ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
■y^y^
THE
LIMITS OF EVOLUTION
AND OTHER ESSAYS
ILLUSTRATING THE METAPHYSICAL THEORY
OF PERSONAL IDEALISM
BY
G. 'H. HOWISON, LL.D.
/mills; PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
wj irpdj rhv ivdpuirov, ttoXItt^v Sura irdXeois rrji avurdrris.
Marcus Aurelius: III, ii
On, to the bound of the waste.
On, to the City of God.
Matthew Arnold: Rugby Chapel
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
I9OI
All rights reserved
Copyright, 1901,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
J. S Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith
Norwood MaaB. U.S.A.
WHO FEEL A DEEP CONCERN
FOR
THE DIGNITY OF THE SOUL
PREFACE
The thread connecting the following essays is
already indicated on the title-page. They all illus-
trate, each from the field of its own subject, the
metaphysical theory which I venture to call Personal
Idealism. Partly, they show how this theory draws
its arguments, as if unexpectedly, from the discus-
sion now of this topic taken up for its own philo-
sophical interest, and now of that ; partly, they in
turn reflect the light of the theory upon the dis-
cussion of the topic. To the running reader, the
several papers, with titles so widely divergent, would
hardly suggest any common trend of thought. They
all have it, however ; in fact, taken together, they
may be said to present the mentioned philosophic
theory in its bearings on all the chief human con-
cerns,— on knowledge, joy, and devotion; on Sci-
ence, Art, and Religion. Still, in view of the great
diversity of their subjects, one might easily fail of
a clear and firm seizure of the thought that unites
them, unless the clue were given by some words
of introduction.
vii
Vlll PREFACE
Just what, then, docs Personal Idealism as a philo-
sophical theory mean ? I can best reply, I suspect,
by anticipating anotlicr question, which can hardly
fail to be asked : Why should the word " personal "
come into the title of the theory at all ? Is not
idealism the doctrine that mind is the only j)ri-
mary or absolute reality? — and so is it not always
the assertion that personality is the central source of
things ? Why, then, isn't the prefix superfluous ?
The answer is, that the actual history of philosophic
thought, even after philosophy attains to the view
that rational consciousness is the First Principle,
exhibits a singular arrest of the movement toward
putting complete personahty at the centre of things.
Historic idealism is, in fact, far from being personal;
rather, it is well-nigh overwhelmingly impersonal.
Philosophy, it is often said, is the search after
unity. As a statement of one philosophic aim, this
is true enough ; and certain it is that in this search
after unity philosophy has almost always lost sight
of its other interests, some of which are at least as
great. The prevailing tendency in the history of
thought, if we leave rigidly agnostic philosophers out
of the account, has been to some form of monism ;
and idealistic philosophy, despite its diligent hostility
to materialism, has usually been at one with its foe
in absorption with the One-and-All. The only vital
difference it introduces is to substitute for the one
PREFACE IX
material Substance a single conscious Subject, or
Universal Mind, through which, and in which, and
for which, all things subsist — all things, including
the so-called other minds. In the long history of
idealistic thinking, even in the Western world from
Plato to the present day, there is but one very emi-
nent mind, the justly celebrated Leibnitz, who dis-
tinctly and systematically breaks with the monistic
tradition. In recent times, particularly, through the
influence of Hegel and his later school, idealistic
thought, under the usurped name of Absolute Ideal-
ism, has shared the field with its rival Evolutionism
in advancing the doctrine of the One. The only
important difference — no doubt a great one — is
this : where evolutionism says the One Unknowable
(if it refrains from saying Matter), this idealism says
the One Mind, or the One Absolute Experience, all-
embracing, all-sustaining, all-determining.
To the ordinary mind of our Occidental world,
alive with the spirit of Western civilisation, acting
instinctively from the principle of individual respon-
sibility, and of philosophy and its history as unexpert
as Milton's Moloch was of wiles, it would doubtless
come as a surprise to learn that the main drift of
philosophic thought in the Western world for the past
century had been increasingly toward the Oriental
view of things, and that amid Western civilisation
individualism was not a philosophic matter-of-course.
X PREFACE
Yet such is the unmistakable fact. With this every-
day Occidental's instinctive preference for personal
initiative, responsibility, and credit, I confess myself
in strong sympathy ; and though from my acquaint-
ance with the facts I cannot share in his surprise,
I am glad t)f an opportunity to protest with him
against this all-engulfing monism, fatal to our moral
freedom even when taking on the plausible form
of monistic idealism. Idealistic monism, though in-
deed a real philosophic advance as compared with
other monism, is in the last resort irreconcilable with
personality. By its unmitigated and immitigable
determinism, with its one sole Real Agent, it directly
annuls moral agency and personal freedom in all
the conscious beings other than its so-called God.
Accordingly, it leaves this professed God himself
without genuine personality ; for his consciousness
is void of that recognition and reverence of the
personal initiative of other minds which is at once
the sign and the test of the true person.
The aim throughout the following papers, on the
contrary, is to present, and in one way or another
enforce, an idealistic system that shall be thoroughly
personal in the sense just implied. Instead of any
monism, these essays put forward a Pluralism : they
advocate an eternal or metaphysical world of many
minds, all alike possessing personal initiative, real
self-direction, instead of an all-predestinating single
PREFACE XI
Mind that alone has real free-agency. At the same
time the aim is not at all to promote a certain other
style of pluralism, which one might well enough call
individualistic in the bad sense, whose dogmatic ideal
is the dissolution of reality into a radically disjunct
and wild "multiverse," — to borrow Professor James's
expressive coinage, — instead of the universe of final
harmony which is the ideal of our reason.
The pluraHsm here set forth is far removed from
the anarchic individualism that seems to be advo-
cated by such thinkers as, for instance, Professor
Lutoslawski ; ^ nor is it to be confounded with that
"pluralistic or individualistic philosophy" which Pro-
fessor James himself, while brilliantly supporting it,
defines^ by saying, "According to that philosophy,
the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even
though that mind be dubbed * the Absolute,' to know
the whole of it. ... There is no point of view
absolutely public and universal." Rather, to the
theory here set forth, the point of view of every
actual mind, as that mind in its eternal wholeness is,
is absolutely public and universal ; and even in the
mind's temporal aspect, the aspect of its struggle
toward knowledge over the rugged road of experi-
1 W. Lutoslawski : Ueber die Grundvoransseizungen tind Conse-
quenzen der individiialistischen Weltanschauung. Helsingfors, 1898.
"^ W. James : Talks to Teachers on Psychology, etc., Preface, page v.
New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1900.
xil PREFACE
ence, such a public and universal view must in every
mind be jiotential. I confess, however, tliat I am
almost ashamed to record, here and elsewhere in
these pages, this dissent from Professor James, — a
writer for whose genius I feel so warm an admira-
tion, and with whom, on the great main matter^
phn-aiism, I am in such hearty accord. Only, I
cannot consent to put our common metaphysics at
such risk and disadvantage, in comparison with
monism, as a confessed and despairing ultimate irra-
tionalism involves.
Something of the same tenor I might say, too,
of my relation to the views of Mr. F. C. S. Schiller,
the versatile author of that striking book. Riddles
of the SpJiinx. But in his case, it is chiefly his finite
and pathological "God" that I am unwilling to admit
as an implication of pluralism, much as I delight
in the point and force of what he advances in sup-
port of our common view.
To put the theory of the present book in a clearer
light, its chief points had best be summarised one
by one. They may be stated as follows :
I. All existence is either (i) the existence of
mindsy or (2) the existence of the items and order of
their experience ; all the existences known as "mate-
rial " consisting in certain of these experiences, with
PREFACE XUl
an order organised by the self-active forms of con-
sciousness that in their unity constitute the sub-
stantial being of a mind, in distinction from its
phenomenal life.
II. Accordingly, Time and Space, and all that
both "contain," owe their entire existence to the
essential correlation and coexistence of minds. This
coexistence is not to be thought of as either their
simultaneity or their contiguity. It is not at all
spatial, nor temporal, but must be regarded as simply
their logical implicaiioji of each other in the self-
defining consciotiS7iess of each. And this recognition
of each other as all alike self-determining, renders
their coexiste7tce a moral order.
III. These many minds, being in this mutual
recognition of their moral reality the determining
ground of all events and all mere "things," form the
eternal {i.e. unconditionally real) world; and by a
fitting metaphor, consecrated in the usage of ages,
they may be said to constitute the "City of God."
In this, all the members have the equality belonging
to their common aim of fulfilling their one Rational
Ideal; and God, the fulfilled Type of every mind,
the living Bond of their union, reigns in it, not
by the exercise of power, but solely by light ; not
by authority, but by reason ; not by efficient, but
xiv PREFACE
by final causation, — that is, sinii)ly by bcin<^ the
impersonated Ideal of every mind.
IV. The members of this Internal Republic have
no origin but their purely logical one of reference
to each otlier, including thus their jirimary reference
to God. That is, in the literal sense of the word,
they have no origin at all — no source in time what-
ever. There is nothing at all, prior to them, out of
which their being arises; they are not "things" in
the chain of efificient causation. They simply are,
and together constitute the eternal order.
V. Still, they exist only in and through their
mutually thought correlation, their eternal " City,"
and out of it would be non-existent. But through
their thought-reciprocity with each other, God being
included in the circle, they are the ground of all lit-
erally originated, all temporal and spatial existences.
VI. Hence, relatively to the natural world, they
are free, in the sense of being in control of it : so
far from being bound by it and its laws, they are the
very source of all the law there is or can be in it.
Relatively to God also, and to each other, all minds
other than God are free, in the still higher sense that
nothing but their own light and conviction deter-
mines their actions toward each other or toward God.
PREFACE XV
This freedom belongs to every one of them in their
total or eternal reality, be it burdened and obscured
as it may in the world of their temporal experience ;
and its intrinsic tendency must be to fulfil itself in
this external world also.
VII. This Plurahsm held in union by reason, this
World of Spirits, is thus the genuine Unmoved One
that moves all Things} Not the solitary God, but
the whole World of Spirits including God, and united
through recognition of him, is the real " Prime
Mover" of which since the culmination of Greek
philosophy we have heard so much. Its oneness is
not that of a single inflexible Unit, leaving no room
for freedom in the many, for a many that is really
many, but is the oneness of uniting harmony, of
spontaneous cooperation, in which every member,
from inner initiative, from native contemplation of
the same Ideal, joins in moving all things change-
able toward the common goal.
VIII. This movement of things changeable to-
ward the goal of a common Ideal is what we have in
these days learned to call the process of Evolution.
The World of Spirits, as the ground of it, can there-
fore neither be the product of evolution nor in any
^ Aristotle's well-known definition of God, Metaphys. xi, 7.
xvi PREFACE
way subject to evolution ; cx'cept that in the case of
minds other than God, who have their differentiation
from him in a side of their being which is in one
aspect contradictory of their Ideal, this sense-world
of theirs is by its very nature, in its conjunction with
their total nature, under the law of return toward
the essential Ideal. In this world of sense, this
essentially incomplete and tentative world of expe-
rience, evolution must therefore reign universally ;
but beyond this world of phenomena it cannot go.
Every mind has an eternal reality that did not arise
out of change, and that cannot by change pass away.
IX. These several conceptions, founded in the
idea of the World of Spirits as a circuit of moral
relationship, carry with them a profound change in
our habitual notions of the creative ofifice of God.
Creation, so far as it can be an office of God toward
other spirits, is not an cvcttt — not an act causative
and effective in time. It is not an ocawrence, dated
at some instant in the life of God, after the lapse
of aeons of his solitary being. God has no being
subject to time, such as we have ; nor is the funda-
mental relation which minds bear to him a temporal
relation. So far as it concerns minds, then, creation
must simply vican the eternal fact that God is a cojn-
plete moral agent, that his essence is just a perfect
Conscience — the immutable recognition of the world
PREFACE XVll
of spirits as having each a reality as inexpugnable
as his own, as sacred as his own, with rights to be
revered; supremely, the right of self-direction from
personal conviction. This immutable perfection of
the moral recognition by God, let it be repeated,
is the living Bond in the whole world of spirits.
Did it not exist, did God not exist, there would be,
there could be, no such world ; there could be no
other spirit at all. Real creation, then, vieans suck
an eternal dependence of other souls upon God that the
non-existence of God zvoitld involve the non-existence
of all souls, zvhile his existence is the essential supple-
mentitig Reality that raises them to reality ; luithout
him, they zvonld be but void names and bare possi-
bilities. Thus in the Divine office designated "Crea-
tion," exactly as in that denoted by "Redemption"
or " Regeneration," the word is a metaphor ; but in
the one case as in the other, it symbolises a reality
eternal and essential, of a significance no less than
stupendous.
X. The key to the whole view is found in its
doctrine concerning the system of causation. It
reduces Efficient Cause from that supreme place in
philosophy which this has hitherto held, and gives
the highest, the organising place to Final Cause
instead. Final Cause becomes now not merely the
guiding and regulative, but actually the grounding
•Will PREFACE
and constitutive principle of real existence ; all the
other causes, Material, Formal, l^flicient, become its
derivatwcs as well as the objects of its systematising
control. A philosophy is thus ])resentecl in which
the Ideal is indeed central and determining, and
therefore real, and the measure of all other reality; a
philosophy that, for the first time, might with accu-
racy be named Absolute Idealism, did not the title
Personal express its nature still better.
For this metaphysical scheme I am not here argu-
ing, of course. I am simply putting it forward in
all its naked dogmatism, with no other object, just
now, than to get its points apprehended. For this
purpose it may be further helpful to point out its
historical affiliations. A natural mistake would be
to confound it with the theory of Berkeley ; ^ and
certainly its first proposition substantially repeats
Berkeley's main assertion, that nothing really exists
but "spirits and their ideas," — taking Berkeley to
mean by "ideas," in every spirit but God, conscious
experiences, whether "inner" or "outer." But with
this single proposition, the resemblance of the pres-
ent theory to Berkeley's doctrine ends. Its kinship
is rather with the system of Kant ; and yet there
would be a great misapprehension in identifying it
^ As a reviewer of 77^1? Conception of God, in the New York Nation,
not long since did.
PREFACE XIX
with Kantianism. It certainly agrees with Kant,
as it departs from Berkeley, in two chief matters :
it maintains the a priori character of all the con-
necting and inference-supporting elements in human
consciousness, and it consequently removes the centre
of the permanent order in Nature from the Divine
mind to the human, — understanding by the human
the type of every mind other than God. It thus
aims with Kant to avoid the merely theocentric or
theological idealism of Berkeley, which rests on bare
empiricism as an account of human knowledge ; an
idealism — or a sensationalism, rather — that at bot-
tom is a mere assumption of a Divine Mind, as it
permits to our intelligence no transcendental princi-
ple by which to reach the belief through a logical
continuum.
Like Kant's, the present system finds the basis
for its theory of knowledge in the native spontaneity
of the human mind, — of all minds not divine ; and,
again like Kant's, it provides for the " transcen-
dental " efficacy of this spontaneous intelligence, for
the power to go beyond past experience and judge
of the future i)i perpetuum with unreserved univer-
sality, by the hypothesis that Nature is a system
of experiences, the " matter " of which is sensation,
while the "form" or fixed order of it is determined by
the elements — Space, Time, Cause, and so forth —
that the self-active consciousness supplies. But from
XX PREFACE
this point onward its adherence to Kant ceases. It
does not, like Kantian idealism, restrict the applica-
bility of a priori principles to the world of sense, to
mere phenomena, and thus confine knowledge to
natural science ; nor does it make of the distinction
between our a priori scientific and our a priori ethi-
cal equipment a disjunct and impassable difference
in kind. On the contrary, a leading aim with it is
to break down the Kantian barrier between the
"practical" and the "theoretical" consciousness, and
to open a continuous theoretical highway for reason
in both its scientific and its ethical uses. It seeks
to raise our ethical intuition into the region of intel-
ligence instead of feeling, and to do this by showing
that the ethical first-principle is not only itself an
act of knowledge, but is the principle of all know-
ledge, and of all real experience as distinguished
from illusion.
In further consistency with this, in its philosophy
of Nature it departs from Kant on the question of
the origin of the "contents " in experience, the "mat-
ter" in natural objects. Whichever of the two views
ascribed to Kant may really be his, — whether this
"matter" of sensation, which he says is strictly
''given,'' be taken as given (i) in the sense of being
produced in us by the agency of some other being,
or (2) in the sense of simply being there inexplicably,
as a dead datum, back of which we cannot get, and
PREFACE XXI
from which we must take our whole cognitive start,
— the theory here set forth accepts neither, but the
rather abandons both. It neither accepts sensation
as an unfathomable datum merely, nor does it en-
tertain the hypothesis that it is an effect produced
in the mind by some foreign agent acting as an effi-
cient cause. Its aim, so far as explanation through
efficiott causation is concerned, is to explain Nature
wholly from the resources of the individual mind ;
and to explain it further, and in the full sense, by
referring it beyond the individual to the whole world
of minds in which every individual essentially be-
longs ; but here the principle of explanation changes
from efficient to final causation.
In detail, the explanation is this : Each mind other
than God no doubt organises its own sense-contents,
directly by its own a priori formative consciousness,
for spontaneity is meaningless unless it is individual ;
and Nature is, in so far, a product of the individual's
efficient causality. But all this organising of a sense-
world, and the having of it, falls within the logical
compass of each mind's central and eternal act of
defining itself as individual ; and this it does, this
it can do, only in terms of the world of other minds,
— in the final resort, in terms of God, the Type of
all intelligence. Thus the self-consciousness of every
mind with a sense-world, though receiving no con-
tribution to that world from the efficiency of any
XXll PREFACE
Other mind, has even with regard to Nature a spon-
taneous and constant reference to every other, and
so to the Divine Mind. In this way, the mutual
recognition of all minds which is essential to the
very existence of each as a conscious individual,
and which is the cognition that constitutes them
ethically rational, becomes also the constitutive prin-
ciple in the world of Nature. In fact, its entrance as
a principle into the natural order is precisely what
raises Nature out of being a mere private show for
each mind into a universal experience, with an
aspect common to all minds alike. It is this that
lifts it out of resilient manifoldncss and mere dis-
junction, and carries it into unity — the unity of a
communal system of experience, in which the dissents
of individuals are reduced and harmonised by the
deeper principle in their being, out of which their
total nature flows by the self -defining act of each.
Such an essential reference from each to other and
to all, and from all to God, operates, however, and
can operate, by no process of efficient causation.
The whole operation is ideal; and what is called
final causality, the influence of an ideal, which is
now generally acknowledged to be the only causa-
tion in the moral world, is thus brought to be also
the true primary causation in the world of Nature.
So much for the divergence from Kant. There
is but one other modern philosophical theory with
PREFACE XXlll
which readers would be likely to connect the pres-
ent one, — the system of Leibnitz. The scheme
certainly does approach to the Leibnitian monad-
ology more closely than to any other form of ideal-
ism that has preceded it. But while it so largely
agrees with Leibnitz, it also departs from him seri-
ously,— if indeed one can always be sure of what
Leibnitz really means by his persistently metaphori-
cal expressions.
Upon two very important counts, at any rate, the
present scheme aims to avoid what seems to be the
shortcoming" of the monadology : (i) it parts company
with that "gradation among the monads" which, as
Leibnitz manages it, amounts to an iron system of
caste in the world of real individuals, leaving them
no being but process, and process exclusively di-
rected by the so-called God, of whom they all are
but so many "fulgurations"; and (2) it equally leaves
aside that illusory character of extension and dura-
tion which Leibnitz so bluntly alarms, when he pro-
poses to account for the apparent extending and
lasting of things sensible by saying that these quali-
ties are merely owing to "confusion and obscurity
of thought." It gives to natural objects, as items
in the real experience of minds, a reality secondary
and derivative, indeed, but unquestionable, and asso-
ciated essentially with the self-defining activity of
every mind but God ; while it provides for the great
xxiv PREFACE
fact of evolution, which Leibnitz appears to have
been aiming at in his doctrines of " p;radation " and
"aggrandisement," by its view of the progressive
character of the sense-world as a phase in the being
of minds attracted by a divine Ideal.
These relations to Leibnitz, particularly when set
in connexion with the higher rating of individuality
and of final cause that characterises the theory now
offered, suggest its close relationship with Aristotle,
or even its direct derivation from him. Indeed, were
it not for the profound ambiguity that marks Aris-
totle's thought, its cloudy vacillation between plural-
ism and monism, one might well find in his repeated
insistence on the dominantly individual character of
Substance and on the distinctness of God from the
entire world of sense and passivity, joined with his
emphasis on final causation, the complete anticipa-
tion of the central features of the present view. But,
taken on the whole, the main drift of Aristotle seems
unmistakably to monism after all, and his frequent
elevation of final cause, e7i passant, to the apparently
foremost place, is at last cancelled in the asserted
efficient causality of God as the Prime Mover. Aris-
totle's "real world," combining ideal form with real
matter, appears to be enclosed by him in the all-
determining single-conscious compass of his Divine
Oewpia, which he makes the synthetic " Entelechy "
that unites in its action efficient and final causation
PREFACE XXV
at once, and thus besets all individual existence both
behind and before.
The character of the present theory, relatively to
Aristotle, is to be found in its attempt to carry out
the individuahstic tendencies in Aristotelianism to a
conclusion consistently coherent ; just as it likewise
attempts a consistent continuation and development
of the pluralism begun by Leibnitz and carried for-
ward by Kant to his unfortunate point of arrest. In
short, the new attempt may be described as an effort
to relieve the cardinal new insights of Aristotle, Leib-
nitz, and Kant, ahke, of a common group of inherited
inconsistencies, and to continue the pluralistic aperqu,
which undergoes a growing clarification in the think-
ing of these great minds, onward toward its proper
fulfilment.
To all the great systems thus far mentioned, I am
of course in a debt that can never be cancelled. I
am only too glad to acknowledge it, and my only
hope is to have added to the borrowed capital, for
the common use, some small increment that may
render the whole more available for human demands.
To the great representatives of monism, too, I feel
a special indebtedness ; for one owes a peculiar as
well as great obhgation to the thought from which
he feels obHged to dissent. Particularly am I sen-
sible of this in the case of Hegel, to whom I owe
many years of Hght and guidance, and who must
XXVI PREFACE
always remain for nic one of the world's great minds.
He has left us, I am persuaded, in his Logic a per-
manent inheritance, which despite his metaphysical
abuses of it. and despite its sundry sli})s and gaps,
only awaits the labours of some sufficiently powerful
successor to become a complete system of our expe-
riential ascent out of inadequate to adequate cate-
gories. One might hope that this service may yet
be performed for us by the Master of Balliol, or by
our own National Commissioner of Education.
In the various essays, the new pluralistic theory
of ultimate reality is presented now in one of its
factors, now in another ; in none of them, however,
is any exposition of it as a systematic whole under-
taken. Proofs of this or that part of it are attempted
in each paper, but no establishment of the system
as such ; this must wait for another place and occa-
sion. The fullest discussions of important phases
in the theory are contained in the first essay and
the last; and for this reason these were given the
two most prominent places in the book. The inter-
vening essays are placed nearly in the order of their
original production, though the central theme of the
theory, which may very properly be called The eter-
nal reality of the Individual, undoubtedly comes out
with increasing articulateness and emphasis as they
go on towards the end of the book.
PREFACE XXVU
The several papers have been very variously occa-
sioned, and have been written at varying dates, cov-
ering a period of something like twenty years. The
reader who cares to do so can follow up their chro-
nology in the appended foot-notes. In the earlier
papers considerable changes have here and there
been made from the form in which they were origi-
nally printed, in order to bring all their statements
into harmony with the governing view. In their
original form, monism of an Hegelian type played
no small part, side by side with the strongest affirma-
tions of personal reality and individual freedom, —
a collocation, it would seem, rather characteristic of
Hegelianism than not. At the date of their first
production I had not become aware of the hopeless
contradiction between the two views. Those who
feel the curiosity, can dig the originals out of their
hiding-places in the journals, and see them with all
their sins of inconsistency upon their heads. But I
trust these earlier attempts may be left to a natural
oblivion. It is only to the form given them in this
volume, that I should wish readers to refer for the
expression of my mature opinions.
I have to thank the editors of the New World, the
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and the Overland
Monthly for their kindness in permitting me to use
the matter printed as articles in their respective jour-
xxviii PREFACE
nals : more definite acknowledgments are made in
the appropriate foot-notes. For the very full Index
I am indebted to Mr. H. A. Overstreet, student of
Balliol College, Oxford, B.A. of this University, and
long a member of its department of philosophy.
University of California,
Berkeley, November, 1900.
CONTENTS
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION
PAGE
Evolutional Philosophy : its Two Forms, their unfavourable bear-
ing on Human Interests, and the Question of Limits thence
arising I
I. Chasm between the Phenomenal and the Noumenal:
Evolution cannot cross it, and does not seriously claim
to do so . . . . . , . . .12
II. Break, in the Phenomenal World, between the Inorganic
and the Organic : Evolution interrupted by it, and
compelled to look for its own explanation to some
changeless Noumenal Principle .,..'. 26
III. Further break between Physiological and Logical Genesis :
Evolution, which as natural science is a matter of phy-
siology or empirical psychology only, incapable of clos-
ing this; the only Evolutional Continuum a logical and
ideal one ......... 27
IV. Gulf between the Unknowable and the Explanatory:
Philosophy, as explanation, should reach the latter,
but Evolution, raised into the Principle of philosophy,
itself declares that it can only reach the former . . 29
V. Transit from Nature in general to Human Nature viewed
as essentially Reason: this impossible by Evolution;
demonstration, in detail, that Human Reason, so far
from being the result of Evolution, is required by it as
the prior ground through which alone it can exist and
be known as pertaining continuously to other things;
proof of the strictly ideal character of the Phenomenal
World and its evolutional law ..... 30
xxix
XXX CONTENTS
PAGE
VI. The ic.ll relations between Nature and Human Nature
now seen to imply an iilealistic philosophy : man Nou-
menal, not merely rhcnomenal; and every human
I'cing thus absolutely, eternally, and unchangeably real,
while the natural world is essentially fleeting . . 48
VII. Critical consideration of the question, so much and so
loosely debated, Arc the theory of Evolution and the
Christian Religion really compatible? .... 50
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM
The various aspects of the question, Is Pantheism the legitimate
outcome of Modern Science ? Detail of the subsidiary ques-
tions which it implies ........ 36
I. What Pantheism exactly is : the consolidation of the
Divine Being with all possible being; distinction be-
tween the two forms of Pantheism, the Atheistic and
the Acosmic; essential Atheism of both at root . . 58
II. Exact discrimination of Pantheism from Materialism and
from Subjective Idealism: its superiority over both;
its theistic deficiency, even in its Acosmic form, in re-
gard especially to the idea of Divine Immanence . 65
III. Exact contrast between Pantheism and Deism, and emi-
nent superiority of Pantheism : it breaks down the
mechanical and irreducible separation of God from the
world, which Deism sets up; the participation of popu-
lar Thaumaturgical Theism in this deistic fault . . 69
IV. The service of Pantheism in contributing toward the for-
mation of genuine Theism : it suggests, though it nec-
essarily fails to fulfil, the theistic ideal of God immanent
in the world by the activity of his image in the mind
of Man, the only Divine Immanence compatible with
the moral freedom of the Soul ..... 72
V. WTiy Pantheism nevertheless rouses apprehension and
aversion in the Modern Religious Consciousness : we
are prescient of its antagonism to our Moral Freedom
or Self-Activity 74
CONTENTS XXXI
PAGE
VI. The war inherent between Pantheism and the character-
istic interests of Human Nature: these identified with
the behef in Individual Free-agency and Individual
Immortality ......... 76
VII. Is there anything in the nature of Modern Science that
gives colour to the view that Pantheism is its only
legitimate outcome? Apparent evidences for this view,
both from the Method and from the two most promi-
nent Results of Modern Science : the theistic nega-
tions in the Empirical Method, and the pantheistic
trend of the Principle of Conservation and the Prin-
ciple of Natural Selection ...... 81
VIII. This apparent Pantheism of Science not really war-
rantable: its inexact and self-contradictury character;
strictly speaking. Science is simply neutral in all such
questions, and leaves the way entirely open for their
settlement by higher methods than its own ... 94
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY '<
Striking movement in German Thought since 1S65: its general
character that of Monism moving toward Pluralism, through
Agnosticism and its Self-Dissolution loi
I. The pseudo-idealistic Pessimism of Eduard von Hart-
mann, known as the " Philosophy of the Unconscious " 105
II. The optimistic Materialism of Eugen Diihring, or the
" Philosophy of the Actual " . . . . . i:;i
III. The Neo-Kantian Agnosticism of Fricdrich Lange, and.
the so-called " Standpoint of the Ideal " . . . 142
IV. The Self-Supplanting of Agnosticism through the comple-
tion of its own implicit logic : passage to a complete
Idealism; sketch, in outline, of what such an Ideal-
ism is . . . . . . . . . -159
XXXU CONTENTS
THE ART-PRINCIPLE AS REPRESENTED
IN POETRY
/
PACE
Introductory statement of the Problem ami its Difliculties : the
solution by an appeal to the Universal Principle of Art . 179
I. The Essential Principle of Art, in general : reduction of
the usual antagonism between the Ideal and the Real
in the schools of /Esthetics, and arrival at their har-
mony in the Real-Ideal, the actual union between Idea
and Fact; Art the interpretation of the Fact in terms
of its quickening Idea 181
II. Further development and modification of this principle in
the light of the maxim that Art is its <rjjn end : strictly
creative character of Art; but this does not mean its
right to do as it pleases; it cannot make the ugly, or
the guilty, or the vile, beautiful; essential correlation
between the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, as
expressions of the one Real-Ideal , . . .187
III. Exact distinction between the True, the Beautiful, and
the Good : they form a strictly Triune Group, insepara,
ble; the ground of this in the indivisible Psychologic
Trinity in the soul — the unity of its emotion and its
will in its intelligence or reason; its final explanation
to be found only in the correlation between the rational
freedom of God and the rational freedom of man;
every work of art thus an embodied Theodicy . '194
IV. Art, as the embodiment of the Beautiful, in its difference
from Philosophy, whose aim is the True, and from
Religion, whose aim is the Good, has its essence turn
wholly on its forni ; its proper theme always the same
indivisible Real-Ideal as theirs, always true and good,
but its form the form of Beauty — the address to our
Rational Capacity for Joy . . . . . .201
V. Application of these results to Poetry : the classification
of the Fine Arts; ascending series of Architecture,
Sculpture, Painting, Music, Poetry; the art of the
Poet the culmination of the principle ruling in all the
Fine Arts 204
CONTENTS xxxiii
PAGE
VI, The summarised result as to the Art-Principle in Poetry :
the specific criterion of Poetry, as such; whether the
list of Fine Arts should be extended by including a
sixth art — Prose Literature 2ii
THE RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO
RELIGION
/
The varied views, Conceptual and Historical, of the relation be-
tween Reason and Religion : their Essential Antagonism vs.
their Potential Harmony; the Three Doctrines of their pos-
sible harmonisation — the Old, the Middle, and the New . 217
I. Detailed Statement of the New Doctrine, or Rationalism,
and of the steps to be taken in proof of it; the two
Religious Methods, (i) of Authority, or Declaration,
(2) of Reason, or Conviction . . , . . 224
II. The Contrast between these Methods not to be con-
founded with that between Romanism and Protestant-
ism; rather, a division between Two Schools of Thought
in all religious Denominations • . . , , 226
III. Rejection of the Method of Authority on the ground
(i) of its Logical Contradictions, and (2) of the Per-
petual Elusion of Search, characterising its assumed
Divine Source 230
IV. Its conflict with the Essential Spirit of Christianity, the
Religion founded in the recognition of the Free Reality
of the Individual Mind ...... 241
V. The argument, both Indirect and Direct, in behalf of the
Method of Reason as the only one germane to Fulfilled
Religion. The Direct Argument, (i) from the Tacit
Admissions in the history of Apologetics, shown by
their changes regarding External and Internal evi-
dences; (2) from the Successive Steps in the Historical
Development of religion ; (3) from the Logical Im-
plication of Christian Theism in the method of Natural
Science. The subtle indirectness of the real argument
to God from the Rationality of the World . . . 260
XXXlV COXTENTS
HUMAN IMMORTALITY: ITS POSITIVE
ARGUMENT
PACK
I'rofessur James's In<:;ersoll Lecture: need of something more
than a fairway for the " Will to Believe," in the case of Im-
mortality. Can \vc advance beyonil Answering Objections,
and reach some Positive Proof ? 279
I. Ihe objection to Immortality from the maxim nf modern
psychology, that " mind is a function of the brain " :
logical Haw in attempting to rebut it by the Trans-
mission-Theory of this functional relation . . . 284
II. Stricter interpretation needed of the functional relation
between Mind and Brain, if Personal Immortality, the
only immortality significant, is to be reconciled with
modern psychology; substitution of Simple Concomi-
tance between brain-function and mind-state for Pro-
fessor James's Transmission-Theory; passage to the
a priori or self-active personal consciousness of each
mind, as the implied ground of this Concomitance . 292
III. Extension of the foregoing argument, from the single
case of Time, as a priori, to the whole complex of the
a priori conditions for experience, or Nature; the Soul
the source and centre of these conditions, therefore
determinant of Nature instead of subject to it, and
hence not perishable by any of Nature's vicissitudes,
ol which Death is merely one ..... 303
rV. Reply to the Objection that the foregoing argument estab-
lishes nothing but a power intrinsic in the Soul to
keep in existence merely, and fails to prove an immor-
tality of rational and moral Worth .... 308
CONTENTS XXXV
THE HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND
FREEDOM
PAGE
Some historical lights on the Difficulties of the Problem : radical
changes needed in certain Theological Conceptions, if its
solution is to be reached ....... 313
I. General conditions of a Harmony between Determinism
and Freedom : the genuine Definitions of both . . 318
II. Special conditions of harmonising Divine and other Self-
Determination; the coeternity of all Free Beings with
God 326
III. Apparent contradiction between Causation in God and
the Freedom of other beings ; the Assumption at the
basis of this 332
IV. Reality of the Contradiction, so long as Divine Causation
is conceived as Efficient. Need of some conception* of
Divine Causation consistent with the reality of Moral
Freedom ......... 341
V. Solution of the Contradiction, by the substitution of Final
for Efficient Cause, as the form of Divine relationship
to the Real World, the World of Spirits . . . 347
VI. Proof that tlie system of Pluralistic Freedom, or the
World of Spirits subsistent tlirough Final Causation, is
neither Atheistic nor Polytheistic, but is Theistic and
Monotheistic 35 1
VII. Explanation of Alternative, or Choice, in the World of
Experience, and solution of the " Dilemma of Deter-
minism "......... 372
6 KoafjLO^ dxravet ttoAis tcrri.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION.^
It has become a commonplace, that in the think-
ing of the nineteenth century the characteristic and
epochal fact is the conception of Evolution. This
conception has at length been carried out into every
province of human experience even, is now in some
loose sense a general habit of thought, -and seems on
the eve of becoming all-dominant. Its raptest devo-
tees have for some years demanded that the mind
of man itself, in which the conception has its very
origin and basis, shall confess its own subjection to
the universal law, shall henceforth acknowledge
itself to be simply a result of development from
what is not mind, and shall regard all that it has
been accustomed to call its highest attributes — its
ideality, its sense of duty, its religion — as tracing
their origin back to the unideal, the conscienceless,
the unreligious, and as thus in some sense depending
for their being on what has well been termed " the
physical basis of life."
1 A lecture delivered at Stanford University, October, 1895. First
printed in the A^e-cU IVorld, June, 1896.
B I
2 £SS.iyS LV puii.osoriiY
This doctrine of mental origins need not be taken,
however, in the sense of materialism. Indeed, its
able and exact advocates expressly repudiate the
materialistic construction often put upon it ; and to
meet their views with precision and justice, one
ought carefully and persistently to discriminate their
doctrine from materialism. To do this may cost
much exercise of subtlety ; but the distinction is real,
be it as subtle as it may. Rather, the new doctrine
is in its exactest statement a mode of idealism ; and
this idealistic philosophy takes two different forms.
In the hands of most evolutionists, the philosophy
is agnosticism — idealism arrested at the line of mere
subjectivity and sceptical negation. It demands that
the God of our familiar traditional religion, the om-
niscient Creator who sees in the begmning that con-
summate end when the children of his hand shall
bear his perfect spiritual image, and who thus is
eternally their Redeemer, shall abdicate in favour
of the Unknowable — the omnipresent Power that
doubtless is immanent in all things, and whose re-
sistless infinity comes forth in the ever growing pro-
cess of evolution, but whose nature and whose final
goal are forever hidden from even possible know-
ledge ; the Immutable Energy, of which we may
declare neither that it is conscious nor unconscious,
neither that it is material nor spiritual, but only that
it is the Secret behind the Veil.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 3
But in the hands of others the philosophy of evo-
lution becomes an affirmative idealism : the theory
of the Unknowable gives way to the theory of
Cosmic Theism, the Persistent Force to the Omni-
present Mind. God is made immanent in Nature —
as directly present throughout the immensity of the
universe as each person's mind is to its own body.
Every member in the vast whole, nay, every atom,
is represented as instinct with God ; yes, as being
God in some limitation or other, and in some victo-
rious expression or other, of his incessant energy.
As declared in the threadbare lines of Pope, —
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
«
All things are accordingly but aspects in the self-
vision of the one and only eternal Consciousness,
whose ceaseless rending of his successive disguises,
that he may at length appear to himself in his
proper image, unconfined and unobscured, is the ex-
planatory cause of that ever changing, ever broaden-
ing, and ever deepening stream of existences which
we have come to name the Drama of Evolution : —
They change and perish all, but He remains ;
A moment guess'd — then back behind the fold
Immerst of darkness round the Drama roll'd
Which, for the pastime of eternity,
He doth himself contrive, enact, behold.
4 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
One or the other of these philosophies now claims the
right to supplant the venerable forms of old religion,
and seems almost on the verge of effecting its desire.
The science of our century, stimulated to unprece-
dented discovery by ideas derived from the philosophy
that ushered the century in, comes at the century's
close to the support of these ideas with its vast accu-
mulations ; and the new consensus of our time appears
to gain its proper utterance, now in the philosophy of
Herbert Spencer, and now in that Neo-Hegelianism
regarding which the current question is, whether it
can get its best expression by being read as Hegel
darwinised, or as Darwin hegelised. The change
that seems imminent, in whichever way interpreted,
would be profound indeed, — far profounder than ap-
pears on the surface. Its revolutionary character
is so little comprehended by the mass of the intelli-
gent that many of the official teachers of Christian-
ity, to say nothing of its less critical laity, not only
dally with the new views, chiefly with Cosmic
Theism, but openly embrace them, with no apparent
suspicion of their hostility to the principles that are
fundamental to the Faith. Yet the hostility is real ;
and it is not from any caprice of his merely private
way of thinking, but from a genuine, even if obscure,
apprehension of the things indispensable to this
Faith, that Mr. Balfour in his Foundatiofis of Belief
assails both forms of the new philosophy, which he
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION J
prefers to designate Naturalism and Transcendental
Idealism. Were the complete substitution of either
for the philosophy underlying the older religion con-
clusively to take place, we of the Western civilisation
should literally have entered a new world.
Many doubtless believe that we are in that new
world already, and beyond return. But many, proba-
bly more, still hang back, disturbed by anxious
questionings — by an inward struggle between the
sense of authority in what seems truth declared by
science and the sense of majesty in what is felt to
be an ineffable good which the apparent truth seems
to put in peril. For my own part, I side with those
who feel that the vaunted new world of evolutional
philosophy is of a portent so threatening to the high-
est concerns of man that we ought at any rate to
look before we leap, and to look more than once.
We ought to ask insistently what this new world
really makes of mankind, of its vocation and its
destiny, and we ought to insist upon an unevasive
answer. Undoubtedly it may be said, and in so far
said well, that the unfavourable bearing of a doctrine
on hopes indulged by man cannot alter the fact of
its truth. But we have at least the right, and in the
highest case we have the duty, to demand that we shall
know what its bearings on our highest interests are.
If the truth bodes us ill, that very ill-boding is part
of the whole truth ; and though, unquestionably, we
6 ESS.fVS IN PHILOSOrilY
should have to submit to it even though it destroyed
us, it cannot follow that we could approve of it or
that we ought to approve of it. To glorify what is
our destruction would be indeed to play the fool, and
add to the tragedy of our being the anguish of self-
contempt.
It ought to be plain, and I think it will be plain
on a careful and exact examination, that the so-called
Philosophy of Evolution, when given such a scope as
to make evolution the ground and explanation of the
existence of mind in man, is destructive of the real-
ity of the human /^ri-i?;/, and therefore of that entire
world of moral good, of beauty, and of unqualified
truth, which depends on personal reality for its
being. This hostility to personality and its three-
fold world of ideal life is a trait belonging to every
evolutional account of the mind in man, whether
the account be made in terms of the agnostic or the
cosmotheistic view of the Eternal Ground. Both
views aim to explain the origin and progressive sus-
tentation of the whole human consciousness by the
vaQvoiy productive causation exerted by that Ground.
The Immanent God of the idealistic evolutionists is
just as truly the sole real agent in producing and
carrying on the consciousness of his creature, is just
as incessantly and directly the creature's executive
cause, as the Persistent Unknowable of the agnostic.
The world of moral freedom, which is a fundamental
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 7
postulate of the Christian Faith, is annulled by both
conceptions alike ; and while the theory of Cosmic
Theism, if treated with such idealistic methods as
those employed by Professor Joseph Le Conte in his
later writings, may be made to provide for a quasi-
immortality of the distinct single soul, we should
nevertheless remember that the ever-present brood-
ing of the immanent Cosmic Mind forever suppresses
the possibility of real freedom, and consequently
takes away from everlasting continuance all that
could make the soul a genuine individual, and there-
fore all the moral worth that alone could give to
continuance what religion means by Life Eternal.
Under a sheer evolutionary account of man, the
world of real persons, the world of individual respon-
sibility with its harmony of spontaneous dutifulness,
disappears. With it disappears the genuine per-
sonality of God. An immanent Cosmic Conscious-
ness is not a personal God. For the very quality
of personality is, that a person is a being who
recognises others as having a reality as unquestion-
able as his own, and who thus sees himself as a
member of a moral republic, standing to other per-
sons in an immutable relationship of reciprocal duties
and rights, himself endowed with dignity, and ac-
knowledging the dignity of all the rest. The doctrine
of a Cosmic Consciousness, on the contrary, reduces
all created minds either to mere phenomena or, at
8 ESSAYS IX rilll.OSOPHY
best, to mere modes of the Sole Divine Life, and
all their lives to mere effects of its solitary omnipres-
ent causation : —
When me they fly, I am tlic wings.
This discovery, that the leading conceptions of the
evolutional philosophy are opposed to the vital con-
ceptions underlying the historical religion of our
Western civilisation, of course does not in the least
settle the merits of the issue between these concep-
tions in the court of rational evidence. But the
interests at stake touch everything that imparts to
human life the highest worth, and all that our past
culture has taught us most to value. These inter-
ests, it may well be contended, are so great as to
justify us in challenging any theory that threatens
them. Human nature is not prepared to face de-
spair, until it shall have been proved beyond all ques-
tion, and after a search entirely exhaustive, that
despair must indeed be faced.
Amid all the clamour of the times in extolling
evolution, then, it is eminently seasonable to ask,
Just how much can the principle of evolution really
do ? Is it of such reach and such profundity as
actually to serve for the explanation of everything
known "i To state the question more exactly, How
far over the fields of being does evolution really go,
and with unbroken continuity } Let us try to dis-
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION g
CUSS this question critically and definitively, and so
let us ask, —
(i) Whether evolution really has no limits at
all?
(2) Whether it has not limits even within the
universe of phenomena, and, if it has, what these
limits are ?
(3) If these limits, though recognisable, can still
be passed, what is the only clue to the possibility
of making evolution cosmically continuous ?
But here many a reader will probably say. How
can there be any serious question in this matter
at all, at least for minds that have finally broken
with external authority, and believe the human fac-
ulties, working upon the evidence of facts, to be
the only judges of what is true ? Has not science
now spoken in this matter, and in words that can-
not be reversed ? To this I would reply, that on
the question really started in the mind of our times,
the question which I raise in this essay, science in
its own proper function has absolutely nothing to
say. The truth is, science never has said anything
about it, and never will nor can say anything about
it. Many scientific experts have no doubt had much
to say in the matter, and oftenest in the interest of
the evolutional philosophy. But they ought to get
aware, and everybody else ought to keep aware, that
when they talk of a tiiiiversal principle of evolution,
lO ESSAYS /.V rillLOSOrHY
they have left the province of their sciences, and
the very bounds of all science as such.
Of course, there is no longer any question at all
as to the reality of evolution as a fact, within the
specific region where it has been the subject of
scientific inquiry. There is no question, either, of
the use and importance of the hypothesis of evolu-
tion as a mctJiod of science, in that same definite
and tested region. On this matter, it is the business
of scientific experts alone to discover and to speak,
and it is the privilege as well as the duty of philoso-
phers, as of other people not experts in science, to
listen to what the men of science report, and to
accept it as soon as it comes with their settled con-
sensus. But whatever some men of science may
do in the way of philosophical speculation, science
makes no claim whatever that evolution goes a hair's
breadth farther than its scientific evidences carry it;
and hitherto these evidences are strictly confined
to the morphology and the physiology of living
beings, and of living beings only — to the thread
of descent by reproduction, convincingly traceable
by observation and experiment from the lowest
forms of plant life to the highest of animal.^
1 It is of course not ignored here that the entire series of physio-
logical phenomena is everywhere accompanied by a " parallel " or con-
comitant series of psychic or " mental "phenomena, which coordinately
undergoes an evolution of its own. In fact, one might say, with many
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION II
The extension of evolution from this limited and
lowly scope in the region of life into a theory of
cosmical reach, and, still farther, into a theory of
the origin of life, and then of the origin of mind,
is an act for which science furnishes no warrant
whatever. .The step into boundlessness is simply
the work of philosophical speculation, as it always
is. I do not mean to say that philosophical specu-
lation is necessarily without warrant, or destitute of
evidences of its own, more or less valid within its
own field. But what I do wish to say is, that these
evidences are not the evidences of science ; that
scientific evidences must by their nature stop short
of such sweeping universals ; and that when either
scientific men or the general public assume that
such speculative extensions of principles reached in
some narrow field of science have the support and
the prestige of science, they are deluded by a soph-
ism— a sophism really so glaring that its common
prevalence is matter for astonishment, and might
beforehand well be incredible. The correctness of
this statement will appear as we go on.
No, our question is not in the least a question of
science. It is only when men of science, or other
of the biologists, that this psychic series is but a part of " physiology "
totally conceived; though the thread of genetic connexion is of course
not at all the same as that in physiology proper. But this implication
does not touch the question of the essential mind, the intelligent prin-
ciple. See below, however, pp. 16-25. ^^- PP- 39~4''
12 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
people fascinated by the powers of the scientific
method, undertake to raise this into the universal
method of philosophy that our question ever comes
forward. Upon it science is reservedly silent. It
is a question of philosophy alone ; and philosophers,
whether professedly such or not, who make this new
and surprising claim for the method and evidences
of science, must not expect to carry the day by mere
proclamation. They must come to the bar of his-
toric philosophy, and be judged by that Reason
which is the source of philosophical and of scientific
method both, and the sole authority to determine
the limits of either.
Directing our attention first to the agnostic form
of the new philosophy, and taking up the first of our
foregoing questions, we find at once a fact of the
greatest significance. Yet in the popular appre-
hension of evolution this fact is continually so ig-
nored or neglected that its statement will likely
enough come to many readers as a genuine surprise,
and not improbably as a mystery hard to fathom.
The fact is this : When the question is brought
home whether evolution has no limits at all, the
careful and really qualified advocates of the evolu-
tional philosophy are found to be the most stringent
deniers of the limitless range of evolution. Its
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 1 3
limits, they say, are rigid and absolute : it reigns
only in the field oi phenomeita, including the "outer"
or physical world of the external senses, and the
"inner" or psychical world open to mental experi-
ence, otherwise called "inner sense."
The distinction here implied is so very important
that I shall surely be pardoned for going far enough
into the explanation of philosophical technicalities
to make it clear. It is the distinction between
(i) the facts of direct experience — the realities that
present themselves to our sensible apprehension,
"outer" or "inner" as the case may be, forming a
series of innumerable items arranged either by con-
tiguity in Space or by succession in Time — and (2) a
higher or profounder kind of reality which reason
requires us to assume as the indispensable and
sufficient ground for the occurrence and the cease-
less changing of the former, and, above all, for those
changeless connexions of sequence and position
which we observe among them, and which by com-
mon consent we designate as the laws of cause and
effect, or of the uniformity of Nature. To mark the
fact that the realities of the first sort are without
other evidence than their presentation to our senses
"outer" or "inner," it is agreed in philosophy to
call them "phenomena," that is, simply appearances
in consciousness. To mark the counter-fact that
the underlying Reality contrasted with appearances,
14 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
and required as their explanation, is forever hidden
from the senses, and is therefore without other evi-
dence than that of pure reason, philosophical con-
sensus names it a " noumenon," that is, a reality
present simply to the reason.
Upon this distinction between the phenomenal and
the noumenal the whole discussion hangs and turns.
To the proposition maintained by evolutionist phi-
losophy, that evolution has no application beyond
phenomena and can have none, historic philosophy at
once gives its assent and its authority.^ The dispute
begins, only when the school of evolution goes on to
place the whole of human or other living nature in the
realm of the phenomenal, denying to the living, even
as a psychic being, any noumenal reality of its own,
and treating even the human person as a mere form
in which, as in all other phenomena, the supersen-
sible Noumenon, one and sole, appears ; or, in other
words, as a mere manifestation or effect of the Nou-
menon, which is held by the school to be omnipres-
ent, immutable, immanent in all phenomena, indi-
visible and all-embracing, solitary and universal.
Beyond this point of agreement among all evolu-
tionists, agnostic and pantheistic alike, the dispute
opens further, and within the evolutionist school
^ Just as, at the same time, it condemns and discredits Positivism
for its attempt to ignore this fundamental distinction, essential to the
being of philosophy and expressive of the very nature of reason.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 1 5
itself, when those of the agnostic party go on to
declare that the Reality beyond phenomena — which
they insist exists as an " immutable datum of con-
sciousness " — must be regarded as permanently the
Unknowable. The dispute gets to its keenest when
they base this agnostic dogma on the claim that
nothing deserving the name of knowledge is attain-
able in any way except the method of natural
science. To this extravagant estimate of scientific
method, to the superficial philosophy of this method
which it implies, and to the consequent construing
of the Noumenon as unknowable, the pantheistic
idealists demur, and go on to vindicate the complete
knowableness of the Reality at the basis of experi-
ence by attempting to show Reason itself to be that
Reality, which as perfectly self-knowing must be per-
fectly knowable to reason in men. The issue thus be-
comes implacable between the agnostics and these
affirmative idealists ; and it is only just to say that
in the demurrer to the overestimate of natural
science and its method, in the criticism of the shal-
low analysis of the method, and in the protest
against the finality of agnosticism, historic philos-
ophy sides with these ^^/^j-z-theists. The agnostic
position, the largest historic view of philosophy would
say, is an unwarrantable arrest of the philosophic
movement of reason ; and its unjustifiable char-
acter appears in the fact, which can clearly be
l6 /iSSAi'S LV PHILOSOPHY
shown, that it involves at once a pctitio and a self-
contradiction.
This largest philosophy would no doubt also convict
pantheistic idealism of an undue arrest of reason ; but
its first concern is to approve the protest of this
form of idealism against the assault on the power of
reason to reach absolute reality. It approves, too,
when this idealism criticises the agnostic interpreta-
tion of the method of science, as a shallow analysis of
what the method presupposes. Still, its condemna-
tion of pantheism, even when pantheism is idealistic,
is unyielding, and renders its discredit of the logic
employed by agnosticism only the more inexorable.
Its justification in both of these adverse judgments
will be our main occupation for the rest of this essay,
but our first attention must go to what it declares
against agnostic evolutionism. And let us turn, first
of all, to the proof that this agnosticism, as just
alleged, involves a self-contradiction and a begging
of the question.
If it were indubitable that we can only know what
our inner and outer senses tell us, — only the facts of
present and past experience, — then " it needs must
follow as the night the day " that we can know only
phenomena, and that the noumenal Reality behind
phenomena must remain forever unknowable. But to
say, even with deep Tennyson (God save the mark ! ),
that "we have but faith," that "we cannot know," that
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 17
"knowledge is of things we see," is to dogmatise in
the very premises of the debate, and to raid upon the
central matter at issue. The question whether we
have not some knowledge independent of any and
all experience — whether there must not, unavoid-
ably, be some knowledge a priori, some knowledge
which we come at simply by virtue of our nature —
is really the paramount question, around which the
whole conflict in philosophy concentrates, and on the
decision of which the settlement of every other ques-
tion hangs. To cast the career of a philosophy upon
a negative answer to it, as if this were a matter of
course, — which the English school from Hobbes on-
ward has continually done, — is to proceed not only
upon a pctitio, but upon a delusion regarding the
security of the road.
This placid and complacent delusion might far more
fitly be called an ignoratio elenchi — an " overlooking
of the thumbscrew" — than the fallacy which actu-
ally has that name ; for those who entertain it are
blind to the snare laid for them in the very struc-
ture of that experience on which they build their
doctrine, and risk unawares the thumbscrew pre-
pared by Kant. He suggested that experience may
be not at all simple, but always complex, so that the
very possibility of the experience which seems to the
empiricist the absolute foundation of knowledge may
depend on the presence in it of a factor that will
iS ESSAYS /A' PHILOSOPHY
have to be acknowledged as a priori. This factor
issues from the nature of the mind that has the
experience, ami introduces into experience all that
distinguishableness, that arrangedness, and that de-
scribable form, without which it could not be con-
ceived as apprehensible or intelligible, that is, as
an experience at all.
The almost surprisingly happy thought of Mr.
Spencer and his school at this juncture — to turn the
flank of Kant and his " pure reason " by applying
the conception of evolution to the origin of ideas,
and thus explaining a priori knowing away — does
not do the work it was contrived for. It is certainly
adroit to say that cognitions which in us human
beings are felt as irresistible, as if part of the nature
of things and incapable of change or of alternative,
are simply the result in us of transmitted inheri-
tance ; that our remote ancestral predecessors had
these cognitions at most as associations only habit-
ual, regarding which no incapability of exception was
felt, and that our feeling them as necessities is
merely the result of their coming to us through gen-
eration after generation of successive ancestors,
handing on their accumulated associations in ever
increasing mass and cohesion. But this clever
stroke cannot get rid of Kant's suggestion, that in
order to the solidifying of associations in any con-
sciousness there must be some principle — some
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 19
spring — of association, of unification, of synthesis,
in that consciousness itself. Nor can anybody
merely by the suggestion of a counter-theory, how-
ever plausible, dispose of those profound and pene-
trating arguments of Kant's by which the great
Konigsberger shows Time and Space, for instance,
to be a priori, and exposes the fact that every
attempt to explain them as generalisations from
experience must tacitly assume them already opera-
tive in the very formation of the experiences from
which the generalisation is made. Without them,
Kant's point is, the thinker could not make use of
the experiences to generalise to them ; he must have
had them, and in forming experiences employed them
already, in order to his having i7i the experiences the
requisite characters on which to rest and support
the generalisation.
The theory that the synthetic processes in our
human consciousness are merely associations of
habit, Hume, to be sure, construed as referring to
each single mind only ; and Kant's force in replying
to him might at first seem owing to this neglect of
the evolutional series in which experiences really
run. But adding the vast enginery of asonic evolu-
tion to Hume's views really does nothing toward
removing that weighty and piercing objection of
Kant's. For even supposing all other cases con-
ceded, whatever seeming necessity of other ideas
20 ESS^tyS IX PHILOSOPHY
evolution and heredity might be assumed to explain,
the attempt to explain by them the origin of our con-
sciousness of Time must fall under the ban of Kant's
saying. Time is presupposed in any association of
sensible items at all ; myriadfold is it presupposed
in the ever accumulating, ever consolidating associa-
tions in the drift of evolution. It is the indispen-
sable presupposition of our even figuring to ourselves
the process of evolution, and it cannot have been
transmitted to us except by having previously been
acquired somewhere among our progenitors, more or
less remote. When did it enter the streavi of evolu-
tion, and how ?
Strive as one may, there is no escape from Kant's
implication that not even evolution ^ can produce
Time in our consciousness — the perception of the
infinite possibility of succession. For Time is the
necessary presupposition without which evolving con-
sciousness could not have the groupings of succes-
sion, hardening evermore, that are supposed to lead
slowly on to the consciousness of Time as a neces-
sary and immutable condition of experience. There
is for the evolutionist no escape from Kant's
1 Even the cosmic conception of evolution was perfectly familiar
to Kant. In fact, Kant was the first to expound it in grand detail
(in his Universal History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens'), and
he therefore cannot have failed to include it mentally in his sweeping
assertion that there is a vicious circle in every attempt to found our
consciousness of Time on generalisation.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 21
clutches, except he maintain either that succession
can exist without Time, or else that Time is per se
itself a thing, instead of a relating-principle for
things. If he take the former alternative, he falls
into Kant's cUvich more hopelessly than ever, for he
will have to tell what, in that case, succession intel-
ligibly is. If he take the latter, he will recede into
antiquated metaphysics, which talks about existence
per se, out of all relation to minds, and which, at any
rate in respect to the nature of Time, received its
quietus in Kant's TTanscendcntal Esthetic.
The cautious thinker, then, who would estimate the
value of agnostic evolutionism in the light of the his-
tory of philosophical discussion, will join in the ver-
dict that the current philosophy of evolution is guilty
of the fallacy of petitio when it offers its argument
for the Unknowable as if it were a proof conclusive.
The argument rests on a parti pris in the funda-
mental dispute in philosophy, especially in modern
philosophy, and so leaves in the air the whole system
built upon it. A much more serious matter is, that by
its neglect of Kant's profound and hitherto unrefuted
considerations, and by disregarding the presumption
thus established in favour of the opposing view,
agnosticism draws upon itself the discredit of philos-
ophising somewhat in the dark, and not in the wide
daylight of entire historic thought. Far from being
the conclusive truth which its tone of so confident
22 F.SS.nS I.V rniLOSOPHY
propagandism would imply, and which the throng of
its generally intelligent but inexpert readers are prone
to take for granted, the agnostic system appears to
the critical student of philosophy as logically an open
question at best.
The self-contradiction of agnosticism — to pass now
to its second alleged defect — is a characteristic which
it shares in common with other philosophies that fall
short of a view completely comprehensive. The self-
contradiction comes out in a peculiar way, particularly
interesting for the critical history of thought. It
may be made apparent as follows. The system main-
tains at once the two propositions, (i) that all know-
ledge is founded wholly on sense-perception, physical
or psychic, and is consequently restricted to the ob-
jects and items of experience, that is, to phenomena
merely ; and (2) that the Reality beyond phenomena
is nevertheless an immutable datum of consciousness,
that is, an unquestionable certainly, or, in equivalent
words, a matter of unqualified knowledge. In short,
it is maintained that we can only know by means of
sense, and yet can really know that the supersensible
exists ; that our cognitive powers are confined to the
field of phenomena, and yet that they somehow pene-
trate beyond that field sufficiently to know that a
Noumenon is real. We are naturally led to ask. By
what strange power is this feat accomplished } — by
what criterion of truth is this certainty tested } Of
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 2%
course it cannot be by sense, for the object is super-
sensible ; how, then, is it managed ? We get this
answer : We know the truth that the Unknowable
exists, by the criterion of all truth, namely, the " in-
conceivability of the opposite." But if this criterion
really says anything in support of genuine certainty,
it says that a pure conception of the mind, going
quite beyond the literal testimony of sense, is objec-
tively valid, in and of itself.
Manifestly, the only way of escape from this very
awkward conclusion, so plainly contradictory of the
prime thesis that our knowledge rests on sense alone
and is confined to things of sense, is to say that in-
conceivability means nothing but the incapacity yN\\\z\i
limited experience begets in us — our impotence to
think beyond the bounds built for us by the accumu-
lated pressure of hereditary impressions. But here,
if we would maintain the empiricist theory of know-
ledge in its consistent integrity, we are confronted
with two difficulties : ( i ) How can impotence to pass
the limits of experience suddenly be transformed into
power to pass them and pierce to a Noumenon, even
as barely existent } (2) How can our incapability of
conceiving the opposite of existence for the Noume-
non mean anything more than that we are so hemmed
in by the massed result of our sense-impressions as
to be incapable of releasing our thoughts from their
mould t — that we must think as sense compels us,
24 /':ssAVS Lv PHILOSOPHY
and arc unable to tell whether the thinking means
anything more than its own occurrence, or not? Con-
strued with rigorous consistency, then, the existence
of a noumenal Unknowable as "an immutable datum
of consciousness" turns out to mean nothing but this :
That our conceptions arc built for us in such irresist-
ible fashion we cannot help supposing there is such a
Noumenon ; but whether a genuine Reality answers to
this helpless thought, there is nothing to indicate.
There thus comes to light a more secret and more
deeply constitutional contradiction in this agnostic
scheme — the contradiction between the merely evo-
lutional origin of our power of thought and the reality
of that Unknowable from which the system derives its
main agnostic motif. Here we learn, if we attend to
what the situation means, that we cannot affirm an
absolute Reality and then stop short, with the result
of leaving it entirely vacuous and blank. If we can
trust our conceiving powers or our judgment in the
transcendent act of asserting the reality of the Nou-
menon, why should we be smitten with sudden dis-
trust of these supersensible powers when we come
to the problem of knowing the nature of this tran-
scendent Being 1 Surely there ought to be shown
some justification for this arrest of the transcending
cognition, this apparently arbitrary discrimination
between one of its acts and other possible similar
acts. It will not do to plead here that the Noumenon
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 2$
is />er sc supersensible, but that the reach of our
conceptive powers, on the contrary, is limited to the
world of sense. If we assume that our cognising
the existence of the Noumenon is anything more
than an illusion, we have already granted to one
of our conceptions the privilege of overstepping this
limit.
Thus at every turn the inherent inconsistency and
inner contradiction lurking in the evolutional explana-
tion of mind, with its consequent doctrine of mental
limitation, comes into light. The noumenal change-
less Energy, incessant and ubiquitous, is rightly felt
by Mr. Spencer and his school to be indispensable to
the explanation — yes, to the very existence — of evo-
lution. Without it no new form could arise among
phenomena ; nor could there be such a fact as varia-
tion of species in response to varying environment,
or as natural selection resulting from a struggle for
existence. In short, the Unseen Power must be a
certainty, if evolution is to be, and is to work ; yet
when evolution exists, when it works with the un-
bounded sweep desired, and mind becomes its prod-
uct, then mind can have no faculty by which to
reach the certainty of an Unseen Power, since con-
sciousness is then reduced to sense alone, to sense-
perceptions and abstractions from them.
In this impotence of the principle of evolution to
cross the break between the phenomenal and the
26 /iss.-ns IN riiiLosornY
noumcnal, displayed, as it is, in such an aj)parcl of
contradictions and assumptions, the philosophic
range of evolution finds its First Limit.
II
Passing to our second question, we ask : Can evo-
lution be made validly continuous throughout the
world of pJioiovioia? Here we speedily become
aware tliat it cannot have even this compass, except
at the cost of u}idcrgomg a cJiange of ineajiiiig in kind.
The primary meaning of evolution is the meaning
proper to the world of living beings, in which it had
its first scientific suggestion, and where alone its
scientific evidences are found. But biological evolu-
tion— the only evolution thus far known to science
— means not only logical covi\x^^xxi\X^J , or resemblance
for observation and thought, but also likeness due
to descent and birth ; due to a physiological com-
munity, through the process of reproduction. It
is directly dependent on the generative function,^
and its native meaning is lost when we pass the
boundaries of the living world. What is it to mean
when it has lost its first and literal sense .-• What
is the continuous thread by which a unity of develop-
ment is to hold, not only among living beings, but
also among those without life, since it cannot any
longer be physiological descent ? How is this
^ Either sexual or asexual (by fissure, etc.), as the case may be.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 2/
chasm, that now comes into view between the inor-
ganic and the organic, to be bridged ?
Empiricist principles would fain bridge it with some
element of sensible experience, by some hypothesis
made in terms of such experience alone. There is
no hypothesis of this kind, however, but that of
"spontaneous generation," — whatever this handy
phrase may mean. This hypothesis historic philos-
ophy and recent science alike correctly designate
as a generatio ceqiiivoca, and they show that all the
indications of careful biology are steadily more and
more against the assumption which it covers. The
loaical march of the notion Evolution here suffers
a certain arrest ; the thread of continuity disappears
from the region recognised by agnosticism as.veri-
fiably known, and it seems to vanish into something
unknowable. We instinctively ask, as we before
asked about the unknowable Noumenon, Why should
we believe that such a continuity exists at all .'' How
can there be any evidence of its actuality, if there
is no real evidence but the evidence of experience .''
