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PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
THE
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
A CRITICAL AXD SPECLXATR'E TREATISE OF M.^^'S
RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE -\ND DEVELOPilENT
IX THE LIGHT OF MODERN* SCIENXE
-\ND REFLECTR'E THINKIXG
BY
GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD, LL.D.
FORMERLY PT.OFESSOR OF PHH.050PHY IX YALE UXIVERSITY
VOLUME II
XEw tore:
CHARLES SCREBNER'S SONS
1905
Copyright, 1905,
Bt Charles Sckibneb's Sons
Published, October, 1905.
"All living Things are indebted to Thy goodness,
. . . . It is Thou alone, O Lord, who art the
true Parent of all things." Prayer to Shaxg Ti.
" Among themselves all things
Have order; and from hence the form, which makes
The Universe resemble God." Da^tte.
"Is not God i' the world His power first made?
Is not His love at issue stiU with sin,
Visibly when a wrong is done on'*i^rtH?^' ' ' ' ■ &rdw:-,"jxg.
CONTENTS OF VOLUME II
PART IV
GOD: THE OBJECT OF RELIGIOUS FAITH
CHAPTER XXVI
importance of the conception
Page
The Change in Point of View — The Conception of Divine Being — Its
Influence on Morals — and on Social and Political Life — Positive
Content of the Christian Conception — Influence on Philosophical
Development — God, the Central Problem of Religion — Indiffer-
entism, Syncretism, and Agnosticism — The Removal of Prejudice 3
CHAPTER XXVII
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE
The Two Problems involved — Knowledge and Faith distinguished —
Conception of the " Unknowable " — Theory of Rational Intuition
— The "Vision of God" — -The so-called "God-Consciousness" —
The Claim of Demonstration — The Experience of the Race — An-
thropomorphism again 21
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED
Use of the Word "Proof" — The Ontological Argument — Anselm and
Descartes — The Cosmoiogical Argument — The Conception of a
World-Ground — The Teleological Argument — Conception of Uni-
versal Order — The Moral Argument — The Argument from Human
Ideals 45
CHAPTER XXIX
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED
Necessity for Criticism — The Nature of the Task — Further as to the
Conception of a World-Ground — The Unity of Reality — Force
expressive of Will — Immanence of Mind — Will and Mind as Con-
scious — Negative Conception of the Unconscious — PossibiUty of
viii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
an Absolute Self-Consciousne: - Bearing of the Categories — The
Personal Absolute — God as Ethical Being — Conception of Per-
sonal Life 66
CHAPTER XXX
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE
Purely Negative Notions Valueless — The Absolute not the Unrelated
— The Infinite not the Unknowable — Adjective Nature of the
Terms — Quantitative Meaning inapplicable to Persons — The Ab-
soluteness of Self-hood — Ideal Being of the World-Ground . . . 107
CHAPTER XXXI
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES
Meaning of the Term — Conception of Onmipotence — of Omnipresence
— and of Eternity — The Divine Omniscience — Nature of Time-
Consciousness — Self-Consciousness and Other-Consciousness of God
— The Unity of God 122
CHAPTER XXXII
THE PnOBLEM OF EVIL
Deficiencies in the Conception of Personal Absolute — The Problem of
Evil unsolvable — Estimates of Happiness and Misery — Estimates
of Moral Evil — Pain as Means of Development — The Defects of
the "Medicinal Theory" — Problem of EvQ as a Theodicy — Help
from the Theory of Development — The Answer of Ethical Dualism
— The Answer of Monistic Philosophy — Bruhmanism and Bud-
dhism — The Christian Answer — The Individual and the World . 146
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES
God as Ethical Spirit — The Divine Justice — Belief in its Perfection
— The Attribute of Goodness — Christian Conception of God —
The Stoical Conception — The Logos Doctrine — Religious Pessi-
mism — Perfection of the Divine Moral Attributes 177
CHAPTER XXXIV
HOLINESS AND PEnFECTION. OF GOD
Unethical Conceptions of Holiness — The Ideal of Ethics — Jesus' Con-
ception of Purity — Defects of Ilifltorical Christianity — The Divine
Wiwlom — Union of the Metaphysical IVodirafos and Moral At-
tributes — God as the Ideal-Real — Absolute Will as perfect Good-
WUl 200
TABLE OF CONTENTS ix
PART V
