the sinner forgiven and by him who
forgives, of the nature of the sin committed. It must
thus be quite inconsistent alike with impenitence on the
sinner's part or with indifference to the gravity of the
offence on his who forgives. No doubt it is possible to
speak of a forgiveness of those " who know not what they
do," 8 but in such a case those who are said to be for
given must miss the full experience of forgiveness, except
in so far as by such a subsequent understanding of their
action as necessarily involves repentance they appropriate
the pardon which has been by anticipation already pro
nounced. And on the other hand, a sinner who does not
find in what is offered him under the name of forgiveness
a comprehension of the heinousness of his offence corre
spondent to the depth of his own penitence cannot but
feel that he has failed to attain that for which he seeks.
Here at once we see how, if personal relations exist only
between human beings, the penitent sinner must be often
thus defrauded ; while if, on the other hand, he can always
pass beyond the neighbour he has offended to God and
say with the Psalmist of the Miserere, " Against thee
8 Luke xxiii. 34.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 255
have I sinned " 9 he can attain in the experience of divine
forgiveness what otherwise he must for ever go without.
But the supposed immorality of the Forgiveness of
Sins disappears if we regard it in this way ; and no kind
of Forgiveness which falls short of this has any claim to
rank as an idea which, in Mr. Bradley's phrase,10 "is
really required in practice by the highest religion." And
as to the superior dignity which may be attributed to an
eternal Order conceived impersonally, whether after the
manner of Karma in Indian religion or otherwise, I can
but repeat what I have in substance already said, that we
can only reverence it in so far as we impart into our attitude
towards it an element which is at home only in personal
intercourse ; for a system definitely realized as impersonal,
of which we can say that it "as impotently rolls as you
or I " " we are far more likely, when we find ourselves
helplessly in its grip, to loathe and curse than to venerate.
And yet, even in loathing and cursing it, we shall not
cease to illustrate the unconquerable tendency of the
human soul to envisage its relation to the ultimate Reality
in terms of personality ; we shall but be treating it as a
devil instead of as a God.
I am not forgetting in what I have just said the austere
and lofty piety of the Stoics and Spinoza which would
find freedom and peace in the world by willing that what
we cannot help happening should happen. But I feel
sure that here again the use of the name of God is really
in contradiction with the conception of his nature ex
plicitly held. " Our wills are ours to make them " «
9 Psa. li. 4.
'o See Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 433. Cp. p. 439-
» Fitzgerald, Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam (3rd and 4th eds.), §72.
« Tennyson, In Memoriam, introductory verses.
256 GOD AND PERSONALITY
God's, but this saying has no meaning if God's will is
a mere figure of speech, if it is not at least as really what we
mean by will as ours is. But here, as in all similar cases
we must remember, if we are to be true to our purpose
of basing our theology upon religious experience, that our
starting-point must be our experience of submission to
the divine Will and not an attempt to imagine the divine
self -consciousness in abstraction from that experience.
Having dealt so fully with the conceptions of Sin and
of Forgiveness as religious ideas which seem to possess
a greater value in the context of a personal relation to
God than otherwise, it will not be necessary to dwell in
the same detail on the others which I mentioned as
agreeing with these in that respect — that is, on Justice,
Sacrifice, and Union. But some few observations may,
perhaps, be profitably made upon each in turn.
In the case of Justice it might plausibly be argued
that ideal or absolute Justice may be best conceived on
the analogy rather of the working of a law than on that
of an award by a personal judge. It might be pointed
out that we regard the establishment of a legal system,
whereof persons are but the ministerial agents, as an
advance upon the stage of social development in which
one is left to the chances of finding on the judgment-seat
a Solomon or an unjust judge who " fears not God nor
regards man " *3 as the case may happen to be. This
seems to point to the progressive diminution or elimina
tion of the personal factor as indicating the direction we
should follow in our attempts to work out the thought of
a supreme Justice.
On the other hand, we must note that there is much
reason for doubting whether the notion of a personal
'3 Luke xviii. 4.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 257
source of Justice, whether in a sovereign or in God, is
not on the whole younger than that of a custom or law
valid on its own account and only declared by the
individual judge.
But I shall do no more than call attention to this fact,
and shall not now pursue the consideration of it ; it will
come before us again when in my second course of Lectures
I attempt to trace the bearing of the conclusions reached
in this course upon our view of the various activities in
which human Personality expresses itself. I only mention
it at present to show that the elimination of the personal
element is far from constituting the whole story of the
development of our notion of Justice. What I would
rather insist upon here is that our preference for an im
personal law over the personal discretion of the judge is
due chiefly to the security afforded by it against the
uncertainty which must prevail where the discretion
must be now one man's and now another's. There are
persons to whose discretion one would commit oneself
with far more confidence than to the generalities of a
legal rule ; and hence our care to leave as little scope as
possible in human tribunals for the vagaries of personal
caprice does not at all carry with it an ultimate preference
for the impersonal over the personal, which we must
needs carry over even into our notion of divine justice.
Again, impersonal Justice is contrasted with Mercy.
So opposite to one another may the two conceptions
seem to be that men have sometimes imagined them to
be the respective attributes of different divine persons.