In this break between the inorganic and the organic,
evolution, as a principle of such continuity as philo-
sophic explanation requires, finds its Second Limit.
Ill
On the other hand, the recognition of continuity
in some sense or other — a logical or intelligible
28 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
resemblance, and a continued progression of resem-
blance, among all the parts of the inorganic world,
and between the parts of the inorganic and those
of the organic too — is to our mental nature
irresistible. What is the true sense in which
the reality of this continuous connexion ought
to be taken ? Some explanation of it is for our
intelligence imperative. It cannot mean literal
descent by physiological generation ; it cannot be
by reproduction through sap or through blood.
What, then, can it mean — what alone must it mean .-'
Inexplicability by anything merely sensible — even
psychic, when this is taken simply as the sensibly
psychic — here shows up plainly. If the notion of
continuous genesis is to be made apprehensible to
our understanding, if it is not to vanish into some-
thing utterly obscure and meaningless, the meaning
for it must be sought and found in some mode of
mind — of i?«r mind — quite other than the mode of
sense. But such a mode the agnostic interpretation
of evolution, and, reciprocally, the evolutional inter-
pretation of mind as originating out of non-mind,
necessarily denies.
At this juncture, then, where a new break is
discovered, — the break between physiological and
logical genesis, — the philosophical reach of evolu-
tion betrays its Third Limit.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 29
IV
The preceding result is recognised — in fact, is
proclaimed — by agnostic evolutionism itself, in its
tenet of an Omnipresent Energy, whose existence
it maintains as a certainty, but whose nature it
declares inscrutable. This inference of some neces-
sary noumenal Ground is the deep trait in Mr.
Spencer's doctrine, answering to the true nature
of the philosophic impulse, and constituting the
profoundest claim of his scheme to the title of a
philosophy. But the dogma that the nature of this
Ground is past finding out really means that the uni-
versal resemblance among phenomena of every order
— the mysterious kinship, not only of the inorganic
and the organic, but of the entire physical, and
physiological world and the psychic world — must
be accepted as a dead and voiceless fact, a " final
inexplicability," as Stuart Mill used to say. But
surely philosophy means explanation, else it is not
philosophy; surely, too, a "final inexplicability"
does not explain. While, then, historic philosophy,
disallow as it may their theory of knowledge, goes
heartily along with Mr. Spencer and his school
in their metaphysics thus far, it declines to arrest
its progress with them here, and pronounces that
in the Something at the heart of universal phenome-
nal resemblance, still to be explained, but by their
30 jiSs.irs IX riiii.osoPHY
form of evolutionism confessedly inexplicable, evolu-
tion as an explanatory principle comes upon a fatal
check.
In this self-confessed inability to supply any final
explanation of the great fact upon which its own
movement rests, evolution as a principle of philoso-
phy, that is, of thorough explanation, exposes its
Fourth Limit. There is a bottomless chasm be-
tween the Unknowable and the Explanatory.
V
When the philosophic progress has arrived at this
point, however, its further pathway becomes evident,
and consistent thought will discover what this limit-
ing Something is. It may provisionally be called,
correctly enough, the Omnipresent Energy; it might
well enough be called by the apter and still less
assumptive title of the Continuous Copula. We
can now determine the real nature of this undefined
Something ; and I say its nature purposely, and with
the intention of discriminating ; for our immediate
settlement will only be in regard to its kind, and
not as to the specific being or beings, amid a pos-
sible world of noumena, in which that kind is pre-
sented. We cannot, by our next philosophic advance,
determine forthwith whether the being having the
nature referred to is the absolutely Ultimate Being
of that kind ; but the kind may be ultimate, even
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 3 1
though the being be not so. It will be an impor-
tant step, however, if we can show now what the
nature of the yet undetermined Copula is. More-
over, it will at once appear in what being, known
to us, the proximate seat of that nature is — the
seat first at hand, relatively to the connexion be-
tween the parts and species of Nature, and to the
evolutional character which that connexion undeni-
ably wears.
It is a common characteristic of most philosophies
that they proceed somewhat precipitately with the
act of noumenal or metaphysical inference, and,
passing human nature forgetfully by, leap at once
to the being of what they call the Absolute Reality,
and to the determination of the nature belonging
to that. This is like settling the nature and reality
of the landscape while ignoring the nature and ex-
istence of the eye that sees it and in truth gives
it being, or helps to give it being. Not the Abso-
lute Being, not the Absolute Mind, or God, which
the reality of evolution may finally presuppose, but
rather mind as a nature or kind, and, proximately,
mind in man, as the immediate and direct expres-
sion of the Copula whose nature we seek to know,
must be the first and unavoidable Reality reached
by metaphysical cognition.
That this is the accurate truth will become appar-
ent by analysing the conception of evolution and
32 ESSAYS LV PIIILOSOPIIY
noting in the result the conditions essential to the
conception if it is to be taken as a real principle
as wide as the universe of possible phenomena. It
will readily become evident that the elements unit-
ing in the notion Evolution are the following :
(i) Tivtc and Space. — The conception of evolu-
tion is a serial conception, relating only to a world
of items arranged in succession, or else in contiguity
more or less close, or more or less remote. But
Time and Space are the media without which this
seriality essential to evolution could neither be per-
ceived nor thought.
(2) Change and Progression. — Evolution is not a
static but a dynamic aspect of phenomena. Under
evolution, the items in the time-series and the space-
series are viewed as undergoing perpetual change ;
and not simply change, but change that on the
whole is marked by stages of increase in complexity
and diversity of being, so that the world of phe-
nomena, as a whole, is conceived as gradually attain-
ing a greater and greater fulness and richness of
life. The expert in biology would very rightly tell
us that the "ascent of life" is extremely irregular;
that there is decline and decadence as well as
growth and aggrandisement. But even the biologist
finds the persistent ascent in life when life is re-
garded in the large, in the range from the lowest
plant to the highest animal, and through the series
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 33
of the great genera within these kingdoms. And
when we take the still larger view of cosmic evolu-
tion, this element of progression or ascent becomes
the central one in the conception.
(3) Causation. — This would be better described as
Natural Causation or Physical Causation, in order to
distinguish it, by an apt term, from another element
which, we shall presently see, enters into evolution,
and which we should correspondingly name Metaphysi-
cal or Supernatural ^ Causation. The causation we
are considering now is directly involved in evolution
by the preceding elements of Change and Progres-
sion, We should mean by it the Mechanism, the
Chemism, or the Association, involved in the changes
of phenomena. The habit of popular speech and
surface thought is to regard and describe causa-
tion as a process by which one phenomenon ',' pro-
duces " another. But an exacter thought states the
two as simply in a certain relation, the relation of
Cause and Effect. In this light, causation holds
both in physical and psychical succession, and means
a certain connexion or nexus between phenomena.
The philosophy of evolution most current, based on
the dogma of the sense-origin of all knowledge, and
on the sole and final efficiency of the method of
^ The reader is warned that in interpreting this word in the present
volume, he must divest himself of all its magical and thaumaturgical
associations. It means nothing but supersensible, rational, or ideal.
34 £SSAyS IX PHILOSOPHY
science, unanalyscd to its true presuppositions, con-
sistently interprets this connexion into the merely
regular succession of the past — a sequence merely
dc facto ; but if we thoroughly consider what is
logically presupposed in scientific method as actually
used by the competent, we shall readily see that it
should be interpreted as necessary and irreversible
succession, a sequence inevitable forever. For the
vital process in scientific method is induction, or
generalisation ; and the secret of it, as actually em-
ployed in scientific practice, lies in taking observed
successions in phenomena, and when with the help
of the various methods of precision — agreement,
difference, joint agreement, concomitant variation
— they are brought to represent exactly what occurs,
then suddenly giving to these merely historical suc-
cessions the value of universal laws, having a pre-
dictive authority over the future in perpetnum.
If in this process there is always a cautious reserve
in the mind of the practised and sedate man of
science, — as indeed there is, — the reserve has no
reference to the amazing final act of generalisation :
all the anxieties of the expert are about the pre-
cision of his facts. His instinctive assumption
about the generalisation is, that, when once the
particulars are settled, this process takes place of
itself, is matter of course, is resistless and flawless :
if there is error anywhere in the scientific proced-
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 35
lire, it is in the observations and experiments, or
in the sifting and correcting of them by the methods
of precision. The moment we are satisfied that
our particulars are exactly settled, that moment the
generalisation becomes irresistible, and we declare
that a law of Nature is disclosed.
But now the crucial question is on us : What prompts
and supports the generalisation? It cannot be just
the facts ; for, simply by themselves, they can mean
nothing but themselves. What is it, then ? The
implication is not to be escaped : the ground of
every generalisation is added in to the facts by the
generalising mind, on the prompting of a concep-
tion organic in it. This organic conception is, that
actual connexions between phenomena, supposing
them to be exactly ascertained, are not simply
actual, but are necessary. The logic of induc-tion
thus rests at last on the mind's own declaration
that between phenomena there are connexions which
are real, not merely apparent, not simply phenome-
nal, but noumenal ; that the reality of such connex-
ions lies in their necessity, and that the processes
of Nature are accordingly unchangeable. But the
implication most significant of all in this tacit logic
is the indispensable postulate of the whole process ;
namely, that this necessity in the connexion of
phenomena issues from the organic action of the
mind itself The mind itself, then, if the processes
36 ESSAYS LV PHILOSOPHY
of science arc to be credited with the vahic of
truth, is the proximate seat of that nature for which
we are seeking as explanatory of what the Continu-
ous Copula really is. At next hand to Nature, our
mind itself — the mind of each of us — is that
Copula. This truth will become clearer as we pro-
ceed with the analysis of evolution.
(4) Logical Unity. — It is of course obvious that
evolution, like every other scheme of conception,
must have its parts conformed to the laws of logical
coherence, and that in this sense Logical Unity is
a factor in the very notion of evolution. But we can
now see that it is present there in a sense far pro-
founder and more vital. In fact, according to the
result of the preceding step in our analysis, Logical
Unity is simply the direct and manifest version of
Causation in terms of mind, which we just now came
upon as the authentic meaning of the causal Copula.
As the logic of induction sends us directly to the
organic or a priori activity of thought for a warrant
of science, and thus indicates mind to be the real
nature of the Omnipresent Energy, it now becomes
evident that the vague thread of kinship running
through all phenomena is the thread of logic, and
that the suggested common parentage of all is just
the parentage of thought. The unity of logic, the
unity of congruous conceptions, is the only unity
that joins by one unbroken tie the diverse forms of
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION ^y
the inorganic, the organic, and the psychic, and thus
spans all the breaks between mechanical, chemical,
physiological, and psychic genesis, by a continuous
logical genesis, and at the same time closes the
gap profound between the so-called Unknowable and
explanation.
The bond of kindred uniting all these beings and
orders of being, so contrasted and divergent, so
incapable of any merely natural or physical genera-
tion one from the other, is the inner harmony be-
tween the lawful members in a single intelligible
Plan, issuing from one and the same intelligent
nature. In short, the only cosmic genesis, the only
genesis that brings forth alike from cosmic vapour to
star, from star to planetary system, from mineral to
plant, from plant to animal, from the physiological
to the psychic, is the genesis that constitutes the life
of logic — the genesis of one conception from an-
other conception by virtue of the membership of
both in a system of conceptions organised by an all-
embracing Idea. This all-determining Idea can be
nothing other than the organic form intrinsic in the
self-active mind, whose spontaneous life of conscious-
ness creatively utters itself in a whole of conceptions,
logically serial, forming a procession through grada-
tions of approach, ever nearer and nearer, to the Idea
that begets them each and all. By this it becomes
plain that the theme of evolution, if it is to be indeed
38 £ss.iys IN r/fuosopHY
cosmic and reign in all phenomena, must have all its
previous elements — succession, contiguity, causal
connexion, generation (mechanical, chemical, physio
logical, and psychic) — translated upward into this
logical genesis. We have just seen that this has its
source in the mind's organic Idea, or primal self-
consciousness of its own intrinsic coherence, its own
variety in unity.
(5) Final Cause, or Ideality. — This, the mind's
consciousness of its own form of being as self-
conscious, — that is, spontaneously conscious and
spontaneously or originally real, — is the ultimate
and authentic meaning of causality. In the cause
as self-conscious Ideal, the consciousness of its own
thinking nature as the "measure of all things," — as
"source, motive, path, original, and end," — we at
length come to causation in the strictest sense,
Kant's Causality with freedom. It might happily be
called, in contrast to natural causation, supernatural^
causation ; or, in contradistinction from physical,
metaphysical causation. The causality of self-con-
sciousness— the causality that creates and inces-
santly re-creates in the light of its own Idea, and by
the attraction of it as an ideal originating in the self-
consciousness purely — is the only complete cau-
sality, because it is the only form of being that is
unqualifiedly free.
^ Again a warning against false associations with this word.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 39
Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at
the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full
and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the
cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond
of their law which in the mood of vague and inac-
curate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an
effect. More exactly, it is only a cause in the sense
in which every effect in its turn becomes a cause.
Still more exactly, it is the proximate or primary
effect of the creating mind ; within and under which
prime effect, and subject to its control as a sovereign
conception in the logic of creation, every other effect
— every phenomenon and every generic group of
phenomena — must take its rise, and have its course
and its exit. Throughout Nature, as distinguished
from idealising mind, there reigns, in fine, no causa-
tion but transmission. As every phenomenal cause
is only a transmissive and therefore passive agent, so
Nature itself, in its aggregate, is only a passive trans-
mitter. But because of its origin in the Final Causa-
tion of intelligence, its whole must conform to the
ideal that expresses the essential form of intelligent
being, and all its parts must follow each other in a
steadfast logical ascent toward that ideal as their
goal. Thus Teleology, or the Reign of Final Cause,
the reign of ideality, is not only an element in the
notion Evolution, but is the very vital cord in the
notion. The conception of evolution is founded at
40 ESSAYS LV PiriLOSOPIlY
last and essentially in the conception of Progress:
but this conception has no meaning at all except in
the light of a gOvil ; there can be no goal unless there
is a Beyond for everything actual ; and there is no
such Beyond except through a spontaneous ideal.
The presupposition of Nature, as a system undergoing
evolution, is therefore the causal activity of our Pure
Ideals. These are our three organic and organising
conceptions called the True, the Beautiful, and the
Good. They are the fountains, severally, of our
metaphysical and scientific, our aesthetic, and our
moral consciousness.^ They are the indispensable
presuppositions without which our judgment that
there is progress would be impossible : this judgment
once vacated, the reality and even the conception of
evolution alike disappear. Yet there is no existence
for them, and therefore no authority, except the
spontaneous putting of them by and in our thought.
Here we reach the demonstration that evolution not
only is a fact, and a fact of cosmic extent, but is a
necessary law a priori over Nature. ^ But we learn
at the same time, and upon the same evidence, that
it cannot in any wise affect the a priori self-con-
1 It must not be supposed, however, that they do not themselves
constitute a system, in which the Good is the organic principle, and
this itself the first principle of intelligence.
^ As is maintained also by Professor Joseph Le Conte. See his
Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 65. New York :
D. Appleton and Co., 1892.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 4 1
sciousness, which is the essential being and true
person of the mind ; much less can it originate this.
On the contrary, we have seen it is in this a priori
consciousness that the law of evolution has its source
and its warrant. Issuing from the noumenal being
of mind, evolution has its field only in the world of
the mind's experiences, — "inner" and "outer,"
physical and psychic ; or, to speak summarily, only
in the world of phenomena. But there, it is indeed
universal and strictly necessary.
In the light of the foregoing analysis, a thorough
philosophy would now move securely forward to the
conclusion that the Continuous Copula required in
evolution, the secret Active Nexus without which it
would be inconceivable, is at nearest inference the
spiritual nature or organic persotiality of man himself}
Whether there is not also involved a profounder, an
absolute Impersonation of that nature, to be called
God, is a further and distinct question, legitimate no
doubt, but not to be dealt with till the ivnnediatc
^ The reader will notice that all the argumentation which follows
really proceeds upon the tacit implication that this intelligent nature is
not limited to man, but is, in whatever degree of phenomenal mani-
festation, common to all living beings. It is stated in terms of human
nature, first, because, as brought out below, it is the human being who
raises the question here argued, and argues it ; and, secondly, be-
cause in man alone do we come by the path of experience upon its
rounded Type.
42 JUSSAVS LV PHILOSOPHY
requirements of tlie lo^ic in the situation are met.
Tlicse requirements point us, first and unavoidably,
to the intelligence immanent in the field of evolution,
the intelligence of man and his conscious companions
on the great scene of Nature ; and, at closest hand of
all. — first of all, — to the typical intelligence of
man simply. The whole question, so far as any-
thing more than conjectural evidence is concerned,
is man's question : he is the witness to himself for
evolution ; in /lis consciousness, directly, and only
there, does the demand arise for an explanation of
it ; in himself he comes upon the nature of mind as
directly causal of the form in Nature — of the ideally
genetic connexion holding from part to part in it —
and of the reality of progress there as measured by
his ideals of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.
Here, now, we arrive at the point where we natu-
rally pass from the criticism of agnostic evolutionism
to that of pantheistic idealism, or Cosmic Theism.
We promised, you will recollect, to attend carefully
to what the fullest historic philosophy has to say in
judgment of this theory of the world as well as of the
other. We shall see that this world-view gains much
over the agnostic, and yet that it falls short of the
explanatory ideal.
The commanding question, let us remember, is
whether the mind in the world, and preeminently the
mind of man, is only a phenomenon like the objects
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 43
it perceives in Time and in Space, or is transcen-
dently different from these, and noumenal. The
favourable significance of Cosmic Theism for man
and his supreme interests, and of every other species
of affirmative idealism, lies in its passing beyond
the agnostic arrest at the Omnipresent Energy, by
its recognition that the logic of evolution, as depicted
in such an analysis as we have just made, requires
in the Noumenon a self-conscious nature. This is
a step greatly human, because it opens somewhat
more widely than agnosticism, and certainly more
affirmatively, the chance for hope that the existence
of no conscious beings may fail of everlasting con-
tinuance and fulfilment. Yet it has also an unfavour-
able bearing on the highest human aspirations, not
only because it fails to reach immortality as an
assured and necessary truth, ^ but for the far graver"
reason that it decidedly tends to leave all individual
minds in the world of mere phenomena ; or, if it
permits them to be conceived of as sharing in abso-
lute reality, by being parts or modes of the Sole
Noumenon, deprives them by this very fact of that
real freedom which is essential to personality and
to the pursuit of a genuine moral ideal.^ It is there-
^ See Professor Royce in The Conception of God, pp. 322-326.
New York, The Macmillan Company, 1897.
2 For the thorough, if unwitting and unwiUing, acknowledgment of
this by a leading representative of this philosophy, see Professor Royce's
44 ESSAYS IX PiniOSOPIIY
fore all-important for true human interests that a
reality unqualifiedly noumenal shall be vindicated
not only to human nature, but to each particular
human mind. If the reasoning about to be cm-
ployed for this purpose should seem to the reader
to carry its conclusions widely beyond man, — as
wide as all conscious life, of which human conscious-
ness must now be regarded as only the completed
Type, — I know no reason why men should hesitate
at this, or grudge to living beings whose phenomenal
lives are at present less fulfilled than their own the
chance for larger existence that imm.ortality and
freedom give. But let us come to the argument.
Reverting to our analysis, we may now clearly
see that the elements essential to evolution are
simply the elements organic in the human mind.
Evolutional philosophy, of whatever form, teaches
that these elements — Time, Space, Causation, Logi-
cal Unity, Ideality — arc, in the human mind, the
results of the process of evolution. The agnostic
evolutionist holds that they are gradually deposited
there through associations ever accumulating in the
long experience of successive generations, until at
length they become in us practically indissoluble,
though theoretically not. The pantheistic idealist
discussion of this question in The Conception of God, pp. 292 f., 305 f.,
315 mid. (where the last sentence, if logically legitimate, would read,
"The antinomy is \noi\ solved"), and 321, cf. the foot-note.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 45
penetrates behind the associations, to explain their
possibility and their origin by his doctrine that the
rational elements have their seat, not directly in the
mind of each man, but in the eternal and universal
Mind to which he gives the name of God. In
neither view is a priori consciousness admitted in
the individual person as individual, nor in the human
mind at all, as specifically human. In fact, by the
associative agnostic method, which would build these
elements up outright in the course of evolution from
what seems to be their assumed non-existence, they
are all put as if explicable by evolution. But as our
analysis has shown, they are all, on the contrary,
prerequisites to the existence of evolution as well as
to our conceiving of it. Legitimately, they are like-
wise inexplicable by the pantheistic method of seat-
ing them a priori in God, to be thence gradually
imparted to minds as they are slowly created by
the process of psychic evolution ; for this ignores
the fact that a priori cognition, by virtue of its
pertinent proofs, is an act in the mind of each par-
ticular conscious being, be the development of the
mere experience of such being as low as it may.
The proper interpretation of a priori consciousness,
at the juncture where it is established, is at most,
and at next hand, as a human, not a divine, original
consciousness, and, indeed, as a consciousness inte-
rior to the individual mind.
46 ESS.iVS LV PHILOSOPHY
As for the proofs of a priori consciousness in us,
these have perhaps been clearly enough given in the
analysis by which it was shown that the several ele-
ments are prerequisite not only to the conception of
evolution, but to our human experience itself, and to
the system of Nature into which they organise that
experience. This is the case, at any rate, with all the
elements except Time and Space, and is emphatically
so with the most important conditions of tlic notion
Evolution, namely, the Pure Ideals ; and, among these,
preeminently with the Moral Ideal. But as a diffi-
culty about the a priori or ideal character of Time
and Space disturbs many minds, it may be necessary
in part to restate what has already been said in proof
of the ideality of Time, and to reinforce this by
certain new points. I speak only of Time, because
the same reasoning, obviously, must also apply to
Space.
The necessarily a priori nature of Time can be
shown, even should we grant for the sake of argu-
ment that the dispute over hereditary transmission
of acquired characters, now going on in the school
of evolution between the Spencerians and Weismann,
were decided in favour of the former, and that trans-
mission were a fact. For transmission of acquired
habit can never explain the infinity and necessity of
Time. Nor can this infinity and necessity be explained
away by the theory that it arises from a confusion of
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 47
conceptions — of infinity with mere indefiniteness, and
of necessity with mere subjective inability to get rid of
a hardened habitual association. These properties of
Time, taken, too, in their unrestricted meaning, are
unreservedly true by Mr. Spencer's own criterion —
the "inconceivability of the opposite."
Moreover, as pointed out near the beginning of the
present essay, they are conditions precedent to form-
ing any habitual association at all. It is just in
thinking all these elements in an active originating
Unit-thought, or an " I," that the essential and
characteristic nature of man or any other real intelli-
gence consists. Such an originating Unit-thinking,
providing its own element-complex of primal thoughts
that condition its experience, and that thus provide
for that experience the form of a cosmic Evolutional
Series, is precisely what an intelligent being is. Thus
creatively to think and be a World is what it means
to be a man. To think and enact such a world merely
in the unity framed for it by natural causation, is
what it means to be a "natural " man ; to think and
enact it in its higher unity, its unity as framed
by the supernatural causation of the Pure Ideals,
supremely by the Moral Ideal, is what it means to
be a " spiritual " man, a moral and religious man ; or,
in the philosophical and true sense of the words, a
supernatural being — a being transcending and yet
including Nature, not excluding or annulling it.
48 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
Evolution itself, then, and not evolutional philoso-
phy merely, in finding in this rational nature of every
mind its proximate source and footing, finds there
its Final Limit.
VI
We have here reached the proof that what is most
distinctively meant by Man is not, and cannot be, the
result of evolution. Man the spirit, man the real
mind, is not the offspring of Nature, but rather Na-
ture is in a great sense the offspring of this true
Human Nature. As we have seen, the only thing
that can overspan all the breaks which evolution must
pass if it is to be a cosmic principle, is idealising
thought — the humane nature, in its highest, largest
sense. It is this that adds in to the chaotic insignifi-
cance of the mere mass of things the lofty theme of
ever-ascending Progress. Apart from this ideality,
there would be no cosmic order at all, no Manward
Procession. Yet, that the whole of Nature cannot be
referred to men alone, or to other conscious beings
directly on the scene of Nature ; that the existence
of an absolutely universal form of their nature is
required for her cosmic being, — this will not be de-
nied when our psychology is as exact and all-recog-
nising as it should be. Such a psychology will dis-
cover within the complex of experience, human or
lower, in addition to the system of a priori elements
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 49
that constitutes the core of intelligence, another com-
ponent. This other component, which Kant named
" sensation," to mark the fact that it expresses some-
thing incomplete in us, something which must be
supplemented to us by reception ^ from what is not
ourselves, is best interpreted as a limit which points
to the cooperation 1 of some other noumenal being
with men and other conscious centres. But when
once the conditioning relation is shown to exist from
man toward Nature, as the scene of evolution, instead
of from Nature toward man ; when once it is seen —
as Huxley, the protagonist of evolution, at last came
so clearly, if so unawares, to imply ^ — that in Con-
science at least, the ideal of Righteousness, man has
that which no cosmic process can possibly account for,
but to which, rather, the cosmic process presents an
aspect of unmistakable antagonism, then our way will
come open to determine the cooperating Noumenon,
the Supreme Reality, as also having this higher
human nature, as having it in its ideal perfection, and
iThe reader should beware not to interpret these terms " reception "
and " cooperation " literally, that is, in the light of ordinary natural or
efficient causation only, as it is our bad uncritical habit to do. Their
genuine interpretation must be by means oi final cause. But see the
essay on " The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom," pp. 332-351.
2 See his Romanes Lecture on " Evolution and Ethics," in his Col-
kded Essays, vol. ix ; especially pp. 79-S4, and Note 20. In these
pages and in this Note, their great author holds out for the inclusion of
Conscience, in some vague way, in the evolutional process as a v/hole ;
but he has demonstrated an antagonism that is fatal to the hypothesis.
50 ESSAYS IX PHILOSOPHY
we shall have found the entrance to the path toward
the demonstration of God. For the survey and the
tracing of that path, this is neither the place nor
the occasion.^
VII
Let us turn back now to the point struck upon
near our beginning, — to the question, Is evolution
consistent with the Christian religion ? It is a trite
question now, perhaps overworn ; and probably very
many readers think that it is already settled in the
affirmative. Yet it is a question of the utmost
pertinence, and ought to be pushed to a decisive
but discriminating answer. There are those who
are only too ready with an answer decisive enough,
but unfortunately they are of two opposed extremes.
Both parties are of one mind as to the incompati-
bility of Christianity and evolution ; but while the
one says that all evolution must therefore be anath-
ema, the other jeeringly retorts, " So much the
worse, then, for your religion ! " And the loose
verdict of the times is doubtless in favour of what-
ever can be made to appear as the cause of sci-
ence. The trouble with such disputants is, that
their assertions are far more decided than discrimi-
nating, and so are not in any final sense decisive.
We may justly claim, however, that the outcome of
^ For one form of the argument here alluded to, see pp. 351-359, below.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 5 1
our inquiry into limits enables us to answer this
question with the definite discrimination required.
This outcome shows us the narrow limits of evolu-
tion as a doctrine of unpretending science. Still
more significantly, it brings out the unavoidable
limits of evolution as a philosophy, as regards the
origin of man and the nature of the eternal crea-
tive Power. In short, it teaches us that the
answer to the question whether Christianity and
evolution are compatible, turns wholly on the stretch
that evolution has over existence, especially over
human nature.
But it is time we all understood how finally at
variance with the heart of Christian faith and hope
is any doctrine of evolution that views the whole
of human nature as the product of " continuous
creation," — as merely the last term in a process-
of transmissive causation. The product of such a
process could not be morally free, nor, consequently,
morally responsible. It must needs be merely a
mass of "inherited tendency"; and, howsoever fair
its effect might appear, no life of genuine dutiful-
ness, no life of goodness freely chosen, could enter
into its being. As a speculative possibility there
may be ways of conceiving man thus " continu-
ously created " and yet in such relations to the
Creator as would provide for his immortality, in
the sense merely of his everlasting duration ; Pro-
52 /wSSAVS IN PHILOSOPHY
fessor Le Conte has expounded some of them im-
pressively.^ It is doubtless with a view to such
conceptions that ministers of religion nowadays so
often say, "The evolution of man is well enough,
if biologists will only leave us a Personal God at
the beginning of the process." But that //, when
conjoined with that consequent, is an if of tragic
meaning : the Power behind evolution, were the
whole of man evolved, could never be a personal God
— in short, would not be a God at all. For it is
the essence of a person to stand in a relation with
beings having an autonomy, in whom he recognises
rights, toward whom he acknowledges duties. No
conception of a professed God that fails to give
this moral quality, can by providing continuance of
existence, however lasting, compensate for the loss;
since it should never be forgotten, that, when moral
freedom is cancelled, immortality can have no moral
worth, no genuinely human dignity, and consequently
cannot answer to what we mean by the hope of
Eternal Life. But hope of immortality as Life
Eternal and faith toward Duty — fealty to our hu-
man dignity as moral free-agents, quickened by
fealty to God as the grounding Type of that free-
dom— are the verv soul of Christian Faith. The
impartial philosophical observer cannot but be filled
^ See, especially, the statement in his contribution to The Concep-
tion of God, pp, 75-78.
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 53
with surprise, then, at seeing official teachers of
the Christian Rehgion so strangely oblivious of real
bearings as to accept — yes, sometimes proclaim —
an evolution unlimited with respect to man as con-
sistent with their faith. Plain in the doctrinal fir-
mament of every Christian, clear like the sun in
the sky, should shine the warning : Unless there
is a real man nndcrived from Nature, unless there
is a spiritual or rational man independent of the
natural man and legislatively sovereign over entire
Nature, then the Eternal is not a person, there is no
God, and our fiitJi is vai)i.
Doubtless, as I have already said, planting the
contrast between Christianity and evolutional phi-
losophy in this firm way, in itself settles nothing as
to which of the two is true. Indeed, responding to
the impression so strongly made by later sciencCj
one might well say that the onus probandi had been
shifted, and that the true form of the pressing
question should be. Is Christianity consistent with
evolution ? But the truth can never be settled
until issues are rigorously defined. And if our
inquiry in this essay has a solid result, it estab-
lishes the fact that evolution cannot have the uni-
versal sweep essential to a sufficient principle of
philosophy. The professed Philosophy of Evolution
is not an adult philosophy, but rather a philosophy
that in the course of growth has suffered an arrest of
54 Essjvs IN PHILOSOPHY
development. The result of our incjuiry here, in
making this plain, goes far toward settling the issue
between such j^hilosophy and the Christian belief
in personality. Does it not in fact settle it against
evolutionism, and in favour of the older and higher
view? Fulfilled philosophy vindicates our faith in
the Personality of the Eternal Cause, in the reality
of God, by vindicating the reality of man the Mind,
and exhibiting his legislative relation to Nature and
thence to evolution. It thus secures a stable footing
for freedom, and for immortality with worth, and
thereby for the existence of the Living God who
is Love indeed, because the Inspirer of an endless
progress in moral freedom.
Let men of science keep the method of science
within the limits of science ; let their readers, at all
events, beware to do so. Within these limits there
is complete compatibility of science with religion,
and forever will be. Let science say its untram-
melled say upon man the physical, the physiological,
or the experimentally psychological ; upon man the
body and man the sensory consciousness, — these are
all doubtless under the law of evolution issuing from
man the Rational Soul. But let not science contrive
its own destruction by venturing to lay profane
hands, vain for explanation, on that sacred human
nature which is its very spring and authorising
source. And let religion stay itself on the sover-
THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 55
eignty of fulfilled philosophy, on man the Spirit,
creative rather than created, who is himself the
proximate source of evolution, the cooperating Cause
and Lord of that world where evolution has its
course.
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM
In response to your invitation,^ I willingly take
part in discussing the question, Is pantheism the legiti-
mate outcome of modern science! While turning it
over for some months past, I have become more and
more convinced that any satisfactory answer to it
depends upon clearing up the meaning of its terms.
What is pantheism ? And what actual features in
modern science can give colour to the suspicion
that pantheism is its proper result ? Or if such a sus-
picion is well founded, what leads us to regard it with
a certain aversion ? If science establishes or clearly
tends to establish the pantheistic view, why should
this stir in us alarms ? Is there some secret hostility
to the interests of human nature in a pantheistic
^ The essay was read at the Concord School of Philosophy, July,
1885. Under the title "Is Modern Science Pantheistic?" it was
printed in the Overland Monthly, December, 1885, and reprinted, with
some slight changes, in ihe Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. xix.
No. 4, nominally for October, 1885, but not issued till the spring of
1886. It formed a member in a "symposium" to which the other
contributors were Mr. John Fiske, Dr. F. E. Abbot, Dr. A. P. Peabody,
Dr. Edmund Montgomery, and Dr. W, T. Harris. Mr. Fiske has pub-
lished his contribution in his well-known work. The Idea of God as
affected by Modern Knowledge ; and Dr. Abbot his, in his volume
called Scientific Theistn,
56
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 57
science ? Can there be antagonism between the
truth and the real interests of man ? — is not truth
our highest interest ? Or is truth of mere fact per-
chance not our highest interest? — is there perhaps
such a thing as gradation in truths, and an inward
truth that must be supreme for tis, but which yet
may be antagonised by the truths of Nature ? And
if our nature looks both to truths of fact and to
truths of worth, is there some ghastly gulf in our be-
ing?— are we the victims of a tragic chasm between
two indestructible wants of ours ? Or if again not
so, if deeper knowledge harmonises these wants, what
is this rational path to our peace ?
Your present question can hardly have for most
minds the interest which so directly belongs to the
question of Immortality, discussed by you last year ;
at least, not on its surface. Yet a study of it in
the detail of the subsidiary questions just stated will
not only secure the clearness needed for an intelli-
gent answer, but will bring to view how really deep
its interest is. It will show this to be no less pro-
found, while far more inclusive, than that of your
earlier problem. For this reason, I venture to
offer you the reflections that have passed in my
mind in the endeavour to clear up these more
detailed questions. These defining questions I
will ask you to consider with me in their proper
succession.
58 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
Of all the questions, perhaps none is surrounded
with more vagueness than the first — What /> pan-
theism ? The recognised defenders of religion, the
theologians who speak with the hoary authority and
the presumptive weight that naturally belong to his-
toric and instituted thmgs, are indeed in the habit
of drawing a sharp verbal distinction between theism
and pantheism, as they also do between theism and
deism ; but when the unbiassed thinker, anxious for
clearness and precision, inquires after the real dis-
tinction intended by these names, he hardly finds it
in any sense at once intelligible and reasonable. We
constantly hear that theism is contradicted by both
deism and pantheism : by deism through the asser-
tion of God's distinctness at the expense of divine
revelation and providence ; by pantheism through
the assertion of the divine omnipresence at the
expense of the distinctness of God from the world.
We hear constantly, too, that theism, to be real,
must teach that there is a being who is truly God :
that the Principle of existence is a Holy Person, who
has revealed his nature and his will to his intelligent
creatures, and who superintends their lives with a
providence which aims to secure their obedience to
his will as the only sufficient condition of their
blessedness. Yet all this is but an abstract and very
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 59
vague formula, after all. Of Jww the contradiction
whose extremes are represented by deism and pan-
theism is to be transcended and reconciled, it has
nothing to say. Hoiv the divine personality is to be
thought consistently with the divine omnipresence,
or Jioiv the omnipresent providence of God is to be
reconciled with his distinctness from the world, this
merely general proclamation of orthodox theism does
not show, and in itself has no power to show. When
we pass from the general formula to the attempted
supply of the desired details, we are too often made
aware that the doctrine professedly theistic is en-
cumbered with a mass of particulars profoundly at
variance with its own principle. We notice that
confusion or contradiction reigns where consistent
clearness ought to be ; that faultily anthropomor-
phic or really mechanical conceptions usurp the
place of the required divine and spiritual realities.
We too often discover, for instance, that every
doctrine is construed as deism which refuses its
assent to a discontinuous and special providence, or
to an inconstant, localised, and miraculous revelation.
On the other hand, we find every theory condemned
as pantheism that denies the literal separation of
God from the world and asserts instead his imma-
nence in it.i We find that in the hands of such
1 This apparent assent, en passant, to the expression of theism in
terms of immanence is liable to great misinterpretation ; but I think it
60 ASSAYS IN PJllLOSOrilY
interpreters theism is identified with belief in artifi-
cial theories of the qiiomodo of atonement, or, as such
writers arc fond of calling it, "the plan of salvation,"
— theories which in some way or other rest on tlie
merely legal conception of ethics, involving the quid
fro quo of a substitutive responsibility.
Into the place of the all-pervading providence and
all-transforming grace that makes eternally for right-
eousness, are set hypothetical schemes of expiation
by sacrifice, of appeasal by the suffering of the inno-
cent, of ransom by blood, of federal covenant and
imputation, of salvation by faith alone. Theories of
the divine nature and administration which omit
these details, or refuse to take them literally, are
stamped as deism or as pantheism, even though the
omission or refusal be dictated by a perception that
the rejected schemes are incompatible with the fun-
damental principles of ethics, and therefore with any
divine revelation and government at all. Thus, by
mere confusion of thought, or by inability to rise
above conceptions couched in terms of space and
best to leave the statement standing as originally written and printed,
and to guard the reader by a warning not to take the word " imma-
nence " literally. Most theories of the divine immanence are unques-
tionably pantheistic, and all that is meant in the text above is to indicate
there may be a way of conceiving immanence which would not be so.
But of this further, when we reach the point of settling the distinction
between genuine theism and pantheism. .See the foot-note on p. 74,
below, and the text corresponding. Cf. also pp. 61, 69, and 72.
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 6 1
time, the original theistic formula — which in its
contrasting of theism against deism and pantheism is
unobjectionable, and correct enough so far as it goes
— is brought in the end to contradict its own essen-
tial idea.
Still it must never be forgotten that these ill-
conceived efforts at the completer definition of
theism are made in behalf of a real distinction.
We shall find it true that there is a conception of
the world, for which deism may be a very proper
name ; and another, for which pantheism is the
only title really fitting. We shall see that they
are both radically distinct from theism, which may
be defined as the doctrine of a Personal God who
reveals himself by such an immanence in the world
as contributes to transform it into his own image
tJiroiigh the agencies of moral freedom ; a God
indwelling, as the central guiding Light, in a
realm of self-governing persons who immortally
do his will in freely doing their own, and fulfil
their own in doing his. Nor shall we fail to find
that the doctrines named deism and pantheism
are historic doctrines. They are not abstrac-
tions merely conceivable, but have been advocated
by actual men of a very real persuasion and a very
discernible influence. Neither can I doubt that
these two doctrines, in their deviations from the
theistic theory, will be recognised by our sound
62 £S;s.iys ix riiiLosoriiY
judgment as defective, and consequently be reck-
oned opinions injurious if taken as final.
But let us now ask in earnest what pantheism
exactly is. In beginning our answer, we may avail
ourselves of a useful clue in the structure of the
name itself. The derivation of this from the two
Greek words ttuv (all) and ^e'o? (God) would seem
to make it mean either (i) that the All is God, or
else (2) that God is all — that God alone really
and actively exists. The name, then, hints at two
quite different doctrines. It may signify cither
(i) that the total of particular existences is God,
in other words, that the universe, as we commonly
understand it, is itself the only real being; or (2)
that God, the absolute Being, is the only actively
real being — all particular existences are merely
his forms of appearance, and so, in truth, are either
illusions or have an aspect of illusion haunting
such partial reality as they possess. Of these
diverse doctrines we might convey now the one
and now the other by the name, according as we
pronounced it /<r?;/theism or pan///^ism. In either
way the word unavoidably covers an absolute iden-
tification of God and other being. In the first
way, God is merged in the universe ; in the second,
the universe is merged in God.
As a matter of history, too, pantheism has actu-
ally presented itself in these two forms. The doc-
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 63
trine has come forward in a great variety of
expressions or schemes of exposition, such as those
of HeracHtus, Parmenides, and the Stoics, in ancient
times, — not to speak of the vast systems lying at
the basis of the Hindu rehgions, — or as those of
Bruno and Vanini, Schelling, Oken, Schopenhauer,
and Hartmann, in our modern era.^ But various
as these schemes are, they may all be recognised
as falling into one or other of the two forms sug-
gested by the common name. The two forms, evi-
dently, may be respectively styled the atheistic and
the acosmic, as the one puts the sensible universe
in the place of God, and thus cancels his being ;
1 Tlie names of Plato and Aristotle, among the ancients, and of
Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel, among the moderns, are omitted from
this list because the question of their pantheism is with many still
in dispute. As to Plato and Aristotle, of course the dispute is well
founded, their position being more or less ambiguous, presenting a
struggle between pantheism and individualism; though my own
conviction now is that the drift of both is unquestionably panthe-
istic. At the time of writing the essay (1885), I still held the opin-
ion that an idealistic monism such as Hegel's was compatible with
moral freedom; the persuasion that theism involves such an imma-
nence of God in souls, more or less pervades the paper in its original
form. This explains still more pertinently why I then omitted the
names of Spinoza and Fichte from the list. I regarded Plato, Aris-
totle, Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel as forming a single growing but clear
tradition of genuine rational theism. I hardly need add, that in getting
convinced of the inconsistency of this whole tradition with moral free-
dom, I have changed my view both of theism and of the relation
borne to it by these noted thinkers. I should now list all of the
modern names among them as pantheists.
64 JiSSAVS IN PHILOSOPHY
while the other annuls the active reality of the
cosmos, or world of existences other than God, by
reducing these to modes of the one and only Uni-
versal Life.
Both forms are manifestly open to the criticism
visited upon pantheism by the standard defenders
of theism : they both contradict the essence of the
divine nature by sacrificing the distinctness of the
divine personality to a passion for the divine omni-
presence. The sacrifice of the distinctness is obvi-
ous, at any rate, even if such a loss of distinct being
is not so evidently incompatible with the true nature
of godhead ; though that this loss is incompatible
with real deity will erelong appear.
Further, both forms are in the last analysis
atheisms ; the one openly, the other implicitly so.
The one may be more exactly named a meta-
physical or theoretical atheism, as it dispenses
with the distinct existence of God in his office of
Creator ; the other may properly be called a moral
or practical atheism, as in destroying the freedom
and the moral immortality of the individual it can-
cels God in his greater office of Redeemer. Under
either form the First Principle is emptied of attributes
that are vital to deity. In the first, the entire dis-
tinct being of God disappears ; in the second, all
those attributes are lost that present God in his
adorable characters of justice and love, and in the
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 65
ultimate terms of his omniscience and omnipotence.
For genuine omniscience and omnipotence are only
to be realised in the control of free beings, and in
inducing the divine image in them by moral influences
instead of metaphysical and physical agencies : that is,
by final instead of efficiejit causation.
II
It will help us toward an exacter understanding
of pantheism to appreciate its relations to other
anti-theistic forms of philosophy, particularly to
materialism and to what is known as subjective
idealism. With this appreciation, it will become
clear that pantheism constitutes a synthesis of
thought higher than either of these theories. The
pantheistic conception of the world may indeed be
read off in either materialistic or idealistic terms,
but neither reading reaches its whole meaning.
Besides, the twofold reading holds good whether we
take pantheism in its atheistic or its acosmic form.
On a first inspection, to be sure, this double inter-
pretability hardly seems to be the fact. On the
contrary, one is at first inclined to identify atheis-
tic pantheism with materialism outright, and to
recognise in acosmic pantheism a species of Mys-
ticism or exaggerated spiritualism ; ^ hence, to con-
1 " Der pantheistischen Mystik isi wirklich Goit Alles, Dem gemeinen
Pantheism us ist alles Gott," — quotes Dr. Martineau from Rothe, very
significantly, in the title-page of his Spinoza.
66 ESS^IYS IN PHILOSOPHY
trast the two forms as the materialistic and the
idealistic. Nor does further reflection at once
disabuse us of this mistake ; for the seeming iden-
tity of atheistic pantheism with materialism is
very decided, and the only correction in our first
judgment that we next feel impelled to make, is
to recognise the ambiguous character of acosmic
pantheism. The Universal Substance, we then say,
in order to include an exhaustive summary of all
the phenomena of experience, must of course be
taken as both extending and being conscious ; but
is this Substance an extended being that thinks, or
is it a thinking being that apprehends itself under
a peculiar mode of consciousness called extension .-'
In other words, is the thinking of the Substance
grounded in its extended being, or has its exten-
sion existence in and through its thinking only .-*
Which attribute is primary and essential, and makes
the other its derivative and function } Under the
conception of the all-embracing existence of the
Absolute, this question is inevitable, irresistible —
will not down. According as we answer it in the
first or the second of the two suggested ways, we turn
the pantheism into materialism or into subjective
idealism.
It thus becomes plain that the acosmic form of
pantheism may carry materialism as unquestionably
as it carries idealism, though indeed not so naturally
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 67
or coherently.^ Still sharper inquiry at last makes
it equally clear, too, that atheistic pantheism will
carry idealism as consistently as it carries material-
ism, if doubtless less naturally. For although in
the sum-total of the particular existences there
must be recognised a gradation from such as are
unconscious up to those that are completely con-
scious, and it would therefore be the more obvious
step to read the series as a development upward
from atoms to mind, still the mystery of the transit
from the unconscious to the conscious cannot fail
to suggest the counter-hypothesis, and the whole
series may be conceived as originating ideally, in
the perceptive constitution and experience of the
conscious members of it. There is a marked dis-
tinction, however, between the idealism given by
acosmic pantheism and the idealism given by the
^ There might be added here, in connexion with acosmic pantheism,
a //iiV^ hypothesis — that, namely, of the simple "parallelism" or con-
comitance of the two attributes, extension and thought. This third hy-
pothesis would land us either (i) in agnosticism, as with Spencer, or (2)
in " absolute " idealism, as with Hegel, — in the Idee as the transcend-
ing synthesis of materialism and subjective idealism. We should thus
get two additional species of non-atheistic pantheism. [The real effect
of the preceding note is doubtless a criticism of the twofold division
in the text. The fact is, this division is a relic of the Hegelian mon-
ism by which the original paper was in one side pervaded ; but let it
remain standing, — in part as a piacular memorial! The exclusion of
" absolute " idealism from the list of pantheisms, meant the tacit as-
sumption that it had transcended pantheism. But see foot-note to
p. 74 below.]
68 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
atheistic. The idealism of acosmic pantheism,
grounded as it is in the consciousness of the Uni-
versal Substance, has naturally a universal and in
so far an objective character. The idealism of athe-
istic pantheism, on the contrary, has no warrant
except the thought in a particular consciousness,
now thi«, now that, and no means of raising this
warrant into a character even common to a class of
conscious beings, much less into unrestricted uni-
versality ; hence it is particular and subjective.
Pantheism, then, in both its forms, is not only a
more comprehensive view of the world than either
materialism or any one-sided idealism, inasmuch as
it provides a chance for both of them, but it is also
a deeper and more organic view, because it does
bring in, at least in a symbolic fashion, the reality
of a universal. This advantage, however, it does
not secure with any fulness except in its acosmic
form. Indeed, the atheistic form is so closely akin
to the less organic theories of materialism and sub-
jective idealism that we may almost say we do not
come to pantheism proper until we pass out of the
atheistic sort and get into the acosmic.
An additional gain afforded by pantheism, emi-
nently by the acosmic sort, is the idea of an inti-
mate union of the First Principle with the world of
particular beings : the creative Cause is stated as
spontaneously manifesting its own nature in its
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 69
creation ; it abides immanently in this, and is no
longer conceived as separate and tlierefore itself
limited in space and in time. This faulty concep-
tion of God as temporally and spatially conditioned,
characteristic of the cruder dualistic view of things
with which human efforts at theological theory
begin, is overcome by pantheism, at least in part.
But the pantheistic interpretation of immanence,
as will appear farther on, is itself very gravely de-
ficient : quite irreconcilable, in fact, with the con-
ditions of a genuine theism, or with those of a
genuine religion.
Ill
But the eminent merit of pantheism as contrasted
with deism, we have now reached the position to
see. By the name " deism " it has been generally
if tacitly agreed to designate that falling short of
theism which stands at the opposite pole from
pantheism. If pantheism is defective by confound-
ing God and the world in an unethical identity,
deism comes short by setting God in an isolated
and impassable separation from the world. Deism
thus falls partly under the same condemnation of
materiality that a rational judgment pronounces
upon sensuous theism, with its zoomorphic ^ con-
1 Falsely called " anthropomorphic," since the properly human form
of being is the rational, not the physiological, and the faulty " anthro-
70 ESii.ns rx r/f/Losornv
ceptions of a producing Creator, dwelling in his
peculiar quarter of space called Heaven, and its
mechanical theory of his coninuinication with the
world by way of "miracle" alone — by way, that
is, independent or even subversive of the process
from means to end in Nature.^
But while thus marred by mechanical limitations,
deism must be allowed its relative merit too. This
lies in the judgment it passes upon the mechanical
method of sensuous theism. If in the interest of
distinguishing the Creator from the creation, God
pomorphism " of which nowadays we hear so much complaint, consists
exactly in construing the nature and action of God in terms of our
sensuous life and its conditions.
^ I must be understood here as reflecting only upon the popular
thaumaturgical conceptions of the supernatural. The genuine doctrine
of miracle has a speculative truth at its basis, profound and irref-
ragable; namely, that the causal organisation of Nature — the system
of evolution, ever ascending from cause to differing effect — can never
be accounted for in terms of the sensible antecedents alone, but
requires the omnipresent activity of a transcendingly immanent per-
sonal cause; and that the system of Nature is therefore in this sense a
Perpetual Miracle. But the natural order flowing from this Intelligible
Miracle is immutable, and irreconcilable with " miracle " in the usual
sense. [I would now add (1899) that this immanent personal cause
is, at closest hand to Nature, human nature; or, more generally, the
intelligences other than God, in cooperation with the remoter and
quite indirect causality of God as their Type and Ideal. The operation
of the non-divine causation in Nature is alone direct and efficient; the
divine causation is indirect and final only. But see, for the fuller
account of this, the essays on " The Limits of Evolution " and " The
Harmony of Determinism and Freedom."]
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM y\
is to be thought as capable of existing without a
world, and as literally separated from the world in
time and space, then deism says it is purely arbitrary
to declare the separation overcome by means of
miracle. Consistency, and in so far rationality,
would rather require that the separation be kept
up ; and the folly of the zoomorphic dualism is
made to display itself in the deistic inference, which
such dualism cannot consistently refute, that divine
revelation and providence, without which the prac-
tical religion indispensable to the reality of theism
cannot have being, are by thio literal separateness
of the divine existence rendered impossible.
The comparative virtue of pantheism here, as
against deism and sensuous theism alike, is that it
transcends, in a certain sort at least, this mechanical
rigidity in divine relations. However faulty its way
of accomplishing this may be, — and we shall pres-
ently see this is indeed faulty, — it does us the
service of calling attention to the religious need of
cancelling this mechanical view ; and it habituates
our thoughts to an inseparable union and commun-
ion between God and the world. It teaches us the
great and lasting lesson, that the relation between
God and the world of souls is in nowise contingent
or temporal, but is necessary, essential, and eternal.
72 £SSAyS IN I'llILOSOPIIY
IV
Now we face the question, Why then is panthe-
ism regarded by so many with instinctive inhibition
— as if indeed a doctrine to avert? In coming to
this after what we have just discerned, we must
not neglect the fact that pantheism plays an in-
dispensable part in the forming of a genuine theistic
theory. It is the transitional thought by which
we ascend out of the idolatrous anthropomorphism
of sensuous theism into that rational and complete
theism which has its central illumination in the
comprehended truth of the Divine Omnipresence,
In the morally interpreted immanence of God in
the world, this completed theism finds the true
basis, the pure rational theory, of the divine per-
petual providence. In God's dwelling with the
society of spirits, as " the Light which lighteth
every man that cometh into the world," it finds
the rational basis for the universal and perpetual
divine revelation. Even this higher, this ethically
rational view of Divine Immanence, we must not
forget, has come to us through the suggestion in
the lower immanence taught in pantheism.
Indeed, in this suggested omnipresence of God, —
this indwelling of God in the world by the activity
of his image in the soul, — pantheism lays a founda-
tion for the rational conception of a Perpetual Incar-
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 73
nation, the doctrine of a Divine Humanity. So when
theology sets the doctrine of the Triune God at the
centre of practical religion, pantheism has prepared
the way for vindicating it as in so far the genuine
interpreter of rational theism. That the Eternal
is eternally generated in our higher human nature;
that this Son of Man is in practical truth the Son
of God, and the Son only-begotten ; that by the
discipline of life in worlds of imperfection, men —
and, following men, the whole world of conscious
beings — ascend, through fealty to this Son, immor-
tally toward the Father in the Holy Spirit, — this,
the epitome of Christian theism, first gets appre-
hended, or at least suggested, in the insight which
pantheism brings, that God is not separate from the
world, but effectually present in it, and that the dis-
tinction between the soul and the God who recog-
nises and redeems it can never be truly stated as a
distinction in place and time, a separation in space
and by a period, a contrast between efficient cause
and produced effect. On the contrary, the dis-
tinction must be made in terms of pure thought,
which is essentially timeless and spaceless, neither
lasts nor extends, nor is dated nor placed, but simply
is. It must be viewed as a contrast (and yet a rela-
tion) between different centres of consciousness, each
thoroughly self-active ; and further, as a distinction
in the mode by which each conscious centre defines
74 Ess.ns /x rniLosornY
its individual being in terms of its Ideal. In short,
it must be thought in terms of final cause alone.
No mind can have an efficient relation to another
mind ; efficiency is the attribute of every mind toward
its own acts and life, or toward the world of mere
"things " which forms the theatre of its action ; and
the causal relation between minds must be that of
ideality, simply and purely.
This is a religious truth so clearly fundamental
that when once our attention is brought to it we
cannot but give it assent. So far from denying it, we
incline, rather, to say — and rightly — that we have
in somewise always known it. Yet it is directly
violated by our ordinary and sensuous theistic con-
ceptions ; and not until the pantheistic insight has
been realised in our minds, whether by name or
no it matters not, — realised even if transcended,
and, indeed, only to be transcended, — do we clearly
discover that this violation exists.^
V
But while this permanent insight of pantheism
must be carried up into all genuine theistic thought,
it is also true that in itself the insight falls fatally
' The preceding paragraphs have been much rewritten from the form
in which they were originally printed, for the purpose of removing the
risk of misinterpretation in regard to the doctrine of " immanence."
Cf. the foot-note to p. 60. See also The Conception of God, pp. 97-100,
II4-132, especially 131-132.
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 75
short of the conception demanded by the highest
practical religion. For religion as a practical power
in human experience — the very conception of
theism as an operative life in the spirit — depends
not merely on the omnipresent influence of God,
but equally on the freedom and the immortality of
the soul : on its freedom in the strictest sense; that
is, its unqualified self-activity and autonomy. In
fact, not only is it impossible for souls to be souls,
apart from freedom, immortality, and God, but it is
just as impossible for God to be God, apart from
souls and their immortality and freedom. In other
words, the self-existent perfection of deity itself
freely demands for its own fulfilment the possession
of a world that is in God's own image, and such a
control of it as is alone consistent with its being so :
a divine creation must completely reflect the divine
nature, and must therefore be a world of moral
freedom, autonomous, and, in the last resort, self-
active or eternal.
But this requirement of genuine and fulfilled the-
ism, pantheism cannot meet. Its theory, whether
atheistic or acosmic or agnostic or absolute-ideal-
istic, is the radical contradiction of real freedom
and significant immortality.^ Indeed we may say,
1 For some detailed illustrations of this, especially with reference
to " absolute " idealism and evolutional idealism, see The Conception
of God, pp. 89-127.
y6 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
summarily, that the distinction between theism and
pantheism lies just in this — that theism, in asserting
Goil, asserts the freedom and the moral immortality
of the soul ; but that pantheism, while apparently
asserting God to the extreme, denies his moral
essence by cancelling all real freedom and therefore
all immortality of worth — all that "life eternal"
which means imperishable and continual progress
in fulfilling freedom by universal growth in the
image of God. The conclusive proof of this is, that,
even in its highest form, pantheism necessarily
represents what it calls God as the sole real agent
in existence. Every other being exists but as part
or mode of the eternal One.
VI
At length we see why pantheism is at war with
the characteristic interests of human nature. Our
abiding interests are wholly identified with the reality
of freedom and immortal moral life ; and this, not
on the ground of any passion we may have for mere
unconstraint or for permanence of mere existence —
a ground of course not worthy of a rational being
— but on the immovable foundation laid by reason
as Conscience. For when this highest form of
reason is thoroughly interpreted, we know that the
value of freedom and immortality lies in their indis-
pensableness to our discipline and growth in our
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM JJ
ideal or divine life. To no theory of the world can
man give a willing and a cordial adhesion, then, if
it strikes at the heart of his personal reality and
contradicts those hopes of ceaseless moral growth
that alone make life worth living. Not in its state-
ment of God as the All-in-all, taken by itself, but
in its consequent denial of the reality of man — his
freedom and immortal growth in goodness — - is it
that pantheism betrays its insufficiency to meet the
needs of the human spirit.
It is no doubt true that this opposition between
the doctrine of a Sole Reality and our natural
longings for permanence, our natural bias in favour
of freedom and responsibility, in itself settles nothing
as to the truth or falsity of the doctrine. It might
be that the system of Nature, it might be that its
Ground, is not in sympathy or accord with " the
bliss for which we sigh." But so long as human
nature is what it is, so long as we are by essence
prepossessed in favour of our freedom and yearn for
a life that may put death itself beneath our feet,
and with death imperfection and wrong, so long
will our nature reluctate, so long will it even revolt,
at the prospect of having to accept the doctrine of
pantheism ; so long shall we instinctively draw back
from that vast and shadowy Being which, be it con-
scious or unconscious or simply the Unknowable,
must for us and our highest hopes be verily the
yS £SSAyS IN PHILOSOPHY
Shadow of Death. Yes, we must go still farther,
and say tliat oven should the science of Nature
prove pantheism true, this would only array the
interests of science against the interests of man —
the interests that man can never displace from their
supreme seat in Jiis world, except by abdicating his
inmost nature and jnitting his conscience to an open
shame. A pantheistic edict of science would only
proclaim a deadlock in the system and substance
of truth itself, and herald an implacable conflict
between the law of Nature and the law written
indelibly in the human spirit. The heart on which
the vision of a possible moral perfection has once
arisen, and in whose recesses the still and solemn
voice of Duty has once resounded with its majestic
sweetness, can never be reconciled to the decree,
though this issue never so authentically from Nature,
that bids it count responsible freedom an illusion
and surrender existence on that mere threshold of
moral development which the bound of our present
life affords.
Such a defeat of its most sacred hopes the con-
science can neither acquiesce in nor tolerate. Nor
can it be appeased or deluded by the pretext that
annihilation may be accepted devoutly, as self-sacri-
fice in behalf of an infinite "fulness of life" for
the universe — a life in which the individual con-
science is to have no continued living share. The
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM
79
defence of this pantheistic piety by quoting the
patriarch of many tribulations, in his impassioned
cry, " Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him ! "
is as vain as it is profane. This is only to repeat in
a new form the fallacious paradox of those grim and
obsolete sectarians who held that the test of a state
of grace was " willingness to be damned for the
glory of God." The spirit that truly desires right-
eousness longs with an unerring instinct for im-
mortality as the indispensable condition of entire
righteousness, and when invited to approve its own
immolation for the pretended furtherance of the
Divine glory will always answer as a noble matron
applying for admission to the church once answered
the inquisitorial session of her Calvinistic society, —
" I certainly am not willing to be damned for the
glory of God ; were I so, I should not be here ! "
This sense of our vocation to moral perfection,
and of all it implies as to freedom and continuance,
is what makes our main question of such thrilling
concern. The question starts a ghastly fear, lest
science may be the doom of our loftiest hopes. If
so, it will quench the aspirations which have been
the soul of man's grandest as well as sublimest
endeavours ; for the beliefs it will destroy are the
real foundation of all that has given majesty and
glory to history. To present universal Nature as
the deep in which each soul with its moral hopes
80 £SS^!yS IX PJIILOSOPIIV
is to be engulfed, is to transform existence into a
system of radical and irremediable evil, and thus
to make genuine religion impossible ; ami not only
religion, but also all cordial political union and order,
for this gets and keeps a footing amid the shifting
affairs of this sense-world, only because it is the
outward image of the religious vision. Belief in
the sovereign goodness of the universe and its ground-
ing Light is the life alike of religious faith and of
political fealty. It is impossible that either faith or
fealty can long endure after we have come to the
realising conviction that the whole of which we form
a part, and the central Principle of the whole, are
hostile, or even indifferent, not simply to the perma-
nent existence of the soul, but to its aspirations after
completion in moral life. A nominal God, who
either cannot or will not bring to fulfilment the
longing after infinite moral growth that has once
arisen in a spirit, is not, and cannot be, for such a
spirit, true God at all : —
The wish that of the living whole
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul ?
4c ;(( :^ :jc % 9je ;f:
. . . And he, shall he —
Man, the last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes.
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies.
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer —
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 8 1
Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation's final law,
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed —
Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just —
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hills ?
No more ? — A monster, then, a dream,
A discord ! Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime.
Were mellow music, matched with him !
The profound feeling which Tennyson has here
so memorably expressed, gives your question of this
year a significance as wide as all mankind, as deep
as man's unfathomable heart, and makes its interest
surpass the interest of every other ; for every other
quickest question is involved in this. Let us not
fail to realise that pantheism means, not simply the
all-pervasive interblending and interpenetration of
God and other life, but the sole causality of God,
and so the obliteration of freedom, of moral life, and
of any immortality worth the having ; in a word, of
the true being of God himself.
VII
It is urgent to ask, then, whether there is any-
thing in the nature of modern science that really
gives colour to a pantheistic philosophy. Obviously
82 ESSAYS IN PHTLOSOPHY
enough there arc not wanting philosophers, and
schools of philosophy, who read pantheism in science,
as science appears to them. But the question is,
Is such a reading the authentic teaching of science
itself? Here we must not mistake the utterances
of ;;/(-;/ of science for the voice of science as such.
For on this borderland of science and philosophy
it need not be surprising if men only familiar with
the method of investigation which science pursues,
and not greatly at home in the varied and complex
history of philosophical thought, should sometimes
incline to a hasty inference when the borderland is
reached, should overlook the fact that their science
and its method have necessary limits, and in philoso-
phy take the view which an illegitimate extension
of their method would indicate. So, disregarding
the opinions of certain cultivators of science, we
are here to ask the more pertinent question, What
is there — if indeed there be anything — in the
nature of science itself, as science is now known,
what is there in its results or in its method, that
points to a pantheistic interpretation of the world .''
To this question it must in all candour be an-
swered, that both in the method of modern science,
and in the two most commanding principles that
have resulted from the method, there is that which
unquestionably stiggests the pantheistic view. Noth-
ing less than the most cautious discrimination,
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 83
founded on a precise knowledge of the history of
philosophical inquiry, can detect the exact reach, the
limits, and the real significance of this suggestion,
or expose the illegitimacy of following it without
reserve. The trait to which I am now referring in
the method of science is its rigorously observational
and experimental character ; indeed, its strictly em-
pirical or tentative character. The two command-
ing results, which now in turn play an organising
part in the subsidiary methods of all the sciences,
are (i) the principle of the Conservation of Energy,
and (2) the principle of Evolution, manifesting itself
in the concomitant phenomenon of " natural selec-
tion"— the "struggle for existence" between each
species or individual and its environment, and the
"survival of the fittest." In these two principles,
and also in the general method of science, there are
certain implications that seem to point strongly in
the pantheistic direction. These implications ac-
cordingly deserve, and must receive, our careful
attention.
How, then, does the experimental — or, more accu-
rately, the empirical — method of science suggest the
doctrine of pantheism } I answer : By limiting our
serious belief to the evidence of experience, and
chiefly to the evidence of the senses. The method of
science demands that nothing shall receive the high
credence accorded to science unless it is attested
84 iis.s.n's IX PHILOSOPHY
by unquestionable presence in sensible experience.
All tiie refinements of scientific method — the pre-
cautions of repeated observation, the probing subtle-
ties of experiment, the niceties in the use of
instruments of precision, the principle of reduction
to mean or average, the allowing for the " personal
equation." the final casting out of the largest mean
of possible errors in experiment or observation, by
such methods, for instance, as that of least squares
— all these refinements are for the single purpose of
making it certain that our basis of evidence shall be
confined to what has actually been present in the
world of sense. We are to know beyond question
that such and such conjunctions of events have
actually been present to the senses, and precisely
what it is that thus remains indisputable fact after
all possible additions or misconstructions of our mere
thought or fancy have been cancelled out. Such
conjunctions in unquestionable experience, isolated
and then purified from foreign admixture by care-
fully contrived experiment, we are finally to raise by
generalisation into a tentative expectation of their
continued recurrence in the future ; tentative expec-
tation, we say, because the empirical method in its
rigour warns us that the act of generalisation is a
step beyond the strict evidence, and must not be
reckoned any part of science except as it continues
to be verified in subsequent experience of the event
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 85
under examination. Thus natural science climbs its
slow and cautious way along the path of what it
calls the laws of Nature ; but it only gives this name
in the sense that there has been a constancy in the
conjunctions of past experience, a verification of the
tentative generalisation suggested by this, and a
consequent continuance of the same tentative ex-
pectancy. This expectancy, however, waits for
renewed verification, and refrains from committing
itself unreservedly to the absolute invariability of
the law to which it refers. Unconditional universal-
ity of its ascertained conjunctions, natural science,
in its own sphere and function, neither claims nor
admits ; and a fortiori not their necessity.^
Now, to a science which accepts the testimony of
experience with this undoubting and instinctive
confidence that never stops to inquire what the real
grounds of the possibility of experience itself may
^ The account here given of scientific method may appear to some
readers different from that presented in the essay on "The Limits of
Evolution" (see pp. 33-36). There is no real inconsistency between the
two, however. Here, I am stating the method of science strictly as
such — stating it as the scientific expert uses it and states it to himself.
In the former place, I was stating the philosophy of the method — bring-
ing out its real presuppositions. I was representing the method, not
simply with reference to its practical objects, not purely as a means to
a result in science, but as a step in the theory of knowledge, a link in the
chain not of science but of philosophy. Nor does the above-mentioned
holding-back of science from necessity in its judgments mean anything
but its just recognition of the unavoidable insecurity of its basis of fact.
86 ESS^IVS IN PHILOSOPHY
be, or whence experience can possibly derive this
infallibility of evidence, but assumes, on the contrary,
that the infallibility of the evidence, could this once
be certainly got, is immediate and underived — to
such a science it must seem that we can have no
verifiable assurance of any existence but the Whole ;
that is, the aggregate of particulars hitherto actual
or yet to become so. Thus the very method of nat-
ural science tends to obliterate the sense of the
transcendent, of what lies beyond the bounds of
possible experience, or a least to destroy its credit
at the bar of disciplined judgment. In this way the
method brings its too eager votaries to regard the
Sum of Things as the only reality.
On this view, the outcome of the scientific method
might seem to be restricted to that form of panthe-
ism which I have named atheistic. Most obviously
the inference would be directly to materialism, the
lowest and most natural form of such pantheism ;
subtler reasoning, however, recognising that in the
last resort experience must be consciousness, sees a
truer fulfilment of the empirical method in the sub-
jective idealism which states the Sum of Things as
the aggregate of the perceptions of its conscious
members. But beyond even this juster idealistic
construction of atheistic pantheism — beyond either
form of atheistic pantheism, in fact — the method of
natural science would appear to involve consequences
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 8/
which render the Absolute, whether interpreted as the
Unknowable or as God, the sole causal reality. That
is, scientific method would in this way bring us to
acosmic pantheism. For the empirical method, so
far from vindicating either the freedom of the per-
sonal will or the immortality of the soul, withholds
belief from both, as matters that can never come
within the bounds of possible experience. The habit
of regarding nothing but the empirically attested as
part of science dismisses these two essential condi-
tions of man's reality beyond the assumed pale of
true knowledge into the discredited limbo of naked
and unsupported possibilities.
But it is not till we pass from the method of
natural science to its two chief modern results, and
take in their revolutionary effect as subsidiaries of
method in every field of natural inquiry, — it is not
till then that we feel the full force of the pantheistic
strain which pulls with such tension in many modern
minds. Only in the principle of the Conservation
of Energy, and in that of Evolution, particularly as
evolution is viewed in its aspect of natural selection,
do we get the full force of the pantheistic drift.
This drift, at the first encounter, seems almost irre-
sistible. That all the changes in the universe of
objective experience are resolvable into motions,
either molar or molecular ; that in spite of the incal-
culable variety of these motions, the sum-total of
88 JiSs.tvs JN riiiLOsopjiY
movement and the average direction of the motions
is constant and unchangeable;^ that an unvarying
correlation of all the various modes of motion exists,
so that each mode is convertible into its correlates
at a constant numerical rate, and so that each, hav-
ing passed the entire circuit of correlated forms,
returns again into its own form undiminished in
amount : all this seems to point unmistakably to a
primal energy — a ground-form of moving activity —
in itself one and unchangeable, immanent in its sum
of correlated forms, but not transcending them, while
each instance of each form is only a transient and
evanescent mode of this single Reality.
Nor is this inference weakened by the later scho-
lium upon the principle of conservation, known as
the principle of the Dissipation of Energy. On the
contrary, the pantheistic significance of the principle
of conservation seems to be greatly deepened by this.
Instead of a constant whole of moving activity, ex-
hibited in a system of correlated modes of motion,
we now have a vaster correlation between the sum
of actual energies and a vague but prodigious mass
ol potential ^n^rgy — the "waste-heap," as the phy-
1 The principle of conservation is very commonly stated as the in-
variability of the sum-total of vis viva in the world, and is expressed
in the formula \mv'^ = constant. But the statement in the text, which
returns to the formula of Leibnitz, is more comprehensive as well as
more philosophic, and is for these reasons preferred by some of the
latest physicists,
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 89
sicist Balfour Stewart has well named it, of the
power of the universe. Into this " waste-heap " all
the active energies in the world of sense seem to be
continually vanishing, and to be destined at last to
vanish utterly. Under the light of this principle of
dissipation, we shift from a primal energy immanent
but not transcendent to one immanent in the sum
of the correlated actual motions and also transcen-
dent of them. Very impressive is the view that
here arises of a dread Source of Being that engulfs
all beings. It is Brahm again, issuing forth through
its triad, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, — creation, preser-
vation, annihilation, — to return at last into its own
void, gathering with it the sum of all its transitory
modes. And let us not forget that the conceptions
out of which this image of the One-and-All is spon-
taneously generated are the ascertained and settled
results of the science of Nature in its exactest em-
pirical form.
When to this powerful impression from the princi-
ple of conservation, as modified by that of dissipation,
we now add the proper effect of the principle of
evolution, the pantheistic inference appears to gather
an overpowering weight, in no way to be evaded.
As registered in terms of a rigorous empirical
method, evolution presents the picture of a cosmic
Whole, constituted of varying members descended
from its own primitive form by differentiations so
90 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
slight and gradual as not to suggest difference of
origin or distinction in kind, but, on the contrary,
to indicate clearly their kinship and community of
origin. Still, these differentiations among the mem-
bers, and the consequent differences in their adapta-
tion to the Whole, involve a difference in their power
to persist amid the mutual competition which their
common presence in the Whole implies. In this
silent and unconscious competition of tendencies to
persist, which is called, in a somewhat exaggerated
metaphor, the " struggle for existence," the members
of the least adaptation to the Whole must perish
earliest, and only those of the highest adaptation
will finally survive. Accordingly, by an exaggera-
tion akin to that of the former metaphor, we may, in
another, name the resulting persistence of the mem-
bers most suited to the Whole the " survival of the
fittest " ; and as it is the Whole that determines the
standard of adaptation, we may also, by figuratively
personifying the Whole, call the process of antago-
nistic interaction through which the survivors per-
sist, a process of "natural selection." Here, now,
the points of determining import for inference are
these: (i) That the "survival" is only of th.Q fittest
to the Whole ; (2) that it is the Whole alone that
"selects"; (3) that no "survival," as verifiable by
the strictly empirical method, can be taken as per-
manent, but that even the latest must be reckoned
MODERN SCIENCE AND PAN THEISM 9 1
as certified only to date, with a reservation, at best,
of "tentative expectancy" for hope of continuance;
(4) that "natural selection," as empirically verified,
is a process of cancellation, in the end a selection
only to death; and (5) that the Whole alone has
the possibility of final survival. The " tentative
expectation " founded on the entire sweep of the
observed facts, and not extended beyond it, would
be that the latest observed survivor — man — is des-
tined like his predecessors to pass away, supplanted
by some new variation of the Whole, of a higher
fitness to it. And so on endlessly.
This clear pointing toward the One-and-All that
devours all, seems but to gain still further clear-
ness when the principles of conservation and of
evolution are considered, as they must be, in their
inseparable connexion and interaction. They work
in and through each other. Conservation and cor-
relation of energy, and their "rider" of dissipation,
are the secret of the mechanism in the process of
natural selection, with its deaths and its survivals.
Evolution is the field, and its resulting forms of
existence, more and more complex, are the out-
come, of the operations of the correlated, con-
served, and dissipated energies. Evolution, in its
turn, by its principle of struggle and survival, works
in the very process of the correlation, dissipation,
and conservation of energy. It therefore seems
92 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
but natural to identify the potential energ^y of cor-
relation— the "waste-heap" of power — with the
Whole of natural selection. And thus wo appear
to reach, by a cumulative argument, the One-and-
All in which all must be absorbed.
If we now add to these several indications, given
by the method and the two chief results of modern
science, the discredit that the principles of con-
servation and evolution appear to cast directly upon
the belief in freedom and immortality, the panthe-
istic note in modern science will sound out to the
full. In the case of free-agency, this discredit
comes (i) from the closer nexus that the correla-
tion of forces seems plainly to establish between
every possible conscious action and the antecedent
or environing chain of events out of which the
web of its motives must be woven, and (2) from
the pitch and proclivity that, according to the prin-
ciple of evolution, must be transmitted by the
heredity inseparable from the process of descent.
In the case of immortality, the discredit comes
first by way of the principle of evolution, through
its indication of the transitoriness of all survivals,
and its irremediable failure to supply any evidence
of even a possible survival beyond the sensible
world, with which empirical evolution has alone
to do. But it comes also by way of the princi-
ple of the conservation and dissipation of energy,
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 93
because of the doom that seems manifestly to await
all forms of actual energy. Besides, both immor-
tality and freedom must share in that general dis-
credit of everything unattested by experience which
the persistent and exclusive culture of empiricism
begets.
In effect, while the empirical method ignores,
and must ignore, any supersensible Principle of
existence whatever, thus tending to a loose and
careless identification of the Absolute with the Sum
of Things, evolution and the principle of conserva-
tion have familiarised the modern mind with the
continuity, the uniformity, and the unity of Nature
in an overwhelming degree. In the absence of
a conviction upon independent grounds that the
Principle of existence is rational and personal, the
sciences of Nature can hardly fail, even upon a
somewhat considerate and scrutinising view, to con-
vey the impression that the Ground of Things is a
vast and shadowy Whole, which moves towards
some unknown destination ; sweeping forward, as
one of the leaders of modern science has said,
" regardless of consequences," unconcerned as to
the fate of man's world of effort and hope, which
looks so circumscribed and insignificant when viewed
from the outlook of sense only — from the vanish-
ing shore of Time, giving upon the boundless ex-
panses of Space.
94 /-.SS.iyS JA I'lllLOSOPHY
VIII
But now we come to the last and closest ques-
tion : Is this impression of pantheism really war-
ranted ? And here we stand in need of sharp
discrimination : there is a way of looking at the
course of science, the way we have just been ex-
amining, that seems to find the warrant asked for ;
and there is an exactor way which will show that
the supposed warrant is only an illusion. With
the right discrimination, and using the exacter way,
we shall find that the inference to pantheism from
the method and principles of science, decided as
it seems to be, is after all illegitimate.
Our first precaution in this home-stretch of our
inquiry must be to remember that it is not science
— not exact and rigorous knowledge — in its entire
compass that is involved in our question. It is only
"modern science," popularly so called; that is,
science taken to mean only the science of Nature.
Not only so, but science is in the new context further
restricted to signify only what may rightly be de-
scribed as the natural science of Nature — so much
of the possible knowledge of Nature as can be reached
through the channel of the senses critically used ; so
much, in short, as will yield itself to a method strictly
empirical. Hence the real question is, Whether
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 95
empirical science, confined to Nature as its proper
object, can legitimately assert the theory of pan-
theism ?
With regard now, first, to the argument drawn
with such apparent force purely from the method of 0^
natural science, it will be plain to a more scrutinising
reflection, that shifting from the legitimate disregard
of a supersensible Principle — a disregard in which /
the empirical method is entirely within its right — to [
the denial or the doubt of it because there is and
can be no scientific evidence for it, is in fact an abuse
of the scientific method, an unwarrantable extension
of it to decisions lying by its own terms beyond its
reach. The shift is made upon the assumption that
there can be no science — no exact and conclusive
knowledge — founded on any but empirical evidence.
Now, that there is no science deserving of the name
except such as follows the empirical method of
natural science is a claim which experts in natural
science are rather prone to make ; but the pro-
foundest thinkers the world has known — such as >
Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, 1
Kant, and Hegel — have certainly pronounced the
claim unfounded ; indeed, a sheer assumption, con-
tradicted by evidence the clearest, if oftentimes
abstruse. When instead of blindly following expe-
rience we raise the question of the nature and the
sources of experience, and push it in earnest, it then '
96 ESS.tVS IN PHILOSOPHY
appears that the experience which seems so rigor-
ously to exclude supersensible principles, and particu-
larly the personality of the First Principle, is itself
dependent for its existence on a personal Principle
and on supersensible principles ; that, in fact, these
enter into the very constitution of experience. But
in any case this question of the nature of experi-
ence and the limits of knowledge — the question
whether the limits of knowledge are identical with
the limits of experience — is a question which if we
take up, we abandon the field of natural science, and
enter instead the field of the theory of cognition.
In this, the expert at natural science, as such, has
not a word to say. Here his method is altogether
unavailing. If the problem can be solved at all,
the solution will be by methods that transcend the
bounds of empirical evidence. The scientific expert
may be competent to the solution in his capacity of
man, but in his capacity of man of science he cer-
tainly is not.
So again, with regard to the inferences to pan-
theism from the conservation of energy and the
principle of evolution. Strong as the evidence
seems, it arises in both cases from violating the
strict principles of the scientific method. All infer-
ences to a Whole of potential energy, or to a Whole
determinant of the survivals in a struggle for exist-
ence, are real inferences — cases of passing beyond
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM 97
the region of sensible and experimental /<?:^/j- into the
empirically unknown, empirically unattested, empiri-
cally unwarranted region of supersensible principles.
The exact scientific truth about all such inferences,
and the supposed realities which they establish or
displace, is simply that they are not warranted
by natural science ; and that this withholding of
warrant is only the expression by natural science
of its incompetency to enter upon such questions.
Natural science must therefore, in truth, be de-
clared silent on this question of pantheism ; as indeed
it is, and from the nature of the case must be, upon
all theories of the supersensible alike — theistic,
deistic, atheistic, pantheistic. Natural science has
no proper concern with such theories. Science may
well enough be said to be ;/c;/-pantheistic, but so also
is it non-theistic, non-deistic, non-atheistic. Its posi-
tion, however, is not for that reason ^/z/Z-pantheistic,
any more than it is anti-theistic, or anti-deistic, or
anti-atheistic. Rather, it is merely agnostic ; not in
the sense of the dogmatic philosophies of agnosticism,
but simply in the sense of declining to affect know-
ledge in the premises, seeing they are beyond its
method and its province. In short, its agnosticism
is simply its neutrality, and doesn't in the least imply
that agnosticism is the final view of things. The
investigation of the final view, the research concern-
ing the First Principle, science leaves to methods
H
98 ESSAYS i.v riin.osoriiY
quite other than its own of docile experience and
patient reflection upon experience — methods that
philosophy is now prepared to vindicate as higher
and still more trustworthy. For the primacy of mind
over Nature, the legislative relation of mind to the
world, has been found to be tlie real presupposition
of science itself, and the tacit recognition of this
truth to be the clue to the first sudden advance of
modern science, and to its unparalleled subsequent
progress.^
^ The epochal sentences of Kant, in his preface to the second edition
of the Critique of Pure Reason, have been more than verified by the
century of science and philosophy that has passed since they first saw
the day: "When Galilei made his balls roll down the inclined plane
with a gravitation selected by himself, orTorricelli had the air support a
weight which he had previously taken equal to a known column of water,
or Stahl later converted metals into lime, and this into metal again, by
withdrawing something and then putting it back, a light dawned on all
investigators of Nature. They comprehended that Reason only sees
into what she herself produces after her own design ; that with her
principles of judgment according to invariable laws, she must take the
lead, and compel Nature to answer her questions, not let herself be
merely taught by Nature to walk, as if in leading-strings ; for otherwise
she would be left to observations only casual, and these, made on no
plan designed beforehand, do not at all connect in a necessary law,
which yet is what Reason seeks and must have. With her principles
in one hand, solely by accord with which can agreements among phe-
nomena get the value of laws, and with experiment in the other, which
she has devised according to them, Reason must approach Nature, to
learn from her, indeed, but not in the quality of a pupil, who submits
to be prompted as the teacher pleases ; on the contrary, in the quality
of an invested judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to questions
which he puts to them himself." — The Critique of Pure Reason, edition
of 1787, pp. xii, xiii.
MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM gg
Hence, when once the personality of the First
Principle is reached in some other way — the way of
philosophy as distinguished from that of science —
science will then furnish the most abundant con-
firmations, the strongest corroborations ; the more
abundant and the stronger, in proportion as the First
Principle reached by philosophy ascends continuously
from materialism through deism and pantheism to
personal theism. For the traits in Nature and in
natural science that seem to point to a lower Princi-
ple, especially those that look so plausibly toward
pantheism, are better explicable by the theistic Prin-
ciple, when once true theism is reached ; and science
accords best with this purified theism, though in itself
quite unable to attain to the view.
But the theism that science will corroborate, or
that thorough philosophy can approve and estab-
lish, must be a theism that assumes into its con-
ceptions of God and man all the irrefutable insights
of materialism or of deism, and of pantheism most
of all. These insights reached on the planes of
lower philosophies have an unquestionable reality
and pertinence, if also they are marked by un-
deniable insufficiency. Their insufficiency, when
they are seen in the higher light of genuine theism,
is indeed so great that they seem by themselves
to have hardly any religious import at all. By
themselves, they afford the soul neither outward hope
loo j2:ssyns in philosophy
nor inward peace. Still, the religious conviction that
does make hope and peace secure is not to be attained
without their aid. The mind that has never discerned
the meaning in these lower levels of thought upon
religious problems has not yet entered into the inner
meaning of theism, nor seen it in the light where its
proofs become transparent.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY
MONISM MOVING TOWARD PLURALISM, THROUGH
AGNOSTICISM AND ITS SELF-DISSOLUTION ^
In Germany, the central home of modern thought,
there began, about the year 1865, a philosophical
movement, or a group of related movements, of a
more novel and striking character than any since the
time of Kant and his four chief successors, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel, and Herbart. It has not yet en-
tirely run its course, for two of its inaugurators are
still (1900) living and productive, though the third
passed away a quarter of a century ago, but leaving
behind him a decided influence. The movement is
indicative of the prevailing Zeitgeist, and worth our
study as an expression of the tone of current culture.
Our chief interest in it, how.ever, will be for its sig-
nificant drift beyond its own prepossessions, and
toward a deeper view, through its own inner dialec-
tical dissolution.
iThe essay is a revision of part of an article printed in the. Journal
of Speculative Philosophy, January, 1883, with the title " Some Aspects
of Recent German Philosophy." Originally, it was a lecture before
the Concord School of Philosophy, read in July, 1882.
lOI
I02 ESS.IVS /X rUlI.OSOPHY
In the total stream of this movement there are
discernible three main currents, — the idealistic, the
materialistic, and the agnostic, or " critical," as its
adherents prefer to name the last. This division,
however, is not distinctive of the period, being merely
the continuation of a world-old divergence in doc-
trine. But it is distinctive of the new situation that
these several views are all defended from standpoints
more or less empirical. The rallying-cry of " Back to
Kant!" with which the movement began, was soon
succeeded by a more adventurous cry of " Beyond
Kant ! " This " Beyond," owing mainly to the pre-
dominant interest in the theories of evolution and
natural selection, was construed as lying in the
region indicated by the empirical method of which
these theories are the extolled result. In the case
of materialism, to be sure, this empiricism is natural
and nowise unexpected ; but the occurrence of it in
the case of idealism and of agnosticism, after Kant's
day and in his own land, and among thinkers long
given to the study of his works, is a genuine surprise.
That the very principles of the Critique of Piirc
Reason, the historic stronghold of the a priori,
should suffer the complete transformation of being
made to support a posteriori philosophy, is a per-
formance not far from astonishing. Yet it was
managed, and constitutes the distinguishing feat of
the school calling themselves Neo-Kantians.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 103
Each of these three main currents has had a lead-
ing representative. There are thus three men who
command our attention, as in their several ways
typical of the dominant intellectual interests of their
time, — Eduard von Hartmann, Eugen Diihring, and
Friedrich Albert Lange. The first stands for such
idealism as is now in vogue, derived in a long line of
degeneration from Hegel, through such "left-wing"
adherents as Strauss and Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer
and Feuerbach, and from Kant through the distorting
medium of Schopenhauer. The second represents
materialism, with the singular trait of blending with
the legitimate line of its empirical defences certain
remarkable elements of a transcendental logic. The
third illustrates agnosticism, with the additional and
peculiar interest of being the Neo-Kantian par excel-
lence}
Hartmann was born in Berlin, in 1842, the son of
a general in the Prussian army, in which he held a
commission himself till disease that left him a perma-
nent cripple turned him aside into the career of let-
ters. Diihring, also born in Berlin, in 1833, began
his career in the Prussian department of justice, but
1 Prominent among the Neo-Kantians, after Lange, are Professors
Cohen of Marburg, Bona Meyer of Bonn, Benno Erdmann of Kiel, and
Dr. Hans Vaihinger of Strassburg. [Since the foregoing was written
(1882), Dr. Vaihinger has become professor at Halle, and widely known
as the author of the learned and acute Kani-Kommentar and the editor
of Kantstudien^
I04 ESS^IVS LV PHILOSOPHY
was erelong compelled to abandon this, through loss
of his sight. In spite of his blindness, however, he
has kept up the most copious production and publi-
cation.i \^ contrast to Hartmann, who leads the
quiet life of a man of letters well-to-do, he has tasted
no little of the bitterness of the human lot. For many
years he won much reputation as 2l privat-doccnt at the
University of Berlin ; but in 1877 he was dismissed
from this office on account of his persistent and gall-
ing attacks on some of the scientific and philosophical
performances of certain of his colleagues, particularly
Helmholtz, and since then he has remained in the
comparative quiet of private life. Lange, born near
Solingen, in 1828, made his university course chiefly
at Bonn, where his principal interest seemed to be in
philology and pedagogics. He then passed some years
in practical life, partly as bookseller, partly as secre-
tary of the Duisburg chamber of commerce. Later,
he was made professor of philosophy at Zurich, where,
in his case too, disease left its lasting marks in the
effects of a surgical operation that nearly cost him
his life. In 1872, he was called from Zurich to Mar-
burg, but died there, in 1875, after prolonged suffer-
ings, in the bloom of his intellectual powers, to the
unceasing regret of that large body of his younger
^ His works already comprise no less than twenty octavo volumes,
in the various departments of metaphysics, economics, sociology, mathe-
matics, and criticism.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 10$
countrymen who were beginning to see in him a
philosophic force of far-reaching effect.
Though the three men were so considerably sepa-
rated in years, they began to act upon the public
almost simultaneously. Lange's History of Material-
ism, so noted in its later form, first appeared in 1865 ;
Diihring's first important work, the Natural Dialectic,
was published the same year ; while Hartmann's
PhilosopJiy of the Unconscious came first from the
press in 1868. The main lines of their several theo-
ries we are now to trace and endeavour to value.
I
In opening a study of Hartmann and his large cir-
cle of readers, we come at once upon the sphere of
an influence whose reach in the present " enlight-
ened public " of Germany it is impossible to over-
look ; I refer, of course, to Schopenhauer. Hartmann
is generally and justly recognised as the mental heir
of Schopenhauer, in direct succession. His so-called
system, however, is far inferior in intellectual quality
to that of his predecessor. He differs from Schopen-
hauer in giving to the empirical a great predominance
over the a priori meihod, ^ and in his doctrine con-
cerning the nature of the Absolute. The former
fact expresses his deference to the " stupendous
*The reader will easily recall his significant motto: *'■ Speculative
results by the inductive method of the natural sciences."
I06 £SS^)S /\ Pirn OSOPIIY
achievements" of recent science; the latter, his
ambition to frame a system that should blend in a
single higher unity whatever of preceding theory he
knew — Schopenhauer's pessimism and sundry ideal-
istic gleanings and fragments, no doubt also first
suggested by Schopenhauer, but in detail borrowed
largely from Schelling and the " left-wing " adherents
of Hegel.
Schopenhauer, seizing upon Kant's doctrine of the
ex mente origin of Nature, and the consequently phe-
nomenal character of the world, asked the question
that cannot but rise upon Kant's results, What,
then, is this "Thing-in-itself," assumed as the
source ^ of the sensations that our a priori reason
coordinates into a cosmos ? He felt the force of
Kant's arguments for the limitation of knowledge
to the world of experience, the force of the contra-
dictions into which reason was apparently shown to
fall when attempting to apply its categories to a
Thing-in-itself supposed to lie beyond that region.
But he also felt the necessity of the Thing-in-itself,
of an Absolute, in order to the relativity which,
according to Kant, was an essential feature of know-
ledge. He perceived, too, the chasm that separated
Kant's doctrines of the will and of the intellect.
1 The reader must understand that this phrase represents Schopen-
hauer's interpretation of Kant, rather than Kant's own view. So, also,
regarding much else that follows.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IO7
Accordingly, he proposed to remedy both defects of
the Kantian theory at once, by the doctrine that
reason is only theoretical and the will not phenome-
nal but noumenal. In short, he comes to the dogma
that the Absolute is simply Will, or what might
more fitly be called Desire — a darkling, dumb out-
striving, in itself unconscious, whose impulsions,
under a perpetual thwarting from some mysterious
Check, ^ give rise to what we call consciousness.
The whole of being was thus reduced to terms of
inner or subjective life. There was the dark under-
tow of the ever-heaving Desire, and woven over it
the shining image-world of Perception : the universe
was summed up as Will and Representation. Of
this Will we knew nothing, save that it was insatia-
ble ; the forms of consciousness were not its expres-
sion, but its repression — its negation. Ever the
higher these rose in the ascending evolution of
Nature, in reaction against its wilder and wilder
throbbings, ever the more bitterly must their neces-
sary finitude thwart the infinity of its blind desire.
Universal life was thus, from its own conditions
and essence, foredoomed to misery. Its core was
1 Schopenhauer nowhere expressly admits the existence of this;
rather, he continually evades it, putting forward the essential insatiability
of the Will as the explanation of pain, and so of consciousness. But
the implication seems tacitly and unavoidably present everywhere. So
also, as Hartmann has rightly noted, is the implicit assumption that the
Will is intrinsically conscious, after all.
io8 jiSSAYS liV rnii.osoPHY
anguish, its outhmk was despair. And all the facts
of existence, from wheresoever taken in the ascend-
ing levels of consciousness, confirmed but too darkly
this haggard prophecy of a priori thou<;ht : every-
where the overplus of pain, everywhere illusion dis-
pelled in disappointment. There was, and could be,
but one avenue of escape — death and oblivion.
Upon this fact rose the whole structure of ethics.
The "whole duty of man" was simply: Suppress
the will to live. All moral feeling was summarised
in Pity, and all moral action in ascetic living, to the
end that, the tone of life being perpetually lowered,
the Will might slowly sink into quiescence, and so
life itself at last fade out into the repose and silence
of annihilation.
Such was the philosophy, no doubt at bottom
theoretically hollow, but still wearing on its surface
a certain tragic fascination, that stirred Hartmann
to attempt a new composition of similar tone on
the ancient theme of Man. In the minds of Scho-
penhauer and Hartmann, let it be noted in passing,
the philosophic problem takes for its leading ques-
tion a phase of Kant's "What may I hope for.-*"
The chief concern for them is, What is life all
worth .'' They are both possessed by a profound
sense of the misery of existence ; but while, under
Schopenhauer's treatment, the pessimistic strain
seems to sound out only at the close, and appears
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY IO9
to issue from conditions that bear solely on the
purely theoretical question of the origin of experi-
ence, there can hardly be any doubt that with
Hartmann the pessimism was first, and the hypothe-
sis of the Unconscious an afterthought to explain
it.^ His problem has the look of being this : Given
misery as the sum of existence, what must be pre-
supposed in order to account for it ?
The method and the contents of his solution
both show what a weight empirical evidence has
with him, in contrast with dialectical. He professes
a certain allegiance to the latter, and also makes free
resort to a priori deduction of a somewhat antiquated
type ; but his general drift to fact, induction, and
analogy is the patent and distinguishing feature of
his book.- As the explanation of his problem, and,
indeed, of life itself, he seizes upon a striking but oc-
cult class of facts in physiological and psychological
history. There is given directly in our experience, he
says, the manifest presence of an unconscious agency.
He refers in this to the class of experiences com-
1 This is quite evident in the earlier editions of Hartmann's first
work, but becomes less and less so as the editions multiply and his
thought gets more critical. In fact, in its latest form, his philosophy
supplements this pessimism with a sort of concomitant optimism, op-
erative in the present, while the effective pessimism is relegated to a
remote future.
2 E. von Hartmann : 77/1? Philosophy of the Unconscious. Trans-
lated by W. C Coupland. London: Triibner and Co., 1883.
no ESSAYS IX PHILOSOPHY
monly groiqicd under the term " reflex action " :
facts of somnambulism, trance, clairvoyance, mem-
ory independent of conscious perception, and
instinctive knowledge — all those "unconscious
modifications," in short, the emphasising of which
formed such a memorable dissonance in the think-
ing of Sir William Hamilton. The recognition of
"unconscious ideation" he traces clearly, too, to
Leibnitz, to Kant, to Schelling, and to Schopenhauer.
The Unconscious is actually here ivitJi us, Hartmann
holds : there is a something beneath our conscious-
ness, that performs for us, even when consciousness
is suspended, all that is most characteristic of life,
and that, too, with a swift and infallible surety and
precision. What less can we do, then, than accept
this Unconscious as the one absolute reality ? We
accept, and so come by the Philosophy of the Uncon-
scious.
Just here, however, Hartmann is confronted by the
warning of Kant. On grounds of a critical determi-
nation of the limits of reason, Kantianism forbids
the philosopher to undertake the discussion of an ob-
ject thus removed beyond the bounds of possible ex-
perience. This warning must first of all be silenced.
So Hartmann now provides a metaphysics to meet
the Kantian thesis that knowledge can only be of the
phenomenal. Here he unavoidably leaves his favour-
ite basis of facts, and resorts to hypotheses purely
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY in
a priori. He proceeds in the light of the supposed
contradiction involved in any transcendent Thing-in-
itself — an assumed background, as it were, hid beJiind
the vision-world of experience, this phenomenon rising
thus between the Thing and the mind, and so veiling
it. Hence he proposes as the remedy the bringing
of the Absolute zvithiji the veil of the phenomenon,
and, so to speak, between it and'the mind, to lie there
as if an originative tissue, connecting the two as it be-
gets them. In other words, he makes the Absolute,
construed as his Unconscious, the immanent source
of two concomitant streams of appearance : the one
objective, the sensible world itself, the other subjec-
tive, the stream of the conscious perceptions of the
world. 1 These two streams, as both flowing from the
one Unconscious under identically corresponding con-
ditions, are in incessant counterpart. Thus know-
ledge, though not a copy from natural objects, is an
exact counter-image to them, engendered from a com-
mon source. Consciousness and Nature are both pure
show {ScJiciji). The world is an "objective appari-
tion " (c7« objectiver Schein), perception is a duplicate
"subjective apparition" (ein snbjcctivcr Schein\ and
both are exhaled from the depths of the Unconscious :
phenomenal existence is thus doubled throughout.
Space, Time, and the Causal Nexus are also dupli-
cated, as well as the items they contain or connect.
^ A reminiscence here of Spinoza, or of Spinoza hegelised.
112 ESSAYS IN FHILOSOPHY
All, instead of being merely subjective, are objective
also.
The Kantian doctrine — that Space, Time, and
Causation are merely subjective — being thus disposed
of, its corollary of the empirical limitation of know-
ledge likewise falls away, and Hartmann assumes he
may proceed with his metaphysical programme. First,
however, the method of philosophy must be more pre-
cisely accentuated. How can knowledge of the Ab-
solute, which (as the Unconscious) lies wholly beyond
our consciousness, ever arise.-' By virtue of two
facts, replies Hartmann : our " mystic sense of union
with the Unconscious," and that uniformity of Nature
which constitutes the basis of induction. The orga-
non of philosophy has thus two factors, Mystic and
Induction. From the former come all the clues to
knowledge, the mysterious "suggestions" of the Un-
conscious itself ; from the latter, the verification of
the clues, as they are followed into the complicated
system of experience. It is by induction alone that
philosophy distinguishes itself from religion ; for re-
ligion and philosophy both alike take their origin
from the mystic of the "suggestions," though religion
keeps these mysterious whisperings in the obscure
but kindred form of myth, while philosophy, following
the self-revelation of Nature in induction, lays them
bare in their clear and literal truth.
By the light of this method, now, the Unconscious
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 13
SO far reveals its real nature that we know it is some-
thing infallibly and infinitely intelligent. Strictly, it
is not the f/«conscious, but rather the S/z^^conscious,
the Unbeknown {das Unbezvusste)} In its infallible
infinite-swiftness of perception, however, as expe-
rience testifies of it, there is a transcendent type of
the flashing inspirations of genius. It is therefore
not se If -consciOMs, ; its intelligence is clairvoyant, and
has no "large discourse of reason, seeing the end in
the beginning." But as intelligent energy, it must
contain grounds for the two constituents that w^e find
present in all intelligent activity within experience —
will and representation ; and here is the point at which
to correct and complete Schopenhauer's doctrine of
the Absolute. Will is not the Absolute : for will as
well as representation is part of conscious experience ;
will is itself phenomenal. Rather are will and repre-
sentation the two coordinate primal manifestations of
the one Unconscious ; and we thus get an inductive
basis for Will and Idea as vietapJiysical realities, both
unconscious, however, — factors inherent in the being
of the Unconscious.
Here in the Unconscious, too, is the truth of Schel-
ling's famous Neutrum — the something neither sub-
ject nor object, that he set up for the Absolute ; and
no longer, Hartmann thinks, a target for Hegel's "the
^ Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown.
Lowell: The Courtin\
I r 4 £SSA ys in phil osophy
Absolute popping up as if shot out of a pistol," since
it is innv construed in terms vouched for by actual
experience. Moreover, the conception is here found
that will embosom the system of Hegel himself : the
" logical Idea " i^das logische Idee) falls as a mere con-
stituent into the vaster being of the Unconscious.
For what is the Unconscious, as revealed in expe-
rience, but that which works by the incessant inter-
play of representation and will '> And just as will in
its essence is only blind Struggle, so is representation
in its essence nothing other than luminous Idea — the
all-embracing logical bond that grasps the vague of
sensation into distinct objects, and these objects again
into genera, and these genera at last into a single
organised whole of being.^ The Unconscious, then,
is primordially Will and Idea ; and from the connexion
of these arises the twofold world of finitude, pouring
forth from the Unconscious in the counterpart streams
of object and subject, of sensible world and conscious
perception.
^ A one-sided and superficial construction is here put upon Hegel's
theory. Justice to Hegel requires us to remember that his Idea (^Idee)
is never represented as a bond merely " logical," in contradistinction
from the " will," but always as the " negative " or " sublating " unity of
intellect and vf'iW — a unity that takes up and solves the antinomy that
appears between them when their distinction and contrast is taken ab-
stractly ; taken, that is, in neglect of their correlative union, and so
viewed partially instead of in the whole. Hartmann's leap, too, from
idea as representation ( Vorstellung) to the hegelian Idea (^Idee) is, to
say the least, a bit sudden and violent.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY II5
Hartmann is now at length well ashore on the
familiar coasts of Schopenhauerland. This World-
child of clairvoyant virgin Idea and darkling brutal
Will is no product of far-sighted love, endowed with
an exhaustless future of joy. It is the offspring of
violation, of a chance burst of passion, and its being
carries in it the germs of misery ever expanding.
This gloomy theme Hartmann now pursues statis-
tically over all the provinces of experience, seeking
to prove that suffering everywhere outbalances
happiness, that "he that increaseth knowledge in-
creaseth sorrow," the pitch of anguish rising higher
and higher as Nature ascends in the scale of con-
sciousness, and especially as man enlarges and
quickens that intelligence whose chief result, from
the nature of the case, must be the keener and
keener sense of the deceitfulness of life.
Nor, continues Hartmann, let any one hope to
evade this conclusion by theories of possible com-
pensation. Men no doubt usually live in one of
Three Stages of Illusion in regard to this essential
misery of life. They either think that even in this
world the sum of joy so far exceeds the sum of sor-
row as to make existence here substantially good ;
or, if sobered out of this by inexorable experience,
they take refuge in the Hereafter, in the prospect of
an endless opportunity beyond the grave, — a refuge
of lies, for the one Unconscious is the sole basis
Il6 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
of consciousness, there is no indestructible self,
death is simply subsidence into the absolute vague,
and immortality is therefore a delusion ; or, finally,
surrendering both of these dreams, they resort to
the future, and indulge in the illusion of hope, —
tJiis world can yet be made the abode of happiness,
and let us make it so. But, admonishes Hartmann,
all these fancies ignore the contradiction that lies
in the very heart of existence ; there is but one
plain moral in the drama of experience, and that is
the utter hopelessness of life. The world may not,
indeed, be the worst world possible, but its being is
certainly worse than its not being. It were better if
the world had never come to be. Ethics consequently
is summed up in the single precept. Make an end of it !
For the Will being in its essence but wild unrest,
both metaphysics and experience teach that the
only way of escape from the misery inherent in
life is to bring the Will to quiescence ; or rather,
speaking plainly, to blot it out. And in conscious-
ness, seat though this is of sorrow while it lasts, we
have the light to the one sure way of deliverance ; as
consciousness is the preparation for the rescue of the
Idea from the clutch of the Will. The way of salva-
tion is the way of annihilation. Our sole intelligent
desire, won in the bitter school of experience, is the
longing for release from struggle, the wish to be
delivered from this delusive Maya o£ consciousness
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY WJ
and to pass into motionless Nirvana. Hasten, then,
the day when the pitch of misery shall have brought
the race to the saving anguish of despair, and man-
kind in united and complete renunciation shall exe-
cute a universal auto da fc, by final self-immolation^
ending the tragedy of existence forever !
Nevertheless, while this is the sum of its theory,
ethics may have the important practical question to
settle. How shall we make an end of things the sur-
est and soonest ? There is here indeed no duty, there
is no such thing as duty ; there is simply a possible
satisfaction of the desire for release from misery.
But to this end there may be an alternative of
means. We may each promote the end, either by
an indirect and negative or else by a direct and
positive agency. By following the traditional stand-
ards of virtue, we may advance society in order,
peace, prosperity, and apparent welfare, the indirect
though real outcome of which is however but the
profounder despair ; or we may by passion, fraud,
and violence heighten the rising flood of misery
directly. Which each will do is in fact a matter of
1 Hartmann, like Schopenhauer, requires us here to make a refined
distinction between this final " act of devotion " and suicide. Suicide,
both say, is only an enraged and disappointed form of the " will to
live." The real difference, however, is that suicide, directly, fails to go
far enough; nothing short of self-annihilation will answer. But it is
difficult to see why, with their doctrine of individual transiency, suicide
doesn't "get there all the same."
Il8 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
temperament and circumstance. For pessimism does
nothing" actively to j^romote what tiaditional ethics
would brand as immorality; it merely leaves the
so-called morality or immorality to be dealt with by
the fate inherent in existence. The interaction of
both is the compound force that drives the universe
surely to the desired dissolution.
Moreover, the negative or indirect method of pes-
simist ethics gives rise to problems of history, of
politics, of religion ; for one theory of these matters,
put in practice, may promote the final catastrophe
more surely and swiftly than another. Thus pes-
simism has its Philosophy of History, in which his-
tory appears as the evolution of the Three Stages of
Illusion mentioned above. The great scene of the
first stage was the pagan world, typical in which
was the Hellenic joy in sensuous life, and the
Roman glory in conquest and organisation. The
scene of the second is Christendom, so far as it is
untouched by decay of its essential dogmas. The
scene of the third is the modern world of " enlighten-
ment," of "advanced" thinking, of political and eco-
nomic reorganisation in the interest of " the good
time coming." Following this is the surely predes-
tined disillusion that is to lead to the final dissolu-
tion.
Pessimism has also its Philosophy of Politics. Its
ideal polity is a "strong government," based on the
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 19
theory of socialism and administered in the socialistic
interest to the remotest detail.
Finally, pessimism has, as a rounded philosophy
must have, its Philosophy of Religion. According to
this, religion is the consecration in myth and mystery
of the meaning that philosophy puts rationally. Re-
ligion therefore undergoes an evolution side by side
with the development of philosophy. Accordingly
pessimism sees all religions arrayed in two successive
groups, — the Religions of Illusion and the Religion
of Disillusion. The former break up again in accord-
ance with the Three Stages. Paganism is the re-
ligion of the first stage ; Christianity, untainted by
rationalism, the religion of the second; "free reli-
gion," "liberal Christianity," the "positive religion,"
"ethical culture," the "church of humanity," — all
the manifold experiments at making a " religion "
whose interest is to be centred in this world alone, —
constitute the religion of the third. Over against all
these stands Hartmann's "religion of the future,"
the Religion of Intelligence {die Religion des Geistes),
as he likes to call it, whose priests are to celebrate
the doctrine, solemnise the rites, and inspire the
devotees of the great Nirvana — the eternal Silence
and Blank.
These are the main lines of the theory that en-
lists the adhesion of the throng of jaded or faded
120 JiSSAYS /X PHILOSOPHY
sentimentalists who make up the body of Hartmann's
admirers. In contrast with the Germany that
responded to the sober and invigorating views of a
Kant, a Fichte, or a Ilegcl, these people are a
curious and disheartening study. Apart from the
revulsion that minds of moral vigour must feci at
such results, the lack of critical logic exposed in the
acceptance of such a net of contradictions is a tell-
ing evidence of the decline in theoretical tone among
the "cultivated classes." Limp as this doctrine
hangs, with its astonishing attempt to construe the
Absolute by means of pictorial thought, by adjust-
ments of components set spatially side by side (the
duplicate worlds of object and subject), by a temporal
antecedence to the world of Nature (the Unconscious
in its "privacy," before the world arose), in short, by
means of categories in reality mechanical, flung on
the screen of Space and Time, — to say nothing of
its vain struggles to bridge the chasm between con-
sciousness and the Unconscious, of its Absolute at
once unconscious and conscious, of its proving the
reality of transcendent knowledge by the imma-
nence of the Unconscious in the duplicate worlds and
therefore in the world of cognition, when it had
already assumed this transcendency of knowledge to
establish the existence of the Unconscious, — despite
all this, there seems to be a sufficient multitude to
whom it gives a satisfaction, and who are even will-
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 12 1
ing to do battle, at least on field of paper and under
fire of ink, for the high privilege of a general self-
annihilation in the considerably distant future.
It is true, however, and encouraging, that this class
of minds does not form the whole of the German or
other public ; that authority goes by weight and not
by numbers ; and that Germans of the higher and
more thorough order of culture early discerned the
bubble, and pricked it without ado.^ On the other
hand, it would be materially unjust to take leave of
Hartmann and Schopenhauer without emphatically
acknowledging the service they have both rendered
by so completely unveiling the pessimism latent in
any theory that represents the Eternal as impersonal.
They cast a light far back of their own work, and
illuminate for our instruction the void which confronts
us, in the systems of their greater predecessors, when
we look for a doctrine of the Real that answers to our
need of a Personal God.
II
When we turn now to Diihring, we find ourselves
suddenly in the opposite extreme of the emotional
climate. Diihring is materialist, but he is optimist
still more. Indeed, it seems not unlikely that he is
optimist before he is materialist, just as Hartmann
1 Compare Professor Wundt's article on " Philosophy in Germany,"
in Mind, July, 1877.
122 ESSAYS LV rillLOSOPIIY
is pessimist first and expounder of the Unconscious
afterward. In talking him as the representative of
materialism, I have purposely passed by names far
more widely known, — those of Moleschott, Biichner,
and Carl Vogt, for instance, — not only because these
are all men of popular rather than of severe methods,
having far less weight in the scientific world than he,
but because he is a man of far more scope, of really
thorough attainments, of positive originality, and of
a certain delicacy of intellectual perception char-
acteristic of the true thinker.^ Haeckel, who by
his extravagant ardour in advocating atheistic evolu-
tion, his vast knowledge of biological details, and his
high repute among his associates in science, fills so
large a place in the minds of most readers as a repre-
sentative of materialism, must be counted out, accord-
ing to his own public and repeated protests, as not
intending or teaching materialism at all, but a monism
^ A writer more correctly to be compared with Diihring is Czolbe,
of Konigsberg, author of a naturalistic theory expounded in his Limits
of Htitnati Knowledge on the Basis of the Mechanical Priyiciple^ who
died in 1873. But he did not, like Diihring, develop his views into
a comprehensive philosophy, applied to all the provinces of life. He
belonged, too, rather to the previous generation of thinkers than to
this, and was known there as an opponent of Lotze. Lotze, gifted
and influential as he was, I have also passed by, later in the essay, in
the agnostic-idealist connexion, in spite of his acknowledged bearing
on the position of Lange, mainly for reasons similar to those that led
me to disregard Czolbe : he belongs to a movement earlier than the
one here considered.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 23
of "substance at once conscious and material," so
that everything is for him "ensouled." Besides, even
were his protests disregarded, he would here have
to give way to Duhring, on the ground of not con-
cerning himself seriously with the philosophic foun-
dations of materialism, but only with such of its
phenomenal details as belong more especially to
organic existence.
Duhring names his system the Philosophy of the
Actual. This title sounds almost like a direct
challenge to Hartmann, as much as to say, " No
mystical Subconscious, no incognisable Background
here!'' And to have this really so is Diihring's
first and last endeavour. The Absolute for him is
just this world of sense, taken literally as we find
it ; briefly and frankly, matter. As we perceive
and think it, so it is — extended, figured, resistant,
moving, a total of separate units collected into a
figured whole, and into a uniformity of processes, by
mechanical causation ; in short, a variable constant, a
changeless substantive whole undergoing by change-
less laws ceaseless changes in form and in detail.
This striking conception of an indissoluble polar
union between Permanence and Change is accord-
ing to Diihring the vital nerve of the Actual, and
the key to its entire philosophy.^ But this polar
^ In this he apparently presents a one-sided reflection from Hegel,
with whom Identity and Difference are the elementary dynamic " mo-
124 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
coherence, he thinks, is only possible by the Act-
ual's consisting of certain primitive elements, defi-
nite in size, figure, and number, subject to definite
laws of combination and change of combination.
The permanent in the Actual is thus (i) Atoms,
(2) Types, or the primitive Kinds of the atoms, the
origin of species in Nature, and (3) Laws, deter-
mining the possible combinations of the types and
the order of succession in these combinations. The
variable, on the other hand, is the series of chang-
ing combinations as they actually occur ; these
amount simply to a change in the form of the
Actual, in its parts and in its whole. The evolu-
tion of this form moves toward a certain result,
which, as necessarily evolved from the primitive
conditions and therefore involved in them, may be
regarded, though only in the sense of a mechanical
destination, as the Final Purpose of the World.
The Actual, then, taken in its entire career and
being, presents the form of a self-completing sys-
tem of relations. In other words, there is a Logic
of Nature, inherent in the world itself. To repro-
duce this logic in the form of our knowledge is the
aim and sum of science ; to reproduce it not only
so, but also in disposition and life, is the sum of
philosophy. Philosophy being thus the aim and
ments " of the absolute Idea. But the relationship really goes back to
Greek philosophy, in which Diihring seems much at home.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 25
the distilled result of all the sciences, its method
and organon must be identical with theirs. The
method is hypothesis, verified by experimental in-
duction and criticised by thought. The organon
is the imagination checked by the understanding,
and the understanding checked by dialectic. The
imagination gives us the requisite hypotheses ; the
understanding tests and settles their rival claims,
dialectic purging it from the illusory contradictions
into which it naturally runs when facing the prob-
lems of ultimate reality. These problems all con-
cern the notion of infinity, either in the form of
the infinitely great or the infinitely small ; and the
contradictions, seemingly unavoidable, to which they
give rise, are in truth, says Diihring, mere illusions,
springing from the lack of a First Principle that
has genuine reality. These contradictions, he con-
tinues, formed the basis of Kant's boasted dialec-
tic, by which he is thought to have exposed the
illusion hiding in our very faculties. Kant would
have it that these contradictions issue from the
inmost nature of the understanding itself, when
it presumes to grapple with things as they are ; but
their appearance in the form of his famous "anti-
nomies " was in fact owing to his imperfect concep-
tion of the origin of knowledge, and his consequent
falsification of Nature into a mere phenomenon.
With this assertion, Diihring confronts Kant's
126 /ASSAYS I.V PHILOSOPHY
Standing challenge, " How can you make out that
perceptions and thoughts arc true of the Real, when
from the nature of the case they must be products
of our a priori cognition, and therefore shut in to
the perpetual contemplation of themselves?" "By
searching in the right place," Diihring answers
in substance, "and finding that ' co^nvion root' of
sense and understanding of which you yourself,
Kant, have more than rarely spoken, but the inves-
tigation of which you have found it so much easier
to evade." What sort of "criticism of reason " is it,
he goes on in effect, that stops with thrusting ex-
perience into the limbo of an abstraction called
the a priori, and never asking what the Pritis thus
implied must be ? Man brings his perceptive and
thinking organisation into the world with him,
doubtless ; but from whence ? Whence indeed, if
not from the bosom of Nature ? Let us but once
think the Actual as the Actual — as a continuous
whole, unfolding toward its Final Purpose — with
man and his conscious organism verily z;z it, and
the reality of knowledge becomes intelligible enough.
For consciousness is then no longer an imprinted
copy of things, as the truth-cancelling and unthink-
able theory of dualism makes it, but becomes in-
stead a new setting of them, pushed forth from
the same original stock. Man thus inherits the
contents and the logical system of Nature by direct
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 27
transmission, and consciousness, while remaining
self-converse, becomes self-converse in which the pro-
cess of the world is re enacted}
Not only do we reach in this way the reality of
knowledge, but we discover at the same time the
ground for the occurrence of contradictions in it,
and the principles of a dialectic that will solve
them. This Natural Dialectic, proceeds Diihring
in his treatise with that title, moves in the follow-
ing manner. Knowledge, though identical with the
Actual in contents, differs from it in form ; it is,
in fact, just the translation of these contents from
the form of object into that of subject, from the
form of being into that of knowing. Now, a lead-
ing trait of this subjectivity is its sense of possi-
bility — of the power to use the active synthesis
that works in Nature, and that now in mind works
as the secret of its thinking, with an indefinite
freedom. In short, it possesses imagination. As
a consequence, it falls under the illusion of the
false-infinite (Spinoza's infinitum imaginationis), and
assumes that the principles of its logical synthesis
— space, time, and causation — are as infinite in the
object-world as they ever appear to be in itself.
But to suppose causation, time, and space to be
really infinite would strip the Actual of the quality
of an absolute, and thus annul reality altogether.
^ Notice the reminiscence here of Leibnitz's monadology.
128 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
For, first, the chain of causation cannot in fact
run backwards infinitely, but must at some time
or other have absolutely begun; and it must break
off its retrograde in logic as well as in time —
must cease in respect to "grounds" as well as in
reference to "causes." For real causation belongs
only to events and change, not to Being and iden-
tity, and hence there must come a point where the
questions WJiat caused it and Why are finally
silenced, else there would be nothing absolute ;
whereas the nnderived necessity of Being, and of its
elements and laws, is the first condition for a rational
view of the world.
Secondly, it is quite as clear that real time cannot
be infinite ; for real time is nothing but the total
duration of causal changes, and to suppose this infinite
would, reckofiing backwards, make the beginning of
causation, Just noiv established, close an infinite
duration.
Finally, real space is manifestly just the extent
of the sum-total of atoms ; and this must be finite,
because tJie number of atoms is necessarily definite ;
for, if it were not, the Actual of perception, as a
series of changes by definite combination, would be
impossible.
Real or objective space, time, and causation are
thus all finite ; the persuasion that they are in-
finite, with all the consequent array of counter-
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 29
part propositions contradicting the foregoing, is
an illusion arising from neglect of the differences
between object and subject. Subjective space, time,
and causation have, to be sure, a quasi-m'^mX.y ;
yet our authentic thought, even about them, dis-
solves this illusion, and agrees with reality, as soon
as the understanding brings its dialectic to bear.
Here, then, concludes Diihring, the whole Kantian
fog-bank of "antinomies" is explained and scattered.
One series of Kant's pairs of counter-judgments is
entirely true ; the other comes from the false-infinite,
and is the work of the imagination, uncritically mis-
taken by Kant for the understanding.
From this point onward, then, the metaphysics
of the Actual may freely proceed. The Actual as
absolute, as to its veritable Being, is eternal ; time
and causation apply, not to its inmost existence,
but only to its processional changes. Neverthe-
less, this differentiation is just as necessarily in-
volved in its nature as its abiding identity. The
system of changes called the sensible world must
accordingly, at some instant or other, have strictly
begun. Thenceforward the Actual, poured in its
entirety into these changes, moves in a gradually
varying, many-branching Figure, whose elementary
components are of constant dimensions and num-
ber, but whose shape is undergoing incessant alter-
ation, giving rise, from epoch to epoch, to forms of
I30 £SS.-1VS I.V PHILOSOPHY
existence constantly new. The series of element-
combinations is not recurrent, and the world-whole
moves, not in a circuit, but in a continual advance.
This movement is carried forward by the Logic of
Nature, that is, by the combined action of causa-
tion, space, and time, which are its only ultimate
principles. Hence real causation is the transfer of
motion by the impact of extended parts, and the
evolution of the world proceeds by the single prin-
ciple of mechanism. Strictly, then, universal logic
is simply a MecJianics of Nature} This cosmic
principle unfolds itself, primarily, in two auxiliary
ones, — the Laiv of Differe^ice and the Laiv of
Definite Number. The logic of the universe, bear-
ing onward in obedience to these, must move, how-
ever, to a definite result, the above-named Final
Purpose of the World ; this real logic must play
the form inherent in it out to completion. Thus
the universe moves to a self-predestined close, and
is therefore under a third and final law, — the Law
of the Whole.
These three laws, now, are the Open Sesame to
all philosophy, theoretical or practical. They are,
for instance, the secret of that Natural Dialectic
^ Duhring's earliest book of mark was his Critical History of the
General Principles of Mechanics, a work crowned by the University
of Gottingen, and held, generally, in the highest esteem. It passed
to its second edition in 1S77. -^ third edition has recently appeared.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 131
which is to purge our understanding of its subjec-
tive illusions. Exactly as the Law of Sufficient
Reason^ must limit itself, as we just now saw, by
the real and higher Law of Causation, so that the
universe-process may strictly begin, so must the
other subjective logical principle, the Law of Con-
tradiction,^ be construed not to exclude, but to in-
clude, the Law of Natural Antagonism ; otherwise
the Mechanics of Nature would be impossible.
The three laws teach us, too, not only to recognise
the presence of continuity throughout existence,
but how to interpret it with precision, and not to
obliterate difference in our anxiety to establish
identity. The Law of Difference and the Law of
Definite Number not only provide for the move-
ment of Nature through the determinate steps of
the inorganic and the organic, but also for the
ascent by a specifically nezv element from the life-
less to the living, then from the plant to the ani-
mal, and finally from animal to man, with his
rational consciousness. The whole, to be sure,
must be developed through the single principle of
mechanism, but the now favourite doctrine of the
"persistence of force" violates the essential prin-
ciple that specific differences — primitive Types —
1 That every occurrence must have a reason, and a reason sufficient
to explain it.
"^ That no subject can have contradictory predicates.
132 ESSAYS IX PHILOSOPHY
inhere in the primordial being of the Actual, and
is therefore false. So, too, the Darwinian pseudo-
law of the "struggle for life," with its unsocial
corollary of the supreme right of the strongest,
must be rejected, not simply as striking at the
root of ethics, but as violating the Law of the
Whole. Species can arise neither by the transfer
of a mere identity of force nor by any number of
"survivals" of what merely is or has been, but
must come from Kinds in the primitive constitu-
tion of the Actual.
At this juncture, however, Duhring feels called
upon to reconcile the fact of ascending differences
with his principle of mechanical continuity, and to
explain, moreover, the origiJial transit from identity
to difference — from the primal repose of the Act-
ual to its unresting career of causation. But after
manifold attempts, which all imply the unmechan-
ical hypothesis of a conscious primal purpose in
his Absolute, he finally takes refuge in the
"mechanics of the future," which is sure some
day to unravel the mystery.
But at any rate, he goes on to say, our three
laws lead us steadily and securely to the needed
completing term in the theory of the world, by
settling the supreme question of the character and
value of life. This question he discusses in his
work entitled The Worth of Life. He solves the
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 33
problem in the optimistic sense, by means of the
principle of compensation : Existence is unques-
tionably marred by evil, by real evil ; but its domi-
nant tone, its resistless tendency, its net result,
is genuinely good. And this solution does not
rest on any merely subjective accidents of tempera-
ment, but directly on the objective principles of
existence itself. It is found, in short, in the Law
of Difference and the Law of the Whole, and in
the essential necessity, the inevitableness, of the
being of the Actual.
Existence, if it is to be understood, must be
judged, not by the morbid cravings of sentimentalism
fed on fantasy, but by sound sentiment which is
founded on clear comprehension. When we once
see distinctly into the nature of the world, and
adjust our tone and conduct to that, we shall find
a sufificient comfort in life ; there is a bracing sat-
isfaction in the discriminating insight into that
which 7nust be. Existence has, too, a charm, in
itself, and the secret of it lies in that very variety,
or difference, which constitutes the principle of its
movement. Moreover, life mounts in differentia-
tion, and the increased objective good of the
higher levels of consciousness outweighs the in-
crease of subjective susceptibility to pain. Fur-
ther, contrast not only heightens pleasure, but is
the source of it : the sense of resistance overcome
134 /■:ss.-iys lv piiilosophy
is the very root of joy ; evil is the requisite foil for
the reaction essential to life.
Still profounder elements of good — subtle, perva-
sive, even mystic — are contributed by the Law of
the Whole. Not only does the ascent of life to
higher and higher levels point clearly to the greater
fulness of existence as part of the Final Purpose,
and so give play to the "influence of the ideal"
in the encouraging prospect of the future, but our
inseparable union with the Whole, our direct descent
from Nature, and our reproduction of its life in
ours impart to us a certain Cosmic Emotion — Diih-
ring calls it dcr jinivcrselle Affect — which, stirring
at the foundations of our being, fills us with a
dumb sense of the oneness of all things, and by
forces coming from beneath consciousness, nay,
from the beginnings of the world, binds us to the
totality of existence with an attachment that no
sum of ills can utterly destroy. It is from this
Cosmic Emotion that the inborn love of life and
the instinct of self-preservation arise. Our joy in
the landscape comes from it ; also our delight in
art ; our capacity for poetry ; our bent to science
and philosophy, by which we would figure to our-
selves the form of this treasured All. It is, finally,
the source and the reality of the set of feelings
consecrated by the name of religion. To deny the
worth of life is therefore to put ourselves in con-
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 35
flict with the elemental forces of our being, which
will subdue us in spite of our struggles.
Nevertheless, Diihring continues, though life is
essentially good, there is real evil in it, and one
condition of its good is that we shall rise to higher
good by the spring from overcoming the evil : the
world makes itself better through us as channels.
In this fact we pass from theory to practice, finding
in it the basis of ethics. The first principle of ethics
follows from the law that contributes so much to
the excellence of the Actual — the Law of the
Whole. The highest practical precept is, Act with
supreme reference to tlic Whole. But inasmuch as we
are members not only of the Absolute Whole, but
of the lesser whole called society, we can only act
in and through that. Accordingly, first in the order
of his practical theories comes Diihring's sociology.
His writings in this field are voluminous, especi-
ally in political economy, in which he adopts and
develops the views of our countryman Carey. Carey,
he thinks, has revolutionised this subject. The
doctrines involved in the free-trade view, especially
the principle of unrestricted competition, he con-
siders a deification of mean self-interest. They
strike at the foundation of rational ethics — the
supreme moral authority of the Whole, Away with
them, then, and substitute instead the doctrines of
benignant cooperation ! This sentiment is carried
136 ESSAYS fX PHILOSOPHY
out in a corresponding Philosophy of Politics, in
which Duhring develops an extreme socialism. That
the social whole, however, is conceived in the sense
of a dominant atomism, very presently appears.
The "whole" aimed at is simply a greater mass of
force, to give effect to the caprices of that style of
"enlightened" individual who so ignores the great
historic whole as to see in the organic institutions
of reason — the family, the state, the church —
nothing but barriers to the career of humanity.
The end of government, Duhring holds, is "to
enhance the charm of life " ; and here, unfortunately,
in settling the practical test of enhancement, he is
betrayed into destroying the profound principle on
which he rested his case for the worth of life — that
we must be guided by objective values, and ignore
the outcries of subjective caprice. It appears to
him that hitherto there has been no considerable
political or social wisdom in the world. Social
organisation, as well as political, ought now to
undergo a complete re-creation, with the aim of
giving the greatest possible range for each individual
to act according to his own views of what regard
for the whole requires. For example, all govern-
ments armed with force are to be done away. In
their stead is to come voluntary association. Demo-
cratic communes are everywhere to replace organic
states. There is to be no centralisation, no one
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 37
great Commune, but numbers of little communes,
to suit the convenience of individual preference.
There is to be universal "equality," and women —
a redeeming stroke of justice — are to share in all
the vocations, ofifices, emoluments (and the few
burdens) of society, equally with men. Instead of
compulsory wedlock, there is to come voluntary
union from love, the bond to cease when the passion
ceases.
We are nov/ certainly at a long remove from the
hostility to self-interest that erewhile would prohibit
unrestricted competition, and revolted at the selfish-
ness of free-trade. Education is to be reorganised
in behalf of these conceptions, which are further
supported by an appropriate Philosophy of History.
History is simply a continuation of the drama of
Nature ; it tends to hfe, the variation of life, and
the enhancement of its charm. The test of historic
progress is the heightening of self-consciousness ;
but this Diihring seems to take as the greater and
greater accentuation of the individual's sense of
his validity just as he stands at each instant. The
career of history has, accordingly, three periods :
that of the ancien regime, that of the transitional
present, and that of the free and exhilarating
future. This future, however, is to be conducted by
tolerably dry logic ; much sentiment and refinement
are "aristocratic."
1 38 £ss.iys IX pini.osopnY
A suitable Philosophy of Religion closes the general
view. Religion, Duhring maintains, is really nothing
but the "Cosmic Emotion." Historic religions are
only superstitious misconceptions of this profound
pulse of the universe ; they are all to disappear,
as essentially worthless pseudo-philosophies. The
"society of the future" will neither worship nor
sublimely hope : the Philosophy of the Actual has
dispensed with immortality as well as with God.
For, to say nothing of the predestined catastrophe
of the universe, the individual consciousness must
cease at death. There is for conscious beings no
common basis in the cosmic whole of the Actual ;
each conscious being is a perfectly self-enclosed
circuit. Nor is there any individual basis of con-
sciousness except the body. An individual con-
sciousness is merely a definite "situation" — one
specific combination — of the world-atoms. Death
is its dissolution, and is therefore final extinction.
The system which opened with such keen vigour
of theoretic purpose, and which, as contrasted with
Hartmann's, exhibits so many points of a higher,
firmer-knit, and subtler intelligence, has ended in a
moral atomism as it began in a physical — in utter
social dissolution. It is, however, only paying the
penalty of inadequacy in its theoretical principle.
Its root of irrationality is identical with the irrational
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 39
principle in Hartmann's theory — the undertaking
to construe the absolute with the categories of the
relative, to think the eternal in relations of time and
space and motion.
It is a notable merit in Diihring that he himself,
and with no light emphasis, lays down the principle
here implied ; but his conception of absolute being
forces him fatally to contradict it. He will have
the chain of causation once on a time begin. But
a beginning is necessarily a point in time, and a
point in time is necessarily related to a before as
well as to an after. Diihring consequently finds it
impossible even to state his beginning of change
without referring it to a supposed rest preceding
it ; in no other way can he make room for a con-
tinuous mechanical nexus in the whole of his Actual.
The Actual is thus necessarily brought ivholly under
time ; time and causation are carried back, whether
or no, into " Being and identity," and Diihring is
asserting in one breath that the absolute is }wt
subject to relative categories, and yet is so. After
his scruples about time and causation, it is remarka-
ble that he manifests no hesitancy in applying space
to his absolute. He maintains real space to be
finite, and thus annuls his absolute once more.
For so, his total Actual has a limited extent ; but
an extent, like a beginning, must be defined by
something other than itself, is unthinkable except
I40 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
in contrast to a beyond, and therefore the absolute,
as really extended, is undeniably made relative.