But we should in fact scarcely call an unmerciful person
just ; and, in speaking of a person as unjust, we should
think rather of his hard treatment of those who do not
deserve it than of his comparative over-leniency to others j
17
258 GOD AND PERSONALITY
we should certainly think it strange to describe him on
account of such over-leniency as a merciful man. The
truest Justice would seem to include Mercy, and Mercy
in the highest sense would vindicate for itself the name
of Justice ; and it is, I am convinced, easier to represent
to ourselves such a union as realized in a personality
than after any other fashion. It is not unworthy of
remark in this connection that in political communities
the prerogative of mercy is habitually left to be personally
exercised by the head of the State or by those who rule
in his name, after everything possible has been done to
exclude his or their interference in the administration of
justice.
In turning to another important religious conception,
that of Sacrifice, we find that investigation of its history
by no means goes to show that a sacrifice is always thought
to be offered to a determinate person any more than
Sin is always thought to be committed against a
determinate person or Justice to be that which is in
accordance with the decree of a determinate person.
Thus it is not a merely trifling proposition to say
that we see the notion of Sacrifice in its most intelli
gible and ethically significant form where Sacrifice is
regarded as an act of personal intercourse between a
worshipper and his God. It belongs to Sacrifice in the
fullest and highest sense that what is sacrificed should
be, in the very surrender of it, recognized by the sacrificer
as good. Hence there may seem to be at the heart of
the notion a contradiction ; there is certainly a paradox,
in so far as something is treated at once as good (since, if
it is not good, there is no sacrifice in the surrender of it) and
as not good (since it is not pursued, but, on the contrary,
declined). This paradox becomes intelligible only where
DIVINE PERSONALITY
259
the thing in question being surrendered to God is
regarded as safe in him ; in whom, although not directly
in itself, its goodness is enjoyed, even when surrendered.
To this an analogy may be easily found in the mutual
relations of persons but hardly elsewhere ; and it cannot
be disputed that to such mutual relations of persons as
those of which one is here thinking we attribute a value
superior to any which could be assigned to Sacrifice as a
religious act on any theory but that of an intercourse with
the God capable of expression in terms of personal relations.
The religious idea of Union with the Supreme Reality,
the ruling idea of Mysticism as we may call it, is the last
of those which I propose to take in illustration of my
thesis that the recognition of Personality in God imparts
to religious ideas generally an increase of intelligibility
and of ethical significance. A particular interest belongs
to this idea in connexion with our present inquiry. For
some thinkers who lay especial stress on Divine Personality
are inclined to be suspicious of al mystical language,
just because to them a union of two personalities in any
such intimate sense as that which mystical language
suggests appears to them impossible M ; while, on the other
hand, thinkers of a different turn of mind are disposed
to appeal to this same mystical language, which is so
recurrent in the history of Religion, in proof of the inade
quacy of the notion of Divine Personality to the require
ments of the religious consciousness. I cannot, however,
here enter upon anything like a full examination of this
controversy, my general view of which may be easily
inferred from the discussion of kindred issues in pre
ceding Lectures. There is a celebrated phrase which
might seem to suggest a loss of Personality in the climax
M I am thinking especially of Dr. Rashdall.
260 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of Union — I am thinking of the figure under which entrance
upon Nirvana, the goal of the Buddhist's spiritual ambition,
is described in the words : " The dewdrop slips into the
shining sea." J5 In this phrase there is, in fact, nothing
to mark the existence of Personality on either side. The
dewdrop is no more personal than the ocean into which
it is absorbed. In itself this might indicate no more
than that the contrast of the personal existence of the
saint in this life with the impersonal nature of the Eternal
Being from which at death he ceased to be distinct was
absent from the mind of the framer of the phrase. But
it is doubtful if even finite Personality has any place in the
original philosophy of Buddhism. On the other hand, the
great mass of mystical literature in which the union with
God is described under the imagery of a marriage between
lovers bears impressive testimony to the truth that the
human soul is for the most part best satisfied when in the
culmination of its religious experience it recognizes the
antitype of the most intimately personal form which
human fellowship can assume.
Now it is doubtless possible to admit (as Mr. Bradley
would, he tells us,16 be willing to admit) that our relation
to God may be rightly represented as a personal relation,
while insisting that this will not entitle us to attribute
Personality to the Absolute, the supreme and ultimate
Reality. For to do this would (according to this way
of thinking) be to transfer the imaginative language of
Religion without modification to Metaphysics which, as
it is sometimes hinted, is in a very special sense the
sphere of ' bitter earnest.'
It is certainly not my intention to deny that the language
J5 See Edwin Arnold's Light of Asia, bk. viii. ad fin.
16 See Essays on Truth and Reality, pp. 432, 451.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 261
of Religion is always imaginative and in a sense mytho
logical, and that to take it to be literally and prosaically
true as it stands will be apt to lead us into error. Nor
would I have the metaphysician abate a jot of his deter
mination to pursue the intellectually satisfying at all
costs. But (and here Mr. Bradley would assuredly agree)
it is not the test of the intellectually satisfying that it
should be expressible in prosaic language. Nor can
Religion be content that her language should be treated
as ' merely figurative ' :7 in the sense in which the term
might be used of an eighteenth-century poet's conventional
invocation of the Muse. The language of Religion we
must no more dismiss without discrimination as figurative
than accept it without discrimination as scientifically
exact. I will go back to an illustration of which I made
use earlier in these Lectures.18 A child's picture of his
elders' lives is no doubt very unlike indeed to those elders'
lives as known to themselves from within. Or again, we
may think of the distance which may separate a savage's
notion of what the ruler or generalissimo of a great civil
ized State has to do from such an one's actual conduct
of government or warfare. Yet as the child grows up or
the savage is educated, there need be no shock in their
gradual discovery of the unlikeness in many respects of
their earlier picture to the reality. But what if it should
dawn upon the child that those he called his parents
'? I have seen an eighteenth-century translation of the New Testa
ment intended to satisfy readers to whom the Authorized Version
seemed written in a style which, tried by the standard of Hume
and Robertson, was rude and unpolished. John vi. 63 was (if
my memory does not deceive me) thus translated : " The discourse
which I have been addressing to you is entirely figurative ; and to
take it in any other sense would be to be guilty of the highest
absurdity."