Should it be replied that this relativity is fallacious
because it is only a relation to unreality, as real space
\s Jiniti-y and so the pretended beyond on which the
Actual is said to depend is a pure illusion, the empty
" infinite of the imagination " : then wc should have
the worse case, that the Actual has to be relative to
this phantasmal act of consciousness ; and we should
end in the contradiction, that the absolute is con-
ditioned by its own unreal product. So impossible is
it to define the Real except in terms of thought.
The insufficiency of the Actual exposes itself still
further, when Diihring comes to discuss the origin of
consciousness and the reach of knowledge. He
takes a fatal step when he seeks the "common root "
of sense and understanding in a time-and-space
prius, ignoring the fact that he has given no answer
but bald denial to the Kantian doctrine of the
ideality of space and time ; and that, until the
supports of this doctrine are removed, there can be
no use of these elements to locate a root of con-
sciousness : to search for the pr'iiis of something,
in a region still presumably the result of that
something, is an industry not likely to be largely
rewarded. Diihring's entire dialectic, like the part
of it shown in his attempted refutation of the
Kantian antinomies, rests on the assumption, which
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 141
he does not argue, that there is a space, a time,
and a causal progression distinct from the thoughts
to which we give those names — an assumption
which he may have hoped to warrant by estabHshing
afterwards a mechanical transit from mere vitality
to consciousness. From any serious attempt at
establishing such a transit, however, his clear insight
into the limitation of the "persistence of force"
prevented him from making.
But, as with other partial philosophies, it is in the
practical sphere that the self-contradiction in his
principle shows at its worst. This principle compels
him at the outset of his ethics to set up the supreme
authority of the Whole, but its lack of ethical sub-
stance brings him at the end to bare individualism.
At first we feel as if he had failed to draw from it
the high consequences of which it seemed capable.
Why, we say, should he sink from the stern ethics
of devotion to the Whole into this wretched atomism
of private caprice } But we have here the genuine
drift of his scheme ; for real morality is impossible
on a pessimistic basis, and Diihring's principle, in
spite of his subtle and imaginative plea for it, is
optimistic only by illusion. The very Whole which
he makes the ground and the sovereign object of
our duty is in fact but a monstrous Power, whose
self-centred " Final Purpose " is the burial of the
moral life, while yet only on its threshold, in a
142 F.MS.IYS /X rillLOSOPIIY
hopeless oblivion. The yearnings of her offspring,
imparted to them by iicr " Cosmic Emotion," Nature
does not share. She brings them forth, " to laugh
and weep, to suffer and rejoice " for a season, then
to pass to the Abyss, whereto she also, with her
latest and highest, too surely is speeding.
Life upon such terms is essentially worthless, let
it be painted in what bewitching colours it may.
The resistless drift of such a theory is either to
despair, as in the case of the fmnk pessimism of a
Hartmann, or else to illusions of reconstructing
the future in behalf of capricious desire. We can-
not hope for the abiding : let us then turn to the
satisfactions of the hour ! In effect, the professed
hedonism of Diihring's theory is at the last pure
egoism. Covering the horror in the depths of life
with an optimistic gloze upon the surface, Actualism
can have no final precept but to cultivate the Whole
so far, and only so far, as it may be means to the
greatest sum of individual enjoyment : therefore,
^' tvhatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy
might ; for there is neither wisdom nor device nor
knowledge in the grave — and thither thou goest."
Ill
We have now seen monism, in two of its most
strongly contrasted forms, undergo dissolution by the
inner necessities of its own logic. Pseudo-idealism
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 43
and intellectualised materialism have alike brought
monism to a rcdiictio ad absnrdmn when they faced
those problems of practice which are the touchstone
of all philosophy. It was only natural that meta-
physics of this order should give way, then, to an
agnostic interpretation of the critical principle, and
that philosophy should at length undertake a return
to Kant, in the hope of some sounder development
from his doctrines. We have next to see how this
renewed agnosticism, in its aim to be completely
rigorous, also comes to self-dismemberment, and sup-
plants itself against its own intent.
In passing thus to Lange, it is not surprising to
find him animated by the desire to lay a better foun-
dation for ethics than either pseudo-idealism or mate-
rialism has proved able to build. His History of
Materialism is not properly a history, but a philoso-
phy buttressed by history, in which, by exhibiting
materialism in the utmost possibilities that ages of
restatement have been able to give it, he aims to
expose its deficiencies exhaustively, and to assign
the true weight which its principle and the principle
of idealism respectively should have in a rational
theory.
There must be sought, Lange begins, some higher
standpoint than either materialism or current ideal-
ism affords ; and this, he is convinced, is to be found
in the doctrine of Kant, provided it be rigidly main-
144 JiSSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
taincd and consistently carried out. In his own
words, " As a beaten army looks about for some
strong position on which it may hope to rally, so
now for some time the signal has been heard on all
sides, Fall back on Kant ! Still, not till recently
has this retreat been really in earnest, and now it
is found that Kant's standpoint could never in strict
justice be described as left below. To be sure,
misconceptions of his meaning and the pressure of
the impulse to metaphysical invention did for a
while tempt his successors to endeavour the rupture
of the strict limits he had drawn to speculation.
But the sobering that has followed this metaphysical
debauch has compelled a return to the abandoned
position ; and all the more, that men see themselves
again confronted by the materialism which once, on
Kant's appearance, had fled and hardly left a trace."
Lange is deeply sensible of the deficiencies of mate-
rialism, but at the same time appreciates the truth
of a certain phase in it, as against the pretences of
what he takes for idealism. He says: "Materialism
lacks for rapports with the highest functions of man's
intelligence. Contenting itself with the mere actual,
it is, aside from the question of its theoretic admis-
sibility, sterile for art and science, indifferent or else
inclined to egoism in the relations of man to man."
And yet, on the other hand, " the whole principle
of modern philosophy, outside of our German 'spell'
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 145
of romancing with notions {Bcgriffsroniantik\ in-
volves, with scarce an exception worth naming, a
strictly natural-scientific treatment of everything
given us by sense. . . . Every falsification of fact
is an assault upon the foundations of our intellectual
life. As against the metaphysical poetising that
arrogates the power to penetrate to the essence of
Nature, and determine from mere conceptions that
which experience alone can teach us, materialism
as a counterpoise is therefore a real benefaction."
But on the other contrary again, idealism met a
want that mere empiricism cannot supply. "The
endeavour," he adds, "is almost as universal to over-
come the one-sidedness of the world-view arising
from mere fact. . . . Man needs a supplementing
of this by an ideal world created by himself, and in
such free creations the highest and noblest functions
of his mind unite."
In these words Lange's general position already
reveals itself. If Hartmann calls his view the PJd-
losopJiy of the Unconscious, and Duhring his the P/ii-
losophy of the Actual, Lange's might in analogy be
named the Philosophy of the Ideal. He prefers,
however, to speak of the Ideal not as a philosophy,
but only as a standpoint ; because he wishes to
include in philosophy not only the means for satis-
fying the craving after ideality, but the means for
closing with the demand for certainty. The aim of
146 ESSAYS LV PHILOSOPHY
philosophy, lie holds, is not a doctrine, but a method ;
and philosophy itself, when precisely defined, is sim-
ply tJie critical detenu i nation of the limits of the viain
tendencies in onr faculty of conscioustiess. These ten-
dencies are two : the investigation of phenomena,
and speculation upon assumed realities beyond them.
Philosophy has thus two functions : the one negative,
resulting in the critical dissolution of all the syn-
thetical principles of cognition, and the stripping
them of all competence to the absolute, leaving
their outcome purely phenomenal ; the other posi-
tive, affirming the right and the uses of the free
exercise of the speculative bent, when taken no
longer as knowledge but only as poesy.
The supports of this " Standpoint of the Ideal "
are sought in a critique of the Critique of Pure
Reason, or a sort of " new critique of reason," whose
ambition it is to bring to the needed consistent
fulfilment what Lange regards as the first principle
of Kant's undertaking. This principle is assumed
to be the rigid restriction of our knowledge to ex-
perience : we have a priori forms of cognition, but
they become futile when applied beyond phenomena.
That Kant himself regarded this as only the prin-
ciple of his theoretical view is, to be sure, unques-
tionable ; but his setting up the practical reason as
in itself absolute was, Lange maintains, a direct
violation of the principle, and was in fact rendered
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 47
logically impossible by it. Will, like cognition,
Lange holds to be merely phenomenon ; we cannot,
then, aver with Kant that we must be free, but only
that we must think ourselves free.
But with this granted, Kant's way of grounding
ethics comes to an end, and we must seek, says
Lange, to frame a right world-view by consistently
carrying out our only initial certainty. We must
return to the problem of the source and limits of
cognition, where, fortunately, we can assume an a
priori organisation as having been established by
Kant. The elements, too, that Kant assigned to
this organisation — Space, Time, Cause, and the rest
— all belong there. But Kant's attempt to settle
a priori the exact number of such forms was nec-
essarily futile : there is no way to determine what
the contents of our a priori endowment are except
induction. Besides, the gradual progress of the
natural sciences, particularly the modern physiology
of the senses (in which the primary sensations —
light, colour, heat, sound, taste, odour, etc. — have all
been reduced to modes of motion) points clearly to
the probable omission of an essential form from
Kant's list : motion should take its place among the
a priori forms of sense.
Indeed, one principal aim of any attempt at a
reconstruction of the Critiqjie of Pure Reason should
be to bring its doctrine into thorough accord with
148 ESS.-IVS /JV PHILOSOPHY
the results of the latest natural seience. This \vc
can do by uisisting, first, on a strict observance of
the limits the Critique assigned to knowledge, and,
secondly, on dofining these more exactly, in accord-
ance with the mechanical nature of sensation. In
fact, we here arrive at the true import and value
of materialism ; for that the actual of experience is
only explicable on mechanical principles is the clear
outcome of the latest science, with which it only
remains to set our theory of knowledge into agree-
ment, in order at one stroke to give materialism its
due, and yet its quietus as a scheme of interpreting
the absolute.
For the world of actual experience, extended,
moving, interacting in all its parts, and transmitting
energy from part to part under the universal law
of the "persistence of force," is from beginning to
end simply our conscious presentation ( Vorstelhmg).
The derivation of mind from actital matter is there-
fore impossible, as it would involve the absurdity of
the object's producing the subject whose testimony
is the sole evidence that there is any object.^ And
as for hypothetical matter — a conjectural substrate
beneath the actual — that is shut out of the ques-
^ This seems, at a single happy stroke, to dispose of the attempt,
common to Schopenhauer, Hartmann, and Diihring, to explain con-
sciousness as a phenomenon arising from the earlier and more real
existence of the object, or " matter."
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 49
tion by the limits of knowledge. Once we are
certain that our objects are strictly ours, are but
the framing of our sensations in our a priori forms,
we are thenceforth confronted with the limiting
notion called the thing-in-itself. The doubt, thence-
forward ineradicable, of our power to pass this limit
turns into certainty of our impotence to do so, when
we find, as Kant shows us, that the attempt must
cast reason into systematic contradictions.
Our knoivlcdge, then, is confined strictly to the field
of phenomena ; to knowing, not what is, but only
what exists relatively to us; and within this field it is
further restricted to the tracing of mechanical causa-
tion. For, again by Kant's showing, its highest
category is action and reaction, and so all the terms
conjoined by its synthesis must be extended objects
of sense. Hence Du Bois-Reymond's "limits of the
knowledge of Nature" become the limits of all
knowledge whatever. While, then, our philosophy
thus falls into step with natural science, it indeed
vindicates to materialism the entire province of
Nature, but at the same time excludes materialism
from explaining mind. Mind and Nature stand con-
trasted as subject and object ; the object, as simply
presentation to mind, requires mind as the ground
of its existence, and so can never explain mind.
But the relativity of our knowledge, continues
Lange with especial emphasis, reaches wider than
150
£SS.n\S LY PHILOSOPHY
Kant susjiccted, ami its contradictions arc pro-
founder. The limiting thing-in-itsclf Kant assumed
as a reality, or, at all events, he declined to doubt
its existence ; but to carry tbc a priori principle to
its proper conclusion, we must now recognise the phe-
nomenal nature of this notion itself. Our all-encom-
passing distinction between thing and conscious
presentation, between noumenon and phenomenon,
is itself a judgment a priori; in fact, an illusion of
that order. The illusion arises from our constitu-
tional tendency to put the positive pole of the
category of relation — Substance, Cause, Agent — as
if it were something additional to the system of
experience, instead of merely a term within this.
It is thus itself a contradiction, one not simply
functional but organic, and therefore provokes to end-
less other contradictions.
And not only, let us steadfastly remember, is it an
illusion; it is an illusion which, though we recognise,
we can never dispel, — any more than that of the
moon's enlargement on the horizon, the bending of
the stick when thrust into the water, or the appari-
tion of the rainbow. But, like these, it will mislead
only such minds as persist in the stolidity of the
peasant; and just as the cited illusions, when com-
prehended, not only do not disturb our science, but
continue to quicken the pleasure of existence by
their variety and their beauty, so will this ground-
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY I5I
dissonance of our nature, with the whole array of
its derivative discords, serve when once mastered to
enrich the diapason of Hfe and raise it to orchestral
fulness and harmony. The metaphysical passion,
born of this illusion, is indeed worthless for know-
ledge, but it is precious for experience. In its
immature stages, it burns to transcend the limits
of experience, in the vain hope of bringing back
kiiozvledge of that mysterious Beyond ; and so long
as it has continued in this delusion, it has been
the bane of the world. But when once freed from
the error, it will become, with religion and poetry, the
benign solvent of the ills of life. It springs from
the same source as poetry and religion, and is, indeed,
the strongest and most precious jet of the fountain.
For it is the work of the imagination, in fact the
highest and noblest work ; while imagination comes
from the illusion of the noumenon, and without this
would not exist.
Although, then, we must hold fast by the actual
for knowledge, for all the inspiration of life we must
take refuge in the ideal. Phenomenal and noumenal
— the actual and the ideal — together, and only
together, make up the total of experience, of our
vital Whole. In not less than this Whole are we to
live, —
Im Ganzen, Guten, Treuen resolut zu leben, —
and the good and the true are to be sought for in the
152 £S.S\-iyS /X riflLOSOPHY
ideal; in the ideal, not only as vaguely rendered in
the visions of poetry or the solemnities of religion,
but far more as framed into organic epics of the
mind, and turned upon action with all the force of
systems, by metaphysical invention. Nor let it be
supposed that our knowledge of the purely poetic
character of speculation will paralyse its power over
conduct. Though void of literal truth, its ethical
truth is real; the conduct that it means is absolutely
right. "A noble man," to borrow Lange's own
words, " is not the least disturbed in his zeal for
his ideals, though he be c;nd must be told, and tells
himself, that his ideal world, with all its settings
of a God, immortal hopes, and eternal truths, is a
mere imagination and no reality ; tJuse are all real
for life, Just because they are psychic ideals ; they exist
in the soul of man, and woe to him who casts doubt
upon their power ! "
Having thus cleared up the " Standpoint of the
Ideal," Lange next turns to the view it affords of
practical philosophy. He touches first upon the
question of the worth of life, where his settlement
is this : Neither pessimism nor optimism is an ab-
solute truth ; the problem of evil, if we push for its
radical solution, belongs to the transcendent world,
of which we can know nothing. But applied to
the world of experience, the doctrine of the Ideal
gives an optimistic or pessimistic result, according as
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY I 53
we consider life in its whole, with the ideal in it,
or only in its part of actual stubborn fact. The
mere fact, in itself, must always seem bad ; but it
must be remembered that this very badness is the
shock of contrast with the ever present ideal ; and,
after all, the optimistic solution has to come from
moral energy. Play into fact with aspiration after
the ideal and enthusiasm for it, with the firm resolve
to transform fact into a semblance of the ideal pat-
tern, and the reward will come in a gentler toler-
ance of defect and a calmer contentment. " The
freer our career in the metaphysical region, the more
is our world-view pervaded by sentiment, and the
more is it optimistic ; but the more ethical, also,
is its reaction on our doings and bent. We are not
only to reconstruct the actual according to the ideal,
but are to console ourselves for the perception of
what actually is, by contemplating what ought to be
and might be."
The transition hence to ethics is natural and
obvious : the highest ethical maxim is. Serve the
Whole. But the Whole here intended is the entire
complex of experience, with the active ideal in it.
"Work upon fact with recognition of its stubborn
reality, but in the light of the ideal, ' is what the
maxim means. We cannot hioiu that we are free
or immortal, but we cannot help assuming we are
the one, and hoping we may be the other. And,
154 .Jiss.iys IX /'////. osopi/y
on the other hand, wc do know that in our relation
with mechanical Nature, in whose domain, after all,
the larger part of our action lies, we are not free ; we
know that time is exceeding short, and that enjoy-
ment is for the most part hope deferred. The lesson
of life is cJiicfly fortitude and resignation. Lange,
however, has no personal drawings toward egoistic
ethics, nor to hedonism, even in its most public or
social form. He announces himself as in ethics the
legitimate successor of Kant : he desires to act, and
to have men act, from duty solely ; to seek the ideal
and serve it at all personal hazard, though with due
regard to the imperfections of men and the obsti-
nacy of fact.
Lange's sociology follows the lines we should
now expect. His doctrine of the Whole leads him
to a pronounced socialism, but he would have this
socialism a real one, in which organised society is
to correct the aberrations of the individual with
vigour. He sees, too, like Diihring, the import of
political economy in a comprehensive practical phi-
losophy, and some of his earlier writings were devoted
to vigorous discussions in it. Free-trade and laissez-
faire can find no place, of course, in the practical
theory of the moralist of the Whole. Spontaneous
" harmony of private interests," like the talk of the
Cobden school generally, is to him mere vagary,
springing from a fatuous social optimism. In many
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY I 55
essentials, however, he affiliates with Stuart Mill,
while he derides Carey ; whereby he fell into many
an acrimonious dispute with Diihring, for the vitriol
of whose sarcasm, too, he had but little relish.
On the religious question, Lange aims at a purely
ethical position : one religion is to him as good as
another, provided it does the work of consecrating
the ideal and giving it practical influence with men.
As for "rationalising" religion, let it be done, if it
must be done in the interest of culture and taste,
but beware of dreaming that in this way you are
getting at truth ! The Christian religion, for in-
stance, we may retain in spirit, but in letter, no.
Its entire ecclesiastical Symbol, in fact, whether
cultus or creed, may freely stand as long as it can,
provided it be understood to nteaji jiotJdng but a mode,
strictly symbolic, of enshrining the ideal as such.
It is impossible not to recognise the higher tone,
both intellectual and moral, of Lange's general view
as contrasted with that of either Hartmann or Diih-
ring. The substitution of fortitude for despair on
the one hand, and for mere enjoyment on the
other, betokens a sounder moral feeling, while the
standpoint of critical agnosticism is at least in so
far more intellectual as it gives clear vision of the
difficulties that must be radically removed before
any doctrinal procedure can be validly begun. The
156 J^SSAVS LV PHILOSOPHY
adroit preservation, too, of the play of the ideal
in the world of fact is evidence of quick, suscepti-
bility to imagination, and to its necessity and value
in the conduct of life. In this respect, Lange
reminds one of Stuart Mill, though with far greater
ethical fervour, as Mill appears in his Three Essays
on Religion. Like Mill, too, he will prove in the
end to have been a man of feeling, even more than
of intellect, determined in his judgments by the
wants of the heart more than by the lights of the
head. We cannot long conceal it from ourselves
that his belief in the ethical energy of his "Ideal"
is without foundation in his theoretic view ; that
to talk of duty based on what we knoiv to be pure
fiction of the fantasy is a hollow mockery ; that the
only reason which agnosticism can put forward for
acting under the ideal is the anodyne this offers
for the otherwise insupportable pain of existence.
Nor are clear indications wanting that Lange
forebodes the spectral nature of even this excuse —
that he divines the foregone failure of a remedy
applied in defiance of our knowledge that its essence
is illusion. Vaihinger, himself a thinker who pushes
the agnostic view to an extreme almost deserving
the Scotch epithet of fey, says truly enough : ^
1 Dr. Hans Vaihinger : Haritnatin, Diihring und Lange : ein krit-
ischer Essay. Iserlohn, 1S76. A book full of interest and of acute
criticism, though marked by some agnostic extravagances. I have
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1 57
" There breathes through this doctrine of Lange's
a strain of tragic resignation, ... A lofty moral
pathos speaks out in all that Lange teaches, and in
his manner of teaching it." He is like Carlyle, who,
gazing upward at the silent stars rolling through
the solemn and trackless night, and seeing there
the image and type of all existence, could only
ejaculate, " Ech, it's a sad sight ! " For him, life
has reduced itself to the phenomenon of a phenome-
non, to contradictions born of one fundamental con-
tradiction, and that an illusion we can never dispel.
The professed "new critique of reason" has ended
in representing reason as essentially irrational ; the
self-harmonious turns out to be a thoroughgoing
discord, our " organisation " is disorganisation.
Neither can all the seeming glow of the " ideal "
blind us to the reach of this contradiction into Lange's
doctrine of action. The ideal is put forward as an
end in itself ; but in reality it is only viewed, and by
the consistent agnostic can only be viewed, as a means
to suppress weariness of life. So while Lange
proclaims duty, his implicit principle is actually
pleasure ; he denounces egoism, but cannot sur-
mount hedonism ; he declares for the autonomy of
found it of admirable help in preparing this paper. [I ought now (1899)
to add that Dr. (now Professor) Vaihinger seems in the course of
years to have receded from his extremer negations, and to have be-
come an idealist more after the type of Kant.]
158 £SS.iyS J.V J'JJJLOSOPJ/Y
the will, but his doctrine forces a strict hcteronomy.
He stands professedly for a stern socialism, the
sovereignty of the Whole as the orf^anisation of
the ideal, but in his theory there lurks an utter
social atomism : so many individual fantasies, so
many systems of the ideal ; and, for each, the sacred
" duty " of meeting the antagonism of the countless
other private illusions with becoming fortitude and
resignation.
Beyond evasion, so long as conscious existence is,
as Lange holds, shut in to mere appearance, its
ghostliness cannot but betray itself in all its move-
ments. If with Hartmann the universe becomes a
colossal and shadowy Blind Tom, endowed with
a clairvoyance whose infallible "intelligence" dis-
plays itself in striking through the reach of aeons
with fatal precision at its own existence, and,
with Diihring, a gigantic Automaton Chess-Player,
matched against itself, moving with balanced " charm "
to the checkmating of its own game, with Lange
it fades into a phantom Panorama, in front of which
sits man, a forlorn imbecile maundering over a
Perhaps behind it, and shaking the flimsy rattle of
the " ideal " in the fatuous persuasion that he is
stilling the irrepressible sob in his heart. Let it
do its best, agnostic philosophy cannot make of
life anything but essential delirium, — with the
shapes of its phantasmagory distinct enough, no
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY I 59
doubt, and with a persistency in the recurrence
of its wanderings that is even too fatal, but delirium
still. In the wan light of "critical" thinking —
We are such stufT
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
It is no proper refutation of a theory, however,
to show its evil practical results ; the very question
in our day is, Whether our being is not compact
of evil ? It is a just retort upon all such ethical
reproaches to say, " Yes, our fate is heavy and our
prospects are desperate ; but what does that do
toward disproving the fact?" It is true enough
that Lange's ethical structure breaks down, and
that the gap between it and his theory is a dis-
credit to his logic, but his " critical " view is not
to be displaced except by strictly theoretical means.
His procedure must be forced to expose contradic-
tions, or else both the procedure and its results
must be accepted. But should it now prove to be
self-contradictory, it will annul itself and its assumed
principle. That such a contradiction is really in-
volved in it, we may convince ourselves by the
considerations which follow.
IV
Lange's principle is, that the a priori nature of
our cognition prohibits us from assuming that we can
l6o JiSSAVS J.V PIIILOSOPJIY
know by means of it things as they arc.^ This is
but another way of saying that we are forbidden to
assume it is anything more than a peculiarity of
man. It is in effect represented as simply a limita-
tiofi belonging to humanity. Whether its forms are
those of possible other intelligences, of intelligence
as such, we are told we can never know ; and for
the reason that we are shut in by the "limiting
notion " of the thing-in-itself. This agnostic prin-
ciple, now, Lange will carry out with unflinching
comprehensiveness : it is extended to include even
the fundamental distinction between our phenome-
nal world of experience and the noumenal Reality.
This aim of Lange comes from a genuine insight
into the requirements of system. Not only is it
true in general that a principle, to be such, must
work in its sphere with unqualified universality, but,
in this particular case, omitting from the compass
of phenomenalism the contrast between conscious-
ness and things would be fatal to the claims of
phenomenalism as a principle. If the notion of the
thing-in-itself be more than phenomenal, then there
is a thing-in-itself, and in cognising the contrast in
1 It deserves special notice, in passing, that this confusion of Kant's
Ding an sich, or Xkivag-in-itself (something existing " on its own
hook," underived from other beings, independent of any one ego), with
things as they are, is a very prevalent misconception of Kant. It is
at the bottom not only of Neo-Kantianism, but of much other mis-
interpretation of him.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY l6l
question, in putting the judgment There are tJiings-
in-thems elves, we put a judgment of absolute validity,
and see by the light of intelligence as such — with
the eye common to all possible intelligences. This
would force upon the agnostic the further perilous
question, By which of our merely subjective
categories, then, do we manage this astonishing
achievement ? The admission of this one noume-
nal judgment would open the entire agnostic
mechanism of the a priori to the inroad of absolute
knowing. So, by some means, this judgment must
be reduced to a mere conjecture. It will not do to
dissipate it wholly, for then another absolute judg-
ment would arise in its place, namely, There are no
things-in-themselves. But the validity of this would
put an end to phenomenalism conclusively. If there
are no things-in-themselves, then our cognition, call
it " subjective " as long as we may, is the cognition
of all there really is, by all the minds there are ;
the objects that we represent to ourselves in our
normal activity are then the only objects, and our
intelligence becomes itself the universal because the
only intelligence.
Hence it is with the instinct of self-preservation
that Lange draws the mentioned distinction back
within the sphere of merely human consciousness.
Even this distinction itself he will have us refrain
from using as if referring to anything absolute. We
M
1 62 LSSAVS /.V PIlILOSOrilV
must treat tliis also as phenomenal, and hence we
cannot be sure if there is, or is not, a thing-in-itself.
But he holds we cannot now silence the apprehen-
sion that there may be one. So the distinction
remains, and the thing-in-itself becomes simply a
notion, but a Hunting notion. The antithetic form-
ula ]\Ic and Not-ine becomes the all-encompassing
category,^ which therefore causes all our cognition
to sccvi merely subjective, whether it be so in reality
or not, and thus compels us to limit our certainty
to phenomena. The agnostic force of the formula
is accordingly rather increased than diminished : we
have now not a single cognition remaining that can
pretend to belong to intelligence as such. E.xcept
unluckily (let us, the readers, add in passing), this very
last decision that condemns every other, — the goblin
of certainty which haunts the steps of all agnosti-
cism, and which it cannot lay ! This Nemesis of
phenomenalism will presently appear in a clearer
form.
For it cannot longer be concealed, that in setting
out upon his chosen path Lange was in fact moving
towards a goal he little suspected and still less in-
tended. He has decided that to validate the phe-
nomenal limitation of knowledge he must make the
thing-in-itself a mere form a priori. But we have
^ How Schopenhauer the Epistemologist must have blessed Lange
for this stroke, so masterfully repeating his own !
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 163
the right to demand that he shall be in earnest with
this apriority, and a form a priori means a principle
from and in our consciousness organically and solely.
To say that a notion is a priori is to say that its
being a spontaneous thought of ours exhausts its
existence completely ; that the entire being of it
is in a native energy of our consciousness, and that
this elemental discharge from consciousness is the
whole meaning of the corresponding name. For
instance, our pure thoughts corresponding to the
words "space," "time," "cause," are upon the a
priori theory exactly and utterly what Space, Time,
and Cause respectively arc. Anything short of this
view would render apriority null. For if there were
anything extra nienteni to which, even possibly, the
i^/r/t?/'/ elements corresponded, we could never then
be certain that they originated in our consciousness
at all — we should remain in a quandary as to
whether they did or did not. Yet from our con-
sciousness they imcst originate if they are to have
that absolute universality, and that necessity of
application to their objects, with which we incontes-
tably think them. As a consistent Kantian, Lange
must assent to this ; and not simply assent to it, but
proceed from it wholly and thoroughly. To make
the thing-in-itself a genuine form a priori is therefore
to exclude its existence in any other sense. But this
annuls the desired phenomenalistic conjecture of its
164 ESS.-lYS LV PHILOSOPHY
perhaps absolute existence ; we have committed our-
selves irretrievably to the judgment There are no
tliings-in-themselves. Therewith, as shown already,
an act of absolute cognition enters, and universal
phenomenalism falls to the ground. The " critical "
procedure has annulled its own principle. The
Nemesis of all agnosticism, of which we caught a
glimpse above, has for the a priori agnostic formed
to itself a companion avenger.
Lange, however, is equal to the emergency ; he
has that dogged courage which does not realise
its own defeat. He rallies on a new base, and
this rally is the real explanation of his singular
doctrine that the ground-form of consciousness, as
he considers it, — this contrast between conscious-
ness and noumenal Reality, — is an "organic con-
tradiction." He would evade the force of the above
conclusion by showing that the "critical" thing-in-
itself — the noumenon as pure category — is not
the actual contents of that a priori notion which
forms the "limiting" term in the relation Phe-
nomenon-Noumenon. On the contrary, that limit-
ing term is an hypostasis by consciousness, an
imaginary " enrealising " — a putting as beyond, in-
dependent of, or plus consciousness — of its own
system of internal categories appertaining to phe-
nomenal objects. In short, it is a putting of the
notions Substance, Cause, and Agent, as if they
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 16$
transcended conscious experience, and existed apart
from it as its object and ground. The a priori
category of substance and accident (subject and
predicate), which, properly, only connects one com-
posite phenomenon (called the " subject " of a
judgment) with another phenomenon (called the
"predicate") so as to compose a new and fuller
unity, lends its term " substance " for this purpose ;
the category of cause and effect, which, properly,
connects one phenomenon with another so as to
condition and determine the second's occurrence,
lends similarly its term "cause"; and, in like man-
ner, the category of agent and reagent, which, prop-
erly, connects phenomena into a system of mutual
attraction and repulsion, lends its term "agent."
Thus this triune hypostasis, by some a priori
impulse zvhicJL Lange docs Jiot attempt to explain}
is projected beyond the limits of consciousness,
and is thought as one term of the relation Phe-
nomenon-Noumenon, while consciousness as a whole
is taken as the complemental term, its " organisa-
tion " (as Lange calls it) being viewed as the re-
agent, its sum of phenomena as the ejfect of an
interaction between it and the thing-in-itself, and
as the predicate of this supposititious being. By
this spontaneous contradiction of the strict nature
of its categorical system, our consciousness, con-
1 Compare pp. 167 and 174, below, as referred to in their foot-notes.
1 66 £ss.iys IN PiiiLOSoriiY
founding its own organic notions with the hypos-
tatised notion of a thing-in-itsclf, sets a bound to
its own certainty by an a priori illusion which,
just because a priori, it can never dispel ; though
it learns by " criticism " to interpret the illusion
correctly.
The justness of this analysis, so far as it goes,
is evident enough. We doubtless have here the
correct partial genealogy of the remarkable notion
Thing-in-itself — in so far, that is, as this notion
forms the basis of the common-sense dualism of
mind and matter — and the exact genesis of all
"critical" agnosticism. There is missing from the
analysis, however, the very important fact, that the
cooperation of the other a priori elements — Space
and Time — with those actually mentioned, is what
imparts to the "material-substance" interpretation
of this notion its specific character and its chief
plausibility. The infinity of Space and of Time,
in contrast to the finitude of every sense-presenta-
tion, joined with our tendency to ignore the strictly
supersensible elements in consciousness — the cate-
gories in their purity, and the pure Ideas — and
to take our leisure in the familiar region where
Time and Space render all things plain, makes it
easy for us to suppose there is "abundant room"
for "existence wholly out of consciousness" and,
as the saying is, "independent" of it. This blun-
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 167
der of mere inadvertence is no doubt stimulated
by the incessant activity of the pure categories,
but its primary provocative is that very deepest
principle of our conscious Hfe, the consciousness of
our relation to other niiuds ; and it is this principle
which Lange's analysis persistently overlooks.
This primal consciousness of our relation to others
is the real secret of our belief in noumena, and
contains their only true meaning ; and it supplies
the element which carelessly and wrongly united
with Space and Time gives rise to a sensuous mis-
interpretation of things-in-themselves. This primal
conscious principle Lange, as just noted, ^ quite omits
to investigate ; and this omission is the central
defect of his analysis of the nonmenon. The over-
sight leaves his account of the nature and function
of this notion seriously inadequate — a deficiency
of which something further presently.^ By the
misapplication of Space and Time to the thing-in-
itself, we are prompted to think it extended and
enduring ; and this, even when we view it as the
soul or as God. Here is the source of that me-
chanical psychology and that faultily anthropo-
morphic theology — we should call it zoomorphic,
instead, if we spoke correctly — which have always
been the bane of religion, the constant cause of
religious scepticism and indifference. With the
1 See p. 165, above. - See p. 174, below.
i68 JESSAYS Lv PHILOSOPHY
explanation here made, we get a clarifying account
of that travesty of the noumcnon which we oftcn-
est understand by the thing-in-itself, and may now
attend to the real meaning of Lange's result.
The meaning is striking enough. For, in fact,
our philosopher has unwittingly completed the proof
of the absolute quality of human knowledge, and at
the same time demonstrated the falsehood of ma-
terialism— not simply the impossibility of establish-
ing this (which he had already done, as Kant had
before him, merely from his agnostic standpoint),
but its final impossibility, even as an hypothesis.
As to our real knowledge, he has now shown (i) that
a bare thing-in-itself, a thing out of all relation to
minds, does not exist ; (2) that, even as notion, it is
a self-contradiction, something whose sphere is solely
within consciousness putting itself as if it were
beyond it ; (3) that, in spite of this, we continue,
and must continue, to accept this illusion, which
compels us to limit our knowledge to experience and
to renounce all claims to its being absolute. That
is to say, then, the sole cause of our doubting the
rigorous validity of our knowledge, and reducing our
cognition to the mere idiosyncrasy of one species
out of an unknown number of possible orders of
conscious beings, is an illusion whose genesis we
know, a contradiction that we distinctly detect.
Then, beyond dispute, our discrediting liniitatio7i of
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 169
ojir cognitive faculty is an error, and we ought to
correct it by disregarding its cause.
It is idle to say that we cannot do this because
the illusion is organic, and will therefore continue
to play upon us forever. When it is once detected,
it is completely in our power, so far as concerns its
affecting our judgment. The presence of organic
illusions in our faculty of cognition, especially in its
function of sense-perception, is an unquestionable
fact, — the multiform phenomena of refraction, for
instance, — but from the moment wc know them as
organic they cannot mislead us ; because, to know
them so, we must have traced them to an origin
in the necessary laws of the function they affect.
Thenceforward we learn to interpret them, — as signs,
namely, of a complexity in our system of conscious-
ness far richer and more various than we had sus-
pected, signs of a far more intricate harmony of
antagonisms than we had dreamed of ; and the more
wide-embracing their recurrences become, each time
detected and corrected, the more do we gradually
rise to the conception of the self-resource and self-
sufficiency of our intelligence. The power of detect-
ing and allowing for them comes just from their
being organic, and depends upon that.
Therefore, precisely by the investigation through
which Lange has led us, we are now in the position
to assure ourselves of the reality, the absoluteness in
I/O /iSSAVs IX riiii.osoriiY
quality^ of our human intelligence. From the Kan-
tian doctrine of the a priori carried to its genuine
completion, as we have now seen it, we infer that
the objects which present themselves in course of
the normal and critical action of human conscious-
ness are all that objects as objects can be; that
beyond or beneath what completed human reason
(moral, of course, as well as perceptive and reflective)
finds in objects and their relations, or can and will
find, there is nothing to be found ; that our universe
is the universe, which exists, so far as we know it,
precisely as we know it, and indeed in and tJiroiigJi
our knowing it, though not merely by that. To
state the case more technically, the cognition be-
longing to each mind is the indispensable condition
of the existence of reality, though it is not the com-
pletely sufficient condition. If one asks. What then
is this sufificient condition, the answer is, The con-
sensus of the whole system of minds, including the
Supreme Mind, or God.
The process which has led us to this result, and
which might justifiably be called a Critique of all Scep-
ticism, yields also the final impossibility of material-
ism in a still clearer way than we noticed before.
We saw, some distance back, that the actual of sense
could by no possibility be the source oi consciousness,
being, on the contrary, its mere phenomenon — its
mere externalised presentation (picture-object) origi-
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY lyi
nated from within. But the hypothetical poteiitial
of sense, the assumed subsensible substance called
matter, we have now seen to be precisely that self-
contradiction talked of as the physical thing-in-itself,
and it therefore disappears from the real universe
along with that illusion. We have, then, a definitive
Critique of all Materialism.
By the path into which Lange has led us we
therefore ascend from the agnostic-critical standpoint
to the higher and invigorating one of a thorough,
all-sided, and affirmative Idealism. A few words
must suffice to outline its general conception. The
result is, in brief : Our normal consciousness has the
trait of real universality, — it puts judgments which
in the same circumstances every intelligence, and
every order of intelligence, would put. The objects
it perceives, and seen as it sees them when it sees
to its full, are the same that from the same outlook
all intelligences would perceive. For such objects
are themselves but complexes of its judgments, and
the mentioned circumstances and outlook are in
fact part of the objects as perceived ; they are not
limitations imposed upon consciousness from with-
out, but are particularisations of its own primordial
processes. Or, to state the case inversely, the
potential reach of normal human consciousness is
the very thing meant by universality : intelligence as
such is simply the fulfilment of human intelligence.
1/2 ESSAYS LV PJJILOSOPHY
The attempt to take the universe as beyond or apart
from or plus consciousness has sublated itself into
bringing the universe wholly within consciousness
and coincident with it ; and the ancient saying, Man
the vicasurc of all tilings, comes round again, but in a
new and pregnant sense — a sense which in the last
resort gets its meaning from the intrinsic harmony
of human with divine cognition. Only, this uni-
verse-consciousness must be thought as it is, without
omission or exaggeration of any of its contents, and,
above all, by mastering the grounds of its existence
and the method of its possibility.
What we have arrived at is this : All that is, comes
within consciousness and lies open to it, — the lit-
eral all, — whether " starry heavens without " or
" moral law within," sensible system of Nature, with
its bond of mechanical causation, or intelligible sys-
tem of moral agency, with its bond of free allegiance
constituting a "kingdom of Ends." A world of
spirits, a world of minds each self-active, with the
Father of Spirits omnipresent to all— conscious-
ness means tJiat. In being conscious, we are con-
scious of a universe ; wherein each of us, to put the
case in a metaphor (inadequate, of course), is a sin-
gle self-luminous but focal point, upon which the
remaining whole of light is poured in rays that are
reflected back and then returned again, and so on
without end, each added return bringing rays in
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 173
greater fulness from remoter and remoter confines,
to be shed forth again, with increase, and farther and
farther.
Consciousness and universe are in truth but two
names for the same single and indissoluble Fact,
named in the one case as if from within it, and in
the other as if from without. Not that in every con-
scious focus all the contents of this universe are at
any temporal moment imaged with the same clear-
ness or reflected forth with the same energy as in
every other ; only that dim or bright, strong or fee-
ble, confused or distinct, the same Whole is in some-
wise always there. Nor is it to be overlooked, that,
to the fulfilment of each mind's universe-conscious-
ness, it is essential that the consciousness be not
simply a private but a social, an historic, and, in fact,
an immortal consciousness.
The satisfactory and convincing grounds for this
conception, it is not in place to enter upon here with
any detail.^ Let it for the occasion be enough to
say that the interpretation of the facts of ordinary
consciousness into their implying this Social Uni-
versal might be the business and achievement of a
genuine and completed Critique of Reason. Such a
critique would proceed to the adequate explanation
not only of the a priori categories, of which since
^ For a fuller proof of it, see the essay on " The Harmony of Deter-
mination and Freedom," pp. 326-359, below.
174 ESS.IVS IN PIIII.OSOPIIV
Kant's day the world has heard so much, but of tliat
residue of the noumenon which we noticed Lange
leave unexamined.^ It would find the explanation
of the categories, and the nature of the final nou-
menon, in a single active principle in consciousness,
of which the vague notion Noumenon is only our con-
fused native feeling. Our ordinary name for this
principle is the moral consciousness, the conscious-
ness in each mind of its own reality, integral and
sacred, and of the equal reality of all others ; but this
is in fact rather the supreme theoretical principle, the
spring of all intelligence, the master-light of all logic
and all knowledge. The categories are the intrinsic
modes in which this principle puts its activity forth.
Though they appear so different to our first or nat-
ural view, they turn out on critical investigation to
be expressions of one and the same single syntheti-
cal energy — simply forms of a necessary nexus be-
tween all possible terms of sense, which reduces
these to the serviceable means of our reality as free
intelligences. This principle, as blending in one
energetic whole above the categories the two activi-
ties of absolute subject and absolute cause, is the one
intelligible creative unity — the unity of the Person
in its whole reality. The universe-consciousness
thus passes from apparent mere Fact into a pure
conscious Act. And this Act, as always determin-
1 See pp. 165, 167, above.
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY I 75
ing itself in view of a system of conscious subjects,
embraces in its living process of self-definition for
every self the whole world of other selves, and
therein the Supreme Self, or God, and is thus strictly
and \.rv\y personal, — is in the last analysis that order
of intelligence which we call a Conscience.
It is plain, of course, that any proof of this de-
pends upon the validity of the doctrine of a priori
cognition ; only by our proved possession of such
cognition can there be any evidence that we are
self-active realities. It is in this reference note-
worthy, therefore, that Lange, as defender of agnos-
ticism, sees he cannot afford to admit the theory
upon which alone cognition strictly a priori can be
established. Of course, to determine that its prin
ciples are indeed underived from its sensible objects,
consciousness must be capable of an act in which it
extricates itself from its world of things, and con-
templates its cognitive equipment strictly per se,
apart from actual application to objects; an act,
accordingly, which transcends cxpej'ience, and was
consequently named by Kant " transcendental re-
flection " ; an act, moreover, which presupposes the
power not only of using the apparatus of judgment
upon objects that are not sensible at all, but of mak-
ing judgments absolutely valid, since the decision
that anything is organic in us must be a decision
upon our real nature — our nature as it appears to the
1/6 £SSAyS LV PHILOSOPHY
whole worlil of intelligences. This presupposition is
radically at variance with Kant's subsequent finis to
his theoretical critique, by which he shut in know-
ledge to the world of sense, and with Lange's ac-
ceptance and development of this. It is simply in
keeping with this acceptance and development that
Lange takes the ground, which otherwise would be
quite surprising, that the contents of our a priori
endowment can only be determined by induction.
This position, however, is clearly a self-contradic-
tion. For an induction, despite its formal general-
ity, is always in its own value ?i particular judgment,
always comes short of full universality ; whereas, to
establish the apriority of an element, we must show
it to be strictly universal, or, in other words, neces-
sary. It is evident, then, that Lange has here finally
abandoned the standpoint proper to Kantianism, and,
without so intending, has really gone back to the
standpoint of Locke. There we may leave him and
his followers to the thoroughgoing surgery of Hume.
A sufBcient cure, in fact, for all such agnostic
and empirical tendencies might be found in a faith-
ful study of Hume, not in the more literary and
much mitigated form in which he appears in the
Essays, but in his undiluted masterpiece, the Trea-
tise of Human Nature. The very common neglect
of the Treatise in behalf of the Essays is no doubt
LATER GERMAN PHILOSOPHY lyj
in great part owing to Hume's own request, in the
preface to the posthumous edition of the short
" Pieces," that the public would thenceforth look
in these for the proper form of his philosophy. But
in the Treatise he had written down and published
what his genuine public, the keenest philosophic
minds, have credited with a permanent significance
of its own, quite apart from its author's afterthought
about it. This critical material, philosophic thought
can never abandon.
In Part IV of the First Book of the Treatise, too
often overlooked, Hume has supplied a key for the
destruction of the empirical position and the agnos-
ticism logically involved in it. There his diligent
and penetrating reader will see he cannot longer
stop with Hume's doctrine, that experience gives
only, but gives surely, the sensation of the present
moment. He cannot but go on to discover, as Hume
himself seems clearly to forebode, that without pre-
supposing the abiding unity of personal identity,
even the fleeting impression of the instant is impos-
sible.^ This permanence of personal identity, how-
ever, Hume has by simply carrying out the rigorous
logic of empiricism already done away with : it is
nothing but a "deposit" from the "artificial idea"
1 Treatise, p. 187 foil., edition of Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1896. Compare, especially, the passage in the Appendix,
pp. 635, 636.
N
178 £ss^iys Lv rniLosoriiY
Causality ; and this, empiricism has condemned as
having no basis in fact — us bcini; the creature of
"fantasy." Hence all perception — all experience,
even to its simplest item — is itself dissipated and
reduced to illusion.
The flat contradiction between this and the em-
pirical principle, which derives its whole force from
the assumed absoluteness of the single sensation, is
obvious. Hume is thus the instrument of bringing
about a curious result — that a principle should dis-
appear by merely being taken in full earnest and
carried out with unflinching consistency. What he
has really done, and quite irrefutably, is to remove
in this way the empirical principle finally ; or, rather,
he has simply let the principle dialectically remove
itself. True is it indeed, that without an Abiding
and Active in us the transitory and sensible is im-
possible. As the case has been forcibly put in a
saying that deserves to become classic, " Our uncon-
ditioned universality is the ground of our existence,"
— its ground, that is, at once its necessary condi-
tion and its sufficient reason.
THE ART-PRINCIPLE AS REPRESENTED
IN POETRY
The subject which is to engage us this morning,
ladies and gentlemen, has been stated in your ^ pro-
gramme by a title, just read, which fits in naturally
with your whole present Course, on Art in its Gen-
eral Principles and its Particular Phases. The title
describes the actual contents of my essay rather
more accurately than the one chosen for it when it
was first written nine years ago. It was then called
The Essential Principle of Poetic Art? There is
still a use in turning your attention to this former
title ; it will afford us a rather more significant start-
ing-point. To most of you, I dare say, it would
seem more natural to speak of the essential princi-
ples of poetic art, so many cooperating conditions,
of course, must go to the making of poetry. But I
purposely leave the main word of the earlier title in
the singular. To follow to the end the varied con-
ditions of poetic power, in all their diverging multi-
tude, time would wholly fail us. We must content
1 The essay was read before the Channing Auxiliary Society of
San Francisco, October, 1894.
2 Printed in the Overland Monthly, May, 1885.
179
i8o £SSAys Av rniLosoPHY
ourselves with an endeavour to find the single deter-
mining principle from which they all arise.
But is there any such single principle ? We must
confess this seems unlikely, when we contemplate
the confusing diversity of the actual species of
poetry. Not to speak of a common originative
principle, it hardly looks probable, at first sight,
that there should be common to the varieties of
poetry anything important at all, — to the epic, the
dramatic, the lyric, the didactic ; the tragic, the
comic ; the heroic, the sentimental ; the meditative,
the sportive ; the elegiac, the satirical ; the classic,
the romantic. And if we turn from the form and
mood of the poetry to its subject and contents, — to
love and war, to myriad-visaged Nature and the
"marvellous heart of man," to joy and sorrow,
glory and shame, to " the loud laugh that speaks the
vacant mind," and to "those thoughts that wander
through eternity," — the belief in the unity of the
poetic spirit becomes still more difficult. How can
diversity so wide be reduced to unity ? How can a
single principle provide for such manifold effects,
or preserve its identity through such an infinitude
of variations — variations that go to the extreme
of embracing opposites ?
To satisfy these wonderings, and dispose of them,
is doubtless part of our business in the effort to
ascertain the essential principle of poetry. But
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY l8l
this theoretical aim of our inquiry is not its only
aim ; there is a practical interest to be served by it,
too. The theory, to be sure, might if attained yield
us the pleasure of a gratified curiosity ; but we may
rightly demand of such an inquiry that it furnish
us with a discipline in culture, and with a perma-
nent canon of taste. If its result is real, this should
put us in possession of a touchstone by which not
only to sift the pretensions of a production that pro-
fesses to be poetry, but to discriminate between
works undoubtedly poetic, and to assign to each
its place according to its merits. Our question,
then, is not simply whether there is a single essen-
tial principle of poetic art, and what it is ; but, more
pertinently, just what the subtle quality is that
makes a poem a poem, and determines, by the
degree of its presence, the rank of any poem in
the great company of poems.
The surest method of settling this question might
seem to be to examine those works which the mature
judgment of the world has pronounced the best ex-
amples of poetry, and by a careful analysis and com-
parison penetrate at length to their common secret.
But the execution of this would require at least an
academic term of daily lectures. In no less time
1 82 ESSAYS nV nil LO SOPHY
could we hope to traverse the Iliad and the Odyssey,
the Book of Job, the Agamemnon, the Aiitigonc, the
Rubaiydt, the Divina Commcdia, the Hamlet, Lear,
Othello, and Macbet/i, the Death of Wallcnstein, and
the Faust. Even then, ahnost the whole of lyric
poetry, and the whole of comic, would be left
untouched. We are fortunate, however, in having
a swifter method within our reach. We can set
out from a theory concerning the essential principle
of art in general. As poetry is a species of art, its
essential principle must be a specific development of
the principle essential to all art ; and it will merely
remain for us to determine what the specific addi-
tion is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's
art make to the principle of art in general.
The general principle of art has been lucidly
and forcibly presented to you in the lecture by my
predecessor. Professor Le Conte.^ Starting from
the familiar contrast between the ideal and the real,
which people for the most part take so abstractly
as to place the two in irreconcilable antagonism,
Professor Le Conte has shown us how one-sided are
the usual views of art. These, as we all know,
come forward in two implacably hostile schools, —
the school of Realism and the school of Idealism.
The one would have art reproduce Nature in all
1 Joseph Le Conte : " The Principle of Art as illustrated in the
Novel," in the Overland Monthly, April, 1885.
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 83
the coarse reality of its surface appearance ; the
other would have it ignore fact, and work only in
the medium of an ideal nowhere distinctly traceable
in Nature. The true view, as Professor Le Conte
shows, is neither the one nor the other exclusively,
but a higher union of the two, limiting both and
fulfilling both. Accordingly, the universal principle
of art may be stated, summarily, as real-ideality.
That is, art is not the cancelling of the actual and
imperfect, and the putting in its place of a vague
and fanciful perfection that is only an illusory
abstraction after all ; it is the transfiguring of the
actual by the ideal that is actually immanent in it.
The actual hides in itself an ideal that is its true
reality and destination, and this hidden ideal it is
the function of art to reveal. The artist is a seer,
whose eye pierces to the secret of which the natural
fact is the sign and prophecy. He is a magician,
whose hand releases the spirit imprisoned in matter,
and transforms the brute token into the breathing
and speaking body. And as the ideal in the whole
of Nature moves in an infinite process toward an
Absolute Perfection, we may say that art is in strict
truth the apotheosis of Nature. Art is thus at once
the exaltation of the natural toward its destined
supernatural perfection, and the investiture of the
Absolute Beauty with the reality of natural exist-
ence. Its work is consequently not a means to
1 84 £ss.ns ix piiiLOSOPiJY
some higher end, but is itself n final aim ; or, as
we may otherwise say, art is its own eml. It is not
a mere recreation for man, a j->iece of by-play in
human life, but is an essential mode of spiritual
activity, the lack of which would be a falling short
of the destination of man. It is itself part and
parcel of man's eternal vocation.
Now, this self-sustenance, this serious necessity,
grounded in the very nature of art as the investiture
of the actual with its ideal-reality or real-ideality
(call it which you will), is the true criterion of art.
If a work comes to us claiming to be a piece of art,
its claim must stand or fall according as we can or
cannot find a place for it in a scheme of life that
is consistent with our permanently respecting and
revering human nature. And according to its place
in the scale of things compatible with the worth of
man, as measured by his rational self-criticism, must
be its rank in the scale of art.
Applied to poetry, this theory would teach us that
what makes a poem a poem is the embodiment in
it of some element of actual experience, set in the
light of the genuine ideal — the ideal which by vir-
tue of fitting in with the ideal of human nature
forms at once the true reality of the embodied fact,
and a permanent factor in the complete reality of
man. The theory rests upon the doctrine that the
final truth of Nature and of man is one and the
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 85
same ; that the ideal law of Nature — the predes-
tined end toward which Nature moves by force of
its immanent idea — is identical with that revealed
in the human imagination as the ideal of man ; that
the criterion of imagination, as distinguished from
fancy, is this conformity with the profound law of
Nature — this holding fast to the sobriety of the
actual, and pursuing the lines of its ideal-real, as
projected according to rational thought. Such writ-
ings as show this healthy and prophetic imagination
are genuine poems ; such as lack it are not.
These last, no doubt, may afford a transient
pleasure to minds dominated by passion and impulse;
such minds are always seeking for some intense
experience that will satisfy the craving for novelty
and change, and so they fall naturally under bondage
to the glittering but capricious illusions of fancy.
But writings of this order will have no place in the
abiding judgment of man : they cannot endure the
test of time. It is thoroughly true that it is not only
the quality but the test of a real poem, that, like
every other work of genuine art, it possesses a per-
petually increasing ijiterest ; and this, not only for
the individual reader, but for historic mankind, as
culture advances in successive generations and from
age to age. Indeed, we may carry this test even
farther than Professor Le Conte has done, and not
only say that great works of art, and therefore great
1 86 ESSAYS /.V PHILOSOPHY
poems, fail of their full effect on a fust view, but that
they tail of it just in proportion as they are great.
Only the most experienced judges can recognise a
work of the highest order at sight ; even to them the
proper realisation of its true comjxass and depth
comes only through repeated examination and careful
study ; while the ordinary examiner finds the first
impression of the greatest works ineffective or even
disappointing. Work of genius demands for its swift
recognition an answering genius in the beholder; in
lack of it, there must be a patient teachableness, that
awaits the slow self-revelation of greatness.
So far, somewhat altered in form of expression,
and with its implied grounds partially exhibited, the
theory presented by Professor Le Conte. We have
from it a fruitful conception of the ground-trait in
the essential principle of poetry. Namely : All poetry,
in common with all other art, must combine in one
whole a fact of sense and the real-ideal of the imagi-
nation— the ideal that conforms to the root-idea of
the fact. This real-ideal must in poetry, as in Nature,
accord with the principle that determines the per-
manent worth of man ; and the whole into which the
ideal and the fact are blended, must in order to
poetic treatment be presented as a self-justifying
end — the poet must regard and treat his poem as
completely its own end.
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 8/
II
It should next be our business to trace the steps
of speciaHsation by which this trait of art in gen-
eral is differentiated into the specific principle of
poetry. But before doing this, and in order the
better to effect it, I will endeavour to present the
theory advanced by Professor Le Conte in a some-
what altered and developed form, and from a differ-
ent point of view. His theory, seen in the historic
relations that show its importance, may be regaraed
as in the main a fresh outgrowth from the doctrine
of Schiller and of Schelling ; and in what I now
have to add, I shall follow the principles suggested
by Hegel, in his development of the hints furnished
by his two great predecessors ; though I shall also
feel at great liberty to depart from Hegel's lines,
as those conversant with his AestJietik will readily
discern.
The point of view from which I would now recon-
struct our theory of art is this trait of art's being-
its ozuu end, but put in conjunction with another
quite constantly implied by Professor Le Conte, and
once or twice mentioned in his lecture, though
not developed, nor applied in explanation. I mean
the trait of literal ereativetiess. In virtue of this,
every true work of art is not only a nnioji of the
1 88 £SSAVS IN PHILOSOPHY
two contrasted elements, the real and the ideal,
but is an individual unit, in which each element
lives, indeed, though not in its own restricted and
excludent form. Each lives, on the contrary, in a
higher realisation in one and the same fuw icality.
The real is, but is idealised, and the ideal has
attained a completer realisation than it had in the
original fact. And thus the work of art brings
into existence a new and unique being — a genuine
but higher real object. This is the sovereign as
well as the essential quality of art ; and it is because
of it, and only because of it, that we can say that
art is its own end. Art is its own end, because
its new creations are set into existence in pursuance
of the real-ideal constituting the law of Nature,
and thus enter the world as units really belonging
to Nature — units prophetic, too, of that transfigured
Nature which is kindred with rational man and is
to form his fitting abode. And it is only for this
reason that we can truly assert — or, rather, must
not stop short of asserting — that not merely art
in its collective sense, but every separate work of
art, is an end in itself.
The doctrine which thus comes to light, that in art
man not only shares literally in the creative office
of God, but enriches Nature with new members
that express its divine Ground in a still higher
form, will seem to many overbold — extravagant
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 89
and irreverent. But its advocates are neither few
nor inconsiderable ; it is supported by the greatest
names. We can cite for it, among many, the voice
of Emerson, who in his poem called TJie Problem
states it with impressive splendour: —
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone ;
And Morning opes with haste her lids
To gaze upon the Pyramids ;
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky
As on its friends, with kindred eye ;
For out of Thought's interior sphere,
These wonders rose to upper air ;
And Nature gladly gave them place,
Adopted them into her race,
And granted thetn an equal date
With Andes and luith Ararat.
Shakespeare, too, — the same truth, of the blend-
ing of the real and the ideal in a new actual, in a
more veritable identity, at once more ideal and more
real, is the burden of those forever quoted, yet for-
ever fresh lines of his, —
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance />'fw heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;'^
And as imaginatio>i, bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, t]ie poets pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitatioji ajid a name.
Emerson, again, in one of the most perfect of
lyric poems, To the Rhodora, has joined with a
1 That is, from the ideal to the real, from the real to the ideal-
IQO ESSAYS AV Fin LO SO PHY
classic expression of the self-sufficingness of beauty,
and consequently of art, a sublime utterance of the
great secret in which their self-measured excellence
subsists : —
In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay ;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora ! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that if eyes ivere made for seehig^
Then beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose,
I never thought to ask, I never knew :
But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The selfsame Power that brought nie there broitght you.
The self-excuse of beauty and the self-warrant of
human nature, holds the poet, are alike grounded
in the ideal being of the Power who is revealed in
both. We cannot hesitate to hold with Emerson.
The beautiful and the soul of man are indeed in
an eternal correlation. Each, as the expression of
the selfsame Ideal Reason that is the Light of
both, reflects the other and implies the other. In
this inherent union with the other, each is truly
self-complete, and, taken in its entire reality, needs
for its justification nothing but itself. It must be
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 191
said to be an end in itself, to be its own end.
Now, art is art only as it creates the beautiful,
that is, only as it sets the beautiful into actual
existence, or, what is the same thing, transforms
the actual into the beautiful which is its proper
truth and higher reality. To be itself, art must
generate that which in its necessary correlation
with the ideal of human nature is an end, and not
a means; and hence, just to be itself, to be at all,
art must be its own end.
We need, however, to keep clearly in mind what
this rather magisterial expression really signifies.
It is liable to great and even gross misunderstand-
ing. It seems to challenge the most sacred con-
victions of the Puritan spirit, — which, as a genuine
historic spirit, has a real authority, — and it does
challenge, mortally, the Puritan's one-sided con-
ception of human life. But it might seem also to
justify or excuse the sensual spirit, as much as to
say, " Quicqiiid libet licet — art is its own law, it
may do as it will. If it please, it may clothe
license and sensuality in the enticing garb of
colour and fair form and melodious sound and rav-
ishing words ; its only condition is that its product
shall be beautiful."
Now, this its sole condition, a sufficing beatify,
we may fearlessly accept ; but we must also as
fearlessly apply it. When applied with rigour, it
192 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
puts an end to the pretensions of the sensual
school of professed artists and poets, and allays
the righteous rage and honest apprehensions of
the Puritan, and may hope, possibly, to win him to
a larger apprehension of life. For it is not mere
physical or sensuous beauty that constitutes art,
but that intellectual beauty whose consummation
is the beauty of a completely right character. It
must be remembered that the ideal which inspires
and guides art, genuine art, is the Supreme Ideal
at once of man and of Nature. The true artist
worships, and must worship, God ; though his rite
and symbol must be his art, and, so far as he is
artist, must be his art alone. Not that the God
whom he adores by his art is other than the God
whom we all adore by a common dutiful life, but
that to him, in his function of artist, the godhead
in all its manifold of perfections is summed up in
the Spirit of Beauty.
Nor does the doctrine that art is its own end
mean that art is indifferent to science ^ and reli-
gion, that beauty stands in no necessary relation
to truth and goodness. On the contrary, to reach
the heart of the case, we must go even farther
than Tennyson in the striking lines prefixed to his
Palace of Art, in which he declares —
1 Throughout the essay I use this word to designate what might
perhaps be better called philosophy, except that I wish to include
also under it science ordinarily so called, — natural science.
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 93
That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters
That dote upon each other, friends to man,
Living together under the same roof.
And never can be sundered without tears.
For we must say, rather, that beauty, truth, and
good stand in an eternal mutual necessity ; neither
of them has any real existence at all, apart from
the others. Though each has a quality peculiarly
its own, so that they are all real in a distinction
that is irreducible, yet this distinction is in the
form of their being, and not in its contents ; for
neither of them can complete its own idea except
as it gathers the two others in itself. Beauty that
does not embrace truth and goodness is no com-
plete beauty, but only the rudiment of beauty;
truth that does not include good and beauty is
only the fragment of truth ; and goodness that
does not compass truth and beauty is only an
arrested goodness. There is between them a triune
relation which might well be expressed by taking
the stanzas of Goethe on Art, as translated by
Carlyle, and enlarging their sense : —
As all Nature's myriad changes still one changeless Power
proclaim,
So thro' Thought's wide kingdom ranges one vast Meaning, e'er
the same :
This is Truth — eternal Reason — that in Beauty takes its dress,
And, serene thro' time and season, stands complete in Right-
eousness.
o
194 £SSAyS /N PHILOSOPHY
III
It will aid us in further clearing up the concep-
tion of beauty and art as ends in themselves, if we
now trace to a sufficient precision the nature of the
distinction between these three consubstantial Ideas
that have their fruition in this hypostatic union.
In attempting to do this, we naturally have our
attention arrested by a time-honoured and very
striking definition of beauty : Beauty is the reduc-
tion of diversity to unity ; it is variety in unity, or
unity in variety ; it is the harmony of divergent
parts in a single whole ; it is the reconciliation of
antagonistic elements ; it is the triumph of the one
over the many. The definition has not only the
note of age, but of genius : it is itself beautiful ;
we feel that it is fit to have come, as it did, from
the lips of Plato and of Augustine. Moreover, it
is undeniably true, in the sense that it states a real
and universal quality of beauty, and an indispen-
sable condition of its existence. It is certain that
everything beautiful must be self-harmonious: that
every work of art must have an inward fitness of its
component members. But while this is true of art,
and of beauty as its principle, the crucial question
is whether it is peculiar to art and beauty ; or, to
state the case otherwise, granting that it is an in-
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 95
dispensable condition of their existence, is it also
the sufficient condition ?
Now, upon thorough reflection, is it not plain that
in this quality of self-harmony, this unity of diverse
terms, we are not upon the nerve peculiar to beauty
and art, but upon the trunk of their kindred and
identity with truth and science, with good and reli-
gion ? To differentiate this into the specific quality
of art and beauty, some further principle is needed;
the principle of self-harmony, though indispensable,
is by itself insufficient. For science is as unques-
tionably a self-harmonious whole, a variety in unity,
as any work of art can be : truth is a system, of
which science is the imaging exposition, and its
supreme objective principle is the same as that of
religion — the one Creative Idea or Perfect Person;
while religion is the imaging practice of the moral
system (or harmony) in which good by its own
nature subsists. Beauty, truth, and good — art,
science, and religion — come thus alike under the
formula of unity in variety. But while this corrobo-
rates their kindred, and even puts it in a new and
striking light, the formula not only fails to give the
secret of their distinction, but makes no more than
a formal statement of their identity ; the essence of
their common nature is missing, after all. To say
that beauty, truth, and good are all self-harmonies
— all unities in variety — tells us as little of their
196 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
common secret as of the specific secret of each ;
we would know ii</iaf unity of what variety is
present in each.
Well, if we press the matter, we shall discover
that nothing affords any key to either secret except
the nature of our own human personality ; that the
trinity we cannot but observe in beauty, truth, and
good is counterposed to a trinity in our own being
as persons, and that the distinctions in it are
dependent on this correlation, get their definition
from it, and are in so far founded upon it. We
too, as persons (or beings rationally conscious), are
existent in a triune synthesis — an individual unity
of intellect, emotion, and will ; a unity in which the
supreme illumination of knowledge blends and sub-
ordinates the capacity to feel and the power to act.