»» See Lecture V, p. 131.
262 GOD AND PERSONALITY
were not real persons at all ? Were he only to learn
that they were no more than foster parents, or that they
did not love him as they seemed to do, the discovery
might be baffling, disheartening, discouraging enough.
But what would it be in comparison to the discovery that
they had no more independent existence than the cor
respondents of Mr. Toots ? J9 Would not this be a com
plete subversion of the world in which he had grown up
and a grave threat to his sanity ?
The application of this to our present subject will, I
think, be obvious. We shall readily believe that in personal
intercourse with God we behold so small a part of his ways 20
that nothing we could report of them but would probably
or even certainly require drastic revision from the point
of view of a fuller knowledge. We shall indeed all the
more readily believe it, the more deeply penetrated we
are with the sense of being truly in communion with the
Highest. But that this intercourse is not a genuinely
personal intercourse at all ; that personality in " him
with whom we have to do " 2I is no less figurative than
the image of the father's table or the mother's breast or
the bridegroom's embrace, which we may use, turn and
turn about, despite their mutual inconsistency, as suits
our mood ; that there is no reciprocal knowledge and love
coming to meet us at all ; or that, if there is, it is not on
the part of the true God, who is, as we may say, at the
back of everything ; to discover this — and really to believe
in our discovery — would it not mean the overthrow of
our religion, the revelation of such an incoherence in the
world as must confound the reason and shake knowledge
from its very foundations ?
*9 In Dickens's Dombey and Son, see c. 12.
>° See Job xxvi. 14. 2I See Heb. iv. 13.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 263
I think that it would ; and yet, before we conclude
that religious experience favours the affirmation of per
sonality in God, we must turn aside to consider a possible
assertion by the opponents of this position of a religious
interest which may be enlisted upon their side. Is it not
a principal interest of Religion, it may be asked, to be
kept from falling into Idolatry ? And is there not in the
view which has been maintained in this Lecture, and in
the reasons by which it has been supported, an encourage
ment of a tendency in that direction, full of danger to
the very cause we have been endeavouring to serve ?
From the point of view of a philosophical theology we
must understand by Idolatry the worship as God of that
which, at the moral and intellectual level occupied by the
worshipper, is less than the Highest. The acquiescence
by thinkers like Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet in the
distinction of God from the Absolute must, it would
seem, imply the condemnation of any one who stands at
their high level of philosophical culture to a choice between
Idolatry and no Religion at all. I suspect that Signor
Cioce would agree with me in drawing this inference from
their premises, and for himself would frankly embrace
the second of the alternatives allowed. Of Mr. Bosanquet
I will speak later on ; but Mr. Bradley would, I think,
prefer the former, while disclaiming the insinuation of
disparagement conveyed by the word Idolatry, for which
he would probably prefer to substitute ' worship of an
Appearance.' I must confess to an unwillingness to
accept either alternative, and am ready to justify this
unwillingness on the ground that, as I have elsewhere
said in another connexion, " I do not think it possible to
remain content with the reduction of an experience so
manifestly substantial, rational, and harmonious as a
264 GOD AND PERSONALITY
genuine religious experience can be to the rank of mere
mirage or sheer illusion." 22 And, while no doubt this is
by no means what Mr. Bradley and Mr. Bosanquet intend
to effect, I am convinced that denial of the claim of
Religion to take as its object nothing less than the supreme
and ultimate Reality can have no other issue.
In the history of Religion the idolatry of to-day is often
the true religion of yesterday, and the true religion of
to-day the idolatry of to-morrow, but only if we look
for the identity of a religion merely in the identity of the
symbolism which it employs. But that religion which
has its face set ever towards the Supreme Reality and
which does not lower its thought thereof to accord with
its symbols, but rather adapts its symbols, or replaces
them by others better adapted to the highest and best
that it can conceive, this is true Religion, whatsoever
symbols it may use.
On the other hand, such a new religion as Mr. Bradley 23
seems to desire, which metaphysics, although its full
requirements would still not be met, might be able, " in
some sense " (as he says), " to justify and support," would,
I fear, like the worship of the Golden Calf in Horeb, wear
from the first the air of a ' substitute ' provided to satisfy
those whose impatience will not allow them to wait for,
or to do without, the genuine article, and could hardly
in the long run be able, any more than that worship, to
escape condemnation as an idolatrous service.
In personal intercourse with our friends, if we rest
content with our first impressions or even with the im
pressions gained at any stage of our friendship and cease
from further exploration of their characters we are so
3a Group Theories of Religion, p. 181.
*3 See Essays on Truth and Reality, p. 446.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 265
far falling short of the ideal of such intercourse. It may
be that our own limitations or those of our friend really
make this check to our activity inevitable. Still it is a
failure. The most successful marriage is that where
romance does not culminate with the wedding bells, but
where each partner can to the end address the other m
those brave words of Browning's :—
Grow old along with me !