The power to act and the capacity to feel find
their only satisfying object, therefore, in the object
that alone can satisfy the sovereign light within us;
and so our whole being, in all its three constitu-
ents, turns an undivided aim upon the Eternal Per-
fection— the one and only Supreme Ideal, who is
at once the Supreme Beauty and the Supreme
Good, and thence the Supreme Truth, just because
he is the satisfaction at once of our sentiment, our
will, and our reason. Beauty, truth, and good are
therefore nothing more and nothing less than the
forms in which the one Supreme Ideal who defines
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 197
all being defines himself, now to our capacity for
joy, now to our power to know, and now to our
power to act. We cannot define the three without
God — without the Ideal of the Reason. And we
cannot define them without man — without the in-
divisible threefold of human life. They have their
indissoluble unity in an organic correlation between
God and man, and their distinguishing variety in
the threefold distinction expressive of the unity in
variety characteristic of human nature.
So runs the answer to our question, What unity
of ivJiat variety do beauty, truth, and good each
severally present .'' The unity is the unity of God,
the Sovereign Ideal ; or, indifferently, the unity of
man, who in his reason images that Ideal ; and its
changeless identity rests in the organic harmony
subsisting between God and man. The variety is
the diversity in things ; but dissolved in the unity
of the Ideal, which is varied into a specific princi-
ple of unity, now for beauty, now for truth, now for
good, by its permanent correlation to our delight,
to our insight, to our devotion. While beauty, truth,
and good, then, each and all derive their distinct
quality from their relation to human nature, and
not from anything intrinsic in a fancied being of
their own, we find the specific trait of beauty in
its setting the Supreme Ideal into living relation
with our faculty of delight. TJie Ideal is beauti-
198 ESSAYS LV rilll.OSOPHY
fill, in so far, anif in so far only, as it fills us ivith
joy ; and our joy is the sentiment of the beautiful,
in so far, and in so far only, as it is joy in the
Ideal.
Art, therefore, in order to fulfil its idea, must
put the Supreme Ideal before us as a reality. But
while the indispensable ground of art thus lies in
the ideal, the identity of its ideal with that of truth
and good requires that it found on fact, that it
follow the law of Nature, and that its works, while
genuine facts of Nature, — sensibly-objective unique
things, — be higher embodiments of the Creative
Idea that grounds the order in Nature and fore-
ordains its course. In art, then, the Universal Ideal
descends into sensible particularity — descends in
fuller self-realisation than in the merely natural
fact. Thus the work of art, to exist, must literally
be created; and in art man actually adds new and
genuine and higher forms to the system of Nature
itself. This is the sublime prerogative of human
nature. Man completes Nature, not as himself a
mere nature — a round of endowment passively re-
ceived— standing at the summit of the natural
system, but as a free creator, to whom God has
accorded the transcendent office of carrying out
the prophetic types of Nature into that higher
world which is Nature's end and true fulfilment, — a
world of new existences fit to be the expressions
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 1 99
and the companions of man's spiritual life. It was
with literal truth that Schiller sang —
But tJiint\ O Man, is art ! thine wholly and alone.
Yes, — the entire world of spirit — the world of
religion, of laws, and of science, as well as of art,
of good and right and truth, as well as of beauty —
God creates only through the creative freedom of
man. And thus every work of art is and must be
an embodied Theodicy — a symbol of the justifica-
tion of the ways of God to man, of the perfection
of the Sum of All Perfections in accepting and
directing an imperfect world. It is a monument of
that kingdom of Grace, built upon yet above the
kingdom of Nature, wherein good is wrought out
of evil, and evil transformed into good, by the free
cooperation of man and God. It is the visible or
audible token that God regards man with the grace
of x^Q.<dg\\\€vag freedom — creative power and coopera-
tion with him in the regeneration of things and in
self-regeneration. It avouches the perfection of the
world by making palpable the atonement this affords
for evil, in being the means of free reasonable life.
Every work of art is an incarnation of man's faith
in the perfection of things when seen in the whole ;
in short, it is the visible confession that there
really is a God. Art in its unblemished nature, like
religion and the search for truth, is thus literally a
200 ESS^IVS IN PHILOSOniY
sacmment. The artist's calling and genius are
sacred, ami tlie men of old spoke with strict accu-
racy when they called the poet holy, and directed
that he be venerated as a prophet.
Heavy, then, is the sentence on our time of boasted
" enlightenment," and on those minds of prostituted
power who stand for the ministers of art in it, if
belief in this elevating truth has become as good as
dead and well-nigh impossible. Art will never get
its own, nor do its proper work in the discipline of
life, until the sense of its sacred character comes
once more into the general judgment, and masses
of men look upon it as the few great spirits have
looked who have been its true masters and inter-
preters. But art cannot be kept sacred except by
the consistency of its contents with its sacred nor-
mal character, and with the Ideal which, as embod-
ied beauty, it shares with truth and good. It is
hollow and trivial enough, if its soul of deep thought
and reverent imagination is lost, and if men descend
to the folly of taking its formal technique for its
real quality. The power of art lies in the artist's
flashing insight into beauty, truth, and good. It is
the power of thought ; but of thought that swifter
than the sage's, and more sure of its symbols, utters
itself directly in its proper sensible forms. Never-
theless, its genuine contents are such as the sage and
the man of science will surely verify in proportion
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 201
to their degree of wisdom and knowledge. So that,
as Ruskin in his Modern Painters says, " He is the
greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his
works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas."
IV
This brings us to a final removal of the mistake
made in saying that the principle of art's being its
own end implies indifference to truth and good.
The principle does not mean that the contents of
a work of art — of a poem, for instance — are not
necessarily true and moral ; much less does it mean
that the contents, if the artist choose, may violate
truth and morality. Such a meaning would con-
tradict the nature of art, as we have now seen it.
The meaning is, that while truth and good, in all
their various gradations from the lowest to the high-
est, form the essential contents of art, its character
as art — as distinguished, that is, from science and
religion — turns upon its form, and that its whole
business, in dealing with whatever contents com-
patible with its nature, is to put them into its own
form, instead of the form proper to religion or to
science ; to put them into this form upon the form's
own merits, and not merely as if the form were
subsidiary to the form of science or of religion. The
proper form of science is explanation and argument.
202 jlss.ivs J.y rniLosorHY
and the proper form of religion ;uul morality is
exhortation and command ; but that of art i.s simply
the tlirectest embodiment of its theme as the theme
itself requires. Assured that the theme is compati-
ble with the ideal nature of art, the artist knows
that it will justify itself and work its own work, if it
can only find expression in its natural embodiment.
The theme and its right embodiment stand to him
as their own end ; his sole business is to give them
free being. He has faith in his art, faith in the
substance of his theme, and faith in the power of
its own self-determined form to make its worth and
meaning clear. It stands in need of no assistance
from the explanation that belongs to science, or the
exhortation that belongs to religion. Nor has it
any need or intention to instruct for instruction's
sake, or to exhort for the sake of edification. It has
what we may dare to call a higher aim. It will
render its theme as the theme is, sure that the
inward worth which makes the thing of beauty a joy
forever will shine by its own light, and that instruc-
tion and edification will take care of themselves.
So far as the artist entertains any other motive than
the exactly fit expression of his fit theme, so far will
he surely fall short of his artist's aim ; for the pres-
ence of the foreign motive, however moral or judi-
cious it may be, will certainly distract his attention
from the essential demands of his theme, and mem-
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 203
bers will appear in his work that do not belong there,
while others that do belong will fail of getting ren-
dered. This is the reason why didactic or hortatory-
versifying offends a healthy taste, why allegorical
sculpture and painting and music and poetry are
insipid, and why the "novel with a purpose" has
become a by-word and reproach.
To return now to our starting-point, and realise
upon the long transaction we have been carrying on
in the grounds of our view, we may say, with a better
comprehension than at first, that art is imagina-
tive creation taking its hint from fact, and setting
into existence a thoroughly singularised unit, for the
simple purpose of giving the theme which the work
represents an embodiment in living accord with its
nature ; but this nature must be such as agrees with
the real-ideality that makes up the essence of art.
In short, art is the literal origifiation of a beautiful
object simply for the sake of its genuine beauty.
To apply this to the poetic art : A poem, to be such,
must present some theme, of a completely original
unity, wrought out of the materials of real experience
by force of the ideal which, while carried in them,
points beyond them ; and which, though condemning
them to imperfection, recognises in them a token, at
least, of the Supreme Perfection. This theme must
not simply be rehearsed, it must be embodied — set
204 £SS.iyS IN PIIILOSOPHY
forth in an organised and unique whole that gives us
the sense of actual life, and the verity as if of a per-
sonal identity ; and into the treatment of this theme
no motive may enter except the aim to set it forth
in the form its own nature determines. In fact, the
essence of poetic form, in common with that of all
other artistic form, lies just in this intimate corre-
spondence between theme and expression ; and it is
this that is the secret of that impression of living
reality which marks the work of art and the genuine
poem. Form, in this sense, is the very life of poetry,
as of all art. For though rationality of contents is in-
dispensable to art, and the degree of this is a main
criterion of the rank of a work, this still belongs to
art in common with science and religion, and art only
obtains its sufficing differential quality in this trait of
appropriate and adequate form.
V
But all that we have thus far determined leaves us
still on the ground of art in general. We have as
yet no canon of poetry distinct from a canon of art
universally. Our passage to this must be effected by
ascertaining the basis of distinction among the dif-
ferent orders of art. Starting with the common dis-
tinction of the arts into the useful and the fine, we
might do better, for the sake of clearness, to call the
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 205
first the mechanical arts, and the second, after Schel-
ling, the esemplastic — those that form a manifold
into unity for the sake of the unity. And let us note
distinctly that the real difference between the two
classes is this : a mechanical whole (so-called) is
nothing but a means to something beyond it, while
a whole of imagination is not a means at all, but
strictly an end. In short, the mechanical arts do
not result in true wholes. Every mechanical art is
after all only a contributing part to the real whole
that comes into existence in the realm of the esem-
plastic arts alone — the realm of the fine arts.
Nor may we omit the important fact, that the dis-
tinction between the mechanical and the fine arts is
not really a distinction into separate classes, but a dis-
tinction of order, or gradation, in the elements of one
indivisible system. The products of m.echanism are
doubtless in most instances separate material objects,
but these are never finalities. They are, as was said,
only means to some want in our rational nature, and
thereby get their justification ; or else they receive
their condemnation, and eventual dismissal from the
world as man will have it, because of their lack of
such service to reason. The rational ends, it is the
function of fine art, in conjunction with religion and
science, to express ; and it must be borne in mind
that the mechanical enters into every fine art, and is
indispensable to its existence and completion.
206 £SS.iyS LV riULOSOPHY
But let it be still more carefully kept in knowledge,
that this mechanical clement is only the servant of
the fine art as such, and that the fine art, in its own
proper nature, is not even hinted at in the mechani-
cal. The sculptor must be a deft draughtsman and
modeller ; but draughtsmanship and modelling are
not sculpture. The painter must be a draughtsman
and colourist ; but drawing and colouring are not
painting. The composer must be a master of melody
and counterpoint ; but melody and harmony are not
an oratorio or a symphony. The poet must be mas-
ter of rhythm, metre, and all the resources of rheto-
ric ; but rhythm, metre, and all the arts of rhetoric
are infinitely short of the soul of poetry. No, noth-
ing short of the creative principle of imagination gives
the fine arts their specific quality — the principle that
creates for the sake of creating, for the sake of giving
free course to that imagination which is not only an
essential but the guiding factor in the supersensible
being of man, and which not only founds for him the
world of religion and of science, as well as that of art,
but is the constructive and developing principle of
the universe itself.
So then, to get to a specific canon of poetry, we
must settle the grouping of the fine arts, and find
how they are really differentiated from each other.
There are generally recognised a standard five, —
architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry.
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 20/
Aristotle throws these into two main groups : the
mimetic or imitative, embraced in sculpture and
painting ; and the poetic or creative, which are archi-
tecture, music, and poetry. But this Aristotelian
division calls for criticism, and to bring its question-
able character out, let me first emphasise Professor
Le Conte's statement, that the so-called mimetic arts
"are more than imitative, otherwise they would not
belong to the category of fine art." And I would
not only emphasise the statement, but add to it
this : that fine art, as such, is not mimetic at all,
and that the distinction between the various fine
arts is not founded on their relation or non-relation
to the sensible world. In fact, architecture, music,
and poetry must as truly derive their materials from
the world of sensible experience as sculpture and
painting ; while sculpture and painting must as
really contain imaginative creation as architecture,
music, and poetry. That the sense-world which sup-
plies the basis of the latter three is a world of inner
sense, while that which gives a footing to the two
former is an external world, is a point of no material
import. The vital thing in all the fine arts is their
self-motived creative function ; and any real distinc-
tion among them must refer to a gradation in the
perfection with which they give this function free
play. If one, but only one, of the arts recognised
as fine is so hampered by relations to the mechani-
208 £SS.-iyS IX PHILOSOPHY
cal arts, so circumscribed by certain uses its product
has to serve, as to be prevented from entering un-
reservedly into the ideal of its theme, while it unques-
tionably still deals with the ideal, then we must
place that art at the bottom of a hierarchy in whose
higher grades the other arts will follow each other
according to their compass of creative freedom. By
this principle, it is found that the recognised fine arts
form an ascending series in the order in which I
have already named them, — architecture, sculpture,
painting, music, and poetry.
Architecture, it is very obvious, in its aim of giv-
ing the masses and details of a building ideal form
is guided and restricted both by the purposes of
shelter and room that the building is to serve, and
by the laws of constructive engineering. The two
unite to prevent the free action of imagination,
not only in regard to the proportions of the structure
and the mode of combining its component masses,
but also, though in a less degree, in regard to the
ornamentation of its details. A building cannot be
made with an isolated reference to the demands of
beauty. Use and stability must be secured at all
hazards, and the architect can only make it as beau-
tiful as these conditions will permit. Any other
method in building would be ruinous and absurd.
Accordingly, it has been well said that architecture
is not pure art, but only art struggling to get into
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 209
being — or, as the Germans say, it is only art " striv-
ing to become."
In all of the other four arts in the list, the crea-
tive function is quite emancipated from external uses
and mechanical conditions. The only question re-
garding each is, What limits to the perfection of
creative freedom remain because of its material or
medium of embodiment } — what enlargement of free
expression has it, by reason of the greater complex
of elements which it merges into unity in its mate-
rial, or by reason of the more inward and intellectual
nature of its medium of embodiment ?
Sculpture, by this principle, ranks below painting,
not only because its material, as matter in mass, is
less kindred with the intellectual nature of imagina-
tion than the surface of pigment which painting
presents, but because its medium of embodiment,
physical form, is less complex than that of painting,
which unites both form and colour with perspective.
The consequence of all this is, that sculpture is
much more restricted than painting in its control
over the principles of unity. It is limited to one
narrow spot of foreground space, as well as to a pres-
ent instant of time, while painting is limited in the
unity of time alone. Thus the larger manifold that
painting has the power of reducing to unity opens
to it a vaster range of creative combination.
Painting, in its turn, must yield to music in crea-
p
2 1 0 £SSA YS LV PHIL OSOPH Y
tive scope, partly because music works in a medium
— sound, and the scale, and the harmonic and the
rhythmic system — not only more ethereal, but in-
comparably more complex than that of painting,
giving rise to an enormous increase in the alterna-
tives for combination; partly because music is almost
wholly released from space, having its proper form
in time, and even in this is unconstrained by any
rigidly defined boundaries ; but most of all, because
music, in its medium of sound, has an organ of
utterance more expressive of the mystery of exist-
ence than any other, more immediately answering
to the obscure and inarticulate longings with which
the soul looks into the dim Unknown from whence
the ideal unveils itself. It is in sound that the human
heart spontaneously pours itself forth when in com-
munion with those thoughts "that wander through
eternity," or when thrilled by those other thoughts
"that do often lie too deep for tears."
Poetry, finally, is the form of art where not only
are the unities of time, place, and action freed
from the restrictive bounds of the single instant, the
single spot, the single simple transaction, but the
medium of embodiment is thought itself, with its
completely articulate utterance in language. Here
the very source of the ideal view of the world, the
very origin of the creative artistic impulse, becomes
the material and the instrument of its own purpose,
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 211
the executor of its own will. The scope of the crea-
tive faculty is therefore the utmost conceivable, and
poetry rightfully takes the highest place as the art
of the greatest possibilities — the art, indeed, of an
all-inclusive compass, as at length completely self-
supplying and self-directing.
VI
If we now sum up all that our inquiry has gathered
concerning the essential principle of poetic art, our
result is this : What makes a poem a poem is the
fact that there is presented in it, in a rounded whole
of rigorous unity, a theme of real-ideality — a theme
founded in actual experience, but transfigured in the
light of the ideal borne within it which unites it at
once with the reality of Nature and with the Supreme
Ideal toward which all Nature moves. This real-ideal
strikes in with the law of Nature, expresses it, and is
in fact its product. The theme this affords the poet
must be embodied in exact accordance with its own
nature, and simply for its own worth, for its own
beauty, for its own sake. The whole that this em-
bodiment gives must be a literal creation, a unit
thoroughly new and one ; and if it is a complex unit,
as in dramas and epics, every one of its members,
whether characters or incidents, must be equally
unique and created. Finally, this creative embodi-
212 ESSAYS IN PI/fLOSOPHY
nicnt must be /// f/ic 'j-t-inii^ii- vicdiiim of tJiouHit
and language. Ilcnce it must avoitl all those mere-
tricious effects, exaggerations, and extravagances,
that come of attempting to force thought and speech
out of their natural province and make them ape the
functions of music or ]-)ainting or sculpture. It must
avoid, in short, the fault of falsely mimicking external
Nature by that whose proper function is only to
suggest its ideal — the fault of over-melodiousness,
over-description, over-delineation, over-imitation.
Now, the trait of true poetry mentioned last — that
it shall conform to the nature of thought and lan-
guage— is the specific quality that the poetic art
must add to the essential principle of art in general.
And yet it might easily seem to be one that will be
present of necessity, and consequently of no practi-
cal moment as a factor in ascertaining the existence
and rank of a poem ; we might suppose that we could
perfectly well disregard it. But to do so would ex-
pose the very substance of poetic art to mutilation,
and even to destruction. The tolerance which the
disregard would foster of the extravagant externalism
just mentioned is of a piece with another common
mistake — that of supposing that poetry must be set
in metre and rhythm, or that poetry is identical with
verse ; and that its contrast to prose is simply the
contrast between versified and unversified utterance.
This brings us to the question of the real distinc-
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 213
tion between the snhstance of poetry and that of
prose. The settlement of this will decide another
question, quite as important, Whether the series of
fine arts should be enlarged by the addition of prose
writing ? We must therefore investigate these two
questions briefly.
It is plain that, since poetry is creation, it cannot
be limited to composition in the form of verse unless
we can show that imaginative creation in the medium
of thought and language demands verse as its only
normal expression. But to this there are two objec-
tions, which together are fatal. In the first place, it
is a fact that some of the greatest poems lose nothing
essential to their poetic character by being translated
into an unversified form : witness the Book of Job,
in our English Bible ; the translation of the Odyssey,
by Butcher and Lang ; and John Carlyle's version of
Dante's Liferno : something of effect they may and
do lose, but they are real poems of the highest order,
just as they are translated. In the second place,
there are unversified works of genius that are un-
questionable poems; for instance, Coleridge's wonder-
ful fragment TJie Wanderings of Cain, De Quincey's
Vision of Sndden Death, with the Dream Fugtie that
follows it, his Flight of a Tartar Khan, and Jean
Paul Richter's Dream. In fact, verse and poetry are
quite distinct. Verse may often be the form of
poetry, and is usually its most effective and most
214 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
appropriate form, but verse has no necessary nor
absolute relation to the essence of poetry ; verse of
a high order may be, and frequently is, quite void of
true poetry, and poetry is often independent of verse.
Thus we must either add to our list of fine arts
three others, namely, novel-writing, play-writing, and
writing such as De Quincey's pieces and the other
works just mentioned with them, or else we must
take poetry as including them. But in its proper
character of creative embodiment it surely does
include them. It is clear that poetry, in the only
sense in which it belongs to our discussion, is
not contrasted with prose in the sense of unvcrsi-
fied writing, but with prose in the sense of writing
that is not creative, and not its own end ; with prose
215 prosaic — writing used only as a means, to the end
of instruction, conviction, excitation, or edification.
Now, in this sense, the only sense pertinent to our
inquiry, it is manifest that prose is not a fine art,
simply because it does not pretend to be a self-
motived art of creation. Its aim is not an imagina-
tive whole, produced for imagination's sake.
But this adverse settlement of the pretensions of
prose writing to a place among the fine arts has its
chief interest in the light it throws upon the real
cause of the frequent impression, not only that prose,
particularly in the form of oratory, is a fine art, but
that, since it is, the doctrine that fine art must be its
THE ART-PRINCIPLE IN POETRY 215
own end is groundless. The impression has its source
in a confusion of ideas : first, in a failure to discrimi-
nate between a delicate mechanical art (which prose
certainly is, and so may justly be called "fine " in that
sense) and a fine art in the only sense in which aesthe-
tics recognises the term ; and then in a further failure
to avoid the double sense in which we constantly
employ the words "prose" and "poetry." This is an
additional reason for discontinuing the name " fine
arts" and substituting for it Schelling's phrase "es-
emplastic arts " ; and it would be well if we always
said "verse" and "unversified writing" when we
meant them, and kept the words "poetry" and "prose"
to mark the deeper difference regarding art.
Moreover, of this prevalent error there is a further
explanation in the overlooking of the whole series
of decorative arts. These form between the mechani-
cal and the strictly fine or esemplastic arts an inter-
mediary group — a sort of ascending series of "arts
striving to become." Architecture is properly their
"upper limit," the point at which they vanish into
esemplastic art, so that some recent writers on the
theory of architecture have taken the ground that
architecture is merely a decorative art ; though surely
it should be plain that architecture involves creation
in a degree amounting to a difference in kind from
any mere scheme of decoration. Now, prose in its
strict sense, as the antithesis of poetry proper, is an
2l6 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
art combining the mechanical and decorative in one ;
and oratory, jjcrhaps the highest form of genuine
prose, illustrates this fact with the greatest clearness.
Such confusions and oversights as are involved
in the misapprehension which has just been exposed,
might be prevented if we grouped the whole series
of arts as mechanical and fine, and subdivided fine
arts into decorative and esemplastic, recognising that
in architecture we have the nodal point of ascending
transition from the decorative to the creative.
As I reach the end of this over-prolonged inquiry,
in its unavoidable hardness and dryness so little
akin to the fair attraction of its theme, there float
into my memory, as a poetic pointing of our search's
moral, these lines of Emerson's, from his fragment
called TJic Test : — ■
I hung my verses in the wind, —
Time and tide their faults should find !
All were winnowed through and through •
Five lines lasted sound and true !
Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
Nor time unmake what Poets know.
Have you eyes to find the five
Which five hundred did survive f
THE RIGHT RELATION OF REASON
TO RELIGION
On the question, What is the real relation between
reason and religion, the range in contrast of views
is of course very great. And this is true, whether
we consider the views as merely conceivable or as
actually presented in the course of history.
It is evident, first, that the view might conceivably
be taken, that reason and religion are incompatible.
This incompatibility might moreover be construed
in behoof of religion as against reason. It might
be said, that, granting the reality of religion, the
recognition of superhuman Power, the active pres-
ence of the Power must be accepted as simply an
awful Fact — inexplicable, incomprehensible, inscru-
table, yet unquestionable — before which, terrible
and indeed resistless and overwhelming, reason must
prostrate itself, keep silence, and slink away into
undiscoverable hiding. And this view is not merely
conceivable, but is actual and historical ; nay, it is
the eldest view; and if hoary antiquity or multitude
of adherents were taken as the true measure of value
and authority, it would be the weightiest view.
217
2i8 iLSS.ns jx rniLosopiiY
Then granting, in contrast, the reality and the
supremacy of reason, it is conceivable that reason
and religion might be declared incompatible in the
opposite sense. It might be said that reason neces-
sarily puts an end to religion ; that religion is only
another name for superstition ; that men who
heartily accept the authority and guidance of reason
must dismiss religion from the field of reputable
intelligence and real motive, and must relegate all
interest in it to the field of archaeology or of mental
pathology. Nor is this view any more a mere
hypothesis than the former. Rather, it is in a
certain sense the youngest actual view ; and with
the natural vigour, the verve, and the assurance of
youth, it braves the world in the confidence that it is
the only true view, and alone commands the future.
One must no doubt admit, for candour's sake, that
it is the view of men in a stage of comparative
development, the view of ages comparatively recent
and enlightened. Sooner or later it has made
its appearance in every civilised community. It
came to its head in our eighteenth century, and we
should hardly be extravagant in saying that it was
then the characteristic view of the minds that made
themselves most prominent, especially in France,
in England, and in Germany ; in fact, it is the tone
of the eighteenth-century Zeitgeist. From the spirit
of that age it has been transmitted to our own ; it
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 219
survives widespread in much of the temper of our
latest days, is heard in the proclamations of most
agnostics, and is felt in the spirit of much evolu-
tional philosophy.
Secondly, at quite the other extreme, reason
and religion might be viewed as in one sense or
another compatible. They might either be regarded
as essentially identical, each the same interior life
and reality, uttering itself in two different forms ;
or, if not quite this, as at any rate in a tolerant
harmony with each other, occupying their several
provinces in reciprocal peace, nay, even supplement-
ing each other in a sort of friendly alliance ; or,
finally, as at least capable of a modus vivendi, a
peaceable compromise of hostilities.
This irenical view, in its general sense, has un-
doubtedly been the opinion of the vast majority of
religious minds in all ages of enlightenment. To
speak more accurately, it has been the growing con-
viction of religious minds as enlightenment has
grown, and it has engendered efforts, ever increasing
and ever improving, so to understand both reason
and religion as to bring their harmony into clearer
light and better apprehension. Indeed, the reli-
gious history of mankind within the period of enlight-
ened human progress, with the vast religious changes
that have marked it, is explicable by the persistent
220 £SS.4VS IN PHILOSOPHY
impulse to bring religion and reason into harmony,
and is not far explicable otherwise. This history of
religious changes means that men are advancing,
steadfastly if haltingly, on the path of compre-
hending what reason is and what religion really is.
They are learning better what is truly reasonable,
and, at the same time, what is truly religious ; and
this learning is gradually putting them in mastery
of the relation in which reason really stands to
religion, and true religion to genuine reason.
But in the course of this development, three very
different doctrines as to the basis for harmonising
reason and religion have been brought into use and
belief. For the sake of distinction, I will call them,
respectively, the Old Doctrine, the Middle Doctrine,
and the New Doctrine. Let me attempt to state
them all exactly and succinctly.
(i) The Old Doctnne, — This runs to the follow-
ing effect : Reason and religion have an intrinsic
antagonism as well as a possible compatibility, and
their harmony, if religion is to survive, depends
on the submission of reason to religion as to an
absolute sovereign ; the harmony rests on authority.
Reason doubtless has its own proper province in
human life, and religion has likewise its province.
But the former is minor, subordinate, merely natural,
and only temporal ; while the latter is paramount,
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 221
spiritual or supernatural, and eternal. Reason is
the organ of the natural man ; it is altogether of
this world, and has no light for the world to come.
Its function is merely instrumental, not at all law-
giving. It teaches us how the benefits of the visible
world may be won, or how they may be made to
serve even the aims set forth by religion ; but it is
silent as to the invisible world which is the end to
be served by the visible. Did we listen to reason
alone, as it really is, we should know of no world
but this world, and be led to deny the world ever-
lasting, to ignore and deny religion altogether.
For — this Doctrine adds, by way of explanation —
it is the nature of reason, really, to concentrate all
its view on the "things that are seen," and yet to
assume that its compass embraces all being. Thus
extending its judgment into the invisible world, as
it is prone to do, it must of necessity contradict the
transcendent principles that reign there, and be in
its turn contradicted by them. The " evidence of
things unseen " is Faith ; and Faith means, that
reason has met and accepted its due rebuke from a
higher authority ; that it has made its submission
to Divine Revelation, which is and must be imme-
diate, without means, supernatural, supra-rational,
and, indeed, in the highest resort, contra-rational.
The first lesson of religion is, that what is im-
possible with man is possible with God, — " With
222 /iSSAVS IX ri/ILOSOPJ/y
man it is impossible, but with God all things are
possible."
(2) T/ic Middle Doctrine. — This says : There is
no intrinsic antagonism between religion and reason,
but merely a difference of gradation in light. Reli-
gion never contradicts reason, but supplements it,
and their harmony is the natural accord of the in-
complete with its needed complement. The harmony
undoubtedly rests at last on authority, but not on
authority solely ; rather, on aiitJiority coming as ful-
filnioit, and meeting confessed ins? efficiency. Where
according to the Old Doctrine authority was sternly
repressive, in the Middle Doctrine it is gracious.
The Middle Doctrine agrees with the Old in assign-
ing to reason and religion separate provinces. But
it does not limit reason utterly to the things of sense,
nor does it find in the judgments of reason upon
things invisible any contradiction of the judgments
of religion, but only a shortness of reach and a defi-
ciency of light. Nor does the Middle Doctrine find
in the judgments of religion any contradiction of
the judgments of reason, so far as these can reach,
but only light and fulness of revelation where the
light of reason fails. To the Middle Doctrine, as
to the Old, the "evidence of things unseen" is un-
questionably Faith. But here Faith is not a submis-
sion to rebuke and reproof ; it is a humble and grateful
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 223
acceptance of instruction in darkness, and of support
where power has failed ; of support hoped for and
longed for, and of instruction looked for with presenti-
ment. Religion does not, indeed, contradict, affront,
and suppress reason, but it confessedly transcends
reason, and in its interior doctrines and agencies re-
mains to reason essentially incomprehensible and
inscrutable, to be accepted not in knowledge, but on
trust.
(3) The New Docttine. — This declares : Reason
and religion have an intrinsic harmony ; their har-
mony is that of cause and effect, of fountain and
stream, of enfolder and enfolded. Here reason is
viewed as the real source of religion, and real religion
as the outcome and self-completion of reason : reli-
gion owes its being to reason, has no complete reality
except through its reasonableness, and takes all its
final laws from reason.
Thus, according to the New Doctrine the harmony
rests, not on authority, but on reason itself; or, let us
say, it rests not on authority as autJiority, — as com-
pulsory decree or magisterial edict, — but on the
ajitJiority of reason, on tJie autonomy of each rational
beijig as a ratiojial being. The harmony is the im-
mutable harmony of reason with itself. In the New
Doctrine as compared with the Old, the order of
dependence and the source of authority are both
224 ESSAYS IN nilLOSOPIIY
reversed : reason, instead of paying homage to re-
ligion and making its submission to external authority,
now legislates for the religion which is its own off-
spring, and becomes itself the authority from which
the credentials of religion must issue.
It is this New Doctrine, known generally, and
properly enough, as the doctrine of Rationalism,
that I am permitted by the courtesy of this Congress^
briefly to explain and defend. To the question,
What is the right relation between reason and reli-
gion, you will now understand me to answer. It
is that reason should be the source of which religion
is the issue ; that reason, when most itself, will un-
questionably be religious, but that religion must for
just that cause be entirely rational; that reason is
the final authority from which religion must derive
its warrant, and with which its contents must comply ;
that all religious doctrines and instrumentalities, all
religious practices, all religious institutions, and all
records of religion, whether in tradition or in scrip-
ture, must alike submit their claims at the bar of
general human reason, and that only those approved
1 The essay was read as an address before the Congress of Religion,
held in connexion with the International Exposition at San Francisco
in April, 1894.
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 225
in that tribunal can be regarded as of weight or of
obligation ; in short, that the only real basis of
religion is our human reason, the only seat of its
authority our genuine human nature, the only suffi-
cient witness of God the human soul. Reason, I
shall endeavour to show, is not confined to the
mastery of the sense-world and the goods of this
world only, but does cover all the range of being,
and found and rule the world eternal ; it is not
merely natural, it is also spiritual ; it is itself, when
come to itself, the true divine revelation.
And now, in attempting to make all these asser-
tions good, I must of necessity depart a little from
the precept of this Congress that bids us rather make
for unity and peace than stir the fires of controversy.
I am confident I shall introduce no odium into the
discussion upon which we are about to enter ; for, as
I feel none, so I have the cheerful hope that I shall
arouse none. But the proof of the New Doctrine, —
I call it new, in spite of its antiquity, because it is so
much the youngest of the three, — the proof of the
New Doctrine can only be made out by traversing
and refuting the Old and the Middle. Controversy,
in the sense of criticism, is therefore unavoidable.
But it need have no bitterness, nor awaken any ; and
unless I greatly mistake my own temper and the
temper of this company, it will not.
The doctrines I have named the Old and the Middle
Q
226 ESSAYS IN PUILOSOPHY
have a marked feature in common, which is ciinractcr-
istic of their contrast to the doctrine called the New.
It is that they both present religion to each soul on
the warrant of authority, albeit the one docs this se-
verely, with rebuke of reason's pretensions, and the
other graciously, with encouragement and support of
reason's weakness. Therefore it will be best for the
purposes of our discussion to cast them together, and
to pit them in their common reliance on authority
against the view that proposes to rely entirely on rea-
son. The issue we are to consider and weigh will
thus be presented in its simplest terms, as an issue
between two victJiods with religion, — the Method of
Authority and the Method of Reason, or the Method
of Sheer Declaration and the Method of Conviction.
Which, now, is the right method .-' What are the
grounds on which the Method of Reason must right-
fully supplant the Method of Authority, the Method
of Conviction the Method of Declaration ?
II
In order clearly to define the provinces between
which this issue lies as a matter of history, and to
avoid misunderstandings as to what historical reli-
gious bodies are really involved in our criticism, let us
first touch upon a distribution of these doctrines and
methods which is natural, if erroneous, and which has
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 22/
no doubt already half expressed itself in your thoughts.
We are prone to connect the Old Doctrine, the strong-
est expression of the Method of Authority, with the
teaching and practice of the Romanist church. And
it is plausible to take the Middle Doctrine, which at
bottom is still a Method of Authority, though mingled
professedly with a method of reason, as character-
istic of the Protestant churches. Then we naturally
complete this interpretation by allotting the New Doc-
trine, with its unmixed Method of Reason, either to
minds entirely outside the pale of Christianity, and
arrayed in opposition to it (whom it is convenient and
comforting to designate as InfidelsJ, or else to those
small groups — still partly holding to the name of
Christian themselves, but by the great body of the
orthodox acknowledged only askance, if at all — which
are usually called Liberal Christians, or, perchance,
Unitarians or Free Religionists or what not.
But this distribution of views, handy and plausible
as it may be, is really quite wrong, quite out of accord
with the facts. We cannot afford to carry it into our
discussion. The so-called Old Doctrine has been, and
is now, held alike by some Romanists and by some
Protestants ; indeed, it has never been stated with
such unqualified emphasis by any Romanist as it has
been by the elder Protestants, of the school of high
Calvinism. The gracious Middle Doctrine is held
alike by many Protestants and by many Romanists,
228 ASSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
nor has it ever liad a stronger affirmation or a nobler
utterance in the mouth of any Protestant than it re-
ceived from the great doctor augclicus of Roman the-
ology, St. Thomas Aquinas, or than it continues to
receive, and to receive increasingly, from the mem-
bers of his great school, unquestionably the most in-
fluential, and deservedly the most influential, in the
Roman church of our day. Nor can we justify the
blunder of assuming that the New Doctrine, with its
Method of Reason, belongs only to so-called Infidels
and the feeble handful of disapproved Liberals in the
United States and in dissenting England or else-
where. The New Doctrine might with far less error,
though still not with much accuracy, be said to be
dominant among the leading official teachers in the
two great established churches of Protestantism, — the
German and the Anglican ; while in the less impor-
tant but still intellectually influential Protestant or-
ganisations of Holland and Belgium the same is
true, and even more true. Later in the essay, I
shall give what seems to me the unanswerable proof
that the Method of Reason is not only not unchris-
tian, but is really the only method consistent with the
principles of Christ ; that, with its rise, Christianity,
in its full meaning, first became actual in the Christian
body, and that with its victorious supremacy the full
" mind that was in Christ " will for the first time have
come to expression in the mass of his followers.
RIGHT RELA TION OF REASON TO RELIGION 229
No, we shall labour under a really injurious mis-
conception if we pursue our discussion in the persua-
sion that Rationalism means hostility to genuine and
fulfilled Christianity. Much less is it to be supposed
that the chief object of assault in attacking the
Method of Authority is the great church of Rome.
Rome simply shares the attack with that Protestant-
ism, self-styled Catholic or Evangelical, which, like
Rome, founds religious life and religious doctrine on
authority. Moreover, let it be insistently borne in
mind that neither Romanism nor Protestantism is as-
sailed by Rationalism in so far as either is Christian,
as both, in the centre of their quickening spirit, indeed
are. But both are criticised by the growing rational
spirit of mankind, and criticised not in bitterness, but
in all tolerant though unyielding sobriety, in so far as
they have received into Christianity, and have per-
sisted in maintaining there, the Method of Declara-
tive Authority ; a method long antedating Christen-
dom, and really surviving in it from the primeval
religions and the great organised religions of the
Orient and the pagan West ; a method contradictory
of the genius of Christianity.
Let us realise clearly, then, that while the most
pertinent bearing of our discussion, and its greatest
weight of meaning, must doubtless be with refer-
ence to the developments of the Method of Author-
ity in the history of Christianity, we shall have a
230 ESSAYS rx r//n.osoriiY
conception of the dispute altogether too narrow, in-
deed seriously wrong, unless we regard the Three
Doctrines and the Two Methods as principles pervad-
ing religious history in its world-wide scope. The
struggle between Reason and Authority dates from
eld, and its history within Christendom is only the
history of a survival, though a history on the field in-
deed most significant. For this reason, while we keep
in mind the universal reach of the conflict, it is natu-
ral and proper that our discussion shall cast its argu-
ment in the terms that have come into use through
the working out of the Method of Authority in the
region and the circumstances of Christendom.
Why, then, is the Method of Authority invalid >
— what is its fatal defect, religious or other "^ Above
all, what is its especial condemnation when working
in the medium of the Christian religion ^ — what iv.
there in it that contradicts the "mind that was in
Christ " ?
Ill
To the former of these two chief questions I
answer. That the Method of Authority is invalid,
and so must be discarded, first of all, because it is
logically unreal, — it involves a profound self-contra-
diction. Understand that we mean by this method
either the rebuke of reason for invading the spiritual
region where all its carnal judgments must contra-
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 23 1
diet thje mind of God, and so, for righteousness'
sake, must be contradicted by God's direct word ;
or else the discrediting of reason, even though with
gracious condescension, by excluding its incapacity
from the realm of things sacred, and essential to the
welfare of the soul, where again resort must be had
to the direct word of God as the only means of sup-
plement. And if reason — and let me here say that
in this discussion I shall always mean by reason the
human powers of insight in their completest scope,
and not merely the faculty of " reasoning," or con-
sistent and consecutive syllogising, or "explaining"
and "proving," in this mechanical sense — if reason
either necessarily misjudges concerning the things of
eternal life, or is incapable of any judgment at all
about them, then there is of course nothing for it, in
the highest concerns of its being, but simply to hear
and obey the direct declaration of God.
"Most true!" — I can imagine the advocate of
Authority saying, — " most true ! and that is exactly
our impregnable doctrine." I cannot agree with him
in this confidence, however ; the doctrine is anything
but impregnable, it really contradicts itself, and this
in more than one way.
Certainly it is a doctrine on the surface very
plausible, but it will not bear the test of an exact
and careful thinking out. For we cannot but go on
to ask, How, then, is the direct declaration of God
232 ESS.-lYS IN PHILOSOPHY
to be known and verified ? The unevasive answer to
this must be, cither (i) that our human intelligent
power, our deep interior reason, already possesses
such a knowledge of divine things, of God's own
nature, that when our reason reveals itself, through
the depths of experience, we can discern by it in
the internal character of given utterances their
divine origin and authority ; or else (2) that the
presence and speech of God can be known directly
by the evidence of the senses — that a man may
see with his eyes, and hear with his ears, things and
sounds that are immediate proofs, not inferential
implications, of the presence of God then and there,
and of his word then and there spoken. Now, the
former alternative, that of Internal Evidence, in
order to vindicate the claim of authority has to
appeal to the revelation of God in reason, and this
is a plain contradiction. The second alternative,
that of External Evidence, appeals to the testimony
of the senses for the proof of supersensible reality ;
and this is a balder contradiction.
In the case of the Old Doctrine of the relation
between religion and reason, the Method of Authority
involves the further inconsistency of having to appeal,
in order to verify the presence and word of the Most
High, to the very reason rebuked for raising its earth-
centred eye to things celestial ; for this appeal is
made, when belief is demanded upon tokens which the
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 233
hearer is supposed to recognise as divine. In the
case of the Middle Doctrine, it commits the incon-
sistency of calling to the aid of incompetent reason
the still more incompetent and still less spiritual
powers of sense, but powers human nevertheless.
But, in fact, the entire theory of external evidence
for Divine Revelation is shown by comparative studies
to be a survival from the religious consciousness of
primitive times, when men really believed that God
could be clothed in a limited body, and could be
present in a specific space at a given time, and be
seen and heard quite as a man or any other being
with a body is. It is a survival despite the declared
abandonment of this sensuous view of God, and can
only be explained by supposing negligence — a want
of critical attention to the consistencies of the
spiritual view of God that we all now profess. For
such sense-given evidence is manifestly incompati-
ble with the doctrine of reason and of Christ, that
God is Spirit and is not to be truly worshipped in
Mount Gerizim, or even in Jerusalem, but only in
the spirit. It is not consistent with the spiritual
infinity and true omnipresence reasonably attributed
by all Christians to God.
Secondly, I hold the Method of Authority to be
invalid because it is impossible to make it intelli-
gibly out : in obedience to its plausible lead, we
search from one point to another of the asserted
234 ESS.-lYS IN PHILOSOPHY
proofs of God's presence and authoritative voice,
but can never come to anything that is conclu-
sively antl palpably the Divine being. To show
tliis, I must ask you to review with me, briefly,
the history of religious Evidences.
Here it is that the chief point of dispute between
Rome and orthodox Protestantism arises. Both
teach that the primary source of authority is the
sovereign declaration or revelation of God ; but on
the question of its supreme medium for man-
kind they profoundly differ. The Romanist lodges
this vicegerent authority over human reason in the
Holy Catholic Church ; the orthodox Protestant
lodges it in Holy Scripture. Both appeal to a
miraculous communication of the Divine will ; but
the Romanist teaches that this communication is
directly to the Church, the corporate whole quickened
by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, while the
orthodox Protestant maintains that it is directly to
the single inspired writer, whoever he may be.
Preeminently, of course, for both, the Divine Reve-
lation is in the Person and Work of Jesus of Naz-
areth, taken for God Incarnate ; but the witness
to the Incarnation must be absolutely competent
and intact, and this the orthodox Protestant finds
in the supposed infallible inspiration of the writers
of the Scriptures, while the Romanist finds it in
the supposed infallible inspiration of the Church :
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 235
for him, Holy Scripture is but the gradually devel-
oped record of the tradition of the Church, verified
at due times by the Church, and given a derivative
but still unbending authority by being enrolled in
the Canon by solemn act of the infallible body.
But how, for the Romanist, and still more for the
unconverted to whom he would go with the cre-
dentials of salvation, — how is the infallible witness
of the Church to the Incarnation made evident ?
And for the orthodox Protestant, or for the uncon-
verted whom Jic would win to heaven, how is the
infallible witness of the Scriptures made sure ? Is it
not plain that in both cases the whole question
must come down, at last, to the simple matter of tes-
timony, either first-hand or second-hand or, finally,
many hands removed ? And what is the first-hand
testimony ? The declaration of a certain man that
he was the Living God, and that when he spoke
God therefore was speaking, — admitting, for the
sake of argument, that he did so declare. What is
the second-hand testimony.^ That of certain persons,
present when he made the declaration, who heard and
believed it ; heard and believed, also, manifold teach-
ings of a morally guiding, morally inspiring, and
morally regenerative power, and passed all onward
to those with whom they conferred, from whom the
teachings passed, and still are passing, onward to
multitudes of others. What is the remote testi-
236 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
mony ? That these testimonies of presumed and
declared ear-witnesses have been securely and in-
errantly transmitted from generation to generation
for hundreds of years : on the one theory, by the
unbroken consensus of tradition in the Church ; on
the other, by the unbroken preservation of the in-
spired record in the Scriptures.
But now we come to the crucial point : What alone
can all this, in its parts and in the whole of it, —
even supposing the testimony to be flawless, — what
alone can it cstablisJi? At most, that there was an
ever-memorable and indeed stupendous Declaration,
that a few believed it, and that many, on their tes-
timony, have believed what those few believed.
Whatever else may be true, it must be assumed
in all this inquiry that Jesus was a real man, and
spoke as a man. Well, then, how is it possible that
the simple declaration of any man should establish
the truth of it ? Above all, how can the declara-
tion of any man that he is the Living God prove
him actually and verily to be so .■' Not even the
word of Jesus could, in itself, prove anything more
than that he believed he was God, — supposing for
the sake of argument, I repeat, that he really said he
was God, with the intention that he should be un-
derstood literally. Not all the testimony of all the
saints that they heard this declaration, could in it-
self prove anything more than that they did so
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 237
hear, and that he did so declare, and that they be-
lieved it, as he evidently believed it. There can be
no evidence in all this that what they believed was
really fact. If it be said that it was enough to wit-
ness the manifest character of Jesus, to believe his
words beyond all doubt ; that the witnesses were so
transfixed and inspired by the evident worth of Christ
as to ^^ knoio in whom they had believed," as they
firmly testify, — this is to abandon the principle of
Authority, and to appeal to the latent Jmnian know-
ledge of what constitutes a divine character.
And all this holds, remember, irrespective of the
further difficulties which the Method of Authority,
with its necessary dependence upon human testi-
mony, must meet when we come to the intricate
question how testimony, of whatever original au-
thenticity and sincerity, can be securely and verifi-
ably transmitted ; and to the yet closer question,
whether the conditions for such secure and veri-
fiable transmission have actually been met in the
case either of the Church Tradition or of Holy
Scripture, Grave and indeed terrible are these
questions ; the more so for the soul that has true
piety toward God and faithful love for Christ, yet
is habituated to rest its faith on an authority sup-
ported by testimony, when it comes to realise, as
by a sufficiently wide comparative study it must,
how rarely testimony is either exact or exactly trans-
238 £SSAyS IN PHILOSOPHY
mitted ; nay, how almost impossible it is that testi-
mony should be so.
The plain and unavoidable truth seems to be, that
there is no way of making out a Divine authority
by declaration alone, by ear-witness alone, or by
testimony alone, however inerrantly preserved and
transmitted. The radical difficulty is with the orig-
inal Declaration, and with the original car-witness :
neither of these can possibly come at the indubi-
table presence of the invisible, inaudible, altogether
supersensible reality of the divine Eternal Essence.
Our mind, following the indications of the evidence
offered, searches and reaches for the unmistakable
presence of God at the back of the sense-signals,
and is met by — vacancy.
A perception of this led the early apologists of
Authority to supplement the evidence of declaration
and testimony by the evidence of miracle. Thus it
was — and from an intelligent motive — that miracles
came to constitute an integral factor in the accepted
historic system of Apologetics. The miracle was
supposed to demonstrate the actually present power
of the eternal Creator. The claimant, declaring him-
self God's authentic messenger, had his declaration
verified by the manifest presence of God, — manifest
by the clear exercise of that power which made the
world, and ordained and sustains its order ; mani-
fest by the interruption of that order and the
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 239
sustentation of the world notwithstanding. The
argument was : By a Divine Revelation, an authori-
tative declaration of God, we mean a direct utterance
of Him who created and who sustains the world ; we
know it is He that speaks, because here, in the
miracle, is the infallible sign of that complete con-
trol over Nature which is the prerogative of its
Author,
But this attempt to support testimony by miracle,
striking as the argument seems when first presented,
will not endure a serious examination. Upon suf-
ficient reflection, we see clearly that the proof of the
reality of a miracle, of the actual occurrence of an
event supplanting the ordinary laws of succession
in Nature, rests in its turn upon human testimony
again, and, still worse, upon human judgment. A
supposed miracle called in to validate testimony, the
assurance of whose occurrence must yet itself de-
pend upon testimony, nay, upon human judgment,
certainly cannot be called a secure support, a proof
real, final, and conclusive. The same inferential
judgment that collects from certain sensible signals
the actual presence of God, that concludes God is
speaking then and there because certain sights and
sounds are perceived, must of course come again into
play when some amazing event, not to be paralleled
in the previous experience of its observers, is con-
strued into a suspension of the order of Nature, the
240 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
doing of something impossible to any being but God.
Worst of all, the whole argument rests upon the tacit
assumption that the entire connexion of sequences in
Nature reposes on nothing but the ivill of God — a
basis of reasoning that has not borne, and will not
bear, the light of our maturer and more deliberate
thought, grown critical and more exact in the course
of human culture.
Thus it becomes plain that in the last resort
testimony has nothing but other testimony for its
support, human judgment other human judgment ;
and never by any means or method at our command
do we succeed in getting past our human faculties,
so as to come directly upon the infallible and imme-
diate fact of God speaking in his own person. Here,
for the sake of argument, I purposely reason on the
assumption of that comparatively loose and super-
ficial philosophy which treats miracles as real possi-
bilities, capable of proof by testimony, quite as the
normal events in Nature are. But even granting
this, we see by the analysis just presented how futile
a circle there inevitably is in the argument from
miracle, and how it must perpetually come short
of any authority directly Divine. In any proposed
external communication from God, the channels of
human faculty are never to be got rid of ; so, if they
do not in their own native quality constitute divine
vouchers, they must operate as barriers to any com-
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 24 1
munication with God. Of God, who is essentially
supersensible, there can be no such thing as a pre-
sentation directly to our senses ; and all belief that
sensible facts mean his real presence must rest at
last on inferential judgments of our reason, while
these will be nothing but self-continuing circles,
worthless for evidence, unless our reason is granted
to have in itself the real revelation of what accords
with the Divine mind. An absolutely direct utter-
ance of God in the external world, evident strictly in
itself, is thus upon close examination unintelligible
and unthinkable. Yet this is what is implied in a
consistent doctrine of Authority.
IV
But now let us pass to the second, and the much
more important, of our two main questions: — Why
must a religion that would rightfully bear the name
of Christ, especially reject the Method of Authority .?
What is there in the principle of Authority that con-
tradicts the "mind that was in Christ".? What is
there in the central teaching and the spirit of Christ
that puts upon such a method with religion the
stamp of its condemnation } For I have thus far
constantly implied not only that the principle of
Rationalism does not carry us away from real Chris-
tianity, but that genuine Christianity demands and
R
242 JISSAVS IN rnil.O SOPHY
involves this principle, and that in its interior heart
the Method of Authority is fatally in conflict with
the spirit of Christ.
In making this assertion, I do not mean, of course,
that the principle of Authority has not, as a matter
of history, been compatible with some of the teach-
ings and something of the spirit of the great
Founder. To mean this, would amount to saying
that the great bulk of the historical Christian body,
whether Greek or Romanist or Protestant, has al-
ways been entirely false to the spirit of its Lord ;
and this no man of impartial or intelligent judgment
could afifirm. But what I do mean is, that wherever
the principle of Authority has entered and operated
in historic Christianity, it has interfered with the
free expression and development of that teaching
and spirit which is most specifically characteristic
of Jesus when his mind and work are viewed, as
they must be, in the light of the comparative his-
tory of religious thought. I mean that so far as the
various Christian bodies which adhere to the prin-
ciple of Authority have succeeded in displaying the
spirit of Christ, and unconsciously keeping its inmost
secret still alive in the world, they have done so,
not because of the doctrine of Authority, but in
spite of it, — such inward vitality, so kindred with
the interior life of humanity, as this advances along
the pathway of civilisation, has that central insight,
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 243
that subtle spiritual sense which Jesus communi-
cated to the world, possessed.
Now, that the very fountain and vitalising heart
of this spiritual sense is a new insight into what
really constitutes the nature of God, and into the
real relation of men and all souls to God, it will be
possible here to show, I believe, without too much
taxing your time ; and when it is shown, we shall
have the plain proof that this essential and central
doctrine of Christ puts a logical end to the Method
of Authority, demands for its proper expression the
Method of Conviction, and cannot be satisfied with
anything else.
The cultivated world has now for some years been
familiar with the phrase "the secret of Jesus," iter-
ated with such adroit rhetoric by the brilliant author
of Literatiwe and Dogma. Very likely, in common
with most of his many readers, you are little satis-
fied with Arnold's explanation of what that "secret"
was; and I will frankly say that I shall not be sorry
if you are : your state of mind will better open the
way for a new endeavour to answer the question.
For at the point our discussion has now reached,
we have really to ask what the " secret of Jesus "
was ; and we shall agree, I hope, that it lay in a
new Doctrine and a new Temper : a new doctrine
concerning the nature of God and the nature of
the religious relation of men to God and to each
244 ESSAYS IN FHII.OSOPIIY
Other ; and such an unparalleled temper of complete
personal identification with the doctrine as was
even more new in the history of the world. Fore-
shadowings of the doctrine, though only foreshadow-
ings, there indeed had been ; they had even been
put into written record, generations before Jesus,
in the Greek thought of Socrates and of Plato.
But any such temper, any equivalent tone of life, we
cannot with truth affirm there had really been. For
not only did this Hellenic thought fail of consistency
with its highest glimpses, and so come far short of
full insight into the nature of divine and human
personality, but it failed to fill its discoverers with
that absolute and ever-vivid consciousness of benig-
nant relations between God and the soul, and thence
between all souls, as constituting the only real life
of the spirit, which is transparently the character-
istic personal trait of Jesus. To the great Greek
teachers, even to Socrates, as it still is practically
to us all, this one and only truth of living religion
was more or less but a distant thought, summoned
into direct consciousness at intervals by a reflective
effort, and brought to bear upon conduct amid the
clamours of our animal being. To Jesus, on the con-
trary, it is an ever-present perception, like light to
vision, like space to our movements, like time to our
projects in life.
Manifestly, then, we are to say it must be the chief
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 245
aim of any religious method that can justly lay claim
to being Christian, to bring about, in all the minds
upon which it acts, the possession of this secret of
the Founder ; the same insight, namely, into the
nature of God that he had, the same ever-luminous
conviction as to the real relation between God and
souls, — from God toward all souls if God is to be
truly God and adorable, from souls toward God if
the soul is to be genuinely a righteous mind. It
seems clear that the transcendent temper of per-
sonal devotion which Christ displayed is owing to
nothing but his vivid and constant consciousness
of this view of God and the spirit ; so that any
inquiry into what his secret of life was, any inquiry
especially that looks to the imparting of the secret
to others, resolves itself into asking what, exactly,
the peculiar view was, that he held and was the
first to proclaim, concerning the divine and the
human nature, and the essential relations between
them, and between human beings in consequence.
In a general sense, all Christian people know well
enough, and have always known, what this secret
of their Founder is, what the doctrine of God and
the soul that constitutes his characteristic insight,
his new and unsurpassable message to mankind.
The intelligent ordinary Christian, if asked t6 say
how he would sum up in a single phrase the new
and central doctrine of his Master, would hardly
246 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
fail to answer : Christ taugJit, and revealed in his
own life, and above all i>i his death, the previously
unknoivn truth, that God is a Being of universal and
exhaustless i.oi'E, who ^^ would not that any shot/ Id
perish, but that all should have eternal life.'' This
statement of Christ's peculiar doctrine is in so far
right that one cannot fail to find corroboration of it
on nearly every page of the New Testament, nor
can one state the real teaching of Jesus without
including this. The whole view held by Christ,
however cutting in its sharp contrast with the the-
istic views that went before him we may find it,
centres no doubt in this principle of universal love
— love of God for every soul alike, love due from
all souls to God, love owed by every soul to every
other. His single New Commandment only sums
this up: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself." Never-
theless, when we leave the statement simply in this
general form, we fail to reach its real implications.
We need to go beyond the broad precept of uni-
versal love — benevolence that knows no limits of
number, race, sex, or other external conditions —
and ask searchingly what real love really implies,
love that without reserve can be called divine, or
suited to the nature of a Being of absolute good-
ness, of infinite wisdom and power. There might
well enough be a universal love that was full of
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 247
reserves, and loaded with discriminations : every
being might be included in its scope, but each
would receive only the one specific share of regard
allotted to each. A love universal might, too, in
every case be only a condescending love ; or, again,
only a pitying love, the love that is commiseration.
And when religious thought preceding Jesus had
generations earlier passed out of the darkness that
hid the love of God altogether, leaving him to appear
only as a dreadful Power, and had come to recognise
in the Almighty some tokens of love, it was at best
only this commiserating love, this grace that con-
descended, this benignity that reserved and discrimi-
nated, which was its theme. But this early concep-
tion of the Divine Love falls far short of the mean-
ing of Jesus, just because it falls utterly short of a
love that is completely love, and so of a love that
is worthy of a Being truly God. Consequently we
must seek for Christ's meaning elsewhere than in
those phrases of the New Testament that come,
perhaps, most readily to our lips.
These most familiar Christian sayings, like those
already alluded to, have indeed a great import and
pertinence, and may serve to point us on the way to
the whole and luminous truth ; but, also like them,
in their own form they stop short of it. It is true
to say, for instance, that it was lazv that came by
Moses, but grace and truth by Christ ; for this pre-
248 ESSAYS IN pun.osorHY
sents the important and significant fact about the
doctrine of Jesus, that the highest religious thought
of the older world viewed God as a magisterial Sov-
ereign only, while Jesus revealed God as full of
"grace," and his view gives the "truth" about
the Divine nature, rather than the view of Moses.
But here the phrase is again insufficient. " Grace "
is a word of enormous range, just as "truth" also
is ; and what we need to know is whether we are
to understand by it an incomplete and partial gra-
ciousness, such as the grace of pity and of conde-
scension, or a grace absolute and complete, that
accords to its object the prospect of equality with the
source of it^ and intends to confer companionship —
yes, partnersJiip — in every power and gift.
Now the meaning of Jesus, when he spoke of
God as a Father, as a Being of love toward all the
living, and urged men to love each other as each
loved himself, in the light of complete love to God, —
this meaning is manifestly to the effect that God's
love is not only universal, extending to all that live,
without exception, but that in its scope and intention
it is without reserves, and contemplates for every
spirit the same possession of God's own eternal
image. The standard Christ presents for the aim
of him who would love God is God himself; and
the bond by which he suggests the free possibility
of pursuing such a standard is just the relation
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 249
called, in the strongest image Oriental life could
supply, the relation of the son of the house to the
father. This Jesus conceives to be the real tie
between God and all other spirits, and between all
spirits as morally united through God. The soul,
as Jesus conceives it, is the direct heir of all the
Divine fulness. It is literally and strictly free, and
has the spirit of inheritance, not simply of " adoption,"
as St. Paul names it. This means, if it means any-
thing, that in Christ's view of God and the world of
spirits the individual soul stands, in reality, and also
in the mind of God himself, in quite the same rela-
tion of free self-activity toward God as the heir of
the Eastern house stands, when he comes into his
own, toward the father who went before him ; and
that God has the same active interest and purpose
toward the intelligent freedom of each soul as the
Eastern father has toward the son who is to represent
and direct the house when he himself is in the world
no more. In the most authentic utterances of Christ,
as the storms of the Higher Criticism have left them
unharmed,^ it is distinctly taught that God in govern-
ing the world employs none at all of the legalism
that characterises human administrations, rejects the
principle of retaliatory infliction altogether, letting
"his sun shine and his rain fall alike on the just
and on the unjust," and therefore relies entirely
^ In the Sermon on the Mount, especially.
250 ESSAYS nv rilll.OSOPHY
on iho resources in the personal conviction of the
wrong-doer, gradually brought into action by the
discipline of personal experience.
This novel, unprecedented, and astounding doctrine
of a universal moral equality as the aim of all
spiritual being, an equality which is to embrace all
minds in a complete union with the mind of God,
and from which all external authority is to be
excluded, Jesus by the plainest implication sets
forth as the object and goal of all spiritual effort.
All souls are to strive after just that form of life
with each other in which none will employ toward
another any method of constraint, but will rely
upon the moral action of the powers in the others'
souls, just as God eternally does. I do not under-
stand him to teach that there is no place at
all, in the evil part of the spiritual life, for the
operation of constraint. Rather, judging by the
sayings later recorded as coming from him, he
admitted such an of^ce for compulsion.^ But it was
only by the way : it was to be viewed as only con-
tingent and transient, as belonging only in this world
of fleeting shows; it was the "law," which, as St.
1 For instance, " I came, not to bring peace, but a sword '' ; and,
still more to the point, having said, in the Sermon on the Mount, "If
any man will . . . take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also,"
he says, later, " But now, . . . he that hath no sword, let him sell his
garment and buy one." Also, his recognition of the right of external
governments, in their sphere : " Render unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 25 I
Paul says, is to lead us to the moral freedom which is
"ill Christ," that is, is Christian. The aivi, the only
ultimate aim, the ideal of a society of minds, is this
moral reliance on the inherent moral freedom of all
spirits, guided by the contemplation of its perfect ful-
filment in the Supreme Soul, or God, and inspired by
his boundless love beheld and therefore felt by all.
In this conception of God and of the religious
relation of souls to God and to each other, Christ
had parted company with all the piety that had gone
before him, and to such a degree as had never in
the older world been paralleled. His theistic step
was not simply new, it was absolutely revolutionary.
His point of view, of the literal divine-sonship of
every lowliest and most sinful and sinning spirit,
committed him logically to the assertion of the
implicit equality of all spirits with each other, so
far as concerns their moral powers and destination,
no matter what their actual and contingent state ;
and also of their potential equality with God. His
doctrine may well be summarised in the consecrated
phrase, usually apphed only to himself, " The son of
man is the son of God." To take in the full scope
of his teaching, we must translate the idiom " son of,"
which is the Hebrew way of expressing the generic,^
and then the saying reads, " The spiritual powers
1 So, in the Psalms : " Wliat is ma}!, that thou art mindful of him ?
and the son of man, that thou visitest him ? " In the Book of Ezekiel :
252 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
of luinian naUire are in their eternal compass the
same as the spiritual powers of God." His Pharisee
contemporaries took in the purport of his position
correctly, when they said, •' lie called himself the
Son of God, thereby making himself the equal of
God." They were inconceivably shocked by an
expression which, to their view of men and of God,
was simply blasphemy.
For, to take the situation in, we must bear in mind
that to every older religion, even the most improved
and enlightened, such as that of the Jews, the very
essence of the Divine lay in an exaltation above all
categories in which man could share — lay in its
intrinsic and unapproachable Sovereignty. God, in
all these religions, is at best conceived as an awful
and ineffable Majesty, before whom even angels and
archangels may only veil their faces, prostrate them-
selves, and cry, "Holy, holy, holy! Lord! God
Almighty ! There is none like unto Thee ! " How
much more, then, must men lie prostrate and keep
silent before Him! Even when God was spoken
" Son of man (i.e. ?nan), can these bones live ? " Also, in the Book
of Daniel : The king, looking into the " burning fiery furnace," sees
besides his three victims a fourth figure, " like the son of God" i.e. re-
sembling a god. Similarly, Lucifer is called " son of the morning,"
signifying him as the very kind and type of the light — the morn incar-
nate. So also "sons of Belial," for villainous men; "sons of deceit,"
for false and crafty men ; "sons of thunder," for men of domineering
will ; etc., etc. But the list might be extended indefinitely.
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 253
of as compassionate and long-suffering, with tender
mercies upon all his works, the note of condescension
which this carries is the proof that the quality of
Sovereign Exaltation was still present, and really
the dominant idea. In fact, this note pervades even
the one utterance by an Old Testament writer that
approaches nearest to escaping from the usual Juda-
istic moods and entering into the spirit of Christ ;
for when this noble writer asks, " What is it that
God requires of thee ? " and answers, " Nothing but
to do justice and love mercy, and walk Jmnibly with
thy God,'' we hear again an echo of the same over-
whelmed and awe-stricken voice that says, " God
is in Heaven and thou upon the earth, therefore
let thy words be few;" or, "The Eternal is on his
Throne, let all the earth keep silence before Him."
To break away from this magisterial and monar-
chical conception of God, which left men nothing
but the submissive subjects of a Lord, whose sover-
eign will ordained all things, even the supreme dis-
tinction between what is right and what is wrong,^
was indeed a great, an unprecedented step. But
Jesus took it. Instead of majesty and a Lord, he
presents God as the Friend and moral Father of
men, who calls every human being, every spirit, to
1 " Right," on this view, being merely what God has commanded,
and simply because he has commanded it ; and " wrong," on the other
hand, merely what he has forbidden, and because he has forbidden it.
2 54 /uSSMVS IX PHILOSOPHY
the cqualitv o[ sharing" in that fiihicss of spiritual
powers which constitutes the Divine glory. He
felt the unspeakable courage, resting on settled
conviction, which emboldened him to say, " I and
the Father are one " ; and he invites all men, as his
brethren, to avow for themselves, and to seek, the
same unity with God in a divine character. It is
in an entirely just appreciation of this as Christ's
meaning, that the writer of the Fourth Gospel
represents him as praying for those that God has
given him, " that they may be one, as Thou and I
are one," and declares of the Eternal Word, that
"to as many as believed on His name, He gave the
power to become sons of God."