The best is yet to be.* 4
But if we can go so far as this in speaking of the converse
of human lovers and friend's, it is surely the very essence
of that other converse which we call Religion, where we
have to do with no finite being, but with the Supreme
and Eternal, that the possibilities of discovery therein
are inexhaustible. To suppose that, on the attainment
of any level of insight, we have seen all there is to see,
this is surely to commit the sin of Idolatry, no matter
how free we may be from any temptation to " bow down
to wood and stone." 25 But it is not necessary, because
we must not suppose God to be no more than that of which
we have experience in the personal intercourse of our
religion, to deny that this is personal intercourse at all
We know that it is, and, so far as to speak of Personality
in God expresses this knowledge, it is more than a mere
symbolical phrase; although any imaginative repre
sentation of this Personality, such as we cannot but form,
may fairly be called symbolical, and be acknowledged to
be such without any derogation from the reality of the
experience in the service of which it is formed.
That when once the stage of religious development
*4 Rabbi ben Ezra, § I.
*s Heber, Hymn before a Collection made for the S.P.G.
266 GOD AND PERSONALITY
is reached at which religious experience takes the form ot
an experience of personal intercourse, the denial that
there is truly Personality in God must in the end lead
to the denial that religious experience is an independent
and autonomous form of experience at all, I feel for my
own part no doubt whatever.
I think that the Philosophy of Religion owes a con
siderable debt to Signer Croce for bringing this clearly
out. I am of course very far from disputing the sincerity
and deep conviction of Mr. Bosanquet in adopting as he
does a different view. But it seems to me that his thought
about the Absolute is constantly coloured by the religious
associations of the language which he employs — the
language of the religion which has above all others insisted
on Personality in God. The difference between his
intellectual temperament and that of Signor Croce cor
responds to a conspicuous difference between the national
characters of the peoples of which they are such eminent
representatives ; a difference which shows itself in politics
in the fact that the ' anticlericalism ' of the Latin countries
of Europe has no precise analogue in Great Britain. I
sympathize, I will admit, far more with Mr. Bosanquet
than with Signor Croce in regard to their respective
attitudes toward Religion ; but I think that Signor Croce
is in this matter the more logical of the two.
In an earlier Lecture 26 I discussed the antithesis
between Personality and Reason. We saw that while
Reason was an essential feature of our conception of Per
sonality, it was nevertheless a difficulty felt in ascribing
Personality to God that there seemed to be involved in
Personality something which, unlike Reason, was not
common to all persons, in so far as they reasoned aright.
36 Lecture V.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 267
Yet should we not, in ascribing to the thought of a Divine
Mind any variation from this common Reason, anything
capricious or arbitrary or susceptible of an explanation
only from some peculiar circumstances of the thinker,
be ascribing to it something incompatible with the perfect
Wisdom and Truth which are at any rate an important
part of what we mean by God ?
On the other hand, the characteristic religious emotion
of Reverence was one which it appeared hard to refer
to an impersonal object. The dilemma in which we find
ourselves thus placed has more than once come into view
in the course of our discussions, without having been
ever finally disposed of. I would now at last invite your
attention to some few considerations which are all that
I have to contribute to the solution of a very real
difficulty.
In what has been said above of a common Reason,
it will be clear that we have had in mind the kind of
Reason which is exemplified in what are often called the
exact Sciences. These Sciences, as was pointed out in
the first Lecture of this course, may be said to take as
little account as possible of personal differences. Though
of course not all men are equally endowed with the capacity
or the opportunity for carrying on the investigations
proper to these branches of knowledge, so that personal
differences affect in this way the history even of the
exact Sciences ; yet we regard the trains of thought
employed therein as throughout capable of statement
in generally intelligible terms and communicable not
only in respect of the results but also in respect of the
processes which have led up to those results. We suppose
that from the same premises any person competent to
understand them must draw the same conclusions as any
268 GOD AND PERSONALITY
other. Moreover, as we saw in the fifth Lecture, when
examining the ethical doctrines of Kant and Fichte, we
seemed to find in the field of Practical Reason also the
same neglect as characterized the exact sciences of a
factor no less indispensable to Personality than the
rationality which distinguishes it from other forms of
individual existence. But, if we turn from the exact
sciences to the field of Art, we perceive at once an interest
ing difference. We should never say that any competent
musician or man of letters could see how a symphony of
Beethoven or a play of Shakespeare should be completed,
if only he had the earlier movements or acts before him.
On the other hand, we do not regard this fact as meaning
no more than that the composer or poet may do as he
likes, and that he might have finished off his work in half
a dozen ways as well as in that upon which he actually
hit. On the contrary, we are disposed when we see how
it is done to say ' That is the only possible way in which
it could satisfactorily have been done.' *7 Reason, the
common Reason, could not anticipate but can endorse
it, and can say, as Albert Diirer is reported to have said
of a picture of his own, " Sir, it could not have been
better done." In the creative activity of the artist we
seem to see Personality and Reason no longer contrasted
but reconciled and at one. God, it was said of old, plays
the geometer ; 28 but does he not play the artist too ?
Or rather, is not the artist made in his image as well as
the geometer and the moralist ? And was not the writer
of Genesis happily inspired when he imagined the Creator,
2? I am especially conscious here of a debt to the conversation
of my friend Mr. C. J. Shebbeare, though he is in no way responsible
for my use of thoughts suggested to me by him. Cp. his Challenge
of the Universe, p. 183, and Mr. Temple's Mens Creatrix, p. 154.