Under this new inspiring and regenerative con-
ception, religion changes from the worship of an
exalted and unapproachable Sovereign into a joyful
communion in all goodness and nobility with a per-
fect Guide and Friend. The spirit of awe is re-
placed by the spirit of confidence and friendship.
Religion passes out of the stages, however high
they may be, of the religions of Faith or the reli-
gions of Hope, — religions that are actuated by
nothing higher than fealty and trust, or than longing
aspiration with some chance for fulfilment, — and
enters into the stage of the religion of Love. Here,
not devout fidelity to an accepted authority, merely,
and not merely the encouraging hope that service
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 255
faithfully done may bring the soul fulfilment of its
aspirations, but adoring love becomes the spring of
the religious life — love for him who, we now know,
has from eternity first loved iis, and is himself essen-
tially Love. The aim of such a religion is not
merely to "glorify God"; rather, it is to glorify
all souls, as all in the image of God ; to glorify them
by fulfilling for every one of them its vocation to
repeat in a new way the life of universal love that
is the life of God, and thus to attain, through the
universal greatening, such a real glorification of
God as other forms of religion seek after in vain.
The God of Christ is indeed one wdio comes "not
to be ministered unto, but to minister," and who
illustrates in his own Person the great and char-
acteristic truth spoken by Jesus, " He that findeth
his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life shall
find it."
Not exaltation, not isolation, not might, not being
merely the centre of devotion rendered by others, —
not any of these lordly things is truly divine. But
to be an active member in a society where all alike
strive to recognise the infinite worth, the boundless
possibilities, of all the others ; to be the inspiration
and the uniting spirit of such a society ; to give him-
self eternally and exhaustlessly for it and for ever}-
member in it, — this, according to Jesus, is what
makes God tJic God of the living and not the God
256 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
of the dead. This is what God really is — imper-
sonated Love, fulfilled, complete ; and what a com-
plete soul of man is called to be and to do, is to
fulfil itself by playing this same divine part ; assum-
ing it even in this finite world below, in the place and
after the manner that the temporal burdens of each
impose, and the terrestrial gifts of each make possible.
Thus the absolute reality of man, the absolute
reality of all souls, comes forward as a complemental
part of Christ's doctrine of God. Every soul in the
great circle of this divine society, in which God is
but the central member, has in this conception of
God the quickening assurance that he is treated
by the Eternal as a being indeed literally and com-
pletely/>r^, — free not only in the sense that his
own conviction is the sole arbiter of his actions, but
in the larger sense that all possibilities of growth in
conscious life are open to him, even divine possibili-
ties, since there is but one standard of action in the
eternal circle of spirits, and that is the spirit of love
displayed by God. And this freedom of infinite
scope in growth involves the reality, and carries with
it the assurance, of imperishable continuance. Ac-
cordingly we may explicate the new doctrine of Jesus
into these three truths: (i) That God is the perfect
Person, the central member in the universal society
actuated by love ; (2) that the soul is immortal ;
(3) that it is free, both in the sense of being the
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 257
responsible author of all its acts, and in the sense
that its fund of ultimate resources is equal to ful-
filling its duty to love as God loves.
It is this third tenet, the essential freedom of the
spirit, as implied in the conception of God as imper-
sonate Love, that in fact forms the touchstone of
Christ's new religion. It is in this, and in this only,
that the full and real meaning of love as the very
principle of the Divine life comes out. For just as
perfect love "casteth out fear," so it casts out not
only condescension and commiseration and mercy and
alms, as but poor substitutes for its riches, poor
lowly approaches to its height, but it makes away
also with that false benignancy which would smother
the spontaneous action of its object under the over-
whelming weight of its lavish gifts. The true love
wherewith God loves other spirits is not the out-
pouring upon them of graces which are the unearned
gift of his miraculous power ; it is the love, on the
contrary, which holds the individuality, the personal
initiative, of its object sacred. As the true father
desires that the son who, after him, is to be the
head of the family shall have a method and policy
of his own, by which the honours of the line shall
be increased by new contributions, so he who is
the Father of Spirits will have his image brought
forth in every one of his offspring by the thought
and conviction of each soul itself.
258 ESSAYS IX PHILOSOPHY
Love that docs not thus in the renunciation of all
mi^ht address itself to the freedom of its object,
and find its satisfaction in the spontaneous move-
ment toward it from within the mind beloved, is not
the reality of love. The moral government of God,
springing from the Divine Love, is a government
by moral agencies purely. It relies utterly on the
operation of the powers native to the soul itself ; and
leaving aside all the juridical enginery of reward and
punishment, it lets his sun shine and hi.s rain fall
alike on the just and on the unjust, that the cause of
God may everywhere win simply upon its merits.
Thus God's revelation of himself is in a certain
great sense accomplished by his hiding : ^ invisible,
impalpable, his very existence is unknown to other
spirits, except as it is avouched by their own in-
ward voice. On this point, such is his love and jus-
tice, he will assume for himself no privileges ; he only
takes the common lot of every soul, the fact of
whose being must be gathered by all the rest from
the testimony of their own interior thought. And
as the very root and beginning of God's relations
with men or other souls thus springs out of his
recognition and reverence of their thinking freedom,
so, according to the idea of Jesus, the entire pro-
1 Christ's new principle gives this new meaning and enlarged ful-
filment to the saying of the ancient prophet, " Our God is a God who
hideth himself."
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 259
cedure and circuit of these relations is in terms of
this freedom, and by means of it.
With such a conception as this, the Method of
Authority as a method with religion is profoundly
at war. I do not say it may not have its uses in
the vast course of the external history of religion,
just as we find the principle of police, of the rein-
forcement of statutes by punishments and rewards,
has its uses in the struggling history through which
the moral life of man shows itself in the world.
But we cannot allot to it any but a minor and very
transient office, and its nature must be to check the
development of the Christian ideal of religion, as
we have now seen this to be. The principle of
Authority is not only foreign to the " mind that was
in Christ," but is antagonistic to it. If we reject the
principle, as we saw we must, on the ground of its
self-contradictions and its fatal illusoriness, all the
more should we as professed Christians reject it,
since it conflicts so directly with the central ideas
that our Founder introduced into religion.
At the core, what Jesus did was to reform the con-
ception of God in the interest of the absolute reality
and the moral freedom of men. With this what can
be more discordant, what more hostile to it, than
the attempt to establish by an appeal to declarative
authority doctrines that either contradict the human
reason or have no witness from it } For let us
260 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
remember that there has never been any appeal to
Authority, except for dogmas either contrary to
reason or else met by it with entire silence ; and
this is not a case where " silence means consent."
The undertaking, above all, to present Christ himself
as the incarnation of this declarative authority is the
complete reversal of his character, the direct contra-
diction of the religious idea which was the soul of
his work, and for which he laid down his life. It
is not conceivable that he who gave himself utterly
for a new conception of God and man which turns
entirely upon human mental freedom, should himself
adopt the method of arrogance and dictation. I
know well the passages in the Gospels that the advo-
cates of Authority, as well as the hostile critics of
Jesus, are in the habit of citing in proof that he
claimed such authority and spoke accordingly. But
I simply say the passages are needlessly and grossly
misinterpreted, by adhering to their isolated letter
instead of reading them in the light of a large, exact,
and whole view of his work and his central idea.
Into any detail on this question, however, there is not
now time to go ; nor do I feel that on this occasion
there is any need.
In view of all the foregoing reasons, I cannot but
think the case conclusive, that neither form of the
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 26 1
Doctrine of Authority can be maintained. We
should abandon, as consistent thinkers, and still
more as consistent Christians, the imperative author-
ity both of Church Tradition and of Scripture.
There is nothing left, then, but the Doctrine of
Reason — the Method of Conviction as the only
real method of determining religious belief and
practice, resting on the use of the human rational
powers taken in their entire compass.
The form of our proof for the Rationalist method
in religion, with a promise of which I set out upon
our discussion, is therefore, at least thus far, only
indirect : we have found but two alternative methods
possible in religion, — Declaration and Conviction,
Authority and Reason ; we have shown the one to be
invalid and unchristian, and therefore the other alone
remains. Formally, this indirect proof is conclusive
enough, and clears the ground for our general propo-
sition that the only right relation between reason
and religion is for reason to be the source and
religion the derivative, for reason to legislate in
the whole doctrine, and consequently in the whole
practice, of religion.
But it may perhaps be said that the material
question is still untouched ; that our reasoning, thus
far, simply assumes that the Method of Reason is a
method possible with religion, whereas this possibility
needs to be shown real. Those who would raise
262 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
this objection would enforce it, too, by recalling our
attention to the fact, that, in the very beginnings of
this issue, we confronted the assertion — maintained
by one great religious school — that reason is intrinsi-
cally incompetent to religion, because its judgments,
however conclusive and infallible in its own field,
are limited to that field, which is the world of sense-
experience only, and not in the least the world of
supersensible and spiritual reality. Our vindication
of Rationalism will accordingly not be complete till
we have grappled with this contention common to
the religious dogmatist and the agnostic, and made
an end of it by showing not only that the opposite
is true, but that its truth is implied in this contention
itself.
I am not the least disposed to evade this indi-
cation of a needed completion to our argument.
Rather, I willingly grant the point as correctly
made, and I cordially take up the task which I
accepted at the outset as part of this hour's duty,
namely, to show that" reason is not confined in its
judgments to the things of sense, but extends also
to the things invisible, — to all the things of the
spirit, the things of religion.
In entering upon this final stage in our dis-
cussion, it is only fair to take the preparatory
advantage of noticing that the very parties which
discredit reason and maintain the cause of author-
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 263
ity tacitly admit the appeal to reason to be finally
unavoidable. Throughout the historical develop-
ment of the Method of Authority, whether at the
hands of Romanists or of Protestants, there is
after all profoundly implied the power of human
reason to judge of spiritual things, — of God, his
character, his nature, his will toward men and for
men. It is this silent assumption, constantly com-
ing to light even amid the most plain and formal
professions to the contrary, that imparts to the
method of testimony, and to the theory of miracle
as the credential of testimony, whatever of plau-
sible force they may have. The working-power of
this whole authoritative scheme is really derived
from a reliance, albeit unconscious, on the fact
that human reason is all the while deep in the
counsels of God ; it knows the true signs of God's
presence and word, because it knows from of old
what God is, and what are the word and the act that
become him. This is revealed in the striking fact
that none but commands of great moral worth are
received as parts of Divine Revelation, whereas
the miraculous vindication, taken purely and simply,
would not provide for regarding the supreme rational
distinction between Right and Wrong. On the con-
trary, on the ground of pure authority, tested by
power alone, whatever came as edict would have
to be regarded right, as the primitive religions held.
264 ESSAYS IJV PHILOSOPHY
This tacit assumption is displayed, in a way espe-
cially noticeable, in the history of that part of
Christian theology called Apologetics, or the Evi-
dences of Christianity. The silent but irresistible
influence of this discernment of the supremacy of
reason is the explanation, and, as it seems to me,
the only explanation, of the steadfast change we
observe in the method employed to exhibit these
Evidences. At first, in the earlier stages of the
Church, the method was to insist almost exclusively
on the evidences known as External, to rely upon
supposed authoritative declaration, supported by the
testimony of present witnesses, with the claim of an
unbroken transmission of the testimony from gen-
eration to generation. The whole force of the evi-
dential argument was spent in the endeavour to
establish this unbroken transmission as a fact, and
thence the fact of the original declarations, and
the fact of the miracles supporting them. The
argument was made to turn upon showing the
testimony to be that of eye-witnesses, and upon
proving the witnesses to be trustworthy both in
faculties and in spirit. When, later, notice began
to be taken of Internal Evidence, — of the char-
acter of the precepts conveyed in the declarations,
— this was at first kept in thorough subordination
to the External Evidences, and used merely as
a corroboration. It marked an epoch — in fact, a
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 26$
crisis — in the history of the Evidences, when a
distinguished and accepted Christian thinker first
took the step of reversing this order.^ The In-
ternal Evidence was then placed first, the weight
of proof was made to rest directly upon that, and
the evidence of testimony to declaration and to
miracle, and of miracle to the primary declaration,
was reduced to the role of corroboration and sec-
ondary support. At length, in our own times,
among the Protestants, particularly among those
of them called Liberals, — Liberals of all denomi-
nations, — we hear the evidence of personal expe-
rience, of inner personal life, of the adaptation
of Christianity to rational wants, — in short, the
evidence, not of mere reasoning, but of the large
and deep rational or spiritual nature as a whole, —
put forward on all sides as the real ground of
proof ; while the free career of what is called
Criticism, whether the Lower or the Higher, sets
the External Evidences more and more aside, and
tends steadily to their final discredit and entire
disuse. Meanwhile, in the minds of those who
employ these latest methods of Christian Defence,
1 The late Dr. Mark Hopkins, president of Williams College, in his
notable lectures on the Evidences of Christianity, at the Lowell Insti-
tute, in Boston. He follows the lead set by Coleridge in his Confes-
sions of an Inquiring Spirit, though (it must be confessed) haltingly
and at a distance.
266 ESSAVS I.V PHILOSOPHY
religion not only docs not lose it ascendency, but
is fountl to increase in estimation and in power.
The same increasing recognition of the human
rational spirit as the measure of religious truth
is shown still more significantly in the general
historical development of religion, taken on the
largest scale. The movement from the Oriental
pantheisms, on the one hand, and from polytheisms,
especially of the Occident, on the other, into mono-
theism ; the movement from simple monotheism to
Christianity ; from Greek or Eastern Christianity
to the Christianity of the West ; from the Latin
Christianity of Rome to the Germanic Christianity
of Protestantism ; from Calvinistic Protestantism
to Arminian ; from Evangelicalism to Liberalism, —
this vast movement has in all its stadia one steadfast
trend, diverge as it may, now on this side and now
on that, from the straight and shortest path to the
manifest goal. It is a persistent movement from
the non-recognition of the divine-sonship of man
to the fuller and fuller recognition of it ; to the
consequent acknowledgment that rational human
nature is the true witness to the Divine thought
and will, the true medium of revelation. Ever
stronger and clearer, in the successive stages of
man's religious history, — ever stronger and clearer,
and ever more and more unreserved, — becomes
man's growing conviction of the final authority of
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 267
the light that is within him. More and ever more
toward dominance grows the Method of Reason
in rehgion.
Now let us test, then, this instinctive drift of
human nature by the standards of our disciplined
and critical reflection. These will show us, I am
sure, that the instinctive movement is neither acci-
dental, capricious, nor transient, but represents the
profound and lasting judgment of our intelligence.
We shall arrive at our desired proof that human rea-
son is not a circumscribed power, confined to judg-
ments within the world of sensible experience alone,
but is as wide in its scope as all possible reality, and
in fact has for its supreme and most appropriate ob-
ject the world of the spirit, the society of all spirits,
and God as central therein. In short, we shall obtain
the proof that essential reason is directed upon the
things of religion.
Religion, in its broadest but shallowest definition,
is the recognition and obedience of the supernatural
Power supposed the Cause and Controller of all things ;
religious life is fed by communion with this Power,
and directed into courses corresponding" to the con-
ception which the worshipper has of the nature and
the character of the Power. This definition will fit
any and every religion alike, and is therefore of cor-
respondingly minor significance. But in the present
discussion we have no need, any more than we have
268 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
the liberty, to limit ourselves to this very non-com-
mittal and little significant definition. We can better
accept the profound statement characteristic of the
Christian religion, and say that religion is the com-
munion of the soul with God, and the inspiration of
conduct by the spirit which animates God, by the
spirit of him who is perfect Wisdom because he is
perfect Love, who is the perfect Person because his
whole being concentrates its powers upon the recog-
nition of every member in the world of persons —
upon the preservation and promotion of every soul in
the integrity of its freedom as a rational nature. It
is this highest definition of religion that the Method
of Reason must meet, if we are to vindicate for our
human powers a commanding religious office ; so that
what we have to show is, that our rational powers do
affirm for us, and make known to us, the reality of
this World of Persons, benignly related, and of God
in it as its fulfilled and inspiring Type.
This I believe we can show convincingly ; especially
in the light of the problems and theories most char-
acteristic of our times in their concern with the large
questions started by the progress of natural science,
— an aspect of the case the more natural for us to
consider, in view of what my eminent and venerated
colleague 1 has laid before you in his address. Yes,
^ Professor Joseph Le Conte, — who had just spoken on the bearing
of the doctrine of evolution on religious belief, particularly with refer-
ence to the conception of an Immanent God.
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 269
our ripest intelligence asserts religion and a God,
in that highest sense of both to which I have just
referred. Our power of rational insight, when it has
free course and comes to its own, does not stop with
the paralysing doctrine that Infinite Wisdom and
Love is a mere ideal; it declares it to be a fact —
nay, the only complete fact. We have no time at
this hour, of course, to enter into all the paths by
which enlightened human minds have endeavoured
^,0 find God at the centre of all things ; but it will
suffice, for our present argument, to consider the
existence of God in the light of that phase in the
history of human reason which is most characteristic
of our times, — I mean in the light of evolutionary
doctrines. What, let us ask, is their true bearing
on the question whether there is really a God — not
some all-pervading, vaguely diffused cosmic Pan, but
a distinct Person, the Person supreme among all per-
sons, infinite in wisdom, in justice, and in love.
I am as familiar as any of you with the cries that
have on every side risen, and still are rising, from the
camps of evolutionary science — cries that call upon
us either to bury our divine ideals in the vague
obscure of agnosticism, or else to replace Personal
Theism by what its advocates are fond of calling
Cosmic Theism, which is after all only another name
for pantheism. We are even told that science, with
its now settled principle of evolution, must hold by
270 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
this cosmic impersonal or super-personal God, or else
by no God at all. But I confess that the logic of such
cries, whether agnostic or pantheistic, seems very
queer to me. For what is the doctrine of evolution,
as it has now taken definite form at the hands of its
illustrious promoters, but the doctrine of the ever-
growing reasonableness of things .'' Human reason,
in short, in the stadium of its history which is char-
acteristic of our day, has arrived at a view of Nature
and natural processes that regards two great matters
as settled. In definitive opposition to the philosophy
sometimes called phenomenalism and sometimes pos-
itivism, of which Comte may be taken as the repre-
sentative, the evolutional view first insists that sound
reason presumes an Eternal Ground of things, distinct
from all phenomena, an Omnipresent Energy which
is their universal cause ; and then it shows, secondly,
by evidences the more convincing in proportion as
the minds considering them are more familiar with
detailed phenomena of every sort, that the manifesta-
tions of this Energy exhibit a steadfast march toward
the establishment of a world not of mere mechanical
and scientific rationality, but of that infinitely higher
rationality which we name justice and benevolence.
So far towards our desired goal, then, the settled
results of evolutional theory might seem to go. But
it is just at this point that the seeker after proofs of
God needs to observe a critical caution. The ordi-
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 27 1
nary reasoner, no doubt, would here say that the
nature of the Eternal Cause was now transparently
revealed : the First Principle of things, whatever be
its nature, must in the end impress that nature upon
the things that survive, and the final survivals must
therefore be sure indications of the nature ; but the
things that survive in evolution, through the vast
process of natural selection, bear the impress of a
reasonable nature, reasonable in the highest sense ;
whence it seems irresistibly to follow that the nature
of the Eternal Cause must be a reasonable nature,
and in the highest sense. But the keener logicians
of the agnostic or the pantheistic type call our atten-
tion to a flaw in this reasoning, apparently so right
and so plain; and I account their warning just.
They say one cannot rightly reason from partial or
uncompleted effects of a cause, to the unquestionable
nature of the cause ; and that the final, the abso-
lutely decisive results of evolution are not known
to us, nor are they knowable. To reason from the
drift of phenomenal development on the surface of
the earth, or even in the visible heavens, however
plain such drift may be, to the ultimate results of the
Eternal Energy is unwarrantable, by reason of too
sweeping an induction. The verifiable trend of evo-
lution does not and cannot reach to the final effects
of the First Principle ; yet only in the knowledge of
these final effects is the real nature of this Principle
272 ESSAYS /.y PHILOSOPHY
determinable, and as they are nt)l ^nly unknown but
unknowable, so also must the Principle be re.i;arded
as only the Unknowable.
Or to i)ut the case at its very best for theism, as
Mr. Fiske in his Idea of God has put it, the '^ quasi-
personality " of the Eternal Cause must remain the
object, not of a satedly convinced reason, or know-
ledge, but of a supported and comforted _/rtzV//, — a
faith supported by such actual knowledge of the
apparent drift of things within the visible universe,
especially upon the surface of the earth and amid
things human, or preparatory for human history, as
to be a reasonable faith ; a faith, that iS; of which we
may say that it accepts nothing contrary to reason as
interpretable by the light of experience. In the ascer-
tained absence of signs to the contrary, the flight of
Faith from the footing afforded by such actual signs
as are favourable, her flight on wings of hope, is but
the natural operation of that gift in human nature
which supplements its gift of knowledge. Farther
than this, the strictest interpreters of the results of
evolution forbid us to go. On the evidence of such
results alone, we have no assurance that the quality
of reasonableness is anything more than phenomenal
and transitory, after all. What fatal possibilities are
there not in the infinite, when we essay to read it
only by the light of finite historical facts !
Now, this warning from these logicians, I repeat,
RIGHT RELA TION OF REASON TO RELIGION 273
seems to me soundly given. Their point is correctly
made. And yet I hold it is so far from final, that it
leaves their own logic, as I said before, open to the
epithet of queer. We must indeed avoid the hasty
reasoning of the argument first proposed ; but their
own reasoning, it seems to me, is guilty of an over-
sight at least as great as that which it condemns ;
at least as great, if obscurer and more subtile, and
therefore more liable to pass unsuspected. For it is
not from the results of the doctrine of evolution that
the presupposition, the irresistible presupposition, of
the being of God arises ; not from its results, but
from its very grounds — from the logic on which
its conclusions are based. And this logic is not
peculiar to the doctrine of evolution ; it is the logic,
rather, of all natural history, of all experimental and
observational science ; and biological evolution is only
the most striking and significant result of it.
The logical method leading to the theory of evolu-
tion is what supplies the key to the argumentative
situation in the case ; and it is my settled conviction,
which I hope now to impart to you, that the agnostic
and pantheistic interpreters of evolution quite over-
look the real implications of this method. These
deepest implications are neither agnostic nor panthe-
istic, but are on the contrary strictly theistic ; and as
surely as the man of science relies upon his logic, so
surely does he commit himself, whether he realises the
274 £SSAys j.v riiiLosoriiY
fact or not, to the reference of all phenomena subject
to general laws to an Ultimate Principle that is un-
questionably conscious, rational, and moral, and there-
fore personal. Why this is so, and by what series of
logical steps, I will now attempt briefly to explain.
The pathway is far from direct or obvious, and con-
sists of many stages, which we are prone to overlook.
The logic of science, the logic of which the doc-
trine of evolution is so impressive a result, is simply
the logic of induction — the lojric that raises the
infinite superstructure of a universal law upon the
finite and apparently all-too-narrow foundation of a
specific number, comparatively very small, of care-
fully ascertained particular facts. The facts them-
selves will not and cannot support the superstructure :
what, then, is its real support .-' Every act of induc-
tion, every case of generalisation, — that is to say,
of prophetic universalisation from the relatively few
single cases that constitute its observed foundation, —
is a direct appeal from the limitations of observation
to the essential and all-perv^ading rationality of things.
However far the finite results of induction may fall
short of assuring us of this pervading rationality,
the secret of the inductive method is our unreserved
committal to its reality. But there can be no ground
for such a universal rationality in facts themselves,
as they are simply and historically presented; our
first strict statement about it must be, that it is
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 2/5
a pure addition to the facts, made by the spojitajieous
instinct of our minds} In that case, what can save
it from the discredit of being a bare ideal of ours,
worthless for objective truth ?
The considerate answer to this question, which
alone can at once explain the instinctive character
of the act of generalisation and at the same time
give it objective value, is that natural facts are not
to be thought of as things-in-themselves, things self-
subsistent as compared with us, and impinging upon
our waiting sensibility, but are simply parts or items
in our perceptive experience, and being organised by
the principles of our inner consciousness are there-
fore subject to these instinctive judgments of ours,
as the conditions under which alone they can exist.
In short, the answer consists in coming to an ideal-
istic view of the reality of Nature and of natural
things. We are committed by induction, if it is a
valid act, to the main propositions of Berkeley, re-
vised and vindicated by Kant, — that existence, pri-
marily and at core, is the existence of spirits or
minds or conscious centres, and that the existence
of material things is simply phenomenal, simply pres-
entation in the experience of minds. The latent
logic of the method of induction therefore leads us,
first of all and directly, not to the existence of a
personal God, nor even to that of the impersonal
1 For some fuller statement of this, see p. 2>2> stq> above.
276 ESSAYS nv PHILOSOPHY
God, immanent in Nature, to which the evolutional
pantheist concludes, but, on the contrary, to a rational
nature everywhere present and regulative, and only
to a person or persons as these are necessarily pre-
supposed in such a nature. Nor docs taking the
next step of passing to these persons bring us to
God, but only, at nearest hand, to men.^
But the inner logic of induction, secret and silent
though it be, does presuppose the reality and the
solidarity of conscious society, as an association of
beings united by a common rational intelligence,
and making common part in a common history of
sensible experience. Nor can the objective value of
inductive generalisation be thought in any other
way than as the benign consensus of the whole
society of minds, considering the facts of experience
in the temper of justice and truth. What we reach,
then, as the all but direct implication of induction, is
the reality of a tiniversal rational society. We attain
to the reality of the wJiole society, such that every
really possible member of it must be real.
The further question of the being of God is simply
the question, then, of the possible range of individ-
uality in minds. Every act of thought is the act of
an individual ; and all reality, as finally coming back
to thinking being, is thus intrinsically individual.
Since the inductive act presupposes Nature to subsist
^ See p. 31 and p. 41 seq., above.
RIGHT RELATION OF REASON TO RELIGION 277
in and through the existence of the absolutely total
and complete society of possible minds, the question
of God's reality is exactly the question whether a
perfect Person is necessarily included in the total
circle of individual differentiation by which the abso-
lutely entire society of minds is constituted. To
this, it would seem there is but one answer : It is
impossible to exclude from the total circle that Su-
preme Person whose mark of individual difference
is his eternal perfection in the rational nature wliich,
under various conditions of manifestation amid de-
fects, is common to all the others.^
Such is the argument to the inherently religious
and iheistic character of the Method of Reason
when applied to religion. It has undertaken to
show that reason, by its nature, asserts the ex-
istence of God, — of God in the deep Christian
sense of the living and loving Recogniser and
Saviour of the spiritual and rational nature of
every mind ; a God who is an ever-active member,
with all intelligences, in the benign society where the
ultimate aim of all, quite as it is God's eternal will,
is the perfection and bliss of all the rest. Such, I
repeat, is the argument. I do not offer it as the
only possible proof of the truth of Rationalism, but
simply as a sufficient one, and one naturally drawn
from the leading mental interests of our time, and
^ For a full treatment of this argument, see pp. 351-359, below.
278 £ss^ys IX riiiLosopiiY
therefore suitable and pertinent. Let those who
would impugn it, assail tlic value of the method
of inductive science, if they will. But those who
value that method — and who in these days does
not? — nuist in consistency with its tacit logic
conclude that the voice of reason is for God, the
God of Christ and of Christianity ; and that as reason
is essentially religious, so true religion is essentially
rational.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY: ITS POSITIVE
ARGUMENT
WITH REFERENCE TO THE TNGERSOLL LECTURE OF
PROFESSOR JAMES
In offering you to-night some words on the
great question of human immortahty, I enjoy the
advantage of the interest awakened by the essay
of my brilHant friend from Harvard, read a few
months ago in this room.^ The memory of that
noble evening lives with you, I doubt not, still
undimmed, and long will live, as it lives and long
will live with me. The thoughts then stirred
within you, I can count upon as having waked
many another of those questions which haunt us
concerning the mystery of life ; and I may feel
assured of your sympathy when I now attempt
to renew their current.
I may assume, I judge, that some of you not only
felt regarding immortality the difificulties which our
guest addressed himself to obviating, but were also
1 The essay was read before the Berkeley Club of Oakland, California,
in April, 1899. Professor James had read his IngersoU Lecture to the
same company in September, 1898.
279
2 So £SS.iyS IN rillLOSOPHY
conscious of a certain feeling of insuflliciency left by
the method he took to relieve them. Probably, too,
many of you wished, as I did, that we might be
supplied in some way with something more posi-
tive, something more satisfyingly affirmative, than
the mere opening of a chance to pull ourselves
together and seize upon immortal life by a tour
lie force of resolute belief. For this was all that
our essayist could achieve by simply replying to
objections, though it was no doubt all that he aimed
at achieving.
Many others of you, I moreover suspect, wondered
in particular if there might not be some course
of thought in which that idealistic theory of our
existence, suggested by his transmission-view of
the functional relation between our conscious ex-
periences and the brain, would be carried up above
the region of mere hypothesis into the world of
real fact. I mean the theory, that, as Professor
James himself expresses it, *' the whole universe
of material things — the furniture of earth and
choir of heaven — should turn out to be a mere
surface-veil of phenomena, hiding and keeping back
the world of genuine realities; . . . the whole world
of natural experience, as we get it, to be but a
time-mask, shattering or refracting the one infinite
Thought which is the sole reality of those millions
of finite streams of consciousness known to us as
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 28 1
our private selves." ^ This theory, Professor James
in his argument presents as a possible supposition
merely, and his logical aim is simply to show that
the superficially alarming proclamation of physio-
logical psychology, which declares all consciousness
to be a function of the brain, cannot exclude the
chance for this supposition, nor our rational right
to make it if we will. He puts it, indeed, as an
imaginative possibility rather than a scientific hy-
pothesis, and gives it great poetic force as well
as logical plausibility by his quotation of Shelley's
lines,^ —
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the wliite radiance of eternity.
"Suppose," he adds, "that this were really so, and
suppose, moreover, that the dome, opaque enough
at all times to the full super-solar blaze, could at
certain times and places grow less so, and let certain
beams pierce through into this sublunary world. . . .
Only at particular times and places would it seem
that, as a matter of fact, the veil of Nature can grow
thin and rupturable enough for such effects to occur.
But in those places gleams, however finite and un-
satisfying, of the absolute life of the universe, are
from time to time vouchsafed. . . , Admit now
1 William James : Htiman Immortality, p. 15 seq. Boston: Hough-
ton, Mifflin, and Co., 1898.
2 Shelley's Adonais, stanza lii.
282 ESSAYS LV PHILOSOPHY
that our hruiiis are such thin and half-transparent
places in the veil. What will happen ? Why, as
the wiiite radiance comes throuj;h the dome with all
sorts of staining and distortion imprinted on it by
the glass, . . . even so the genuine matter of reality,
the life of souls as it is in its fulness, will break
through our several brains into this world in all sorts
of restricted forms, and with all the imperfections
and quecrnesses that characterise our finite individu-
alities here below." *
This ideal theory of the true and real being that
hides behind phenomena, Professor James, I repeat,
puts forward only as a possible hypothesis, to point
and emphasise his contention that "when we think
of the law that thought is a function of the brain,
we are not required to think of productive function
only ; zue are entitled also to consider permissive or
transmissive functioti." "^ For, on this hypothesis,
"our soul's life, as we here know it, would none the
less in literal strictness be the function of the brain." ^
And his object in this contention is to display the
pertinent and pointed moral, that "dependence of
this sort on the brain for this natural life would in
no wise make immortal life impossible ; it might
be quite compatible with supernatural life behind
the veil hereafter."* So that " in strict logic, then,
^ Human Immortality, pp. i6, 17. "^ Ibid., p. 15.
^Ibid.,^. 18. * Ibid., -p. 18.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 283
the fangs of cerebralistic materialism are drawn ; "
..." the fatal consequence is not coercive, the con-
clusion which materialism draws being due solely
to its one-sided way of taking the word * function.' " ^
He points out that it assumes the functional relation
of brain to consciousness to be always and solely
productive, ignoring the fact that it may just as well
be either (i) permissive, i.e. releasing, or (2) trans-
missive. "My words," he closes by saying, "ought
consequently to exert a releasing function on your
hopes. You may believe henceforward, whether you
care to profit by the permission or not." ^
Upon this merely permissive conclusion of his
argument, this bare opening of room for belief, — to
take advantage of which we must summon the cour-
age to risk the belief, and so leave it after all a mat-
ter of sheer resolution, — I repeat I can hardly doubt
that many of you wondered if this were all that phil-
osophic thought can do for our heart's desire after
light and foothold beyond the grave. You must
have wondered if that region of " super-solar blaze "
must always remain this blank Perhaps ; if that
"white radiance of eternity" always must be visible
to the poet's eye alone ; or if it might not, rather,
by some better philosophic fortune be revealed to
clear insight as a reality undeniable, and so our belief
in it become the act of intelligence, solid and sup-
"^ Human Immortality , pp. 18, 19. '^ Ibid., p. 19.
284 ESSAYS I.V PHILOSOPHY
ported, instead of being an act of that desperate
courage which risks all, because not to risk is to
perish anyhow.
It is in a hope to meet this query — to show, if pos-
sible, the way of raising this ideal hypothesis into
fact resting upon positive evidence — that I offer
you what follows in this essay.
Before entering upon the affirmative argument for
the imperishableness of the light that lighteth every
man when he cometh into the world, and essaying
to prove really Ids the white radiance of eternity,
which by the dome of physical life, however many-
coloured, is only stained, let me point out clearly a
certain oversight in the otherwise brilliant reasoning
by which our guest and essayist would provide a justi-
fiable chance for faith and courage to cast in for
immortality — a chance to risk belief without the
risk of demonstrable folly. For that, in brief, is
what Professor James's general aim in the philosophi-
cal field may be said to be, — to vindicate the exer-
cise of moral and religious faith against the charge
of ignorance, unreason, and folly ; to make it plain
that one is not a fool, even though he do believe out
of sheer fealty and loyal will, when once a proved
uncertainty leaves him an open chance ; and to dis-
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 285
play this open chance in face of those "results of
modern science " which are so often declared adverse
to it.
What, then, is the exact "open chance" that Pro-
fessor James leaves us, in this urgent question of
immortality, by his transmission-theory of the func-
tion performed by the brain for consciousness ?
Does the transmission-theory, in strict logic, indeed
draw the fangs of cerebralistic materialism ? — does
it take away the real sting of death ? The answer
to this question depends on the answer we shall
have to give to another — whether the transmis-
sion-theory, as managed by Professor James, estab-
lishes any chance for the personal immortality of
each of us. For the real sting of death is the
apprehension in each of us that Jie may perish in
dying; and no hope of the changeless persistence of
any eternal "mother sea" of consciousness, Divine
or other, can afford us any consolation if this dread
of our personal extinction be not set at rest.
Professor James has himself partly realised this
critical issue in the case. "Still you will ask," he
says, " in what positive way does this theory help
us to realise our immortality in imagination .? " ^ He
alludes here to his previous statement, that the
transmission-theory implies the " mother sea " of
eternal consciousness, in accordance with which
^ Human Im»iortality, p. 29.
286 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
"the great orthodox philosophic tradition " treats the
body as " an essential condition to the soul's life
in this world of sense," but conceives that "after
death the soul is set free and becomes a purely
intellectual and non-appetitive being." ^ And he
quotes corroboratively from Kant the sentiment
that "the body would thus be, not the cause of
our thinking, but merely a condition restrictive
thereof, and, although essential to our sensuous
and animal consciousness, ... an impeder of our
pure spiritual life."^ Then, with great pertinence,
he adds: "What we all wish to keep is just these
individual restrictions, these self-same tendencies and
peculiarities that define us to ourselves and others,
and constitute our identity, so called. Our finite-
ness and limitations seem to be our personal es-
sence ; and when the finiting organ drops away,
and our several spirits revert to their original source
and resume their unrestricted condition, will they
then be anything like those sweet streams of
feeling which we know, and which even now our
brains are sifting out from the great reservoir for
our enjoyment here below .-*" ^
This keen and indeed irrepressible demand for
individual perpetuity of consciousness he still more
thrillingly emphasises when he comes to attempt
^ Human Iminortality, p. 28. * Ibid.y pp. 28, 29.
3 Ibid., pp. 29, 30.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 287
the rebuttal of the second objection to immortal
life — the strange objection drawn from the ennui
at contemplating the incalculable thronging of the
eternal world, involved in immortality. " Life," he
rehearses, in behalf of the objector, "is a good thing
on a reasonably copious scale ; but the very heavens
themselves, and the cosmic times and spaces, would
stand aghast, we think, at the notion of preserving
eternally such an ever-swelling plethora and glut
of it." ^ And to the objection his telling reply is
in substance this : The inner significance of other
lives exceeds all our powers of sympathy and insight.
, . . Every one of these aliens, however gro-
tesque or even repulsive to you or to me, is ani-
mated by an inner joy of living as hot or hotter
than that which we feel beating in our private
breasts. . . . Not a being of the countless throng
is there whose continued life is not called for, and
called for intensely, by the consciousness that ani-
mates the being's form. . . . Spiritual being, when-
ever it comes, affirms itself, expands, and craves
continuance.^
The true and real point of this reply, you cannot
fail to notice, turns entirely upon the assumption
that nothing short of individual immortality can be
the object of any serious question in this region.
So now let us ask, with accuracy, what assurance —
^ Human Liimortality, p. 36. 2 Jj^id^^ pp. 39-41.
288 ESSAYS LV PHILOSOPHY
what leaving open of a consoling hope, even — of this
personal preservation the transmission-theory of
brain-function can afford. Professor James de-
clares, and no one will deny, that the production-
theory leaves no room for the hope of any kind of
immortality, individual or generic : does his trans-
mission-theory, then, really afford any hope of indi-
vidual immortality ? And let us remind ourselves,
once more, that this is the only immortality in
which wc have any interested concern, or are capa-
ble of having any. We are not interested in the
everlastingness of the eternal " mother sea," call
it God or call it what we will, unless we include in
it the sum of all our enduring distinct personalities.
So the question is. Does even the theory that the
brain performs simply a transmissive function in
our conscious life, instead of a producing one, really
warrant even a Jiope of personal preservation for-
ever, not to speak of an assurance of it ?
Professor James's own management of this theory
is singularly disappointing in this reference, and
singularly short of his own pungent emphasis of the
universal passion for personal continuance. The
white radiance of eternity which he hints as shining
through the many-coloured dome of natural life,
— the pied translucence of the brain, — is prevail-
ingly conceived by him as in itself a continuous
and undivided and undifferentiated Whole. Upon
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 289
this our brains operate ^ as "organs for separating
it into parts and giving them finite form." Again,^
he says: "The transmission-theory connects itself
very naturally with the whole tendency of thought
known as transcendentalism. Emerson, for example,
writes: 'We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,
which makes us receivers of its truth and organs
of its activity. When we discern justice, when we
discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow
a passage to its beams.' " All this is in even keep-
ing with Professor James's other sentence,^ that "we
need only suppose the continuity of our conscious-
ness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional
waves occasionally pouring over the dam," and with
the earlier one, already once quoted, that "as the
white radiance comes through the dome, . . . even
so the genuine matter of reality, the life of souls
as it is in its fulness, will break through our several
brains into this world in all sorts of restricted forms."
Once, and but once only, does he approach the
greater idealistic doctrine of an eternal Pluralism.
Then he says, indeed, " But it is not necessary to
identify the consciousness postulated in the lecture,
as preexisting behind the scenes, with the Absolute
Mind of transcendental idealism, although, indeed,
the notion of it might lead in that direction. The
Absolute Mind of transcendental idealism is one
^ Human Immortality, note 3, p. 52. '^ Ibid., note 5, p. 58.
8 Ibid., p. 27.
U
290 ESSAYS IN FIIILOSOPllY
integral Unit, one single World-mind. For the
purposes of my lecture, however, there might be
many minds behind the scenes as well as one." ^
This is undoubtedly so : strictly, too, the rebuttal
purposes of his lecture would be far better served
by this pluralistic hypothesis than by that of a
single all-wide mother sea of Mind ; rather, in fact,
these purposes cannot be properly served by any
hypothesis except the pluralistic. But unfortunately
he goes on to say, "All that the transmission-
theory absolutely requires is that they [tlie many
minds behind the scenes] should transcend our
minds, which thus come from something mental
that preexists, and is larger than themselves." ^
Thus he is confronted — and so are we in follow-
ing him — with the awkward consequence that our
minds, our individual personalities, only get their
being by the fact of transmission through the brain.
Existing only on condition that the brain allows
us to be, as sifted, restricted, or coloured phantoms
of the infinite sea of light beyond, all that zue in
strictness are must fail of being, must go out extin-
guished, whenever the transmitting medium shall
cease to exist. All that is ^ve, all our individual
identities, must vanish into nameless nothing when
death arrives. That the vast Mind-ocean supposed to
be beating over the brain's threshold, or the many
^ Huntafi Immortality, p. 58. * Ibid., p. 58, at bottom.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 29 1
minds, not ours, perchance supposable behind the
scenes, abides or abide in the immutable eternity
which is its home or theirs — this concerns us not,
this consoles us not. What we are, on this trans-
mission-theory of our selfhood, is members of the
dead. We were only the phantasmal results of a
contingent and passing condition to which the
Eternal Reality, by some impenetrable mystery, sub-
mitted itself or was submitted. In death that con-
dition has vanished, and so we too are gone. We
are not sharers in the imperishableness of the eter-
nal Consciousness, be it One or be it many. It (or
perchance they) alone has (or maybe have) life in
itself (or in themselves), alone is an End (or are
ends). We are not ends, but are only means, and
transient means at that. We are only stage super-
numeraries — nay, worse, only stage properties — of
the eternal drama, and not at all its proper person-
ages. We are only here as appurtenances of the real
dramatis personcB, — Oiily as masks and false shows.
We are made mere tools of a counsel in which we
do not share ; our personality is trod upon and put
to shame, in behoof of the invisible and inap-
proachable Lord or lords of our life, in whose
sight we are as nothing. It is just this that makes
the sting of our fate, far m.ore than the cessation
of the joys belonging to sensuous perception.
For this defect in the argument of our essayist
292 ESSAYS IN PIIJLOSOPHY
there is but one possible remedy, — I am sure you
will agree with me in this, — and that is, to adopt the
hypothesis, not simply that there are many minds
behind the scenes, but that these minds are our
minds — our veritable and genuine selves; and that
the summaries of sense-coloured experiences which
Professor James, following the empiricist tradition of
the English school of philosophy, especially as voiced
by Hume and Hartley and Mill, is led to call the only
verifiably real meaning of our self, or our mind, are
but the more or less dimmed and darkened expres-
sions of those our real spirits, inhabitants of eternity.
Short of this identification, short of this close union
of the soul and its experiences in a single identity
belonging to the eternal world, and enclosing the
world of time, there can be no assurance of our
continuing in spite of death. Short of showing that
upon some admissible interpretation of the functional
relation between the brain and phenomenal conscious-
ness a chance remains for this identification, we can-
not even keep open the chance that we may be
immortal, and so cannot set the objection drawn from
cerebralistic materialism finally aside.
II
But what admissible interpretation is there of the
relation between brain-function and conscious experi-
ence that will really dispose of the cerebral objection
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 293
to immortality, and enable us to move onward, far
beyond, to some positive /r^<?/ of our individual per-
manence ?
It certainly seems plain, not only that Professor
James's method with the transmission-theory is un-
equal to this task, but that no form of transmissive
relation between brain and experience is equal to it,
or can be. For every form of the transmission-theory
must regard the brain and its operations as a prior
condition of such consciousness — as a fact not sim-
ply concomitant with the consciousness, but prereq-
uisite to its existence. In every such theory the
brain is supposed to exist, somehozu, whether any con-
sciousness that can be called ours exists or not. So it
must either exist (i) as the creation of the assumed
one Mind behind the scenes, and be the medium he
uses to display himself in his perhaps endlessly shifting
transient disguises ; or (2) as the creation, similarly,
of the many minds behind the scenes, used by each
for the same object of transient disguise ; or (3) as
somehow self-existent, an unintelligible mystery in
being, thwarting more or less the assumed eternity
and infinity of the Absolute Mind or the absolute
minds. In either case, it acts as a limiting and sup-
pressive condition upon us, reducing us to mere shad-
ows of something else, converting us into instrumental
effects merely, and only giving us being that is desti-
tute of conclusive reality — being that is only deriva-
294 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
tive, dependent, contingent, and so possibly (or, rather,
probably) transient.
This easily appears. If the brain, as in the third
supposition, is an inexplicable self-existence, then, as
transmitter upon which our individual existence is
made to depend, it must in ceasing to exist deprive
the eternal Mind or miiuls of the conditio sific qua
non of our being, must thus display itself as in its very
destruction victorious over intelligence, and no hope
of our continuance remains. And even if the brain
is, according to the first or the second supposition,
the creation of the eternal Mind or the eternal intelli-
gences not ourselves, and still is the means of our
being, then our only hope would lie in the chance
that God or the superior intelligences may have the
power and the good will to create the brain anew, or
to replace it by some better medium. But this hope
seems cjuenched at once in our inability to conceive
of an identity continuing when the continuity of the
conditioning medium has been broken. Or if for
argument's sake we waive this difficulty, who can
assure us that the creative power is equal to renewal,
since its creation has once perished .'' On the other
hand, confidence in the good will of our eternal
Source or sources has nothing to go upon but the
limited allotment of good that the life actually expe-
rienced has afforded ; and this, as all serious minds
too sadly know, is little enough, when we consider
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 295
only the actual good of the actual world here below.
Judged by the light of this "vale of tears" alone,
there is no evidence that good will toward jis is the
chief or the permanent aim of the eternal Lord or
lords.
The transmissive interpretation of brain-function,
then, must unavoidably fail to do the work we need
to have done. Is there perhaps sovie other tvay ? Is
there some other mode of conceiving the correlation
between brain-changes and psychic experience —
some conception of their persistent correspondence
that regards brain-function as neither productive nor
releasing nor transmissive "i I suppose there is ; and
that it is gained by taking two important steps char-
acteristic of the exacter philosophy.
The first of these steps is, to read the doctrine of
modern psychology with a still stricter interpretation
than Professor James has read it with — to construe
it rigidly as a case, to borrow his own words, simply
of concomitant variation. When we say that tJic mind
is a function of the brain, we are therefore to under-
stand that in exact scientific truth we can mean noth-
ing more than this : That physical and physiological
changes go on, seriatim, side by side with changes
in psychic experience ; or vice versa, that psychic
changes run parallel, pari passu, with physiological
changes in the brain and the other neural tissues.
We do not even mean that the brain is a transmitter
296 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
of power behind it, any more than tliat psychic experi-
ence transmits to the brain some power behind the
experience. Concomitance simply means, at last,
that both series of changes are connected with some
cause, distinct from either, which is the secret of
both. To use a common phrase, it means that the
two are "joint effects " of some single higher cause,
for the time being undiscovered. It points our in-
vestigation at once to the problem of searching for
and determining this unknown cause, of converting
it from being unknown into being known.
The second step is, to connect these two streams
of concomitant or joint effects with our own true
primordial and actively conscious self as their real
cause, though it is at first unrealised and unknov/n
as such. This step is doubtless impossible for a phi-
losophy which halts, as Professor James's does, with
a dogmatic disbelief in a priori knowing, or self-active
consciousness, and which insists that no knowing is
intelligibly real except the contingent and tentative
knowing supplied to us "from elsewhere," and as if
inch by inch, in sensible experience. But the clear
and scientific connecting of the two " parallel "
streams of effects, one physical, the other psychic,
with the one organising soul or mind, becomes pos-
sible enough, and indeed easy, when once we pene-
trate the too superficial theory of empirical philosophy,
and settle upon the a priori or self-active character
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 297
of knowledge as a fundamental fact ; when once we
pass beyond the external view of experience, which
causes it to appear as if it were constituted out of
sensation or impressions alone, and were not, as it
really is, itself a complex, in which the utterly vague
something we call " sensation " or " impression " is
always organised and made to take form and descrip-
tive definiteness, and thus clear reality, by a priori
or self-active consciousness.
Our real experiences, day by day and moment by
moment, are so intrinsically organised and definite,
it does not at first occur to us that the principles
which organise and define them, rendering them
intelligible, and consciously apprehensible, are and
must be the spontaneous products of the mind's own
action. We do not at first see, as careful reflec-
tion later brings us to see, with Kant, that the
mental elements without which the apprehensible
presence of the items of experience would be incon-
ceivable and inexistent cannot possibly be derived
from these, and thence applied to the mind. But this
later penetrating reflection convinces us that what our
experienced objects must have in order to be objects
— to be perceived at all — must be brought by the
mind itself to the very act of experience. What
must be presupposed, if the objects are to be per-
ceived at all, can by no conceivable means be ex-
plained as first coming to the mind from the objects,
298 Ess.tvs /x rnii.osoriiY
and must thorcforo, as the only alternative, be
acknowledged to be contributions from the mind's
pure self-activity.
But when we have reached this conclusive convic-
tion that the roots of our experience and our experi-
mental knowledge are parts of our own spontaneous
life, we then readily come to see, further, that the
system of our several elements of consciousness a
priori is precisely what we must really understand
by our unifying or enwholing self, — is exactly what
we try to express when we say we have a soul, and
that this soul possesses real knowledge ; that is, a
hold upon eternal things. The realm of the eternal,
in short, then becomes for us just the realm of our
self-active intelligence ; and this it is which, if we
can show its reality in detail, will prove to be the
clue to our immortal being. So the critical question
is, How can the real existence of such a priori con-
sciousness, such genuinely self-active intelligence,
be conclusively made out .? I have already in a few
sentences indicated the general line of this proof, as
we inherit it from Kant ; but there is now required
some fuller account of it, made intelligible and con-
vincing by clear particulars.
Any comprehensive answer to our question would
carry us much farther into the fields of critical specu-
lation than I could possibly go in the brief time at
our disposal, and certainly much farther than I could
HUxMAN IMMORTALITY 299
hope to have you willingly follow. But fortunately
we can argue here ex exemplo. It will be sufficient
for our purpose to establish the reality of a single
thread of such a priori or self-active knowing. And
this it is simplest to do in the case of such a con-
stituent element in our experience as, for instance,
Time or Space. For these elements, as we all know,
are the " containing " conditions of the whole of our
sense-perceptive life ; indeed, of the whole physical
world, upon whose decay and destructibility all our
fears of death, and of extinction through death, are
founded. It will be most pertinent, moreover, to
confine ourselves to the single element of Time
alone, as it is in this that we find nearest at hand
the medium of union between the physical and the
psychic series in our experience, and thence the
means for connecting both with the unity of our real
self.
We return, then, to the strict concomitance of the
two series, as all that can in exact science be meant
by the functional relation between the brain and the
sense-perceptive consciousness. And we ask, Must
one stop with this mere parallelism of the physical
and the psychic .'' — must we rest in it as an obsti-
nate and impenetrable fact } That we must, is the
ordinary dictum of the proclamatory "new" or
"objective" or "physiological" psychology — the
two "parallel" series are there, and nobody can get
300 £SSAys IN rj/n.osoriiY
beyond the dead fact of their concomitancy ! But
w/iy not f Surely the concomitance of the two is
in Time, and conditioned by Time; that at least is
indisputable, is involved in calling the relation con-
comitance. If it can be shown, now, that Time is no
" thing-in-itself," no thing existing of itself indepen-
dently of minds, but must be explained as a peculiar
form of consciousness, in each of us, that cannot be
conceived of as derived from any possible communi-
cation ab extra, and consequently must be acknow-
ledged as the expression of our mental self-activity,
we shall clearly have connected our empirical con-
sciousness, our varying flood of serial experiences,
our states of mind, with our active unit-being, and
shall have lodged this our active identity in the
eternal world, or order, in the only sense in which
such an order of existence can be made intelligible.
I must not delay you with prolonged or intricate
proofs that the real nature of Time is such as I have
described, though such proofs are indeed numerous
and prolific. It is enough for our purposes to-night
to call attention, first, to the simple fact that we can-
not rationally entertain the proposition that there is,
or can be, no Time, — which shows that the con-
sciousness of Time is inseparable from our essential
being ; in other words, is intrinsic in it. Secondly,
let us attend to the more significant fact, that we are
conscious of Time as a unity at once absolutely com-
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 3OI
plete and also infinite, and cannot be conscious of it
except with these characters, — which shows that it
cannot have come to us by transfer or communica-
tion. For if it did come in this way, then, in the
first place, it must have a history, and a limit of
history to date, quite as all else that comes so has;
and this would mean that it must be thought as finite
in quantity, as well as an incomplete unity capable of
increase. And, in the second place, its coming in
this heroic fashion is itself unstatable and unthink-
able, except in terms of Time itself ; and this shows
that the pretended empirical explanation requires the
preemployment of the thing whose origin it would
clear up, — all the light the explanation gives, it
borrows from the very thing it pretends to explain.
Time is therefore inevitably brought home to the
soul as its real source, and our convinced judgment
confesses the consciousness of Time to be a con-
sciousness a priori ; that is, an act of the soul, of the
individual mind, in the spontaneous unity of its exist-
ence. It is seen to be a changeless principle of
relation, by which the active-conscious self connects
the items of experience into the serial order which
we call sequence or succession, and blends the two
concomitant series, physical and psychic, into the
single whole that expresses the self's own unity.
So a sufficiently strict interpretation of the mod-
ern psychological doctrine, instead of merely making
302 ESSAYS IX ri/ILOSOPHY
materialism give way, and yield place for a chance
and hope that we may be immortal, — instead of simply
leaving room for the inii^erishable eternity of the
universal viotlur sea of Mind, — lays sure the founda-
tions for a certainty that we each belong to the
eternal world, not simply to the world of shifting and
transient experience. It provides for oilv selves, for
each of them individually, a place in the world not
merely of consequences and mediated effects, but of
primary and unmediated causes. Hence it gives us
assurance that death no more than any other event in
experience is our end and close, but that we survive
it, ourselves the springs that organise experience. It
shows us possessed, intrinsically, of the very roots
and sources of perception, not merely of its experi-
enced fact, and so presents us as possessed of power
to rise beyond the grave — yes, in and through the
very act of death — into new worlds of perception.
Accordingly, it matches the Christian improve-
ment upon the older conception of the future exist-
ence— the ascent to the doctrine of "resurrection"
or avd(naaL<i, the supplementing of immortality by
the exaltation of the "body," or sense-perceptive life.
As ourselves the causal sources of the perceived
world and its cosmic order, we are not destined to
any colourless life of bare ideas, to "some spectral
woof of impalpable abstractions or unearthly ballet
of bloodless categories," but are to go perceptively
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 303
onward in perpetiimn, exercising forever our inherent
power of framing experience, of begetting worlds of
sense-coloured variety and definiteness, in their long
career surely of higher and higher subtilty, refine-
ment, beauty, and goodness.
Ill
But you may now not unreasonably ask for some
clearer exhibit of the steps by which this conviction
is reached. So far, our argument must be admitted
to have achieved, explicitly, nothing more than this
— to connect our experience, our psychic history of
sensible states, with the active unity of our oivn
minds, each for itself, in contrast to connecting our
consciousness, as Professor James does, with the
" mother sea," the one and only Mind, or the eternal
many minds not ours. As yet, then, we have done
no more than shift the mere hope or chance for
continuance from that diffused "white radiance of
eternity" to these our own eternal centres of light.
Two things it is therefore natural to ask :
(i) How do the results we have just established
carry us beyond the mere possibility to the positive
fact of human immortality .-'
(2) How does our connecting the two concomitant
series of experiences with the individual being of each
soul, lead to the knowledge that we are not only the
304 ESSAYS LV PHILOSOPHY
lords over death, but are essentially imperishable
against every other contingency ?
I have just said that our argument has not yet
answered these questions explicitly. But it is riglit
I should add that it does answer both of them by
implication. As for the first, let us now note that
our discussion, in proving Time to be an expression
of each mind's spontaneous activity, proves the self-
active existence of every mind as such, and so estab-
lishes the eternity of the individual spirit in the only
ultimate meaning of eternity ; since, as the ground
and source of Time itself, the being of the soul must
transcend Time, though including Time, and conse-
quently, while involving everlastingness, must have
its _/>/// meaning in just that spontaneous sourceful-
ness of self-consciousness from which everlastingness
arises. In this established certainty of our individual
self-activity, supposing our previous reasoning about
Time to be valid, we have therefore passed beyond
the mere open chance of being the arbiters of the
time-world and all its contingent events, and have
entered upon a corresponding certainty of all the
consequences that logically follow from our self-
active legislation over the whole of possible experi-
ence. And as for the second question, these
consequences of the ascertained sourceful and direc-
tive power of our individuality will now be shown in
detail to involve, first, the essential supremacy of the
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 305
soul over death, and then its intrinsic imperishable-
ness from any cause.
Surely, if each soul, so far from being the result
of temporal antecedents or being the simple aggre-
gate of its various experiences, gives evidence of a
self-activity that conditions not only all actual but
also all possible experience, then each of us must
possess an existence that subsists independently of
any and every contingent event, including the event
of death no less than the various events of life. For
what, upon the now proved time-giving nature of
our real self, is the great event called death .? It
may well be described, to borrow the language of
the geometers, as a singular point on the curve
of our experimental being, a point where a given
stage or mode of our experience, or sensible con-
sciousness, comes to its cessation and close. But
not only is it no longer what the same geometers
call a point d'arret, where the curve comes to a
sudden end ; it is, rather, from our now established
coign of vantage, z. point of tratisition, where the curve
undergoes a change in the expression of that con-
tinuity which has its unchangeable form summed
up in the equation stating its essential nature and
law of being — the self-definition of the individual.
This result follows, clearly enough, from the single
fact that our personality is the source of Time, and
that Time is the all-inclusive condition of the occur-
306 ESS.IVS LV PIJII.OSOPIIY
rcnce of auy event, incliuiini; tlicrefore even the
event of tleath. But \vc can carry our legislative
and (.lirective relation to ex[)cricnce much farther
if we will, — as far as the complete summary of the
conditions prerequisite to the whole process of Natin-e,
and thus discover our personal self to be the regu-
lative source of a!I the laws under vvliich natural
or sensible existence must have its course, and so
to be possessed of a being that by its essence tran-
scends all the vicissitudes of the merely natural
world, surviving all its possible catastrophes and
supplying the ground for its continuance in new
modes under new conditions. For, evidently, we can
apply the same reasoning to Space and to Causa-
tion that we have applied to Time. By the same
arguments from unity, infinity, and strict necessity,
we must conclude to the a priori or spontaneous
character of the forms of consciousness which we
call Space and Cause. Thus we conclude to the
dependence of Nature upon us, taken in our primary
and active being, instead of our derivative depend-
ence upon Nature. In the place, then, of death's
ending us, — death, but one item in the being of the
natural world, the whole of which is conditioned upon
our central self-consciousness, — -we arrive at the set-
tled and logically immovable conception that we are
ourselves the changeless ground of that transition in
experience into which death thus gets interpreted.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 307
We are not yet come, however, to the utmost
goal of our desire : we are still short of the com-
plete meaning of immortality, for that is the utter
imperishableness of the soul. Our argument, so
far, only goes expressly to the point that we sur-
vive death, — perhaps many deaths. But one can
well ask. May we not be subject to substantive
destruction, by some other cause, some other power.'*
— to annihilation outright, in our eternal essence,
and, if the reasoner please, mysteriously, inexpli-
cably, whether by the power of God or otherwise 1
Yet to this more searching question too, our argu-
ment, once its subtlest implications are brought to
light, yields an answer favourable to our most im-
passioned aspirations. For the ultimate and real
meaning of the argument is, that a soul or mind
or person, purely as such, is itself the fountain of
its percipient experience, and so possesses what has
been happily named "life in itself." Proof of the
presence in us of a priori or spontaneous cognition,
then, is proof of just this self-causative life.
A world of such individual minds is by the final
implications of this proof the world of primary
causes, and every member of it, secure above the
vicissitudes of Time and Space and Force, is pos-
sessed of a supertemporal or eternal reality, and is
therefore not liable to any lethal influence from
any other source. Itself a primary cause, it can
308 ASSAYS LV rJIILOSOPJIY
neither ilcstroy another primary cause nor be de-
stroyed by any. The objector who would open
the eternal permanence of the soul to doubt, then,
must assail the proofs of «//7'(?;7 knowledge ; for so
long as these remain free from suspicion, there can
be no real question as to what they finally imply.
The concomitance of our two streams of experience,
the timed stream and the spaced stream, raised from
a merely historical into a necessary concomitance by
the argument that refers it to the active unity of
each soul as its ground, becomes the steadfast sign
and visible pledge of the imperishable self-resource
of the individual spirit.
IV
We sometimes hear it objected to the foregoing
line of proof, that it comes quite short of any im-
mortality which a rational being can value. It
can establish nothing, the objectors say, but the
indestructible power of staying on, merely in a
world of sense-perception.
The objection is pertinent, and would be serious
were our a priori consciousness completely summed
up in furnishing the conditions sufficient for a world
of sense-perception only, and for self-preservative
action in such a world. But the objection vanishes
as soon as we realise that our argument, properly
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 309
judged, rests upon the spontaneous character of the
organising cognition as a source, not upon what hap-
pen to be the contents to which, for brevity's sake,
we have thus far confined our attention in making
out the fact of this spontaneous mental life. The
truth is, our a priori cognition is not confined to
these conditions of mere perception ; it goes, on the
contrary, and with still clearer evidence, to the region
of our guiding ideals — to the True, to the Beautiful,
to the Gocd. These all-controlling ideals are not
only the goal of the sense-perceptive or experiencing
spirit, but are actively constituent in the soul's
primary being. The same reasoning that leads us
to conclude Time, Space, and Causation, the con-
ditions of sense-perceptive life, to be structural in
our active primal being, leads quite as unavoidably,
and more directly, to the higher conclusion that the
three ideals are also structural in it, and still more
profoundly. By their very ideality they conclusively
refer themselves to our spontaneous life : nothing
ideal can be derived from experience, just as nothing
experimental is ever ideal.
The worth-imparting ideals, then, are, by virtue of
the active and indivisible unity of our person, in an
elemental and inseparable union with the root-princi-
ples of our perceptive life. Proof of our indestructi-
ble sourcefulness for such percipient life is therefore
ipso facto proof that these ideals will reign everlast-
3IO Ess.tys /x r////osor//v
ingly in and over tliat life. Onee let us settle that
we arc inherently capable of everlasting existence,
we are tiien assured of the highest worth of our
existence as measured by the ideals of Truth, of
Beauty, and of Good, since these and their effectually
directive operation in us are insured by their essen-
tial and constitutive place in our being.
'Tis but a surface-view of human nature which
gives the impression that the argument to immor-
tality from our a priori powers leads to nothing
more than bare continuance. What it really leads to,
is the continuance of a being whose most intimate
nature is found, not in the capacity of sensory life,
but in the power of setting and appreciating values,
through its still higher power of determining its ideals.
For such a nature to continue, is to continue in the
gradual development of all that makes for worth.
Not only does this follow from the general fact
that all conscious being — at any rate, all human con-
scious life — takes hold a priori upon worth of every
sort, but it can be made still plainer by consider-
ing for a moment just what the a priori cognition
of Worth is, when taken in its highest aspect — the
aspect of good will, or morality. The consciousness
of self is intrinsically persojial — the consciousness
of a society — of being in essential and inseparable
relation with other selves.^ That a mind is con-
* See pp. 351 seq., below.
HUMAN IMMORTALITY 31I
scious of itself as a self, means at the least that it dis-
criminates itself from others, but therefore that it
also refers its own defining conception to others, — is
in relation with them, as unquestionably as it is in
the relation of differing from them. It cannot even
think itself, except in this relatedness to them;
cannot at all be, except as a member of a reciprocal
society. Thus the logical roots of each mind's very
being are exactly this recognition of itself through
its recognition of others, and the recognition of
others in its very act of recognising itself. Hence
moral life is not only primordial in the nature of
mind, but what we commonly call a moral conscious-
ness, as if we would thereby divide it permanently
from the rest of consciousness, and count this re-
mainder mere knowledge or mere aesthetic discern-
ment as the case may be, turns out to be in fact
and in truth the primary logical spring of all other
possible consciousness. So profoundly and so im-
movably is this deepest Fountain of value and worth
inseated in our being.
From this fact it follows, and still more clearly, as
was just now said, that the barest proof of our simple
continuance must in reality carry the proof of that
form of life which we reckon the highest expression
of worth. To prove continuance, it suffices to display
the self as the spontaneous source of perceptions
simply. But equally spontaneous is our positing of
312 ESSAYS IN PJ/ILOSOPHY
tlic Good, the spring of all excellence and worth, by
our recognition of the society of minds in our primary
act of being conscious of ourselves. Strange ele-
mental paradox, self-affirmation by self-denial, self-
denial in self-affirmation! Ego per alteros ! — he
that findeth /lis life shall lose it; and he that loseth
his life, the same shall find it 1 And thus the easy
argument of exhibiting the least conditions sufficient
for experience, so like a simpleton in its seeming
clutch at the thin surface of things, carries in its
subtle heart the proof of an imperishable persis-
tence in all that gives life meaning and value.