38 Plutarch, Quasi. Conv. viii. 2, p. 718 c. ff.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 269
like a greater Diirer, beholding " all that he had made,
and behold it was very good " ? 29
These reflections upon the possibility of conceiving a
factor in the Divine Mind distinguishable from that which
seemed, when supposed to exist in absolute perfection,
to exclude something necessary to Personality, and yet
by no means describable as an irrational factor, may, I
think, be supplemented by some observations intended
to suggest that a Reason of what may conveniently
be called the mathematical type is not adequate to inter
pret even the world with which the investigations of the
natural sciences themselves are concerned.
In the first place, it is to be borne in mind that even
according to that view of the physical world which we
may call pre-evolutionary, but which has not always been
abandoned by thinkers who have won fame as exponents
of a philosophy of Evolution— I mean the view which
looks to the laws of matter in motion and ot the com
pounding of simple elements for a complete explanation
of all phenomena— there must, as John Stuart Mill pointed
out,3Q be supposed an initial collocation of material
elements, inexplicable by those laws themselves, but neces
sary before they could begin to operate. Such an original
collocation would in theistic language be referable only
to the Divine Will ; and thus even an account of the
world in terms of a pre-evolutionary natural science would
seem to involve in its cause not merely a Reason whose
workings could be traced out by a calculating intelligence
from certain premises, but a Reason which could establish
those premises— in other words, a Reason which, working,
in the phrase of Leibnitz 3' in accordance with the principle
»9 Gen. i. 31. 3° Logic, iii. 5 §§ 8, 9.
31 Sec Theodicee i. 8.
270 GOD AND PERSONALITY
of the best, is more easily conceived — is perhaps only
conceivable — after the analogy of a personal intelligence.
If, however, the conception of development be taken
seriously, we must refuse to accept the pronouncement
of the Hebrew Preacher that there is no new thing under
the sun, 32 and must acknowledge, with M. Bergson, that
evolution is creative ; and in that case it is clear that
the Intelligence which is manifested in the world-process
must be thought of rather after the analogy of the drama
tist than after that of the geometer ; so that there will
not seem to be the same incongruity in the attribution of
Personality to it which there certainly is when, in repre
senting to ourselves the Supreme Mind, we employ the
analogy rather of the mathematician or moralist than
that of the artist.
Shall I be thought too fanciful if I add to these two
considerations a third, drawn from the implication of
such judgments as we constantly make when we speak
of certain events imagined or even actual as grotesque
or fantastic, or as like bad dreams or nightmares ? We
seem to appeal herein to a certain mood or style as we
may put it, which, though we could no doubt not describe
it in detail, we feel to be that of Reality, and with which
the imaginations or experiences in question are, as it were,
out of tune. Although no doubt we often speak of this
as especially manifested in what we call Nature, that is
to say in the 'world as unaffected by the deliberate opera
tions of man — the thought which inspires such language
is of course the ruling idea in the poetry of Wordsworth —
yet it is possible sometimes to find Nature itself strike
a jarring note. We may recall the familiar lines of
Tennyson : —
3* Eccles. i. 9.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 271
Are God and Nature then at strife,
That Nature lends such evil dreams ? 33
And the very outcries of pessimistic spirits to whom the
world seems a ' city of dreadful night ' remind us of those
dream experiences in which we comfort ourselves in
the midst of horrors by an assurance that we shall awake
out of what must be after all a dream because it has not
the familiar sanity of the real world. It is not of the mood
of Nature as contrasted with Man or with Spirit so much
as of the mood of Ultimate Reality that I am here think
ing. Coleridge said 34 that the World was no goddess
in petticoats but the Devil in a strait waistcoat. And
certainly, since the evil wills of men undoubtedly produce
their evil effects in the real world, I cannot affirm a priori
that there are no evil wills other than human to which
what we cannot but hold to be evil in the world beyond
humanity may be traceable. 35 I should rather hold
it to be likely that there are such. But that does not
affect our capacity of apprehending what we may call
the standard mood or style — as we may speak of the
mood or style of a particular poet or artist — whether
what we call Nature fully express it or no. Such a capacity
seems, indeed, to be implied in our aesthetic judgments
generally. We appreciate and take pleasure in all kinds
of eccentric moods and feel that it is well to have them
isolated and expressed by individual artists, yet we fall
back for more enduring satisfaction on the great masters —
Who saw life steadily and saw it whole. 3*
But even these are only relatively universal, only relatively
33 In Memoriam, § 55. 34 Table Talk, April 30, 1830.
35 See Problems in the Relations of God and Man, p. 270.
36 Matthew Arnold, To a Friend.
272 GOD AND PERSONALITY
satisfying. They are not always in accord with one another,
and we reach forward after a supreme mood which will
harmonize them without loss in no merely eclectic or
artificial fashion. 37 What are we here speaking of but
of that in the Supreme Spirit whereof what we call the
' personally characteristic ' in a finite spirit is the image,
just as in that which in knowledge and morality is common
to all rational beings philosophers have been ever ready
to recognize the thoughts or ideas of the Eternal Mind ?
I do not know that I have made intelligible the drift
of a speculation which it would take too long to attempt
further to develop here. But I hope I may have done
so sufficiently for my present purpose, and will now
pass on to the last topic to which I shall call your
attention in my present course.
It will perhaps have occurred to my readers that the
arguments of this Lecture have pointed rather to a single
personality of God than to that distinction of persons in
God which, as we saw before, was taught by the theology
which, among the great theologies of the world, had been
most in earnest with the task of working out the impli
cations of Divine Personality.
It has been my contention throughout that, although
the existence of Personality must in any case give rise to
problems which cannot but embarrass every philosophy
unable to allow to it any but the subordinate significance
assigned to it by all systems except those which may be
classed as theistic, yet a satisfactory defence of Divine
Personality can only be founded upon the facts of religious
experience. Nor, in my judgment, can a theological
account of such religious experience as takes the form
37 Here too I am conscious of a special obligation to the conver
sation of Mr. Shebbeare.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 273
I
of the consciousness of personal intercourse with the
Supreme stop short of conceiving this personal inter
course as itself falling within the divine life, and thereby
translating the personal distinction which it involves
into a fundamental factor in the Supreme or Absolute
Experience itself. But this personal distinction cannot
be interpreted as involving a difference in personal
character without abolishing that unity behind and through
all differences which is what we primarily have in view
in speaking of the Absolute at all. It could only involve
such a difference for those who could accept a genuine
pluralism, which would appear in a religious form as a
true and thorough-going polytheism.
Such a thorough-going polytheism, we must observe, we
shall not find in doctrines of a hierarchy of many gods under
a single chief, but rather in such as leave us at the end
with an eternal opposition of a good and an evil Principle. 38
If, however, the personal distinction within the Supreme
Experience to which our religious experience testifies is
not to be regarded as involving a corresponding personal
difference of character, then the analogue, or rather
archetype, in God of the personally characteristic element
in human souls will not be diversified by the existence
of the personal distinction which, in the language of
Christian theology, is called the distinction of the Son
from the Father ; and the language used about it will
not vary from what would be used by theists who recog
nize no such personal distinction within the Divine life.
This is not, of course, to say that the rich variety of
personal character wherein lies the great interest of personal
intercourse is lost in the Supreme Experience. In its
relation to the personal distinction which we may call
3* See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, i. 42 ad. fin.
18
274 GOD AND PERSONALITY
that of the Son or Word from the Father, it is probably
best represented as constituting the content of the Word,
and the corresponding variety of moods as " broken
lights "39 of what I have called the supreme mood, of
which may be given the name which the poet gives it
from whom that phrase is taken — the name of " immortal
Love."
On the other hand, care must be taken to avoid the
suggestion that this richness of content is absent from the
other term of the personal distinction, which Christian
theology calls the Father. For it would destroy the very
meaning of that religious faith in following the implica
tions of which we have been induced to borrow the ter
minology of the Christian schools, if the wealth possessed
in the religious life is more or less or other than that
supreme Good which is the nature of the Father, and
therefore that of whosoever can call himself his Son.
It is for this very reason that this bond of union, this
common nature itself, can come to be described in theo
logical phraseology as Person also. It might seem that
the analogy of human intercourse would suggest another
word. Two human persons' love of one another may
be the best thing about each of them ; yet we describe
it as an affection or sentiment on the part of each rather
than as something no less real than they themselves who
feel it. They may come to lose it and yet remain real.
On the other hand, if we think of the bond which binds
human beings together as a community or society to
which they belong, and of this as something no less real,
than its members, or rather as something more lasting,
more sacred, more august than any of its members, some
thing for which they may even sacrifice their lives, yet
39 Tennyson, In Memoriam, introductory verses.
DIVINE PERSONALITY 275
we know how even here it does not seem to possess, despite
its greater permanence and dignity, that special assurance
of reality which comes to the individual members in their
consciousness of self. The intention of the theological
phraseology to which I have referred I take to be no other
than this— to claim for the life of mutual knowledge and
love which, in the intercourse of Religion, the worshipper,
so far as he realizes his sonship, enjoys with the Supreme,
and in enjoying it recognizes to be no other than the
very life itself of the Supreme — to claim for that life a
complete concrete reality, in no respect less than that
of those who share in it and have their being in it.
Here I must leave the subject of Divine Personality :
in the sequel I hope to consider what is the bearing upon
our conception of human Personality and of its mani
festation in the various phases of human life, of that
conception of Personality in God which I have attempted
to outline in the present course of Lectures.
INDEX
ACCIDENT, 222
Acts of the Apostles, 127, 138, 190
Agnosticism, 149
Alexander Aphrodisiensis, 94 n.
Alexander, Prof. S., 202 /.
Anaxagoras, 233
Anselm, 145
Arabian Nights, 246
Archimedes, 50
Aristotle, 40$"., 50, 73 ff., 80,
86, 94 w., 105, i6;/., 214,
231, 239
Arnold, Edwin, 260
Arnold, Matthew, 67, 86, 271
Art, 33, 158. 268#
Athanasian Creed, i3<>/., 210
Athanasius, 211
Atonement, 190, 195
Attribute, 222/.
Augustine, 38 n., 163
Augustus, 38
Austen, Jane, 246
Bacon, 115, 204
Balaam, 24
Beauty, 207, 235
Beethoven, 15 if., 268
Bellarmine, 55 n.
Benson, R. M., I95/-
Bergson, Prof. H., 224, 226,
228 /., 270
Berkeley, 129 ff., 173
Bhakti, 88
Bigandet, 203 n
Boethius, 47, 50 j., 54 /., 89,
io8/.
Bosanquet, Mr. B., I7/., 34,
52, 54, 100, 102, 105 ff.,
124 #, 130 ff., 1427., 191,
221, 224 n., 263 /., 266
Box, Mr. G. H., 86 n.
Bradley, Mr. F. H., 101 n., 102,
105 /., 107 n., 124 it., 132 ff.,
I38#, 151. I53f-, 159,
174, 180, 191, 209/., 255,
260 /., 2637.