THE HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND
FREEDOM
A STUDY IN THE METAPHYSICS OF DIVINE CAUSATION
You have asked me, Mr. President, and members
of the Theological Society,^ to give my views upon
a question into which I should hardly have made
any public venture of my own motion, at least at the
present time. But as you have been kind enough
to extend the invitation, and also quite urgently,
and as the subject has occupied me much for many
years, with results that may at length have taken
a form definite enough for at least a tentative expres-
sion, I have listened to your hospitable request and
to my interest in the topic, and have perhaps not
let the vastness and the intricacy of the theme give
me the pause they ought. For our subject is the
deep and hitherto very dark question of human
freedom, and its compatibility with the omniscient
and therefore omnipotent supremacy of God.
The historic way of dealing with this has usually been
either to assert the Divine Supremacy ruthlessly, to
^ The essay was read before the Theological Society of Pacific
Seminary, in Oakland, California, April 5, 1898.
314 £ss.ns Lv rim osoPHY
the ilcnial oi frcctloni, or to nuiintain freedom a Vou-
trauce and deny the omnipotence and omniscience
of God, or even the existence of God altogether.
The times are now, however, full of a consciousness
that a religious view of existence demands the justi-
fication of both principles, and their reconciliation.
The problem is stated by your president, in your cur-
rent programme, in these words : Are the ideas of
Determinism and Freedom reconcilable, and do they
merge in identity and lead to the outcome assumed by
Dr. Go7'do7t f In this statement, there is a reference
to the belief quite surely implied in the tenth chap-
ter of Dr. Gordon's volume,^ that determinism and
freedom do merge in identity, or tend to do so, and
that this means the tendency of God's supremacy
and man's free action to blend at last in universal
salvation.
To the questions so squarely and so candidly put,
I think it most becoming, as well as most natural,
to answer squarely and with equal openness. It
appears to me, then, that the two ideas aj^e recon-
cilable, and that though they never themselves
merge in identity, nor even tend to do so, they
yet do lead, by their constant cooperation, to one
1 G. A. Gordon : Immortaliiy and the New Theodicy. [The Inger-
soU Lecture at Harvard University for 1896.] Boston: Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., 1897. The book formed the basis of the year's studies
in the Theological Society.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 315
and the same sublime result, the salvation of every
soul in every world. By this " salvation " I mean
the establishment — in the temporal as well as in the
eternal or causative life of every spirit, and from
and by that causative life — of the dominant love of
righteousness, and the everlasting progress of each
soul thenceforth in bearing its rescued " natural
being " toward the goal of completely possessing
the image of God.
Any interest my thoughts on this subject may
have for you must turn upon the way in which the
reconciliation of the two contrasted ideas is worked
out in them, — if indeed it be worked out. So I
must try to show you what I think Determinism
and Freedom severally are, when deeply and abid-
ingly defined ; how their reality is for each of them
made sure and stable ; how their harmony follows
naturally and easily from their genuine ideas ; how,
in fact, this harmony is involved in their necessary
and complemental relation to each other ; and how,
finally, out of their incessant joint action in the life
of every mind the inspiring result arises of a uni-
verse evermore freely moving to a higher and higher
harmony with God.
It is a judicious remark of Dr. Gordon, in which
he follows the lead of Frederick Denison Maurice,
that the key to Jonathan Edwards's genius in the-
ology was his possession by the idea of the Divine
3l6 F.SSAVS IN PHILOSOPHY
Supremacy, and that the success of any new the-
ology will depend upon its setting out from the
same transcendent base. The problem is, keeping
upon this highest theme in accord with Augustine,
with Calvin, and with Edwards, and avoiding any
compromise of its true exaltation, to find a new
way, more genuinely divine and more expressive
of the spirit of Christ than theirs, to carry out the
sovereign reign of God, to display its reality, and
to accord to it commensurate results. In all this,
in its wide but unfortunately vague generality, I
agree with Dr. Gordon ; as, I doubt not, many of
you also agree. But from the method — so far as
one can gather it from his various writings, especially
his Christ of To-day'^ — by which Dr. Gordon would
aim to render more rational the omnipresent su-
premacy of God, I presume many of you would
seriously dissent ; and so, too, do I, — though doubt-
less for extremely different reasons.
You, I presume, would dissent on the ground that
Dr. Gordon's belief in an immanent God savours too
much of pantheism and of rationalism. I, too, dis-
sent from the pantheistic trend of his theory ; but
I dissent from his method much more, because I
feel that, however rationalistic, it is still not ration-
alistic enough. It admits far too much of the mystic
^ G. A. Gordon : The Christ of To-day. Boston : Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., 1 894.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 317
and occult agency of an omnipresent Deity in our
human life to leave room for that freedom for which
Dr. Gordon himself partially contends, and upon
which, in its unabated completeness, genuine human
goodness and a government really divine are, for
me, irreversibly conditioned. No genuine, no com-
plete freedom for the human spirit, then no
real righteousness, no supremacy of a true God,
nothing really Divine in all the universe !
But as in my way of stating the conditions for
our freedom, and the corresponding relations be-
tween God and other beings, I have to depart so
far from Dr. Gordon's that I fear he would dissent
from my views because they seemed to him not
sufficiently religious, — even to him, — I can hardly
hope that they will appear entirely religious to you.
For the sake of that freedom which is the soul of
righteousness, that righteous justice which is the
soul of a Divine sovereignty, and that exhaustless
though indeed severe love which is the very soul of
God, I am led to state God's creative and regenera-
tive supremacy in a fashion that can hardly fail to
wear in your eyes the look of making away with it
altogether. So, at least I fear, the case must appear
to you at first ; and perhaps for a long time.
Nevertheless I offer you these views in good faith,
and not wholly without good hope also ; for I am
convinced they ^re true, and I feel that their truth
3i8 £ss.iys Lv PHILOSOPHY
must gradually become commanding. I only ask,
but I do ask earnestly, that you will think them
out as patiently as I have done these many years ;
and that you will bear in mind, as you listen and
think, that they are put forward with the sincere
purpose of rendering clearer, and more convincing,
the truth that there really is a Living God who is
"love indeed," and therefore God indeed — the ador-
able object of the loving devotion of all possible
spirits; that he is, and that he reigns with that rule
of freedom whereby alone a God can reign ; that of
his kingdom there can indeed be no end ; that his vic-
tories and the boundaries of his realm will literally
continue increasing forever.
But let us proceed to our proper task.
I
Of the questions whether Determinism and Free-
dom are by any method reconcilable, and what the
steps in the method are, it seems plain that any
settlement must proceed upon recognising as true
the points which follow :
(i) The desired harmony is impossible if deter-
minism is taken to imply Predestination. That is,
if it means a completely defined detail and order of
existence fixed ffom without the ageftt, and imposed
npon liini by edict and constraint. In such a case
there could be no freedom.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 319
(2) On the other hand, no harmony can be
reached by merely translating freedom into deter-
minism and yet keeping up the name of freedom.
This is usually done by raising the question whether
freedom does not simply mean spontaneity in the
agent, instead of alternative or choice, and answer-
ing it by cancelling choice in favour of spontaneity.
But there can be no freedom that omits alterna-
tive and choice. It may be true enough that
chance for alternative is not the bottom account of
freedom, that the existence of alternative needs to
be explained, as to both its meaning and its source,
by the higher principle of spontaneity, or self-activ-
ity ; but in no free system can alternative be omitted.
In a moral order expressing itself in a time-world
of events, it must always be possible to say of any
act that it might have been otherwise — it need
not have been. Instead, then, of asking whether
freedom means choice or spontaneity, we should say
that it means both, and explain how the fact of
choice arises out of the determinism contained in
i-^-^-determination, when this acts upon a world of
experience which at the time of the choice answers
imperfectly to the reason, or ideal-guided conscious-
ness, which self-activity really is.
(3) Nor, again, is the harmony possible if freedom
is taken to imply Caprice, or, in the technical sense,
Chance. That is, if freedom means power to act
320 L'SSAVS IN PHILOSOPHY
without motive, without the influence of plan or
purpose, whimsically, incalculably, in disconnexion
unforeseen and unpredictable. There is no possible
reconciliation, that is to say, if will in the free-
agent is conceived as simply self-will or mere arbi-
irium, a sheer " first cause " as mere power, not
only underived, but unreasoning and unreasonable,
inexplicable, and in fact meaningless. In such a
case there could be nothing definite ; things would
be reduced to indeterminism and chaos, which would
in truth be simply non-existence.
(4) So the conciliability of determinism and free-
dom depends on the fact, if this l^c a fact, that
determinism simply means definitcncss (instead of
constraining foreordination), while freedom means
(instead of unpredictable whim) action spontaneously
flowijig from the definite gadding intelligence of the
agent himself In short, the desired harmony will
fail unless the determinism and the freedom are
both alike defined in terms of the one and identi-
cal definiteness of the rational nature ; but it will
be secured if they can be so defined, and are.
Let us proceed, then, to settle whether this simple
definiteness may not be the sufficing sense of de-
terminism, and whether action really free may not
remain when the utter indeterminism of caprice or
chance is taken away.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 32 1
As for determinism, it is clear that one of its
meanings is predestination — prescription from with-
out, inevitable and fatal. This is what we mean
by the "uniformity of nature" — the "law of causal-
ity," the "iron band of necessity," in the physical
world ; there the things and the events are bound
in a rigid order not originated by them, but com-
ing upon them from some higher source, which they
passively obey. Yet even this predestination is but
a species of definiteness ; and so, as definiteness
may be predestined and constrained, it is of course
a legitimate question whether there may not be
definiteness when the factor of constraint and edict
is taken away. Indeed, the imperative and con-
straining definiteness of physical fate implies some-
where an ultimate Defining Source, itself therefore
free, from which the constraining edict issues; and
this Source, as free and yet defining, must be self-
defined, must be itself perfectly definite though un-
constrained by anything else ; for tJie indeterminate
could not possibly confer detenninateness 7ipon any-
thing. Thus there may be — rather, there must be —
such a fact as definiteness simply ; definiteness that
is not predestination, but is the definiteness involved
in self-determination.
On the other hand, as to freedom, we have just
seen that in the last resort definiteness is free. It
remains for us to discover, conversely, that freedom
Y
323 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
is definite, and essentially so ; that freedom cannot
mean indeterminism, and thence caprice or chance.^
Our first step toward this is to realise that for
freedom's sake we may need to keep, as belonging
to the free being when all the factors of its life
are considered, both meanings of determinism as
these were just now found — the free definiteness
and the determinateness that is constrained. For
action, to be free, if concerned as our human action
is with a world of sensible particulars, must have
in that world a calculable order — unchangeably
calculable. There antecedent mu,st be followed by
consequent with rigour incapable of variation.
Otherwise, and just so far as uncertainty of the
order exists, there is ignorance what to count upon,
there is risk of frustration : the actor is discon-
certed, perplexed, all at fault ; in so far, enslaved.
On the other hand, in such a necessitated world
the actor cannot be free unless he is in conscious
1 In his brilliant and memorable essay on " The Dilemma of Deter-
minism," Professor James chooses to state the doctrine of freedom in
terms of the word " chance." To be sure, he warns his readers that he
only intends by this to mark with emphasis the fact that the world
where the agent acts leaves him a "chance" {i.e. an opportunity^ to
make himself effective in it, and to render its course different from
what it would be without his voluntary acts. But the word seems
time and again to ensnare him in its ambiguity, so that he often treats
fireedom as if it meant caprice or mere Willkiir. See The Will to
Believe, and Other Essays, pp, 145—183. New York and London:
Longmans, Green and Co., 1897.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 323
possession of the law that rules it ; and he cannot
consciously possess the law, as a genuine laxv, man-
datory upon his world, except independently of
the world. The possession cannot be imparted to
him from without; for then, at most, he could only
know it as mere fact true to date, without any
assured control over the future. That is, in the
phrase which Kant's decisive discussion has made
classic, to be free he must know the law a priori ;
know it by its issuing from the spontaneous activity
of his own intelligence in defining himself, and by
its legislating thence upon his world of things. He
organises his world of sense-presented experience as
a complemental part of his whole self-organised life.
Therefore, further, for a being who involves such a
finite world, the condition of his freedom in it, the
condition indispensable but at the same time suf-
ficient, is that his world shall indeed be Jiis ; shall
be of him, not independent of him ; shall be em-
braced under his causal life, not added to it from
elsewhere as a constricting condition ; shall be, in
fine, a world of pJienomeiia, — states of his own con-
scious being, organised by his spontaneous mental
life, — and not a world of " things-in-themselves."
From this result, now, we can pass on to the re-
maining sense of determinism, its meaning of simple
definiteness without predestination, and can reach
our goal- regarding the nature of freedom. We dis-
324 £SSjyS IN PHILOSOPHY
ccrn, luimcly, that tliis free Definer, this legislator of
predestination upon his world of mere things, is, in
accordance with our initial reasoning, himself full of
definiteness ; he is not undefined, but is self-defining.
This is his essence; and so, just because he is free,
he is determined, though of course j^/Z-determined.
He is not and cannot be capricious, formless, whisk-
ing in infijiitHm, self-shattered to chaotic dust and
showered into the bottomless void, but is inherently
self-planned, purposeful, continuous, coherent, calcu-
lable, and thus knoivable. So the free being, as self-
determined and taken in his wh61e contents, is defi-
nite in both senses of the word : he defines himself,
and thus has the definiteness of unpredestination ; he
defines his empirically real world of things, and thus
adds to himself a field of action having the definite-
ness of predestination, — in a manner arms himself
with it, inasmuch as he transcends and controls it.
Our result thus far is, that determinism and free-
dom, when justly thought out, are in idea entirely
reconcilable. Determinism proves to need no fatalis-
tic meaning, but to be, possibly enough, simply the
definite order characteristic of intelligence ; while so
far from freedom's being indeterminism, chance, or
caprice, these are seen to be incompatible with it, and
freedom proves to be, like determinism, the sponta-
neous definiteness of active intelligence. And one
thing, of the highest importance, we must not over-
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 325
look — our discovery that no free being can be the
product of processes in Nature, that on the other hand
none can exert freedom in an unpredestined natural
world, and that consequently every free being in rela-
tion with such a world must himself predestine it,
must impart arrangement (or "form") to it from the
form of his own active intelligence. In fine, a con-
dition of our making freedom possible in a world or-
dered by the rigour of natural law is that we accept
an idealistic philosophy of Nature : the laws of Nature
must issue from the free actor himself, and upon a
world consisting of states in his own consciousness,
a world in so far of his own making.
This principle of cosmic subjection has by theists
always been realised with reference to God : the natu-
ral world, they are always telling us, however full of
laws to which other conscious beings are subject, is
completely subject to the mind and will of God, and
its laws are imposed upon it from his mind in virtue
of his creating it. What we now learn, and need to
note, is that this is just as true of any other being
who can be reckoned free. If men are free, then,
they must be taken as being logically prior to Nature ;
as being its source rather than its outcome ; as deter-
mining its order instead of being determined by this.
Not God only, but also the entire world of free minds
other than God, must condition Nature ; and, as
we shall learn later in our inquiry, they must condi-
326 ESSAYS IX PIin.OSOPFrY
tion it in a sense that God does not. They, we shall
find, must be directly and productively causal of it,
while God's conditioning of it can only be indirect
and remote; namely, as we shall sec, by the constant
reference to him, as their ruling Ideal, which these
nature-begetting minds spontaneously have. In short,
in securing freedom we come to a Pluralistic Ideal-
ism, instead of the idealistic monism that has so long
dominated philosophical theism.
II
This exaltation of man over the entire natural
world, however, though easily shown to accord with
the teaching of Jesus, and to be clearly prefigured in
it, is nearly antipodal to ordinary notions, to the cur-
rent popular "philosophy" assumed to be founded on
science, and to much of traditional theology. But
by this fact we must not be disturbed, if we mean to
be in earnest about human freedom and human capa-
bility of life really moral and religious. And the next
step in our inquiry will reinforce this "divinising of
the human " very decidedly.
For we must now push the question of reconciling
determinism and freedom beyond the region of their
mere ideas, and face its greater difificulties when deter-
minism means the definite order in the live Divine
Mind, and freedom means the self-directing activity
of men or other real spirits not divine. It might per-
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 327
tinently be said that determinism and freedom are
of course compatible enough when they are merely
viewed as the two reciprocal aspects of self-activity
in a single mind, but that the real difficulty is to rec-
oncile the self-determinisms in different free minds.
Paramount is this difficulty when one of the minds
is the supreme God, creator (as he is held) and ruler of
all existence. In this case, it becomes plain that the
solution of any antagonism between determinism and
freedom must depend on solving the conflict appar-
ently latent in the contrasted freedoms of God and
other beings. If the solution is possible, then, it will
only be so by the fact that, on the one hand, perfect
intelligence or reason is the essence of God, — who
therefore determines all things, not by compulsion,
but only in his eternal thought, which views all real
possibilities whatever ; and that, on the other hand,
the spirit other than God also has its freedom in self-
active intelligence. This granted, the range of its
possibilities is precisely the range of reason again,
and so is to God perfectly knowable and known, since
it harmonises in its whole with the Eternal Thought
that grasps all possibilities, though it is not at all
predestined by this. Thus the course of, say, human
action, viewed in its totality, since it springs from self-
active reason, must in its result, as in its source,
freely harmonise with the Reason who is supreme.
Solution of this knot by any other conceptions of
328 j-:ss^ys lv philosophy
freedom and determinism than these, there plainly
can be none. But the solution is secure if God and
other spints arc alike rational, simply by their inner
and self-active nature ; in other words, if the solution
is by spontaneous harmony from zuithin, and not by
productive and executive domination from without. If
the Sovereign is perfectly rational, if the whole of his
being is just perfect intelligence, and if the free sub-
jects are also essentially rational, while this ration-
ality defines the course of vtheir being as a whole,
then the perfect definiteness of his realm and the
freedom of its members — his perfect possession of
it by complete knowledge, and their complete posses-
sion of their own lives, rationally self-determined —
will in the whole coincide, and the harmony is com-
plete. Each spirit other than God, let us suppose,
fulfils in its own way and from its own self-direction
the one universal Type, or Ideal. Then each in do-
ing its "own will," that is, in defining and guiding its
life by its own ideal, does the ultimate or inclusive
will of all the rest; and men realise the "will of
God," that is, fulfil God's ideal, by fulfilling each his
own ideal, while God fulfils the " will of man" by
freely fulfilling himself.
This explanation, however, in presenting a uni-
versal World of Spirits, every one of whom is free,
— that is, independently self-active, self-moved from
within, and none operated either directly or in-
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 329
directly from without by any other, — brings us
to a fresh and greater difficulty. For it requires
us to suppose every spirit, the human, for instance,
as well as the Divine, to have "life in itself";
that is, to be in a very profound sense underived,
self-subsistent, or, in the technical language of
the deeper philosophical schools, eternal. But this
coeternity of man with God appears to conflict
directly with the two most essential attributes of
God — Creation and Regeneration. To be sure, this
self-activity of the human soul is prefigured in that
highest symbol of the Christian Faith, the Fourth
Gospel, where it is declared ^ that " as the Father
hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son
also to have life in himself : and gave him author-
ity to execute judgment, becattse lie is a son of
man," — though how it can ho. given to have life in
oneself, has hitherto been left aside as " the mys-
tery of grace"; and so long as "giving" is taken
to mean transfer or endowment, and so to imply /;r?-
ductive action from God toward men, it must con-
tinue a perplexity — not to put the case too rudely
— to confront at once Divine causative authorship
and human spontaneous action. Yet without this
last, let us repeat, there can be for man no divine
living, his own, sincere and whole, coming from the
springs of his inmost being and penetrating him
1 John V, 26, 27, Revised Version.
330 Ess.ns /.v PHii.osorirv
throughout; he can have no "righteousness of
God," — righteousness, that is, such as God has, —
but must remain in bondage to the false and ex-
ternal "righteousness of the law."
Ikfore it can be said, then, that human freedom
and the absolute definiteness of God as Supreme
Reason are really reconciled, we must have found
some way of harmonising the eternity of the hu-
man spirit with the creative and regenerative of-
fices of God. The sense of their antagonism is
nothino- new. Confronted with the race-wide fact
of human sin, the elder theology proclaimed this
antagonism, and solved it by denying to man any
but a temporal being ; quite as the common-sense
of the everyday Philistine, absorbed in the limita-
tions of the sensory life, proclaims the mere fini-
tude of man, and is stolid to the ideal considerations
that suggest immortality and moral freedom, rating
them as day-dreams beneath sober notice, because
the price of their being real is the attributing to
man nothing short of infinity. "We are finite!
merely finite ! " is the steadfast cry of the old
theology and of the plodding common realist alike ;
and, sad. to say, of most of historic philosophy too.
And the old theology, with more penetrating con-
sistency than the realistic ordinary man or the
ordinary philosophy, went on to complete its vindi-
cation of the Divine Sovereignty from all human
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 331
encroachment by denying the freedom of man
altogether.
Well, if we grant that finitude is the whole
or the characteristic truth about man, then the
old theology was wholly right. There is no escap-
ing from the reasoning of an Augustine, a Calvin,
an Edwards, except by removing its premise. That
premise is the utter finitude of the "creature,"
resting upon the conception that the Divine func-
tions of creation and regeneration, more especially
creation, are operations by what is called " effi-
cient " causation, that is, causation by direct pro-
ductive energy, whose effects are of course as
helpless before it as any motion is before the
impact that starts it. Creation thus meant calling
the creature into existence at a date, prior to
which it had no existence. It was summoned
into being by a simple fiat, out of fathomless
nothing ; and quite so, it was supposed, arose
even the human soul, just as all other things
arose. In exact keeping with this was the dogma of
"irresistible grace": regeneration was the literal
re-creation of the divine image, out of the absolute
death which it had suffered in the supposed fall of
man, — re-creation by just such a miraculous produc-
tive efficiency as had originally called the soul out of
the void. Human finitude as the summary of human
powers, with its consequent complete subjection to
332 ASSAYS LV PHILOSOPHY
Divine predestination, is inwrapt in this conception
of Divine causation as causation by efficiency ; and
there can be no way of supplementing this fini-
tude by the infinity {i.e. freedom) required by a moral
order, except by dislodging this view of creation
and regeneration.
Ill
If we are in earnest, then, about human free-
dom, — if there is to be any real freedom to
reconcile with a real Divine definiteness that is
unchangeable, — we must face the problem of sup-
planting the older theological conception of the two
Divine offices by a conception compatible with a
freedom that is freedom indeed. I^specially must
we find a substitute for creation by fiat, or effi-
cient causation. For no being that arises out of
efficient "causation can possibly be free. Let us
clarify our minds of all traditional obfuscation about
this, and see the case as it really is.
Not even by the theory, sometimes advanced, that
God freely and "of his grace" endozvs the creature
with an " inner " nature which " works out its own
salvation," does a being created by efficient causa-
tion become really free. Even then it is only ap-
parently, not really, self-active. It merely obeys a
preestablished order, — like a clock, for example, to
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 333
which the maker's transcendent skill should impart
the power to run perpetually, from the original
setting and winding of its mechanism. The plan,
to be sure, would be free relatively to the com-
ponent parts, and would control their movements ;
but the plan would not itself be free. It would
be derived from the contriving thought of the
maker, would be completely in subjection to that,
must simply unfold and follow out the course im-
planted in it. The maker alone would be the
source of its purposive action, the intention would
be his alone, and he alone would therefore merit
the fame or the shame of its performance.
Either, then, we must carry out our modern inoral
conception of God's nature and government into
a conception of creation that matches it — a concep-
tion based on that eternity (or intrinsic supertem-
poral self-activity) of man which alone can mean
moral freedom — or else, in all honesty and good
logic, we ought to travel penitently back to a Calvin-
ism, a Scotism, an Augustinianism, of the so-called
" highest " type. Then we would view man as a
"creature" indeed. We should have to accept him
as a being belonging to time only, with a definite date
of beginning, though lasting through unceasing ages,
if that could indeed then be. We should have to
surrender all freedom for him as a delusion. In
effect, with this conception of creation, we must
334 ESS.IYS I.V PinLOSOPHY
return to an unmitigated Predestinationism. Nor
may this stop short of foreordination to Reprobation
as well as to Election — a foreordination not simply
"supralapsarian," but precedent to creation itself.
The separation of the Sheep from the Goats must
be from "before the foundation of the world," and
the Elect must be created " unto life everlasting,"
while the reprobate are created " unto shame and
everlasting contempt."
Thus we see that not even Divine agency can give
rise to another self-active intelligence by zx^y produc-
tive act. S2tch creation, by whomsoever it might
be, could only apply to the existence of mere things,
things lifeless and inorganic, and never to that which
has "life in itself." Much less could regeneration,
the bringing-on of voluntary repentance and genuine
reformation in the soul, be by any sort of efficient
causality, — a truth to which modern theology has
evidently for some time been alive, as its forward
movement is keyed upon the increasing recognition
of the metaphor in the name. These thoughts, how-
ever incontrovertible they may be, are no doubt stag-
gering thoughts, so much are we of old habituated to
calling regeneration the " work " of the Holy Spirit,
and to naming man the " creature " of God, and God
his " maker." Still, staggering though they be, they
must be true if human freedom is to be a fact ; and
that human freedom is to be a fact, the modern con-
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 335
science, quickened by the very experience of the
Christian spirit itself, firmly declares, having now
apprehended that otherwise there is no justice in
human responsibility, and then no moral government,
but only government edictive and compulsory ; and
then — no personal God, no true God, at all!
But if under the moral view of universal being
creation by efficient causation is untenable, by what
mode of causation can it come about ? Or, if by no
mode, then does not creation cease to be an attribute
of Deity ? Have we indeed, then, in the course of
our religious consciousness, come to that point of
complete reversion which shows us that henceforth
God is to be worshipped a'S Redeemer alone, and no
more as Creator ? Was the Gnostic heresy, which
brought to Christianity its first great inward schism,
— was Gnosticism right, then, after all ?
Well, if so, if the "great category of Cause" is not
to hold of Divine relations, how are we to gain any
evidence that there is a God ? Is not the creation
the one witness to God ? — and if God be left without
a witness, what becomes of his reality as Redeemer,
as Regenerator? Must we not, somehozu, still affirm
the judgment of the early churches against the
Gnostic, and in the name of our faith once more
declare the identity of the good God with the God
of might, of the Redeemer with the Creator ? But
— again /^(?ze' f When efficient causation is exolu-lcd.
336 JiSSAYS LV PHILOSOPHY
has not causation, as a principle of inference, lost all
its efficacy ? Nay, when that effectuating Power is
gone, is not the vital meaning gone out of causation
altogether? All these difficulties we must somehow
dispose of. Nor are these the worst ; for if freedom
requires the seating of man in eternity, companion-
ing there a so-called God, what office has God as
Regenerator ? — must not the new conception of
moral being place regeneration also within the scope
of man's self-active freedom ? Has not God, then,
become superfluous and supernumerary every way, in
this society of eternal free-agents ?
We shall gain nothing by trying to evade the
difficulties in such questions, which are real diffi-
culties. We can easily imagine an Edwards rising
from his grave to put these questions as with the
voice of God himself, — questions which beyond
doubt still wake a large echo in the hearts of his
softened successors even; so softened — so demoral-
ised,/^^ would say — that he must disown them un-
less they speedily returned to the high and stern
doctrine of a Sovereign God who forms every crea-
ture to such destiny as He pleases. No, let us make
no evasion ; let us rather, at first, make the difficulty
greater, by reiterating the insuppressible demand for
justice and love, for justice and love universal, which
generations of further communion with the spirit of
Christ have at length awakened in us, and which
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 337
reveals to us the truth that moral freedom is the soul
of our soul, and the soul of Divine government, if
Divine government indeed there is. Let the two
apparently contradictory voices confront each other
for a while — the voice that calls for proofs, for infer-
ential justification, and the voice, still deeper, that
calls for righteous warrant, for moral justification.
In the end our decision will be, that, while neither
voice can be stilled, the moral voice has primacy,
and the voice for inference must seek satisfaction
more subtly than by searching in the harsh paths of
merely natural or temporal power. Perchance the
"great category of Cause" has resources that give
to creation and to regeneration, both, a greater real-
ity of meaning than efficient causality can provide.
Perchance, when this deeper and richer interpreta-
tion of cause comes to knowledge, the real witness
of God will appear — the witness to the Spirit,
to the Eternal Love, who thinks only in terms of
spirit, has only free minds for his realm, and, himself
free with perfect moral freedom, reigns there through
the free processes of the living souls themselves.
Let us reiterate, therefore, that the demand for a
moral world is a demand for a world of freedom —
a world of genuine persons, beings who think their
own thoughts, originate their own decisions, yet
really do think, not ruminate merely, and so decide
z
338 /■:ss.-iys ix piiri.osopHY
rationally, — with judgment at once private and yet
public ; their own, yet all-embracing and benign.
Potency for such judgment, whether yet actualised
in time or not, — power to make it real under what-
ever conditions, be they of time or of space, be the
victorious realisation never so delayed or so gradual,
— this is what moral freedom in reality means; as
Edwards maintained, power to do, not alone to
choose. For moral freedom, the spontaneous activity
of reason, chooses its own ideal, not in time, but in
eternity. Its own ideal nature is its only absolute
or eternal choice ; and its eternal choice is its nature.
If it has a task in time, — as indeed it has, — it is there
not to choose its aim again, but to make its eternal
purpose, its chosen ideal, effectual ; to make it so
in the face of that opposing Check which, as we
shall presently see.^ it introduces into its being by
its primal act of self-definition.
We are not to evade, then, the eternity of free
beings that is implied in any serious demand for
freedom. If the souls of men are really free, they
coexist with God in the eternity which God inhabits,
and in the governing total of their self-active being
they are of the same nature as he, — they too are
self-put rational wholes of self-conscious life. As
complete reason is Jiis essence, so is reason their
essence — their nature in the large — whatever may
^ Compare pp. 362-364, below.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 339
be the varying conditions under which their selfhood,
the required pemliarity of each, may bring it to
appear. Each of them has its own ideal of its own
being, namely, its own way of fulfilling the char-
acter of God; and its self-determining life is just
the free pursuit of this ideal, despite all the oppos-
ing conditions by which it in part defines its life.
Moreover, since this ideal, seen eternally in God,
is the chosen goal of every consciousness, it is the
final — not the efficient — cause of the whole existing
self. All the being of each self has thus the form
of a self-supplying, self-operating life ; or, in the
phraseology of the Schoolmen and Spinoza, each
is caiisa sui. This is what its " eternity " exactly
means.
But at this point the counter-side of our religious
difficulty presses the strongest. The religious life
must indeed be free and individual, yet it must also
be self-subordinating and universal ; whereas the
free system now appears to be an uncompromising
Pluralism — an absolute democracy, which, read it
as levelling down or as levelling up, as all man or
as all god, comes ever to the same dead level, where
any such superiority as real Deity is jealously ex-
cluded. Nay, the older theists of Lordship and
Producing Cause will here surely tell us that this
moral idealism has overreached itself, and become
its own destruction. "This dead level of spiritual
340 LSSAVS IN PHILOSOPHY
democracy," they will say, "crushes the very spirit
of freedom itself, for its exaggerated individualism
erases individuality. It is one endless round of
dull repetition, a lethal monotone. Universal exal-
tation to eternity, in destroying God and his dif-
ferentiating supremacy, has destroyed the interest
of existence, has cast a banal blight upon all origi-
nality, and so upon all the verve of life. Restore
difference, by subordinating man ! — or else confess
that in a godless exaltation of freedom you have
made freedom the deadliest bondage, the bondage
to the tame and the stale." Nor is it sufficient to
reply to this, as no doubt one may, with a tii qjioqiie ;
for though the old-fashioned subordination to the
will of the sovereign God also comes to a monotone
of death in life, this does not obviate the charge
laid at the door of individualism. It simply shows
that, to present appearance, neither view contains
a solution of the moral-religious problem, and that
our search must be pushed farther.
This possible self-contradiction — I do not say it
is real ; on the contrary, I hope presently to show
it is illusory — is not the only dilBculty with our
moral idealism. In another aspect, the scheme
may be charged with polytheism ; or again, on other
grounds, with atheism. All the members of this
required moral system, men or other spirits as well
as the supposed God, are unreservedly self-active ;
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 34 1
it would seem, then, that they are all alike unde-
rived and self-subsistent. So that, even in the
best case, there is no monotheism, there is poly-
theism, or "every man his own god"; while, in the
worst case, we pitch into the pit of atheism, since
one may reasonably ask. Why call one of this circle
of gods preeminently God ? How strangely our
religious consciousness seems here to contradict
itself ! Feeling itself threatened with the loss of
God as eternal Justice and Love, because justice
and love cannot subsist unless the agents held
responsible are the free causes of their own con-
duct, it courageously sets up its spirits in eternity ;
but no sooner are these in their heaven than God
seems lost again, vanishing in the universal disper-
sion of the divine essence.
IV
Were this the authentic account of moral idealism
and its religious resources, our case as religious
beings would be bad indeed. For so fast as we
supplied our spiritual needs at one pole of our
nature, we should destroy the power of supplying
them at the other ; and they must be satisfied at
both. But it is certain that our moral-religious
demands must be and ought to be satisfied : better
the atheism of a lost First Cause, and a lost Sov-
342 £ss^!ys IX pniLOsoriiY
ercign Lord, than the atheism of deified Injustice,
with its election and reprobation by sheer sovereign
prerogative. And while it is certain, too, that the
free-agency exacted by moral government can only
be fulfilled by allotting self-activity to the spirit,
and consequently seating it in eternity, companion
there of God, yet in truth this has neither the poly-
theistic nor the atheistic implications that have
been suggested. Least of all, when its true impli-
cations are understood, does this free eternity of
each mind destroy the distinction between God and
souls, between every soul and every other, and
thus ruin the logical variety and the aesthetic inter-
est of the universe. On the contrary, the system
of free spirits, as already above depicted in its essen-
tial traits, far from being a deadly world of dull iden-
tity, is kindled throughout by an intense variety
which is the very principle of its existence. It
provides in its idea just the resources we need for
solving the contradiction we are now so aware of —
provides them as no possible scheme of monarchic
and efificient-causative Divine agency can.
The fact is, the real difficulty in the case comes
from retaining this old efficient-causal notion of
Divine being and function, after we have silently
but really parted company with it in accepting a
moral order as the touchstone for the character of
souls and the nature of God. The tragic situation
HARMONY OF DETERAIINISM AND FREEDOM 343
of the modern liberalised Christian mind is just
that. Having accepted with fervour the moral
ideal as the Divine ideal, it still remains in bondage
to the old mechanical conception of the great Divine
operations called Regeneration and Creation. These
it still thinks, at bottom, under the category of ef-
ficient causality. It takes their names literally, in
accordance with the etymology, and thus the names
themselves help the evil cause of prolonging con-
ceptions that are hostile to the dearest insights of
the moral spirit quickened in the school of Christ.
Eminently is this true in the case of creation, into
the current conception of which, so far as I can see,
there as yet enters no gleam of the change that
must be made if our relations to God in the basis
of existence are to be stated consistently with the
independence we must have of him in the moral
world. This lack of a moral apprehension of crea-
tion is as characteristic, too, of historic philosophy
as it is of historic theology, or even of ordinary
opinion.
The moral postulate of human self-activity stand-
ing, then, and so the coexistence of all souls in eter-
nity with God, — if we may speak here of God, before
his being has been made clear, — our question is. How
is the reality of God to be established, and how is
his so-called creative ofifice to be stated, now that
344 Ess.tvs IX rniLosoriiY
it has become j^lain that a moral governor cannot
create his free subjects by efficiency, nor, accord-
ingly, his being be proved by reasoning from pro-
duced effect to producing cause ?
In coming to grapple with this question, let us
understand that the principle of efficient causality,
as an expression of Divine relations, once it is set-
tled that all Divine relations are moral, must be dis-
carded in every foi'tn. Long ago the rising Christian
consciousness abandoned the elder Oriental forms of
it, as also the crude forms of Western paganism, ac-
cepting instead the doctrine of " creation out of
nothing" by the yf^/ or "word" of God, For that
consciousness, accordingly, the pantheistic interpre-
tations of efficiency, such as production by emana-
tion or by extrusion from the Eternal Substance,
gave way to a conception certainly higher, in the
sense that creation hy fiat disenthralled the creature
from entanglement with the Creator, and gave him
an existence in some sort distinct. A similar gain
was made over the polytheistic notions of creation,
under which neither gods, nor men their work, were
delivered from the thraldom of eternal matter and
omnipresent Fate.
Still, despite the gains, in abandoning pantheism
and polytheism historic Christian thought did not
clear itself of the category of efficiency. Its dualism
between the Creator and the creation still held fast
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 345
to the older doctrine of a unity by efficient causa-
tion and compulsive control. Instead of a unit-
unity of self-operating Substance or all-dominating
Fate, it merely substituted the harmonic-unity re-
sulting from the action of a single intelligent agent
upon all his works : the works recorded the plan ;
the result, up to the "last things," — eh to, ea-'x^ara,
— registered the impress of "the counsels held in
eternity" from "before the world was."
Philosophy in Christendom, as distinguished from
dogmatic theology, so far as it has kept in sight of the
main Christian theme of a personal God has steadily
tended to abandon this dualism and thus avoid the
unintelligible dogma of Jia^, and has of late replaced
it by various forms of monism, of an idealistic type,
aiming to give a philosophic vindication at once to
Divine and human personality and to human im-
mortality, by explaining all existence as the acts and
inner modes of a single eternal Self-Consciousness.
These more or less thoroughgoing monisms, some-
times called Christian Pantheism, or the Higher Pan-
theism, have been set strongly in contrast with the
monism of materialism or of agnosticism. But, on
the main theme, they all really signalise a return to
the elder views of the Orient. And they all still
employ the category of causal efficiency to express
the relation of the Creator to the creature, repre-
senting this as the relation of the actively deter-
346 ESSAYS IN PlIlI.OSOrilY
mining Whole to the receptively determined parts.
Their advantage over the older dualism is the ad-
vantage of logical consistency : their application of
efficient causation is universally continuous, and not
interrupted by a break as the doctrine of fiat is —
a break merely feigned to be closed by the con-
ception of miracle. This advantage, however, they
only gain by sacrificing the distinct freedom of the
creature from the Creator, a price which the moral
consciousness declares should not be paid.
So far, then, the choice seems to lie between an
unphilosophised and somewhat irrational dualism,
which nevertheless maintains the distinctness of
God from his creation (though, by its way of doing
this, it renders the proofs for him inconclusive), and
a philosophised monism, continuously coherent, ren-
dering clear proofs of its pantheistic Cause, but
really incapable of providing any genuine freedom
for the souls that are his parts. The failure of
both for the wants of the moral consciousness
makes a choice between them unavailing. With
neither of them can the conscience rest. Their fail-
ure is owing, at bottom, to one and the same defect :
they both interpret the causal relation of God to
souls in terms of efficiency, of agent and recipient.
I have made this digression to enforce the posi-
tion, before taken, that the solution of our perplex-
ity requires the abandoning of this efficient notion
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 347
of creation in every form, and to show you, further,
that the present marked tendency of the new philo-
sophic theology to take refuge in some species or
other of monism, can only end in disappointment
and the wreck of that great moral interest from
which the new movement takes its rise. Out of
the digression let us return now to the main ques-
tion : Since every form of applying efificient cau-
sality to state the causal relations of God to minds
is inconsistent with moral reality, is there any mode
of causation consistent with this, and capable of dis-
tinguishing, in the moral world of eternal minds,
between God and souls, between every soul and
every other, and of stating, in a way suitable to the
essential freedom of spirits, that great Divine func-
tion which we try dimly to symbolise by the word
" creation " ?
V
The required mode of causation, if any such there
be, must be one that operates in and through the
spontaneous life of the free being himself. Is
there a causality that does so operate .-'
Yes, unquestionably there is. Its nature was di-
rectly suggested in what I said when describing,
some minutes ago, the active self-consciousness of
any member of an eternal moral world. We then
found every soul to be causa siii — at once its own
348 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
cause and its own effect — in virtue of its acting
from the contemplation of its own self-recognised
Ideal. The action of such a causa siii is purposive,
but its own self-consciousness provides the aim,
and the aim is just its own complete being, as this
really is; namely, as self-defined in the light of
the Divine Perfection. Such purposive causation
through an ideal is inherently free causation : the
being that acts from it is always self-prompted and
self-fulfilled, and so is free. No other conceivable
mode of causation is free. Since the time of Aris-
totle this operation of an ideal has gone by the
name of "final" cause — the causality in a con-
sciously put "end," or aim. Sometimes it is called
by the more sounding title of "teleological " cause
— the cause whose logic, or explanation, is in a
T^A.09, the Greek name for a goal ; that is, again,
an aim, an ideal, the highest term of a thinking
agent's self-expression. To sum up its nature in
a single phrase, let us call it simply the free attrac-
tion of an intelligence by its own ideals, preemi-
nently by its Ideal of ideals.
Final Cause, then, or the Ideality at the logical
heart of conscious life, — to that we are to look for
release from the perplexity about the determinism in
Divine supremacy and the self-determinism in human
or other non-divine freedom. And in finding the
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 349
release we must show that our means preserves
in God the two great offices which our religious con-
sciousness demands — demands with much vagueness
of meaning, no doubt, but which it strives at least
somehoiu \.Q name in the words "regeneration" and
" creation." We are in sincerity bound, too, to show
that our explanation by Final Cause, for the sake of
saving undiminished freedom, is not at the expense
of Christian monotheism. We must make it ingenu-
ously clear that the world of free persons, subsistent
in eternity, is not open to the charge of polytheism,
and, still more, not to that of atheism.
These charges, it is worth while to observe, are not
new. They have, to be sure, been recently pressed
with much emphasis by Professor Royce in his "Sup-
plementary Essay" in TJie Conception of God} but
they have been brought against pluralism, against
the system of manifold free-agency, ever since the
day when the great Leibnitz first sketched its out-
lines in his midsummer-night's dream of monads and
the Monad of monads. He too was accused of ren-
dering God superfluous ; and the innuendo was not
omitted, that he had annexed God to his system for
diplomatic reasons — from motives of "economy."
Even his admiring American translator, the late
honoured Dr. Frederic Henry Hedge, pilloried the
Monadologie in most dubious company, in his volume
^See The Conception of God, pp. 275, 321.
350 USS^Ii'S AV PHILOSOPHY
bearing the ominous title Atlicisui in rJiilosophy}
To be sure, monism was in a way Dr. Hedge's reli-
gion, and so pluralism was for liim the unpardonable
sin. But for every type of the genuinely religious
mind, the omission of God must be unpardonable ; and
what we need in these perplexing discussions is some
settlement of what is the central attribute of God,
that shall impart to all the others legitimate mean-
ing, and put an end to unmerited charges of atheism.
So that I am now called upon to show that the
elevation of the human spirit to genuine freedom,
with the consequent placing of the soul in the order
of eternal being, so far from transforming men into
gods or rendering God superfluous and non-existent,
carries us, on the contrary, to just such a central
attribute of genuine godhead. I am to show you,
too, that in the world of eternal free-agents, the Di-
vine offices called creation and regeneration not only
survive, but are transfigured ; that in this transfigura-
tion they are merged in one, so that regeneration is
implicit in creation, and becomes the logical spring
and aim of creation, while creation itself thus insures
both generation and regeneration — the existence of
the natural order within the spiritual or rational, and
subject to this, and the consequent gradual transfor-
mation of the natural into the image of the spiritual :
1 F. H. Hedge : Atheism in Philosophy, and Other Essays. Boston :
Roberts Brothers, 1884.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 35 1
a process never to be interrupted, however devious,
dark, or often retrograde, its course may be. I am
to show you all this by the light of Final Cause,
which is to take the place of the less rational cate-
gory of Efficient Causation, since — let it be repeated
• — this last cannot operate to sustain moral relation-
ship, and since moral values, measured in real free-
dom, are for the conscience and the new theology the
measure of all reality.
VI
Now, after our long making ready, the sufficient
exhibition of these conclusive truths may, fortunately,
be comparatively brief. Let us begin by showing
that our uncompromising Pluralism, our system of
self-active or eternal persons, is not atheistic, but
demands God ; yes, reposes on God, and alone pre-
sents him as adorably divine.
Bear in mind, then, that by the terms of our prob-
lem we set out upon our present quest from a granted
world of beings really free, and that this freedom
means their subsistence by their self-active thinking.
They are thus all eternal, in the highest and there-
fore sole entirely true meaning of the word ; namely,
they are all subsistent self-actively, by their own
self-defining consciousness. But this does not merely
mean that they are everlasting, — existing, as the
352 £SSAyS IX PHILOSOPHY
ancient and venerable saying is, " to all eternity."
This everlastingness, or indestructible pervadence of
infinite futurity, as we shall in a moment see, is a
real aspect in the being of one of the two great orders
of free self-consciousness, but it is only an aspect, and
only in that one order ; while eternity, or free reality,
means something quite transcending this. It means
that each thoroughly real being is just self-defining,
self-operative, is existent in a sense that excludes the
alternative of its non-existence — in its central uni-
fying essence is quite out of and independent of
time, or is necessary (i.e. unavoidable and necessitat-
ing) instead of necessitated ; and that, in fact, time
itself takes its rise etitirely from this self -thinking which
constitutes the free being as eternal and zvhole.^
But now note — and this is the point of foremost
importance — this eternal existence of the spirit is
essentially soii-definition, the putting of existence
that is unambiguously definite, incapable of confusion
with any other. The spirit is intrinsically individual :
^For Time, it would seem, is nothing but the mind's consciousness of
its own controlling unity, — living on, notwithstanding the throng of
differences from its defining Standard that are introduced into its life
by its act of self-definition (see pp. 362-369, below), and holding these
differences all in its one embrace. It is, however, only the immediate
or lowest form of this consciousness, and so gathers this miscellany of
items into no more than the loose union which we call sequence. It
is supplemented by more significant and increasingly stricter expres-
sions of the mind's unity, such as Space, Force, Syllogism, and so on,
up to Truth, Beauty, and, finally. Good, i.e. benignant love.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 353
it is itself, and not any other ; and it puts itself so,
incontestably. But such a getting to exact identity
can only be by means of diffcretice ; and difference,
again, implies contrast, and so reference to others.
Thus, in thinking itself as eternally real, each spirit
inherently thinks the reality of all other spirits. In
fine, its self-definition is at the same stroke in terms of
its own peculiarity, its own inerasible and unrepeatable
particularity, and of the supplemental individualities
of a whole world of others, — like it in this possession
of indestructible difference, but also like it in self-
supplementation by all the rest ; and thus it intrinsi-
cally has utiiversality.
In this fact we have reached the essential form of
every spirit or person — the organic union of the par-
ticular with the universal, of its private self-activity
in the recognition of itself with its public activity in
the recognition of all others. That is, self-conscious-
ness is in the last resort a conscience, or the union of
each spirit's self-recognition with recognition of all.
Its self-definition is therefore definite, in both senses
of the word : it is at once integral in its thorough and
inconfusible difference from every other, and yet it
is integral in terms of the entire whole that includes
it with all the rest. Thus in both of its aspects —
and both are essential to it — in a commanding
sense it excludes alternative, and there is universal
determinism, that is, universal and stable definite-
2 A
354 iiss.ivs Lv rniLosoPHY
urss, just because there is universal self-deter-
mination, or genuine freedom. But this universal
self-defining implies and proclaims the universal
reality, the living presence in all, of one unchange-
able type of being — the self-conscious intelligence;
and this, prcsctited in all really possible forms, or
instances, of its o?ie abidi)ig nature.
Well, then, how many are there of these possible
forms, these possible instances ? Plainly, as many
as answer in full to the free self-defining in which
all have their being. The number must be vast
enough to provide for all individual differences
compatible with the mutual reality of all. The
world of spirits is thus "ten thousand times ten
thousand, a great multitude which no man can
number." Yet it is not vaguely boundless ; it is
not "infinite" in the sense in which the imagina-
tion and the mathematicians take infinity. On the
contrary, from the nature of the case, its number
must be definite as well as vast, though we do not
actually know it now. Still we do know certain
things about the world of minds, which in the
present context are of determining significance.
Little as we may be able to tell its number, the
series certainly must run through every real differ-
ence, from the lowest increment over non-existence
to the absolute realisation of the ideal Type.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 355
Hence the world of minds must embrace, ^n-/, the
Supreme Instance, in which the self-definer defines
himself from every other by the peculiarity of per-
fect self-fulfilment in eternity, so that all ideal
possibilities, all rational perfections, are in him
eternally actualised, and there is an absolutely per-
fect mind, or God, whose very perfection lies in
his giving complete recognition to all other spirits,
as the complement in terms of which alone his
own self-definition is to himself completely think-
able. But, secondly, the world of minds must
embrace this complemental world, and every mem-
ber of this complement, though indeed defining
himself against each of his fellows, must define
himself primarily against the Supreme Instance,
and so in terms of God. Thus each of them, in
the very act of defining his own reality, defines
and posits God as real — as the one Unchangeable
Ideal who is the indispensable standard upon which
the reality of each is measured. The price at which
alone his reality as self-defining can be had is
the self-defining reality of God. If Jie is real, then
God is real ; if God is not real, then neither can
lie be real.
In the system then, as it really is, God not only
eternally defines himself, and so is self-existent
eternally, but he is likewise freely defined as self-
existent by every other self-defining being. He is
356 Jiss.ivs LV rniLosopiiY
thus, as the universally implicated Ideal, the rational
Ground of all other possible self-definition, and "eter-
nal creation " is a fact : all is real through Final
Cause. The created, as ivell as the Creator, creates.
Self-activity that recognises and affirms self-activ-
ity in others, freedom that freely recognises free-
dom, is universal : every part of this eternally real
world is instinct with life in itself. Each lives in
and by free ideality, the active contemplation of
its own ideal ; and this ideal embraces, as its
essential, prime, and final factor, the one Supreme
Ideal.
Here it is worth while to digress once more, to
take an exact account of the nature of this proof
for the existence of God. Those of you at home
in the history of philosophy will hardly fail to
notice that it is simply what the ontological argu-
ment of Plato, Augustine, Anselm, and Descartes
becomes when taken in the light of the system of
coexistent free minds — the argument so seriously
impugned by Kant, and so vainly striving after
rehabilitation in the monism of Hegel and his
school. For it is the proof of God directly from
the idea of God as the freely posited implicate
without which no self-active or individual mind
can define itself and posit itself as real. But this
logically necessary connexion {i.e. connexion put
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 357
by the pure spontaneity of each intelligence)
between the idea of each mind and the idea of
God, while leading to nothing if it stands by itself,
leads inevitably to the reality of God as soon as
the reality of any single mind is assured.
Now, the reality of each individual mind it is
impossible to question, as Descartes has sufficiently
shown ; for every effort to question it presupposes
its truth. Though I were to keep on saying for-
ever that I doubted my own existence, yet every
time I said it I must be a thinking life to make
the statement possible. Underneath every doubt
of thinking there lies, as a positive fact, the think-
ing that floats the doubt : so the more persistent
the doubting, the stronger the proof of a real self-
consciousness. The inevitable connexion between
the idea of any single consciousness and the idea
of God being given, this dialectically demonstrable
existence of the self brings with it the actual
existence of God. Here we have the real analogue
of Descartes's famous illustration of his form of
the argument by the necessary connexion between
the idea of a mountain and the idea of a valley :
if the mountain is shown actually to exist, it fol-
lows resistlessly that the valley exists too. Des-
cartes, however, instead of connecting the idea of
God with the idea of the self, made the slip of
connecting the idea of perfection with the idea
358 /iSs.iYS IX PHILOSOPHY
of existence^ so that his argument runs clown into
the vapid truism : If perfection exists, then it
exists ; or (since perfection means God), if God
exists, then he exists.
It is certainly the more curious — in fact, it is
astonishing — that the great Frenchman should have
tripped just here, as he was so securely in pos-
session of the dialectic proof of his own reality,
and as, more than once in his Meditations, he also
comes squarely upon the implication of the idea
of God by the idea of the self. It was criticism
exactly pertinent, when he pointed out that the
defect in Anselm's form of the argument was its
connecting only the idea of existence with the
idea of perfection, without attaining to any actual
existence at all, and that the argument needed sup-
plementing in the light of the Cartesian "criterion,"
— the principle, namely, that a necessary connexion
between ideas carries with it a like connexion of
the corresponding tilings, so that when the exist-
ence of one is established, the existence of the
other inevitably follows. But in selecting perfec-
tion and existence as the connected ideas, he over-
looked the awkward fact, that, in the case in hand,
the existence of the perfect was the very point to
be proved.
The argument which we have succeeded in
working out, on the contrary clearly avoids this
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 359
fallacy. It runs : The idea of every self and the
idea of God are inseparably connected, so that if
any self exists, then God also must exist ; but
any and every self demonstrably exists, for (as
apud Cartesiimi) the very doubt of its existence
implies its existence ; and therefore God really
exists. In parting with it, let us not omit to
notice that the argument is nothing but the com-
mon one upon which we always proceed when we
conclude there is any real mind other than our
own — that we have fellow-spirits, like ourselves
distinct from God. The validity of the process,
which in the case of our fellow-men we all so
instinctively perform, and with such unhesitating
conviction, rests in every case alike upon the
same universal implication of each mind with a
world of others. Our self-thought being is intrin-
sically a social being ; the existence of each is
reciprocal with the existence of the rest, and is
not thinkable in any other way. We all put the
fact so, each in the freedom of his own self-defining
consciousness. The circle of self-thinking spirits
indeed has God for its central Light, the Cynosure
of all their eyes : he is if they are, tJiey are if he
is ; but the relation is freely mutual, and he only
exists as primus inter pares, in a circle eternal and
indissoluble.
36o £ss.tys ly pi/ilosophy
To resume now the main thread of our discussion :
We have reached a proof of God from his very
nature as central member in the world of freedom,
and let us realise how genuinely divine his being is.
He is verily a God unchangeably adorable, because
he subsists in and through his free recognition of
his complemental world of free associates, and only
so subsists. In this free eternity, he is therefore
in Hteral truth —
That God who ever lives and loves,
One God, one law, one element,
And one far-off divine Event,
To which the whole creation moves.
For he alone loves, who, by his spontaneous ideal,
has for his objects beings possessing the freedom
which is his own bliss. He alone loves divinely,
who accordingly subsists as the purely ideal Goal,
the final cause or "divine Event" of their being;
divine, because the Goal is left to be freely recog-
nised, and put as ideal, by the self-defining act of
each soul itself, and is not produced nor enacted
upon it by any causation that constrains. God is in
his proper Heaven, is no mere Maker, no player of
the poor r61e of Omnipresent Meddler ; and so each
soul has all its life, at source and in settled des-
tination, from love and in love — love that " casteth
out fear," even the solemnising fear which awe is, and
that thrills only to the beauty and the joy in God's
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 36 1
perfection of love.^ Love, too, now has its adequate
definition : it is the all-directing intelligence which
includes in its recognition a world of beings accorded
free and seen as sacred, — the primary and supreme
act of intelligence, which is the source of all other
intelligence, and whose object is that universal circle
of spirits which, since the time of the Stoics, has so
pertinently been called the City of God. Its con-
templation of this sole object proper to it was fitly
named by Dante and the great scholastics the Vision
Beatific.
But now to our next point. You will here be prone
to say. If this is theism, it is surely — is it not.? —
a universal theism, not monotheism. Why isn't it
simply polytheism on an infinite scale? — an infinito-
theism, an " apeirotheism " .-" ^ And I shall have
1 " The abasement of the individual before the Divine Being is
really a sort of pantheism, so far that in the moral world God is every-
thing and man nothing. But man thus abased before God is no proper
or rational worshipper of him. There is a want of proportion in this
sort of religion. God who is everything is not really so much as if he
allowed the most exalted free agencies to exist side by side with
him." — Professor Jowett, commenting on the De Imiiatione Christi,
in his Life by Abbott and Campbell, vol. ii, p. 151. London: Murray,
1897.
" So the lamented Davidson called it, coining a name out of i.-atipov,
the Greek word for the numerical infinite, — Dr. Thomas Davidson, of
New York, a Scot by birth and training, but an American by choice and
adoption, who passed untimely away in the autumn of 1900, leaving un-
finished so much of needed work in classical and mediaeval philosophy.
362 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
to reply : No, you arc quite as wrong this time as
you were when you called the free system atheism.
The system of freedom is genuine monotheism, and
the only genuine. All the members of the eternal
world except God freely posit themselves as not
God, in freely positing God ; and God, in positing
himself, likewise posits them as not himself. More-
over, this difference from Deity is thought by each
spirit's purely thought-put — and therefore free —
exclusion of any alternative, as a difference that
is defect, the active maintenance or the passive
acceptance of which would be sin.
For inasmuch as its characteristic difference is
by each spirit thought against the Ideal who is
absolute Perfection, the Unity of all possible per-
fections, all difference from this must include some
degree of imperfection, self-posited in the very being
of each self-definer. The active consciousness of
each is therefore really answerable for the presence
of this in his being, but also answerable, by the
terms of its being and his, for the rational control
of it : answerable, just because the free self-definer
is himself the source of it, and yet by his total
nature, which eternally contemplates and mirrors
God, transcends it. On this ground, the absolutely
singular and unrepeatable personality of each soul
lies in the exactly identical manner, one and only,
in which his thinking differentiates him (i) from
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 363
the absolutely perfect self-thinking God, and (2) from
every other soul, which, like himself, is differenced
from God by a deficiency absolutely peculiar.^
In fact, the personality of every soul lies precisely
in the relation — or ratio, if we please so to call it —
between that genuine infinity (self-activity) which
marks its organising essence, and the finitude, the
exactly singular degree of limitation and passivity,
to which the infinity subjects itself in defining
itself from God. Thus every soul, though indeed,
in the unifying wJiole of its nature, of the divine
kind, and of inextinguishable free-infinity, neverthe-
less carries in its being an aspect of negation to
its divine nature, and simply by the operation of its
self-thought idea must realise its eternal freedom in
a way that differs from God's way in kind.
For the consequence of this individualising self-
definition by defect or negation is this : Embraced
within the total being of the soul there must be
a derivative life, which we call its experience, or
sensory being, arising from the reaction of the
primal freedom upon the negating limit, or Check.^
Accordingly the soul's existence, in this sensory
1 Here we come again upon the vast and unknown number of souls
not God: there must be a soul for every really possible degree of
divergence from the Perfect Ideal, and there is no present knowledge
of the number of these degrees.
2 Compare p. 338, above.
364 ESSAYS LV nilLOSOPlIY
aspect of it, has the form of an irrepressible conflict
between the free reason, moving in response to its
Ideal, and this actual antagonising Check. In other
words, within the rational (or spiritual) whole man,
lives the natural and partial, which is the product
of his formal and efficient causation as a self-active
life, operating in the light of his Ideal upon the
object-matter, or material cause, supplied in the
Check. But this union of two antagonistic natures
in one individual whole is absolutely foreign to God,
the eternal Sum of all Perfections. It belongs, on
the contrary, to that non-divine order of existence
which, for lack of a better conception and name, our
historical theologies have called the "creature," and
it therefore forms an inerasible distinction between
the one member of the World of Spirits who realises
its Ideal eternally, and all the other possible members.
We may render this matter clearer by a brief
reference to a most important step in the history
of philosophic thought. It is a notable remark of
Aristotle's when beginning the criticism of previous
Greek philosophy, that, while all philosophy must
be a research of causes, and preceding philosophy
had answered in a general way to this requirement, the
schools had yet not been aware of the whole system
of causes. This system, he adds, ought to include
(i) the material cause, the "raw stuff," so to speak,
or "contents," out of which reality is formed ; (2) the
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 365
forvial cause, the principle of discrimination and
arrangement, by which the material is kept from
being chaotic, and instead is rendered intelligible ;
(3) the kinetic, or changing, or efficient cause, by
which form is applied to matter, and one form is
changed into another; and (4), most important of all,
the. final cause, the cause "wherefore," — the intelli-
gible and recognised aim under which all the first three
operate. Some schools, he continues, had used one,
some another of the first three causes, some had used
more than one, Plato had used all ; but none had used
all the four, none had hitherto employed the final
cause.
True. But the great Stagirite might himself have
gone a step farther : he might have stated the truth,
for it is a truth, that the final cause is the originating
and organising member of the system, and that all the
other three causes arise from it, as well as act by
virtue of it. That is, instead of being simply the most
important kind of cause, it is the Cause of causes,
and the only kind of cause that applies to the exist-
ence of primary realities such as minds.
Now, what we were really seeing, a moment ago,
was how all this is true in the case of the mind that
is non-divine. The operation of final causation, as
involved in each spirit's ideal of itself as a thoroughly
individuated contrast to God, introduces into the
spirit's native infinity the non-divine defining Check :
366 ESSAYS IN PUFLOSOPFIY
here is the beginning, the fcniiimts a quo, of effi-
ciency ; here also is the germ of the material cause,
the "matter" upon which the further display of effi-
ciency is to act. But by the final causation in the
spirit's native contemplation of the Divine Ideal, the
infinity or freedom reacts upon the Check : this re-
active relation and its product constitute a matter or
contents more or \ess, formed, bearing always in some
degree the impress of the original freedom that moves
toward its ideal. Here, then, and in the hence-
forth endless recurrence of the action and the re-
action, we have flowing from final cause — from the
free attraction of the free ideal — (i) material, or
object for the reaction of freedom ; (2) the reactive
efficiency, shown (3) in the appearance oi form in the
material, the form exhibited by the interaction of
the spiritual and the natural. And we now recover,
in this new light, the doctrine set forth earlier in this
essay, that the whole natural world, or world of sense,
is embraced under the world of the self-active intelli-
gence— the world, as Kant has taught us to call it,
of the pure reason, or intelligence a pnori. This
natural world, by the account of it we now get, must,
as noticed already,^ be a scene of ceaseless conflict
between its immediate or present form and the
eternal or ideal form of the spirit. ^
* See p. 364, above.
^ The foregoing account of what and whence Nature is, will of
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 367
Nature is not, indeed, in itself sin ; there is no
guilt in its mere existence. It is simply part and
parcel of the self-definition of the soul, and it has an
affirmative as well as a negative aspect, a possible
movement upward, toward the free spirit's Ideal, as
well as its primary tendency downward and away
from this. But it carries with it the risk of sin ; for
in admitting the negative principle of defect into its
being, the free consciousness opens the possibility
that in the antasronism between the two tendencies
o
in its nature it may side with the negative, and not
keep alert to the affirmative and its ideal Spring. It
may lose, for the time being, its response to the Divine
Ideal, and, as Plato says, become ensnared in the
natural. Hence, so far as concerned with its merely
natural life, it is liable to become slothful, an ignava
ratio in a real sense, to repose inert in the form
that belongs to it at any given date, and to say, as
Mephisto craftily hopes that Faust may be tempted
to say of some passing temporal moment, and so be
lost, Verweile dock, die bist so scJi'dn ! —
Oh stay ! thou art so fair.
course suggest manifold difficulties to the critical mind, difficulties that
particularly concern the usually assumed single-unit character of Nature,
the possibility of a communal natural life for souls, and especially the
possibility and the meaning of wedlock, birth, heredity, and social lia-
bility, or " imitation." To go here into these would lead us too far afield.
I will merely say that they are no greater than those involved in any
system of idealism, and that I hope to deal with them in another place.
368 ESS.IVS /.V PIIll OSOPIIY
Or passing to deeper decline, it may out of this slug-
gard self-love advance into aggressive struggle to
maintain it, falling with hate upon the activities of
others whom it finds, or assumes, to interfere with its
case.
This empirical volition seduced by the vision of
the sense-world, be this sensual or malicious, or be it
ever so much raised above the brutal, — this willing-
ness to stay where one temporally is, to accept the
actual of experience for the ideal, the mere particular
of sense for the universal of the spirit, the dead finite
for the ever-living infinite, the world for God, — this
is exactly what sin is.^ It may take either of two
forms, according as the sinking into sense directly
involves only the violation of the spirit's own self-
reverence or the graver assault upon the sacredness
of others. In either case it is dishonour of God.
The risk of it lies in the nature of our being, goes
back to the conditions of our existence, of our self-
definition in freedom ; is constituent in our freedom
as this is defined against the freedom of God. This
^ Some readers may feel that this account of sin is defective because
it seems to them to omit the characteristic factor of selfishness. But it
does not in fact do so. The statement that sin is the choice of the
actual instead of the ideal, the world instead of God, is more compre-
hensive, but is, as directly made, merely formal. In the light of what
has preceded, however, it is plain that the real meaning, contained
indii-ectly in this formal contrast between God and the world, is that
the ideal is universal love, and its neglect a violation of this.
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 369
risk is therefore "original" in a sense even deeper
than that in which traditional theology makes sin to
be original, — though we too have to say that sin is
original, in the sense that it is a fact which comes
about by reason of this trait in our self-origination.