Browning, E. B., 226
Browning, Robert, 265
Buddha, Buddhism, 83, 88, 2O2/.,
251, 260
Buraet, Prof. J., 174, 237
Butler, 1 88, 235
Carlyle, 185
Carr, Prof. J. Wildon, 121, 228 n.
Cassiodorus, 47 n.
Causality, 217
Christianity, 20, 31 /., 37. 4°.
42 #•• 5L 6l> 65/- 69> 72,
8iff., 100, 102 /., 107, 125,
141, 145**., l63/-, I79/-.
193 #, 202, 209 /., 213, 238,
240. 273#
Chrysippus, 37
Cicero, 37/., 44
Coleridge, 77, 163, 271
Comte, 7 if.
Copying, 204 f.
277
278
INDEX
Courage, 21
Cowper, 208
Crashaw, 227
Creation, 155^., 184, 197 /.
Croce, Sig. Benedetto, 121 n.,
157 ff., 161, 176, 196 ff.t 210,
216 n., 231, 266
Dante, 125 ff., 141 /., 195 n.,
232 /., 246
Delphic Oracle, 177
Descartes, 53, 56ff., 63, 230
Deuteronomy, 43
Dickens, 262
Driesch, Prof. Hans, 17
Duns Scotus, 55 n.
Durandus a Sancto Porciano,
56 n., 68 w.
Diirer, 268 /.
Durkheim, 217
Ecclesiastes, 270
Elisha ben Abuyah, 86 n.
Emanation, 155 /., 162
Epicureanism, 79 /.
Essentia, 38, 44
Euclid, 50
Euhemerus, 76
Euripides, 77 ff.
Eutyches, 47
Evil, 185 ff.
Exodus, 86
Ezekiel, 40 n.
Farquhar, Dr. J. N., 88 n.
Feuerbach, 22
Fichte, 121 ff., 128, 268
Finite God, 33, i^ff.
Fitzgerald, 207, 255
Forgiveness, 249, 252 ff.
Fowler, Mr. W. Warde, 75 n.
Galileo, 63
Generation, 155 /., 162, 181
Genesis, 235, 269
' George Eliot/ 22 n.
Gibbon, 163
Gibson, Prof. J., 26 n.
Gifford, Lord, 17, 27, 3i/.,
212, 214, 244
Goethe, 86 n., 96
Goodness, 227, 230 ff.
Greek Religion, 76^"., 85, 177,
249
Green, T. H., 26 n., 112 ff.,
203, 205
Grierson, Mr. G. A., 88 n.
Hadrian, 38 n.
Harnack, Prof. A., 66
Heber, 265
Hebrews, Epistle to the, 39, 199,
262
Hegel, 52, 54, 77, 96, 157, 196
Heraclitus, 115
Hinduism, 83, 87, 160, 249, 251
Hippolytus, 45
History, 25, in, 159, i68/.,
175 /-. 196, 199
Hobbes, 49
Horsley, 64
Howison, Prof. G. H., 135
Hume, 26, 261 n.
4!
, 37, 39 ff., 50/., 54
Huxley, 188, 205
Idealism, 205
Idolatry, 263 ff.
Immanence, 33, 70 ff., 86, 136 /.,
140, 148, 150, 196
Incarnation, 82, 86, 166
Incommunicability, 55
Irenseus, 38
Isaiah, 208 /.
James, William, 197, 2417.
Jeremiah, 40 n.
INDEX
279
Jesus Christ, 20, 31, 39, 62,
67, 8i/., 847., 109, 135 w.,
I4T/., i64jfjf., 179, 182 /.,
195, 202 /.
Joachim, Mr. H. H., 69 w.
Job, Book of, 262
/o/m, Epistle of, Jiff., 181
/o/m, Gospel of, 139, 163, 209,
261 n.
John of Damascus, 69 w.
Joseph, Mr. H. W. B., 231
Judaism, 43 J., 65, 83, 85 #
Judgment, 190, 197
Justice, 21, 249, 256 ff.
Juvenal, 35 n.
Kant, 26, 59, 62 w., 112,
123, 1877., 250, 268
Karma, 249, 251$".
Keble, 147
Kipling, Mr Rudyard, 23
Knowledge, 204 ff., 234
Lateran, Fourth Council of the,
69 n.
Leibnitz, 59 n., 97 f., 269
' Lewis Carroll,' 47, 222, 246
Liberty, 191
Life, 223 ff.
Lloyd, A., 88 n.
Locke, 26, 57, 64
Logos, 139, 163, 238
Lotze, i8/., 52ff., 100, 103
io6/., 147, 235
Love, 125, 148, 232, 274
Luke, Gospel of, 75, 254
Maimonides, 86
Malebranche, 157
Marcion, 137
Mark, Gospel of, 43 n., 123, 239
Martineau, 119
Mathematics, 158
Matter, 41, 223, 228/7".
Mechanism, 224, 2307.,
Mediation, Mediator, 163, 166,
I71. *77ff-> J94, 2I1
Mercy, 2577.
Merz, Dr. j. T., 22 ff.
Mill, J. S., 269
Milton, 77, 246
Minucius Pacatus, 38
Missale Romanum, I94/-
Mohammed, Mohammedanism,
65, 83, 87
Morality, 33, 103, 105 /., n6ff>,
1 88, 191, 231, 235, 238 /., 253
Moses, 86
Mundo, de, 37, 50
Murray, Prof. Gilbert, 71 n.,
78 w., 272
Mystery, 199 ff.
Mystery Gods, 77/., 80 /.
Mysticism, 87, 259
Myth, Mythology, 167 ff., iJ7ff,
194
Naturalism, 205
Nature, 136 /., 235, 240, 270 /.
Necessity, 191
Neo-Platonism, 163
Nestorius, 47
Nettleship, R. L., 172 n.
Newton, 63
Nietzsche, 77
Nirvana, 260
Nitzsch,. Friedrich, 47 n.
Non-Contradiction, 107, 124 /.,
191
Number, 217
Objective, 57
Ockham, 56 n., 58
Oesterley, Dr. W. O. F., 86 n.
Olympian gods, 77 ff.
Origen, 42 /.
ovffia, 42 /.
Paley, 63 n., 65, 188
Pantheism, 69, 87
280
INDEX
Parmenides, 94
Particular, 20 if.
Party, 35 /.
Paul, St., 135 n., 152, 164 ff.,
183, 199, 203, 208
Paul of Samosata, 61 n., 68 n.
Peter Lombard, 90 n
Philo, 39
Philosophy, i$8f., 161, i6jff.,
I75/., 2i3jfjf., 220
Plato, 5o/., 64, 94, 104, 164 /.,
i68ff., 177, 194, 210 f., 231,
233 #
Pliny, 71, 75
Plotinus, 42/., 51, 174
Plutarch, 37 n., 268
Political Philosophy, 33
Pope, 225
Porphyry, 43
Posidonius, 37
Prayer, Book of Common, 201
Priestley, 63 /.
Principium Individuationis, 91
Pringle-Pattison, Prof. A. S.,
107 n., 125 n.
Probation, 190
TrpOffbJTrelov 46
TTjOOfTWTTOJ', 45/., 51
Providence, 198
Psalms, the, 30, 40, 132, 153,
178, 204, 254 /.
Pseudo-Aristotle, 37, 50
Pseudo-Augustine, 38 n.
' Questionnaire,' 243
Quick, Mr. O., 194
Quicunque vult, I3O/., 210
Quintilian, 387.
Racovian Catechism, 62
Rashdall, Dr. H., 135, 259 n.
Rationalism, 199
Realism, 149, 205 /.
Reid, 24 n.
Repentance, 190, 195
| Revelation, 33, 177
Reverence, 119, 267
Rhys Davids, Prof. T. W., 203
Richard of St. Victor, 55
Robertson, 261 n.
Roman Religion, 75, 79
Royce, 17, 128 n., 159 n., 242
Russell, Mr. Bertrand, 189
Sacrifice, 249, 256, 258 /.
Schiller, 117
Schleiermacher, 63 n., 65
Scholasticism, 156, 204, 222
Science, 25/., in/., 158, 234
Self-consciousness, 55, 57/.
Seneca, ^J ff.
Servetus, 62 n.
Sextus Empiricus, 115 n.
Shakespeare, 20, 127, I51/-.
222, 245 /., 268
Shebbeare, Mr. C. J., 268 n.,
272 n.
Shelley, 80, 154, 197
Sherlock, 56 n., 57 n.
Sidonius Apollinaris, 38 n.
Sin, I83J0F., 249 ff.
Smith, Prof. J. A., 156 n.
Socinus, 62
Socrateitas, 92
Socrates (philosopher), 94, 169,
173, 233 /.
Socrates (historian), 38
Solomon, 256
Soul, 90, 164 /., 168, 171 ff., 177,
202, 237
South, 57 n.
Space, 22, 217
Spencer, Herbert, I49/.
Spinoza, 68 ff., 132, 196, 214,
222 /., 255
Starbuck, Prof. E. D., 241
State, the, 18, 29, 52, 146,
164 /.
Stevenson, R. L., 189, 246
Stoics, 37, 178, 255
INDEX
281
Straightness, 21
Stuckenberg, J. H. W., 119
Subject, 57
Subjective, 567.
Substance, Substantia, 37 ff., 44,
222 ff.
Suetonius, 35 n.
Swinburne, 219
Temple, Dr. W., 268 n.
Tennyson, 30, 95, 255, 270 /.,
274
Teresa, St., 227
Tertullian, 27, 44/., 66/., 137
Theodorus of Gadara, 38 n.
Thomas Aquinas, 64, 75, 90,
273 n.
Thompson, Francis, 208
Thompson, James, 271
Time, 22, 201 /., 217
Transcendence, 33, 70, 73, 75,
140, 148 ff., 196, 248
Trinity, 20, 42 #, 51, 57, 61 ff.,
82, 102, 130, 145 «., 161,
213, 272 ff.
Turner, Elizabeth, 246
Turretinus, 56 n., 6gn.
Tyrrell, George, 227 n.
Union, 249, 256, 2597.
Unitarianism, 62 ff., 84 /., i6o/.,
163
Unity, 218, 220 ff.
Universal, 175, 201, 220 ff.
Usener, Hermann, 47 n.
Valentinus Gentilis, 62 n.
Virgil, 246
Wallace, W., 59 n.
Warren, H. C., 203
Watson, Sir W., 29
Wells, Mr. H. G., 103 ff., 135 ff:
147, 192 /.
Will, 55. 59
Wilson, J. Cook, ngn.
Wisdom of Solomon, 39
Wolff, 58, 62 n.
Wordsworth, 28, 122, 171, 178,
200, 270
Zeller, 37 n.
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