It is a fact, that is to say, directly connected with our
self-differencing reality ; it concerns the explanation
of our very existence, roots in the origin of the natu-
ral man, and follows from that as surely as that is
implied in the very nature of our free being.
Here at length we find what is meant by the
unio7i of freedom zvith determinism in the life of
every spirit. The union consists in the fact that
both determinism and freedom mean the self-deter-
mination of the conscious being in the light of his
twofold ideal, — his eternal apprehension of the
Supreme Ideal in God, and his ideal of himself as
a thoroughly individuated being, inherently self-
differenced from the Divine Ideal, yet essentially
self-related to it, — in the great total of his existence
moving in response to his contemplation of it, and
therefore freely moving.
In our union of the actual and the ideal, we find,
too, the explanation of that consciousness of alterna-
tive which prompts us to say of every event in our
moral experience, especially of any event of wrong-
doing, that it might have been otherwise — we
2 B
370 £ss.iys IX rniLosoniY
might have done rii^ht instead of wrong. The
question of our effectual freedom in the world of
experience is simply the question whether we have
not a living source of right within us, our own
eternal choice, of fuller flood than tlie counter-
current tending to arrest it. But, on the other
hand, the presence in us of this essential counter-
stream brings the constant risk that the movement
in response to the absolute Ideal may in the time-
world actually suffer arrest. Nevertheless, this
arrest cannot annihilate the potential for goodness
that lies in our eternal vision of the Supreme Ideal.
That lives on ; and our sin is, that we fail in our
time-world to avail ourselves of it, because we
temporarily lose experimental realisation of it, and
consequently become absorbed in that side of our
life which arises directly from our principle of
difference — our difference from God.
Our sense of alternative is the sense that the tran-
scending view which connects us with our Divine
Ideal, and which moves us evermore toward har-
mony with that, is really ever-living, and so affords
resources to reduce our defective difference and
carry us beyond all temporal actualities. So that
when we halt in any stage of these, and act as if
our aim and object ended there, and we were there
fulfilled, we know that this is false. We know that
we have belied our real being, that in our true
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 371
nature is a fountain out-measuring every possible
actuality, that therefore we might have done differ-
ently, and that consequently we have contracted
guilt — guilt, not simply before some external tri-
bunal, be it even God's, but guilt before the more
inexorable bar of our own soul.
Assuredly, then, we may dismiss the charge that
the free system is a polytheism. Not a single mem-
ber of it except God is identical with God, either
in existence or in character. All but God provide
in their own being the liability to sin, and when
once, owing to their sins already, they present in
their natural circumstances a character sufficiently
defective, then the natural law of cause and effect
operates, and they are certain then to sin yet more ;
though not even this certainty in the connexion of
their evil experiences is predestined upon them by
any "decree" of God, or by any other efficient act
of God, for God has no efficient relation to their
being, nor they to his. The certainty issues from
their own freedom, which is responsible not only
for the causal connexion between their antecedent
and consequent states, but directly for the existence
of the antecedent. It is therefore a certainty for
which neither God nor any vague " nature of things "
is responsible at all. The presence of it in their
life, and still more the presence of the liability from
372 ASSAYS IX rillLOSOPHY
which it springs, and of the primal self-defining
Check upon perfection, out of which this liability
arises, discriminates every soul from God, indelibly
and forever. God is God alone, there is but one
God, and the souls are at best but his prophets.
VII
But now we come upon another objection, which
I judge will be the last you can raise. You will say,
I suspect, that this world of freedom, self-equipped
for sin, is indeed a world which "lieth in wicked-
ness," that in truth there is no real hope of good
in it : it is a world of inherent and inexpugnable
wrong, and not only damnable, but in fact already
damned. Yet stay a little : yoji at least, like your
classic spokesman Professor James, — to whose essay
on the "Dilemma of Determinism" we have been
referred, in your list of reading for this year's studies,
as the authority upon freedom, — you at least are
souls that have no complicity with the accursed thing
— you have renounced it and its evil ways altogether!
Still, you and he are certainly of it ; and so are all
men who have attained in their temporal conscious-
ness to this mighty "judgment of regret," as he poeti-
cally calls the sweeping condemnation of the world.
You and he and they are of its process, quite as
surely as his Brockton murderer, quite as surely as all
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 373
Other sinners ; quite as surely as those profound and
indeed awfully tragic examples of sin in whom as yet,
looking at their temporal life merely, no one can dis-
cover any signs of their higher spiritual self. The
world, then, with your renouncing and penitential his-
tories in it, cannot be so altogether lost and worthless.
As you have all supplemented the choices of sin
with your purifying "judgments of regret," do not,
I beg you, stop there, but add to them the judgment
of consolation. See to it that yoii do not forget, as
Professor James at times seems to have forgotten,
how the judgment of regret, which arises out of the
spiritual freedom of the soul, is in due course of that
freedom attended or followed by the judgment of
remorse, by the judgment of repentance, by the judg-
ment of reform. These are all in the fountain of
the spirit, and flow from the great deeps of the free-
dom whose shallower expanses make possible the
sin. In their sum, they make up for the sinful
world a judgment of atonement. The infinite of
the soul is mightier than the finite in it. The free-
infinite of the intelligence will go on in the con-
flict of transforming the finitude of the natural life ;
will go on to victory ever more and more. It may
be, as was said before, by paths never so dark and
devious, or now and again even retrograde; it may
be by descent with the natural into the nether pit
of sin and its self-operating punishment ; but onward
374 JiSSAiS IN PHILOSOPHY
Still the undying free spirit goes, and will go, secure
in its own indestructible vision of its eternal Ideal,
secure in the changeless light shed on it by the
changeless God.
For it is assured of immortality — an immortality
that some day, be the time here or be it in tlie here-
after, must attain to life eternal, to the established
dominance of the spiritual over the natural. Never-
theless, the perfection of the "creature" lies just in
this never-ending process of victory. Always it must
preserve its own identity ; must be everlastingly, as
it is eternally, divided from identity with God by
its own defining negative principle. Thus its life
shows its peculiar perfection by the mode in which —
or, if you will, the rate at which — it surely, though
slowly and with heavy toil, heals its own inherent
wound. Two forms of self-active being there are, —
two only : that which is eternally without defect and
invulnerable ; and that which holds defect in its
very nature, but moves toward making itself whole
by its eternal power of "life in itself." The one is
God's infinity; the other is the infinity of man —
the infinity of the "creature," the infinity that em-
bosoms finitude and evermore raises this toward
likeness with the eternal.
Here our inquiry comes in sight of its close.
While I hope that I have now answered your whole
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 375
question, and have shown how freedom and deter-
minism, reconciled in the universal presence of
rational activity, do surely lead toward universal
recovery from moral evil, it would be no more than
natural were you to ask, In just what does the recon-
ciliation after all consist ? In answer, I may sum
up the whole matter in the following way.
Freedom and determinism are only the obverse
and the reverse of the two-faced fact of rational self-
activity. Freedom is the thought-action of the self,
defining its specific identity, and determinism means
nothing but the definite character which the rational
nature of the action involves. Thus freedom, far
from disjoining and isolating each self from other
selves, especially the Supreme Self, or God, in fact
defines the inner life of each, in its determining
whole, in harmony with theirs, and so, instead of con-
cealing, opens it to their knowledge — to God, with
absolute completeness eternally, in virtue of his per-
fect vision into all possible emergencies, all possible
alternatives ; to the others, with an increasing ful-
ness, more or less retarded, but advancing toward
completeness as the Rational Ideal guiding each ad-
vances in its work of bringing the phenomenal or
natural life into accord with it. For our freedom,
in its most significant aspect, means just our secure
possession, each in virtue of his self-defining act, of
this common Ideal, whose intimate nature it is to
376 Ess.ns in rini.osoriiY
unite us, not to divide us ; to unite us while it pre-
serves us each in his own identity, harmonising each
with all by harmonising all with God, but quenching
none in any extinguishing Unit. Freedom, in short,
means first our self-direction by this eternal Ideal
and toward it, and then our power, from this eternal
choice, to bring our temporal life into conformity
with it, step by step, more and more.
And though in this real freedom which is inher-
ently rational there is that determinism, that definite-
ness, which issues from guidance by the universal
rational aim, this very determinism nevertheless,
matched as it is against the counter-definiteness in
the defective phenomenal side of our life, gives rise
to that ever-recurring Alternative, that chance for
the experience of choice, which is so often mistaken
for the whole of freedom, but is only a derivative
part of it. A greater part, even in this region of
experience, is the power in our consciousness of the
Ideal, the power of our eternal freedom, to decide the
temporal choice in its own direction. Thus every
sin is in its central nature a self-dishonour of our
freedom, a self-degradation and self-enslavement.
And still this freedom, as originative and whole,
is immortal, is imperishable, and has abiding might
to prevail and to rescue.
So much for a summary of the solution. You must
not omit to notice, in parting, that it has not been
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 377
effected by means of any sort of " soft " determinism,
— as, with a transfer of Professor James's stinging
nickname, we may call the sentimental optimism that
ignores the world's wickedness and misery. On the
contrary, the result has been reached by means of a
determinism whose way is the rugged and even tragic
path of bitter discipline, through sin and punishment
and remorse, through repentance and victorious good
works. Beyond sin and the possibility of sin, there
lies in the system of free spirits, as the very key to
their freedom, this eternal Atonement. It works by
the ceaseless chastisement which is freedom's school
for its own actualisation in the world.
Let Professor James supplement his Judgment of
Regret by this Judgment of Atonement. For there
is no "dilemma of determinism," such as he has so
forcibly depicted, if the determinism in the world of
sense is itself a partial effect of the self-determi-
nation of the free beings acting in and on that world,
and is subject to continual transformation and cor-
rection by the undying source of freedom in eternity.
He would have us believe that determinism hangs in
a fatal balance between pessimism on the one hand
and what he rightly calls by the stigmatising name of
"subjectivism " on the other — the revolting theory
that the aim of life is, not doing good and avoiding
wrong, but getting the deepest knowledge of the
greatest sum of the most varied "experience," of
378 F.SS/tVS Ih' PHILOSOPHY
base and of high alike and indifferently ; is eating
insatiably of "the tree of knowledge of good and
evil," simply for the eating's sake. We must cither
maintain our judgments of regret, he says, and so
pronounce the determinist world accursed to its core,
or else quash our regrets and end in a fatuous opti-
mism which confounds good and evil by reckoning
evil really good — " whatever is, is right." The latter
horn of the dilemma, he holds, can only be taken in
earnest if "subjectivism" is true; and this, what un-
harmed conscience can endure ?
But if determinism is but one phase of the free
life of each spirit, laying down law upon the world
which is the field of its possible higher activity, then
the dilemma is dissolved. The pair of alternatives
do not then exhaust the possibilities : there is at least
one other supposition open. Not mere knowledge of
good and evil, for its own shameless sake, but know-
ledge for the sake of action, and resulting now in peni-
tent and now in benignant reform, is then the genuine
alternative to pessimism ; and this moral use of the
evil that freedom causes is the atonement, the justify-
ing atonement, with which the profounder freedom
that wells from the eternal fountain of the spirit ex-
piates the surface-freedom's sin. The atonement is
in eternity and from eternity, quite as really as the
provision of an apparatus for the sin. It passes thence
upon the ceaseless process of the natural life. Thus
HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 379
in the course of ages here and hereafter it is sure to
be effectual. But the way is hard, the road of disci-
pline and penitence is long, is across deep and appall-
ing abysses, with many a frightful fall to their bot-
tom, and of this tragic side of our being it is strictly
true that —
The moving Finger writes, and having writ
Moves on : nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
Here speaks the fact of Fate — the changeless
bond among experiences, the " irrevocable fixity of
the past " embosomed within our very freedom : we
"sow in Ate's fields " and reap the fitting crop. But
Fate is the indispensable means to freedom in a shift-
ing world of experience, is therefore a consistent
product of freedom, and the passing over of the
"judgment of regret" into this judgment of remorse,
stirred in us by the sense of Fate, is exactly what
makes in our time-world the signal of our eternal
freedom, and points to the coming judgment of re-
pentance and the better judgment of reform. We
cannot, indeed, recall the past that is behind any
specific present ; but it is only a past thus arbitrarily
isolated that is fixed. The real past is a flowing
whole, and we are forever pouring the future into the
flood, through the gate of the present. Our past is
really always changing, and it is we who initiate the
380 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY
change ; and so the past, though no fart of it can
be recalled, is perpetually being re-created and trans-
formed, now for the worse, now for the better, as its
whole goes on unfolding. But the whole, it is within
the compass of our freedom to bring into fuller and
fuller harmony with our active vision of our Ideal,
in which at source the freedom consists.
This is the life of the responsible universe, the
World of Souls : its freedom is only existent in terms
of God, who, despite the Inexorable Finger, hears in
eternity the sigh of the penitent, and accords to him
eternally an indwelling fountain of salvation, from
"before the foundation of the world." Thus does He
"still the cry of the afflicted" ; thus age by age, to
ages everlasting, "wipe away all tears," and grant to
each sinning and sorrowing spirit the bliss of repent-
ance consciously free, a redemption that arises out of
the soul itself, the merit of virtue that is its own, and
a peace that is indeed within.
INDEX
Abasement, of individual before God,
a sort of pantheism, 361, note r.
Abbot, Dr. F. E., his Scientific Theism,
in Concord " symposium," 56 note.
Absolute, the, as total World of
Spirits, or " City of God," xii seq. ;
as the Unknowable, 2, 15, 272; as,
proximately, the rational nature,
30, 41, 70 note, orjG; identified, by
empirical method, with the Sum of
Things, 83 seq.; as Will, 107; as
the Unconscious, no seq. ; reduced
by Hartmann to relativity, 120; as
the Actual, or real matter, 123 seq. ;
rendered relative by Diihring also,
139-
Agnosticism, Spencerian evolution-
ism a form of, 2, 15, 29 ; an unwar-
rantable arrest of philosophic
movement, 15 ; evolutional, in-
volves petitio, 16 seq., and also
self-contradiction, 22 seq. ; claims
existence of the Unknowable by
"inconceivability of opposite," 23 ;
breaks down by this assertion of
knowledge, 24 seq.; " critical," re-
duces conscious life to essential
delirium, 158 ; a haunting certainty
the Nemesis of, 162, 168 ; genesis
of " critical," 166; self-dissolution
of, 168 seq. ; drastic cure for, sup-
plied in Hume, 176 seq.
Alternative, involved in all freedom,
319, but not the whole account of
'*■ 3^9. 369; needs explanation it-
self by higher principle, 319, 375 ;
explanation of, in noumenal power
to transcend sensory Check, 365
seq. ; a derivative product of real
freedom, 376.
38
Anselm, employs Ontological Proof
of God, 356; justly criticised by
Descartes, 358.
A Priori Cognition, system of, the
essential being and true person of
a mind, .xiii, 41, 301, 305, 308 seq. ;
gives " form " to experience, xiii,
18, 325; not explained away by
Spencer, 18 seq.; presupposed in
association of ideas, 19; also, in
;?// experience, 30; presupposed by
logic of induction, 35; principle
of evolution a case of, 40; an act
of each conscious being, 44 seq., cf.
36, 302, but not admitted as such
by any evolutional philosophy, 44;
proofs of, 46, 296 seq. ; fact of,
pro\'es immortality, 305 seq.; in-
cludes our guiding ideals, 309, and
so provides for worth of immor-
tality, 310; nature and reality of,
of worth, 310 seq.
A Priori Law in Nature, evolution a
case of, 40 ; essential to free-agency,
323-
Aquinas, St. Thomas, represents Mid-
dle Doctrine of relation between
reason and religion, 228.
Aristotle, his definition of God, xv;
profound ambiguity of his philos-
ophy, xxiv ; relation of Personal
Idealism to his system, xxiv, xxv ;
his relation to pantheism, xxiv, 63
note ; his division of the fine arts,
207 ; his criticism of previous
Greek philosophy, 364 ; his System
of Causes, 364, 365 ; his failure to
reach pure finalism, 365 cf. xxiv.
Arnold, Matthew, on the " secret of
Jesus," 243.
382
INDEX
Art, its universal principle the Real-
Ideal, 183 seq. ; its own end, as
creating lor the sake of creating,
187 seq. ; creates the Beautiful, hut
as involving the True and the
Good, 191 seq. ; must present the
Supreme Ideal as reality, 198;
every work of, an embodied The-
odicy, 199 ; a token of man's free-
dom, 199; unblemished, literally
a sacrament, 200 ; power of, the
power of thought, 200; its own
end, in exactly what sense, 201
seq.; definition of, 203; distinc-
tion between mechanical and esem-
plastic, 205 ; division and gradation
of esemplastic, 206 seq. ; specific
characteristic of poetic, 211 seq.;
decorative, intermediate between
mechanical and esemplastic, 215 ;
improved division of, 216. [See
Beauty, and Poetry?^
Association of Ideas, Spencer's at-
tempt to explain " necessary " truth
by, 18 ; a priori factor presupposed
in, 19, 47 ; agnostic evolutionism
would explain origin of time, space,
etc., by, 46, but fails to refute the
arguments of Kant, 47 cf. 18 seq.
Atheism, system of eternal free per-
sons charged with, 340, 349 ; charge
of, refuted, 351 seq.
Atonement, afforded by world, by
being means of rational freedom,
199; as regeneration, implicit in
true creation, 350; structural in the
eternal being of minds, 377 ; judg-
ment of, supplements "judgment
of regret," 377, 378 ; is moral use
of evil involved in freedom, 378.
Augustine, St., on definition of
beauty, 194; on Divine Sover-
eignty, 316; on Predestination,
333 ; employs Ontological Proof,
356.
Authority, as method with religion,
not characteristic of Romanism vs.
Protestantism, 227 seq.; fails, (r)
because self-contradictory, 230 seq.,
(2) because unable to make out
diri-ct presence of God, 233 seq.,
(3) because at war with the spirit
of Christianity, 241 seq., cf. 229.
Hacon, rejects exaggerated claims of
scientific method, 95.
Balfour, A. J., rightly criticises both
forms of evolutional philosopliy, 4.
Beauty, its necessary correlation with
the True and the Good, 192 seq.;
insutiicient definition of, as unity
in variety, or variety in unity, 194
seq.; adequate definition of, finds
key in triune nature of man as cor-
relative to triune nature of God,
196 seq.; is the Ideal as object of
our capacity for joy, 198. [See
Art, and Poetry^
Berkeley, his system and the theory
of Personal Idealism, xviii; his
main proposition, only, accepted
by latter, xviii ; his idealism rests
on empiricism, and so on God as
an assumption merely, xix; his
main propositions, as revised by
Kant, presupposed by valid induc-
tion, 275.
Bruno, Giordano, among indubitable
pantheists, 63.
Biichner, among materialists, 122.
Caird, Prof. E., Master of Balliol,
hope of his services in re Hegel,
xxvi.
Calvin, on Divine Sovereignty, 316;
on "high" predestinationism, 333.
Carlyle, his melancholy over life, 157 ;
translates Goethe's stanzas on Art,
193-
Categories, the, as universal modes of
individual self-activity, 174.
Causa sui, every self a, xiv, 75, 339,
347 seq.
Causation, Final. \^eG Final Caused]
Causation, Natural, Physical, or Effi-
cient, highest category in all past
philosophy, xvii ; in Personal
Idealism, subordinated to Final,
xvii ; made explanation of mind by
all evolutional philosophy, 6; an
INDEX
383
essential element in evolution, 33 ;
generalised to, tacitly, in scientific
induction, 34, though generalisation
not warranted by the facts, but
added in by mind, 35, 275 ; in
purest and truest terms, is logical
unity, 36 seq.; within Nature, only
transmissive, 39; must conform to
Ideal, 39; the "natural" man a
product of, 47, 364 seq. ; cannot
hold from God to the soul, 73, nor
from mind to mind, 74; cannot
originate free beings, 329; inca-
pable of expressing Divine (i.e.
real) creation, 331 seq. ; still holds
Christian consciousness in bond-
age, 343 ; inconsistent with moral
reality, 347. [See Final Cause?^
Causation, Supernatural, or Meta-
physical, its meaning, 38; its func-
tion in the constitution of evolution,
39 seq.
Christianity, relation of evolution to,
7, 50 seq.; conflicts with any doc-
trine of evolution representing
whole of man as evolved, 51 seq. ;
requires genuine freedom, and
therefore eternity, of the person,
75, cf. 329, 342; opposed, in its
central principle, to the Method of
Authority, 241 seq. ; its essence, as
contained in New Doctrine of
Jesus, 246-260.
Conscience, the mutual recognition
of minds, as all absolutely real, xiii ;
fundamental in the being of each
mind and the system of minds,
xiii ; the essence of the Divine self-
consciousness, xvi ; not explicable
by cosmic process, 49 cf. note 2 ;
lays immovable foundation of
human interest in freedom and
immortality, 76; forms ultimate
explanation of intelligence as pure
Act, 173 seq. ; gives the type of
Christian religious life, 250, 251 ;
forms intrinsic root of all self-con-
sciousness, 310 seq. ; the elemental
paradox, 312 ; in essential union
with freedom, 329 seq., 334 seq.; is
ultimate meaning of self-conscious-
ness, 353 ; is, as love, essentially
intelligence, and source of all other
intelligence, 361.
Consciousness, normal, has real
universality, 171 ; universe comes
within, and lies open to, 172 ; world
of, means world of self-active
minds, 172; every individual, is
social, historic, immortal, 173 ; self-
active principle of, explains cate-
gories, and real nature of noume-
non, 174 ; as involving world in the
unity of the Person, is pure Act,
174, 175; moral, is really theo-
retic, and the logical spring of all
other, 174, 310 seq., 361.
Conservation of Energy, its philo-
sophical statement, 87, 88 cf. note ;
its apparent tendency toward pan-
theism, 87, 89, 91-93; its really
neutral religious meaning, as part
of strict science, 96-97.
Continuity, in universal Nature, not
explicable by physiological genesis,
26, nor by " spontaneous genera-
tion," 27, but mentally demanded,
nevertheless, 28, hence must be
sought in supersensible mode of
mind, 28; cannot be supplied by
the Unknowable, 29 seq., but must
be interpreted as logical, 30 seq.,
esp. 37 ; issues from the inner
harmony of mind as rational, 37,
38 ; depends, finally, on the teleo-
logic or ideal-governed nature of
minds, 38 seq.
Continuous Copula, the, required in
cosmic evolution, 28 ; its nature
determinable by an unarrested phi-
losophy, 30 ; not forthwith the Ulti-
mate Being, though its kind may
be ultimate, 30; its proximate seat
the human mind, 31.
Cosmic Consciousness, not equiva-
lent to Personal God, 7.
CosmicTheism.evolutional theory of,
3; rightly requires a self-conscious
Noumenon, 43; inconclusive as to
immortality, 43 ; hostile to freedom,
;84
INDEX
43; only another nnmc for pan-
tlicism, 269.
Creation, Divine, not by efficient
causation, xvi, 331 seq. ; real mean-
ing of, xvii. 65, 75, 354 seq.; as
human attribute toward Nature,
48 seq., ami in art, 188, 199; by
Jiat, contrailicts freedom, 332 seq.,
344; monistic theories of, have
same defect, 345 seq.; only com-
patible with freedom, if symbolis-
ing final causation, 347 seq.
Czolbe, his naturalistic philosophy,
and relation to Lotze, 122 note,
Danvin, relation of Neo-Hegelianism
to, 4; Diihring on, 132.
Davidson, Dr. Thomas, his " apeiro-
theism," 361, note 2.
Defect, involved in self-definition
against the Perfect, 362; factor in
all free beings other than God, 363 ;
basis conditional for phenomenal
consciousness, and for Nature, 365
seq.; involves risk of sin, or moral
evil, 367; capable of reformation
and cure by freedom, 369 seq.
Deism, defined, 58, 69 ; its limitations
and its merit, 70, 71.
Descartes, disapproves extravagant
claims of natural science, 95 ; em-
ploys Ontological Proof of God,
356 ; demonstrates reality of indi-
vidual self, 357 ; illustrates Onto-
logical Proof as case of necessary
connexion, 357; pertinently criti-
cises Anselm, 358 ; his own Onto-
logical Proof criticised, 358, and
supplemented, 359.
Determinism, as predestination, in-
compatible with freedom, 318; as
simple definiteness, wholly com-
patible with freedom, 320; "The
Dilemma of," Prof. James on, 322
ttofe, 372 seq. [See next article, and
also Freedo7n?\
Determinism and Freedom, problem
of their harmonisation, 313, 318 ;
reconcilable, though neither identi-
cal nor tending to merge in one,
314; but irreconcilable, (i) if de-
terminism means predestination,
318, (2) if it cancels choice or al-
ternative, 319, (3) if freedom means
caprice, 319, 320; harmonise, if (i)
determinism means simple defi-
niteness, and (2) freetlom means
the definiteness of sjjontaneous in-
telligence, or Reason, 320; shown
to mean these, resjicctively, 321
seq. ; their harmony possible only
by an idealistic philosophy of Na-
ture, 325, means not merely a har-
mony of their ideas, but of their
operation in real persons, 326 seq.,
hence, reaches maximum of diffi-
culty in case of God's determinism
and man's freedom, 327; their
reconciliation impossible, if Divine
creation means efficient causation,
332scq. ; their harmonisation forces
search after substitute for efficient
causation, 335 seq., takes human
freedom to involve eternity (/.^. self-
activity) of man, 338, hence, result-
ing pluralism seems (i) to erase
individuality, 340, (2) to conclude
either in polytheism or in atheism,
340, but solution of Divine-human
antinomy is found in Final Causa-
tion, as truth of the metaphor in
" creation," 348-356, and neither
atheism, 351 seq., nor polytheism,
361 seq., is real ; harmony of, found
in universal self-determination, 356-
361, and union of both in every
spirit, 369; their harmony a har-
mony of opposed aspects of rational
self-activity, 375, and not a harmony
by any " soft " determinism, 377.
Diihring, life-sketch of, 103, 104 ; ma-
terialist and optimist, 121 ; why
leading materialist, 122 ; maintains
The Actual, or world of sense, to
be the Absolute, 123; conceives
Actual as under polar union be-
tween Permanence andChange,i23,
124; reflects Hegel in this, or early
Greek philosophy, 123 note; iden-
tifies method and orgauon of phi-
INDEX
385
losophy with tliose of science, 125 ;
makes consciousness not copy of
things, but their real outgrowth,
reproducing world-process, 126;
seems reminiscent of Leibnitz, 127
note; his Natural Dialectic, i2j\
his attack on Kant's antinomies,
129; his universal logic, as me-
chanics of Nature. 130; his Three
Laws, as the key to all philosophy,
130; his Critical History of Me-
chanics, 130 note; rejects the prin-
ciple of persistence qf force, 131,
and the Darwinian " pseudo-law "
of struggle for life, 132 ; his Worth
of Life, 132; his optimistic results,
133 ; his principle of " cosmic emo-
tion," 134; his ethical principle,
135; his sociology, 135 scq. ; his
philosophy of history, 137 ; his phi-
losophy of religion, 138 ; his system
fails by construing the Absolute
with relative categories, 139, 140;
his attack on Kant no better than a
petitio, 140, 141 ; self-contradiction
of his ethics, 141, 142; his results
really egoistic and pessimistic, 142.
Edwards, Jonathan, key to his theo-
logical genius, 315 ; on consistent
predestinationism, 336 ; on freedom
as power to do, 338.
Emerson, on the omnipresent Power,
not to be eluded, 8 ; on the literally
creative power of art, 189 ; on the
unity between the Beautiful and
human nature, 190; on Time as
touchstone of poetic power, 216.
Empiricism, its method traced to its
real presuppositions, 34 seq., 273
seq. ; its method as employed and
construed by its experts, 83 seq.;
its self-dissolution, as seen through
Hume, 178.
Energy, Conservation of. [See Con-
servation of Energy.]
Eternity, not merely everlastingness,
351 seq. ; philosophic meaning of,
352 cf. 338-339.
Evil, natural, originates in the pure
2C
logic of self-definition, 362 seq.
367 ; mora!, consists in passive or
active acceptance of natural, 368 ;
junction of both with ideality,
source of sense of Alternative, 369
seq.
Evolution, World of Spirits (or idea-
listic pluralism) the ground of, xv ;
limited to phenomena, 13 seq.;
scientific, interrupted betv.'een In-
organic and Organic, 26, 27 ; also
between physiological and logical
genesis, 28 ; cannot cross gulf be-
tween Unknowable and explana-
tion, 29, 30; conception of, analysed
to its mental presuppositions, 31
seq. ; fact of, has proximate ground
in human nature, 31, 42; cannot
attain to noiimenal rsA'dix of mind,
43 seq. ; has direct ground in each
individual mind, 45; cannot ex-
plain, on contrary presupposes,
consciousness of Time, 46 cf. 18
seq.; grounded, indirectly, in total
world of minds, 48, 276, 352 seq.;
cannot explain genuine conscience,
49; grounded, ultimately, in a
Supreme Mind, or God, 49, 277,
355 ; seconding conservation of.
energy, suggests pantheism, 89
seq., but does not in fact require
this, 94 scq. ; implicate of, seems
ever-growing reasonableness of
things, 270 seq., but direct conclu-
sion from, as result, to rationality of
Eternal Cause invalid, 271 seq.;
method presupposed by, however,
makes indirect conclusion possible,
and demands it, 273 seq.
Evolutional Philosophy, discrimi-
nated from materialism, 2; a mode
of idealism, 2; takes two main
forms, 2; agnostic form of, char-
acterised, 2; idealistic monism, as
form of, 3 ; claims to supplant tra-
ditional religion, 4; relation of, to
Christianity, 4, 7, 50 seq.; destroys
reality of the person, 6; annuls
freedom, and moral value in im-
mortality, 7; reduces minds to
386
INDEX
mere effects (or else modes) of i
Absolute, 8; agnostic, makes lui- i
man person merely Jjhenomcnal,
14 ; same, rightly declares for Eter-
nal IJiDiind of tilings, 25, 29, 270
seq., and, with reserves, for a de-
velopment in rationality, 270, 271
seq. '
Experience, organised by a priori |
consciousness of individual minds,
xiii, 30 seq., 297 seq. ; direct objects
of, distinguished from noumenal
reality, 13; restriction of know-
ledge to, makes noumenal reality ,
unknowable, 16 seq. ; ii f>rior/ hctor
in, indicated, 17, and proved, 20 j
seq., 299 seq.; factor of limitation
in, 49,338; explanation of, as con-
stituent in every mind but God, 1
363 seq., 374.
Faith, basis of religion, in the Method
of Authority, 221, 222 ; religions of,
as distinguished from religions of
Hope, and the religion of Love,
254 ; only basis for theism attain-
able by agnostic evolutionism, 272;
exercise of, as " will to believe,"
di'fended by Prof. James, 284.
Fichte, the elder, question of his
pantheism, 63 »ofe.
Final Cause, God reigns by, xiii ;
supremacy of, key to Personal
Idealism, xvii; factor in explana-
tion of Nature, xxi ; not consistently
treated by Aristotle, xxiv ; condi-
tions conception of evolution, 38 ;
sole complete causalit}', because
alone free, 38 ; vital cord in notion
of evolution, 39 seq.; basis of
genuine omniscience and omnipo-
tence, 65 ; sole causal relation
between minds, 74; definition of,
348 ; only clue to harmonising
Divine supremacy and human
freedom, 348 seq.; as sole mode
of Divine causation, key to God's
adorable nature, 360 ; notably dealt
with by .Aristotle, but not com-
pletely, 364 seq. ; the fundamental
Cause of causes, 365 ; the essence
of freedom, 380.
Fiske, J., his /J,-a of God, in Concord
"symposium," 56 wo/c; his cautious
and correct slatemenl of evolu-
tional argument for theism, 272.
Fitz Gerald, translator of Omar
Khayyam, on pantheistic "subjec-
tivism " of existence, 3 ; on the
Unalterable f^ecord, 379.
Freedom, fundamental postulate of
Christianity, 7, 52, 74. 75, 257, 334,
335; annulled by all evolutional
philosophy, 7, 8; impossible, if
man is jjroduct of natural pro-
cesses, 51, 325; apparently dis-
credited by conservation of energy
and by evolution, 92, but not really
so, 96; essential to human good-
ness, and to govemment truly
divine, 317; not simply spontane-
ity, to exclusion of choice, but in-
clusive of both, 319 ; agents pos-
sessing, logically prior to Nature,
325; reality of, means pluralistic
idealism, 326; defined as eternity,
in sense of .self-activity transcend-
ing time, 329, 333, 338 seq., 351 seq.,
380; impos.siblc, if Divine causa-
tion is " efficient," 331 seq., 334,
339. 343; demand for moral world
is demand for, 337 ; involves power
to do, as well as to choose, 338 ;
defined as self-determination, in
the sense of self-definition, 351 seq.,
hence, as power to transcend sen-
sory Check, 366, 369, further, as
self-direction according to Ideal,
376; a principle of renewal and
reform, and so of Atonement,
377 ; contributed to by Fate, when
latter is kept to its proper realm,
379. [See Detertiiinism and Free-
dom i\
God, existence of, necessary in order
to other minds, xiii-xv, 49, 355;
immanence of, according to evolu-
tional philosophy, 2, 3 ; as imma-
nent, is efficient or producing cause.
INDEX
387
even of other minds, 6 seq. ; per-
sonality of, disappears in all evolu-
tional philosophy, 7 ; not personal,
unless in relation with other real
{i.e. free) persons, 7, 52; genuine,
omnipotence of, only realised by
his causation being purely final,
65 ; relation of, to souls, must be in
terms (i) of pure thought, and (2)
of final causality, 73 seq. ; implicitly
dispensed with by Schopenhauer,
107, and by Hartmann, 109, 119;
expressly so, by Diihring, 123, 138 ;
dissipated in the " Ideal " by Lange,
145, 155; transcends possibility of
presentation to the senses, 241 ;
early conception of, as Sovereign
Power, 252 ; Christian conception
of, as Father, or Impersonated
Love, 253 cf. 245 seq. ; central
member of the society of spirits,
256 ; governs by moral agencies
only, 258 ; recognises freedom of
other minds, 259, 268 ; not a bare
ideal, 269; reality of, implied by
tacit logic of scientific method, 272,
seq. ; supremacy of, whether com-
patible, under any view, with hu-
man freedom, 314 seq.; not the
direct, much less the sole, source
of natural world, 325, 326 ; the rul-
ing Ideal, 326 seq., cf. xiii seq.;
demanded by eternal system of free
persons, 351 ; proof of, by idealistic
pluralism, 352-356, and this proof
compared with Ontological Proof,
356-359 ; exists only as pi-imus
inter pares, 359 ; attributes of, in
light of eternal free system, 360,
361. [See Religion.']
Goethe, his stanzas on Art, modified,
193-
Good, the, the first principle of intelli-
gence, 40 note, 173 seq., 361 ; corre-
lation between, and the True and
the Beautiful, 193; distinction of,
from these, 194 seq.
Gordon, Dr. G. A., his views on
harmony of determinism and free-
dom, 314; his IngersoU Lecture,
314 note ; his estimate of Edwards,
315 seq.
Haeckel, not to be reckoned a ma-
terialist, 122 seq.
Harris, Dr. W. T., U. S. Commis-
sioner of Education, his connec-
tion with Hegel's Logic, xxvi ; his
part in Concord "symposium" on
pantheism, 56 note.
Hartmann, life-sketch of, 103; his
Philosophy of the Unconscious, 105;
mental heir of Schopenhauer, 105 ;
gives empirical method predomi-
nance, 105, 109; pessimism appar-
ently his chief motive, 109 ; his
basis of proof for Unconscious,
no; his tracing of its historical
recognition, no; attempts refuta-
tion of Kantian limitation of know-
ledge, III ; reminiscent of Spinoza,
III note ; makes Unconscious the
source of duplicate phenomenal
worlds. III seq.; holds Mystic and
Induction the two organs for know-
ledge of Unconscious, 112; makes
Unconscious a transcending union
of Will and Idea, 113 seq. ; asserts
preponderance of suffering over
happiness, 115; his Three Stages
of Illusion, 115, 116; maintains
being of world worse than its not
being, 116; implies highest ethical
precept is Make an end of it ! 116;
commends universal self-annihila-
tion as means for this, 117; his
philosophy of history, of politics,
of religion, 118-119; his theory
criticised, 120; his services, in com-
mon with Schopenhauer, 121.
Hedge, Dr. F. H., puts Leibnitz in
dubious company, 349 ; his monism
in religion, 350.
Hegel, monism of, and of his school,
ix; permanent debt of philosophy
to, xxvi ; pantheism of, questioned
but finally admitted, 63 note, and
confirmed, 67 note ; degeneration
of later German idealism from,
103; indirect debt to, on part of
388
INDEX
Hartmann, io6; misinterpreted by
Hartmann, 114 note; onc-sidcd
reminiscence of, in Duhring, 123
note ; Aesthetik of, followed in part,
187.
Heraclilus, among undoubted pan-
theists, 63.
Heredity, attempt to explain con-
sciousness of Time by, fails, 19
seq., 46 seq.
Hopkins, Dr. Mark, his signal inno-
vation in treatmc-nt of Christian
evidences, 265 tiote,
Hume, failure of, to recognise evolu-
tion, exposes Kant's rejoinder to
him to evolutional objections, 19,
but rejoinder holds, evolution not-
withstanding, 19, 20; supplies dras-
tic cure for agnosticism, through
his dissolution of empiricism, 176
seq.
Hu.\ley, implies non-evolutional ori-
gin of conscience, 49, cf. note 2.
Ideal, origin of, according to evolu-
tional philosophy, i ; spontaneous,
essential to the notion of evolution,
38 seq. ; as manifested in the three
Pure Ideals, 40; v\ith Lange, not a
philosophy, but a standpoint, 145 ;
substituted by Lange for Absolute,
146 seq.; made the meaning of
religion, 155 ; the, immanent in the
actual, 183 seq. ; function of, in art,
184 seq. ; the Supreme, of man and
Nature, inspirer and guide of gen-
uine art, 192; as object of joy,
defines the Beautiful, 198 ; free at-
traction of intelligence by its, 338;
action under self-recognised, consti-
tutes mind causa sui, 347 seq. ; sup-
plies key for proof of God's reality,
354 seq. ; correlation of, with defin-
ing Check, makes basis of proof
for monotheism, 363 seq.; same,
explains origin of Nature and pos-
sibility of sin, 366 seq. ; union of,
with actual, explains consciousness
of Alternative, 370 ; indwelling in-
fluence of, the essence of freedom
and of Atonement, 378, 380.
Idealism, pluralistic, or Personal,
explained, viii seq., and outlined,
xii-xviii ; liibtoric, generally imper-
sonal, viii, and at one with material-
ism and evolutionism in monistic
tendency, ix ; monistic, irreconcil-
able with personality, divine or
human, x; pluralistic, or Personal,
rests on spontaneity of all minds,
X, xi, asserts, for all, potential
knowledge, universal and complete,
xii, provides for moral order, xiii,
God, xiv, freedom, xiv, xv, and
evolution, xv, xvi, and means " eter-
nal reality of individual," xxvi; all
evolutional philosophy a mode of,
2 ; negative, or agnostic, sketched,
2; affirmative and evolutional, out-
lined, 3; complete and pluralistic,
outlined, 171 seq. ; one-sided, as
theory of art, 182; pluralistic, or
Personal, proved thoroughly theis-
tic, 351-359, and monotheistic, 362-
372.
Ideas, association of, see Association
of Ideas ; origin of, according to
Spencer, 18 seq., and as decisively
treated by Kant, 19 seq,, 297 seq.,
300 seq., 309 seq.
Imagination, source, according to
Lange, of metaphysics, of poetry,
of religion, 151, and comes from
transcendental illusion, 151 ; dis-
tinguished from Fancy, 185 ; strictly
creative nature of, 189 ; organic
function of, in art, 203, 205 ; essen-
tial and guiding factor in supersen-
sible man, 206; constructive and
developing principle in universe,
206.
Immortality, no genuine reached by
evolutional philosophy, 7, 43, 52;
chance left open for, in Cosmic
Theism, 43, 51; no worth in,
without moral freedom, 52; an
essential condition of fulfilled right-
eousness, 78-81 ; apparently dis-
credited by conservation of energy
INDEX
389
and by evolution, 87 seq., 92;
denied, consistently, by Schopen-
hauer, 108; alboby Hartmann, 115,
116; dispensed with by Duhring,
138 ; made vague hope by Lange,
152, 153; essential to fulfilment
of individuality as universe-con-
sciousness, 173 ; one of the Three
Truths constituting New Doctrine
of Jesus, 256; individual, alone
can satisfy us, 285-287 ; but not
reached by transmission-theory of
brain-function, 289-295; yet is pos-
sible on theory of simple concomi-
tance between brain and conscious
states, 295 seq. ; is involved in the
self as organiser of its own experi-
ence, 297 seq.; proved actual, by
a priori consciousness of Time,
303 seq.; and, more fully, by all-
conditioning relation of self to
Nature, 306; proved not simply
superiority to death, but utter im-
perishableness, 307 seq. ; shown
not mere continuance, but of abso-
lute rational worth, 309-312 ; pro-
vides for established dominance
of the spiritual over the natural,
374 seq.
Induction, philosophy of, as really
presupposing idealism, 34 seq., 98 ;
empirical theory of, as understood
by its practitioners, 83 seq., 85
note ; theistic implications in logic
of its method, 273 seq. ; valid, only
on idealistic view of reality, 275;
logic in method of, only leads,
directly, to imiversal rational na-
ture, 276 ; but, indirectly, to society
QiixdXxon-AXpersons, 276 ; and, finally,
to God, 277.
Intelligence, primarily vioral cogni-
tion, 38, 46, 73, 75, 174, 193, 276,
312, 353, 361 ; self-active, other
than God's, embraces a natural
world, 325, 363 seq., 365 seq.
James, Prof. W., his doctrine of
pluralism distinguished from Per-
sonal Idealism, .\i, xii; hypothetic
character (intentional) of his argu-
ment upon immortality, 280, 281 ;
his general philosophic aim char-
acterised, 284; his transmission-
theory fails to provide for individual
immortality, 285 seq.; makes indi-
vidual consciousness still depend
upon the brain, 290 seq. ; remedy
procedure for this defect in his
proposed, 295 seq., and explained
in detail, 299-312; his ambiguous
use of "chance," 322 vote; real
presupposition in his "judgment
of regret," 372 seq., 377 ; his " di-
lemma of determinism" not ex-
haustive of the alternatives, 378.
[See Immortality, and Determin-
ism.']
Jesus, in question between Reason
and Authority, must be assumed
real man, and to speak as man,
236 ; his zuord simply, capable of
proving what, 236, 237 ; conflict
of Method of Authority with spirit
of, 241-260; central insight of, a
new view upon nature of God and
God's relation to all souls, 243;
his " secret " a new Doctrine and
new Temper, 243, 244; his new
Doctrine rightly stated as presenta-
tion of God as exkaustless Love,
but not adequately, 246; his for-
ward theistic step not simply new,
but revolutionary, 251 ; replaces
conception of God as Sovereign
Power, and Awful Majesty, by
conception as Love Impersonated,
without condescension, without re-
serves, 253 seq., cf. 248 seq.; the
God of. Guide and Friend instead
of Lord, 254; his doctrine of man,
and all souls, their absolute reality,
in sense of their complete freedom
to seek equality with God 256 ;
his Three Truths — God the Per-
fect Person, Souls immortal. Souls
indeed free, 256, 257; key to his
Doctrine and his Temper alike,
this new view of men as free, 257
seq. ; his words, cited to the con-
390
INDEX
trary, uncritically misinterpreted,
a6o.
Jowetl, Piofcssor, on the De Imila-
fiotif, and its excessive type of
religion, 361, note I.
Kant, relations to, of Personal Idoal-
isni, xviii-xxii : shows experience
not simple, but complex, getting
"form" through a priori factor,
17, 297; his " a priori" cognition
not outflanked by Spencer's " happy
thought," 18 scq.; his reply to
Hume not invalidated by evolu-
tion, 19; first to expound cosmic
evolution in grand detail, 10 vote;
his implication true, that evolution
cannot produce our consciousness
of Time, 20 seq.; his "causality
with freedom " identified with Final
Cause, 38 ; rightly makes sensa-
tion point to noumena, 49 ; rejects
extravagant claims of scientific
method, 95 ; shows reason legisla-
tive over Nature, 98 iiote ; dis-
torted by Neo-Kantianism into
supporting empiricism, 102; his
Thing-in-itself identified with Will
by Schopenhauer, 107; and with
Unconscious by Hartmann, no;
his empirical limits of knowledge
attacked by latter, no, iii; his
"antinomies" assailed by Diih-
ring, 125-129; Fall back on, the
rallying-cry of Lange, 144, but his
" primacy of practical reason " is
denied, 146, and liis a priori settle-
ment of " elements " is shifted to
induction, 147; his Thing-in-itself
reduced to mere " limiting notion,"
149; same, erroneously confounded
with " things as they are^ 160 note ;
cited by Prof. James, on sense-
w'orld as restrictive of our think-
ing, 286; impugns Ontological
Proof, 356 ; his w-orld of " pure
reason," as embracing Nature
under it, 306, 366.
Knowledge, centres in conscience as
cognition of World of Spirits, xiii,
174-175. 310. 312. 353. 361 ; prob-
lem of its possibility the fundamen-
tal issue in philosophy, 17; petitio
regarding, made by agnostic evo-
lutionism, 17-21 ; contradictions
regarding, in same, 22-25 '. a priori,
proofs of, 46-47, 297 seq., 300-301,
306, 309, 310, 311-312; reality of a
priori, proves personal immortality,
29S, 302, 304 seq., 307, 308, 310, and
also worth of same, 309 seq., and
constitutes essence of real freedom,
322-323, 325, 329, 333, 362 seq.,
369-371. 373. 375. 380.
Lange, life-sketch of, 104 ; his History
of Materialism, 105, 143; his gen-
eral aim and its ethical motive, 143 ;
his return to Kant, 144; his recog-
nition of truth in materialism and
in idealism, 144, 145; makes the
Ideal notaphiloso])liy, but a stand-
point, 145, 146 ; states negative and
positive functions of philosophy,
146; criticises Kant, 146 seq.; at-
tacks Kant's " primacy of practical
reason," and his a priori settle-
ment of a priori elements, 147;
makes cognition and will wholly
phenomenal, 147; holds a priori
elements must be discovered by
induction, 147; adds motion to the
list of these, 147 ; counts sense-
world explicable on mechanical
principles, 148 ; declares Thing-in-
itself merely " limiting notion" 149 ;
makes " limits of knowledge of
Nature" limits of all knowledge,
149; considers our hypostasis of
" limiting notion " an organic illu-
sion, 150; hence makes metaphys-
ics, religion, poetry, sprung from
this illusion, all work of imagina-
tion, an effect of the " Ideal," 151;
holds balance between optimism
and pessimism, 152, 153 ; his ethics
chiefly fortitude and resignation,
154; his sociology a stern social-
ism, 154; his philosophy of reli-
gion a reduction to the bare Ideal,
INDEX
391
155; merits and defects of his
" standpoint of the Ideal," 155-159 ;
self-dissolution of his agnosticism,
159-169; his movement in fact es-
tablishes absolute quality in our
knowledge, 170, supplies a Critique
of all Scepticism, 170, and a defini-
tive Critique of all Materialisni,
171, cf. 148 7iofe ; in effect, opens
way to affirmative idealism, 171
seq. ; avoids this, by rejecting
Kant's " transcendental reflection,"
and substituting induction, as clue
to a priori, 175 seq. ; abandons,
thereby, Kant's standpoint, and re-
turns to Locke's, 176.
Le Conle, Prof. Joseph, his idealistic
philosophising of evolution, 7 ; his
treatment of evolution in interest
of immortality, 52; his theory of
the art-principle, 182-186 ; his rela-
tion, in this, to Schiller and Schell-
ing, 187 ; his view of the " mimetic "
arts, 207 ; his address at San Fran-
cisco Congress of Religion, 268
7iote.
Leibnitz, the only great modern mind
to break with monism, ix ; his troub-
lesome use of metaphor, xxiii ; re-
lations of Personal Idealism to his
system, xxiii, xxiv; his statement
of the principle of conservation,
88, cf. note ; rejects extravagant
claims of scientific method, 95;
reminiscence of, in Diihring, 127
note; accused of rendering God
superfluous, 349; in a dubious
context, in Hedge's Atheism in
Philosophy, 350.
Lotze, why not included in account
of later German philosophy, 122
note.
Love, divine as conceived by older
religions, only pity and condescen-
sion, 247 ; as conceived by Chris-
tianity, the unreserved offer of
complete sharing in divine life, 248
seq. ; governs by inner conviction
alone, 249 seq., yet admits of tran-
sient place for compulsion, 250;
implies recognition of individual
freedom, 256; God's, holds indi-
viduality and its mental initiative
sacred, 257 ; adequately defined, is
essential intelligence, source of all
other, 361.
Lowell, quoted as authority for " un-
beknown," 113 note.
Lutoslawski, Prof. W., as extreme
individualist, xi.
Martineau, Dr. James, on mystic
species of pantheism, quoting
Rolhe, 65 note.
Material Existence, defined as exper-
ience organised hy a priori mind,
xii-xiii ; is under a priori law of
evolution, xv, 40, 366, 375 ; its ori-
gin in the constitution and action
of non-divine self-consciousness,
338, 363 seq., 365 seq.
Materialism, its relations to panthe-
ism, 65 seq.; its subtle defense by
Diihring, 123-132; its services and
its shortcomings, according to
Lange, 144 seq.; its incapability of
proof, shown by agnosticism, 148,
168 ; its final impossibility, shown
by Lange, 170 seq.
Maurice, F. D., his view of key to
Edwards's genius, 315.
Mill, J. S., on the " final inexplicabil-
ity," 29; Lange compared with,
156.
Mind, coexistence of, with others,
means mutual logical implication,
xiii; equality of, with others, rests
on having common Ideal, xiii ; has
no literal origin, no time-beginning,
no efficient cause, xiv ; intrinsically
free, xiv, xv ; origin of, in efficient
causation, according to evolutional
philosophy, i, 6, 8, 44; but not so
originable, 40-41, 54. [See Person,
and Spirit!]
Miracle, apologetic misuse of, 70;
profound truth implied in doctrine
of, 70 note ; popular misinterpreta-
tion of, 70 note ; logical motive of
introducing into Apologetics, 238 ;
392
INDEX
weakness of, as resting at last on
human testimony and judgment,
239 seq., and as prosujiposing Na-
ture to depend on will of God, 240.
Muioschott, among materialists, 122.
Monotheism, pluralistic idealism
proved the only getniine, 362-372.
Montgomery, Dr. E., in Concord
"symposium" on pantheism, 56
note.
Morality, in strict sense, impossible
without real freedom, 329, 333, 351 ;
hence involves coeternity of souls
with God, 351 seq., cf. 338, 342,
343-
Nature, in essence, sum of organised
experiences of minds, xii-xiii ; joint
explanation of, by Etficient and by
Final Causation, xx-xxi ; not prop-
erly a cause, but only a transniis-
sive effect or aggregate of such
effects, 39; Its origin in the com-
plete self-definition of the individ-
ual, 306 seq., 362 seq.; factor in
every mind other than God, 362-
365; scene of ceaseless conflict be-
tween actual and ideal, 364, 366;
not in itself guilt, but carries risk of
sin, 367 seq.
Necessity, as nexus of phenomena,
issues from individual minds, 41-
45-
Neo-Hegelianism, its dubious rela-
tion to Darwinian theory, 4.
Neo-Kantianism, its singular reversal
of apriorism, 102 ; German school
of, prominent members in, 103
note.
Noumenon, distinguished from phe-
nomenon, 13 seq. ; the human per-
son not a, if evolutional philosophy
holds, 14, 43, 52; possibility of
knowing the, 15, 17, 24 seq., 168
seq. ; if knowable, must be Reason,
15, 170, 174 seq. ; reality of, neces-
sary to evolution, 22, 29 ; every real
mind must be a, xvi, 41, 44, 45, 333,
338 seq. ; interpreted as me.x¬ion,
and limiting notion, by Lange, 149,
160, 162; belief in, as tcil, held
organic illusion by same, 150, 163-
106, but in fact has source in each
mind's primal consciousness of
others, 174 seq.; final explanation
of, 175-
Oken, among undoubted pantheists,
63.
Omar Khaj^am. [See Fitz Gerald.']
Ontological Proof of God, historic
employers of, 356; impugned by
Kant, 356 ; not rehabilitated by He-
gel, 356; formalised by Anselm,
358 ; improved by Descartes, 358 ;
how related to proof by Personal
Idealism, 359, cf. 356 seq.
Pantheism, common confusion as to
its meaning, 58 ; distinguished from
theism and deism, 58, 69, 76; defi-
nition of, 62, 76; two forms of,
Atheistic and Acosmic, 62, both at
bottom atheisms, 64; relations of
chief philosophic systems to, 63, cf.
7iote ; relation of, to materialism
and to subjective idealism, 65-68 ;
theistic gains in, 68, 69; merit of, in
comparison with deism, 69, and
with sensuous theism, 71 ; contribu-
tion of, toward genuine theism, 72,
73; fatal shortcoming of, compared
with demands of religion, 75, 76;
contradicts real freedom, and im-
mortality with worth, 77 ; truth or
falsity of, not settled by this, but its
human significance is, 77-81 ; sug-
gested by modern science, (i)
through empirical method, 83-86,
(2) through this resulting in con-
servation and dissipation of energy,
and in evolution, 87-93; '^°^ really
warranted by science, 94-97 ; en-
tire neutrality toward, on part of
strict science, 97, 98 ; necessary, as
stage of thought preparatory to
genuine theism, 99; needs to be
transcended, 100.
Parallelism, Psychological, not strictly
construed by Prof. James, 295 ; ex-
INDEX
393
actly interpreted, is not obstacle,
but key, to personal immortality,
296 seq. ; concoraitancy of its two
streams explained by unity of Time
as pure act of soul, 300 seq.
Parmenides, among undoubted pan-
theists, 63.
Peabody, Dr. A. P., in Concord
"symposium" on pantheism, 56
note.
Person, sign and test of true, x; real,
disappears in all evolutional philos-
ophy, 6, 7 ; human, in same, merely
phenomenal, or else modal, 8, 43 ;
defined, by its essence, 52; the, sov-
ereign over Nature, 54, 306, 325 ;
each, focal point in universe of
minds, 172 seq.; to each, world-
whole somewise present, 173; each,
a transcending unity of subject and
cause, 174; each, in art, a literal
creator, 198 seq. ; divine functions
of each, in religion of Jesus, 255
seq. ; each, in same, recognised by
God as free, 256 ; self-active nature
of, proved, 299-302; every, es-
sentially social in root of self-con-
sciousness, xiii, 310-312, 359 ; how
numerated, in world of persons,
354, 363, note I ; the Supreme, de-
fined as God by eternal self-fulfil-
ment, 355 ; every, unrepeatable, 362
seq.; each, other than God, self-
defined against God, 363 cf. 355 ;
every, except God, joins two antag-
onistic natures in its unity, 364;
each, from this inner conflict, liable
to sin, 367; yet holds in its idealis-
ing freedom a recovering Atone-
ment, 376 seq.
Phenomena, evolution limited to, 13;
distinguished from noumena, 13
seq; minds not merely, proved by
analysis of notion Evolution, 44
seq., and by establishing a priori
cognition, 300 seq.
Plato, whether a pantheist, 63 note ;
rejects extravagant claims of scien-
tific method, 95 ; defines beauty as
unity in variety, 194; foreshadows
New Doctrine of Jesus, 244 ; criti-
cised by Aristotle, 365; his "en-
snared in the natural," 367.
Pluralism, as implied in Personal
Idealism, xi-xvii ; not to be con-
founded with utter individualism,
xi ; nor with disjunct world of em-
pirical agnosticism, xi, xii; nor
with theory of universal finitude,
.xii ; involves moral order, xiii ;
implied in genuine theism, 73
seq. ; sketched, as result of self-
dissolved agnosticism, 171 seq.;
illustrated in theory of art, 188 seq.,
199 ; pre-supposed in religion of
lesus, 256 seq., 326 ; implied in tacit
logic of induction, 276 ; basis of
proof for immortality, 304, 305,
367; requirt'd by the moral order,
333, 337 seq. ; not atheistic, 351-
359; not polytheistic nor " apei-
rotheistic," 362-372 ; solves the
" dilemma of determinism," 377
seq.
Poetry, its essential principle the
Real-Ideal, 183; its own end, 186,
191 seq., 201 seq. ; essence of, 203
seq., 211; highest of esemplastic
arts, 210 ; creates new and real in-
dividual, 211; differential trait of,
in contrast with other arts, 212 ;
not identical with verse, 213-216.
[See Art.l
Polytheism, system of eternal plural-
ism charged with, 340, 349, 361;
but proved not to involve, 362-372.
Pope, poet, on the pantheistic nature
of existence, 3.
Predestinationism, efficient theory of
Divine causation leads to, 333 seq.
Realism, as one-sided theory of art,
183, 191, 200.
Reality, ultimate, the existence of
minds, xii ; derivative, the exist-
ence of their experiences, xiii ; as
first reached by metaphysical cog-
nition, is human mind, 31 seq.;
necessary and sufficient condition
of, consensus of all minds, 170 ; of
394
INDEX
otlicr selves, involved in all self-
definition, 310, 31a, 353.
RtMsoii, as knowable Noumcnon, 15 ;
the true divine revelation, 225, 268-
277; as method with religion, not
peeuliar to Protestantism, nor con-
fined to unbelievers, 226-230, but
alone fulfils the meaning of Jesus,
242-260; not confined to judgments
of sense, 225, 262; this proved in
detail, 267-277. [See Religioti.\
Religion, possible views of relation
of reason to, 217 scq. ; two opposed
theories of reason's antagonism to,
217-218; three doctrines. Old,
Middle, New, of reason's possible
harmony with, 219-224; two meth-
ods with, — Method of Authority,
Method of Reason, 226; this di-
vergence about, not to be con-
founded with Romanism vs. Pro-
testantism, nor with Christianity w.
Infidelity, etc., 226-230; Method
of Authority fails in, (i) because
self-contradictory, 230 seq., (2) be-
cause unable to veiify directly pre-
sent God, 233 seq., (3) because at
war with essential spirit of Chris-
tianity, 241 seq., 259 seq.; essence
of Christian, or " secret of Jesus,"
243-258 ; doctrine of Christian,
foreshadowed in Hellenic thought,
but its tone and temper not reached,
244; Christian insight in, failed of
also by Judaism, 252 seq.; con-
tents of, must be determined by
reason, 261, as Method of Author-
ity itself tacitly implies, 263, and
ever-increasing reliance on Inter-
nal Evidence shows, 264 seq. ; his-
torical development of, shows man-
ifest and constant growth in using
Method of Reason, 266; broadest
and deepest definitions of, 267,
268; common fallacy in arguments
for, on basis of evolution, 270-272;
highest form of, presupposed in
tacit logic of scientific method, 273-
277. [See Reason, and iMve^
Responsibility, individual, disappears
by logic of evolutional philosophy,
7, 51 ; requires an eternal Plural-
ism, 328 seq., 337 seq., 342 seq.
Rothe, on pantheistic Mysticism, 65
note,
Royce, Prof. J., on uncertainty of
immortality, 43, note i ; admits, in
effect, opposition of Cosmic The-
ism to strict freedom of individual,
43, note 2 ; charges pluralistic ideal-
ism with atheism or else polythe-
ism, 349.
Ruskin, on criterion of "greatest
artist," 201.
Salvation, real meaning of, 315; ulti-
mately universal, 315, 373 seq.,
375-377 ; indwelling source of, 379,
380.
Schelling, among undoubted panthe-
ists, 63; his " A'eulrum" as bearing
on Hartmann's " Unconscious,"
113; his theory of art, germ of Le
Conte's, 187; his title " csemplas-
tic," for fine arts, 205, 215.
Schiller, poet, on art theory, influ-
ences Le Conte, 187; on art as
man's prerogative, 199.
Schiller, F. C. S., his special form of
pluralism, universal finitude, xii.
Schopenhauer, his wide sphere in
later Germany, 105; his influence
upon Hartmann, 105, 106; his doc-
trine of Thing-in-itself as Will, 107 ;
his pessimism, 107, 108; sum of his
ethics, 108; his atheistic religion,
108 ; his service to philosophy, 121.
Science, Natural, cannot settle ques-
tion of limits in evolution, 9^12;
evidence of, comes short of widest
universals, 9, 11 ; method of, as
viewed by philosophy, 34, 35 ; can-
not explain human nature, 49,
54; within its own limits, com-
pletely compatible with religion , 54 ;
method of, as naturally construed
by its practitioners, 83-85 ; seeming
pantheistic drift of, (i) through its
method, 85 seq., (2) through its
chief results, 87-93; "modern,"
INDEX
395
restricted to experimental science
of Nature, 94 ; cannot solve prob-
lem of limits of knowledge, 96;
outside its own limits, entirely neu-
tral, 97 ; its real presupposition the
primacy of mind over Nature, 98 ;
its function in religion, only corrob-
orative, 99 ; tacit logic of, presup-
poses theism, 273-277.
Scotus, Duns, his system of arbitrary
predestinationism, 333.
Selection, Natural, only metaphori-
cal, 90; eventually, only to death,
91.
Self-consciousness, at bottom a con-
science, 175, 310 seq., 353.
Self-definition, involves reference to
other real selves, 353; number of
the minds determined by, 354, 363
7iote.
Shakespeare, on life as illusion and
dream, 159; on poesy as strict cre-
ation, 189.
Shelley, on life as staining the eter-
nal light, 281.
Sin, origin of 367 ; is passive or ac-
tive acceptance of defect, 368 cf.
note ; fuller definitions of, 370, 371,
376; is grounded in freedom, 371,
373 ; is freedom's self-dishonour,
376 ; profounder freedom the eter-
nal Atonement for, 377, 378.
Socrates, in doctrine, precursor of
Jesus, 244; in spirit, comes short
of him, 244.
Space. [See Time and Spacc.\
Spencer, his philosophy an expres-
sion of new consensus of the times,
4; limits evolution to phenomena,
13; holds to empirical origin and
limits of all ideas, 17 ; would ex-
plain necessary ideas away by evo-
lution, 18; his "happy thought"
fails to dispose of Kant, 19-21 ;
falls into contradiction by use of
his "criterion of truth," 23 scq. ;
rightly makes Noumenal Energy
essential to evolution, 25, 29; his
" criterion " proves necessity and
infinity of I'ime, 47.
Spinoza, whether a pantheist, 63 note ;
rejects extravagant claims of scien-
tific method, 95; reminiscence of,
in Hartmann, iii; his infinitum
imaginationis, 127 ; on causa sui
and the eternal, 339.
Spirits, World of, the true Unmoved
Mover, xv ; the true meaning of
consciousness, 172; involved in
self-definition, 353; object of the
Vision Beatific, 361. [See Mind,
and PersonP\
Stewart, Balfour, on " waste-heap "
of cosmic energy, 89.
Stoics, among undoubted pantheists,
63 ; their " City of God," 361.
Struggle for Existence, the metaphor
in, 90; discredit of, by Duhring,
132.
Survival of Fittest, like " natural se-
lection" an extravagant metaphor,
90; in end, only true of Whole,
91 ; seems thus to mean panthe-
ism, 91.
Tennyson, on limitation of know-
ledge, 16 ; on futility of life without
immortality. So, 81; on mystic
union of Beauty, Good, and
Knowledge, 193 ; on nature of
God, 360.
Theism, pure, definition of, 58 cf.
61; Christian, epitomised, 73 ; plu-
ralistic in its interpretation of Di-
vine immanence, 73, 74 ; distinction
of, from pantheism, 76; Christian,
requires method of Conviction,
instead of Authority, 241-260; pre-
supposed in tacit logic of scientific
method, 273-277 ; proved, by logi-
cal implications of eternal plural-
ism, 351-359.
Theism, Cosmic. [See Cosmic The-
ism^
Time and Space, due to essential
coexistence of minds, xiii ; con-
sciousness of, proved to be a prion
by Kant, 19-21 ; why not general-
isations, ig; not capable of pro-
duction by evolution, 20; shown
396
INDEX
prerequisite to evolution, 32 cf. 18;
again proved to be a priori, 46
scq., 300 seq., 306 scq.
Universal, the, scientific method
comes short of, 9, 11, 85, 176, 274.
Unknowable, The, evolutional philos-
ophy of, 2 ; represented as pro-
ducing cause of all minds, 6 ;
self-contradictory, 23, 25; not ex-
planatory, 29 seq.
Vaihinger, Prof. H., as Neo-Kantian,
103 note ; as extreme agnostic, later
modified, 156, cf. note ; on Lange's
ethical melancholy, 157.
Vanini, among undoubted pantheists,
63.
Vogt, Carl, among materialists, 122.
Wortli, copniscd a priori, in form of
the three Pure Ideals, 308; hence,
provides for ideal character of im-
mortal life, 310 seq.
Wundt, Prof. W., on Hartmann's
philosophy, inter alia, 121 note.
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