GOD AND THE WORLD
CHAPTER XXXV
the theistic position
Page
Reality of the Divine Relations — The Concept of Relation — The Rela-
tions of Dependence and of Manifestation — The Figurative Speech
of Theism — The Conflict between Theism and Science — The Rec-
onciliation of Science and Theology — The two Forms of Denial . 221
CHAPTER XXXVI
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM
The Denial of Agnosticism — Religious and anti-Religious Agnosticism
— The Content of Truth — Materialism — The modem Conception
of Mechanism — Failure of Mechanism as a Principle — A Develop-
ing Mechanism — The Position of Pantheism — The Conception of
Identification — The Truth of Pantheism — The Supremacy of Per-
sonal Being 237
CHAPTER XXXVII
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL
Complexity of the Terms employed — The Existing Conceptions —
Distinction between the Two — The Standpoint of Science — Limits
to the Conception of Nature — Deficiencies of the Naturalistic View
— God as the Supernatural — Immanency and Transcendency —
Jesus' View of Nature — Reconciliation of the two Conceptions —
Return to the Conception of A Personal Absolute 264
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THEISM AND EVOLUTION
The Tenet of Evolution — The Modem Conflict — The Two Forms of
the Theory — Materialistic Evolution — Evolution as Descriptive
History — The Metaphysical Assumptions of Science — Reconcilia-
tion of Science and Faith" — The Conception of Development as
applied to Divine Being — God as Personal Absolute and Ethical
Spirit 290
X TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER XXXIX
OOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER
Page
Early Beliefs in "Creator Gods" — ^ Ancient Cosmogonies — Special
Relation of Man — God as Creator, ITpholder, and Destroyer — The
Old-Testament View — The Doctrine of the Logos — Time and
Manner of Creation — Creation and Development — Idealism and
Realism — Progressive Making of the "Over-Man" 314
CHAPTER XL
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE
Necessity for Ethical Conceptions — Absolute and Finite Wills — The
Fact of related Self-Activity — Conception of God as Moral Ruler
— Nature of a Moral Unity — Theanthropic and Theocratic Re-
ligions — Deity as perfect Moral Reason — Perfection of the Divine
Rule — Method of the Divine Rule — God in Nature and Human
Society — Doctrine of Universal Providence — The Supernatural
in Nature — Corollaries as to the Place of Prayer 344
CHAPTER XLI
GOD AS REDEEMER
Religions of Salvation — Need of Redemption — The Conflict in Human
Nature — Conception of a Mediator — Doctrines of Hinduism and
Buddhism — Divine Redemption in Judaism — Christian \'ie\v of
God as Redeemer — Significance of Jes\is' Death — Reality of the
Divine Redemption — The Witness of Experience — The New Life
in God 382
CHAPTER XLII
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION
Religion as Revelation — Source, Subject, and Object of Revelation —
Its Historiral Nature — The P.sychology of Revelation - Means
of Revelation — Significance of Human Speech — Inspiration de-
fined — A Relation lictwcen Persons — The Men of Revelation —
Christianity as Divine Self-Revealing — The Doctrine of Ins|>ired
Scriptures - The Miracle as Means of Revelation — False and
True Conceptions of the Miraculous — Place of the Miraculous —
The Modus Operandi of Revelation and Inspiration — Religion as
the "Psychic Uplift" of the Race JIO
TABLE OF CONTENTS xi
PART VI
THE DESTINY OF MAN
CHAPTER XLIII
the future of religion
Page
The two Forms of Optimism — Religion and Race-Culture — Office of
the Christian Church — "The Irreligion of the Future" — The Per-
manence of Essentials — Universality and Absoluteness of Chris-
tianity—The Rival Religions — The Final Testing 453
CHAPTER XLIV
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Belief in Existence after Death — Causes for this Belief — The "On-
tological Consciousness" again — Connection with Ancestor-Wor-
ship — Various Conceptions of the Soul — Lower Historical Forms
of the Belief — The Doctrine of Karma — Egyptian Notions —
Other Ancient Views — Greek Doctrine of Man — The Early He-
brew Conceptions — Old-Testament Doctrine — Later Judaism —
The Doctrine of Jesus — and of the New-Testament — Later Chris-
tian Developments 479
CHAPTER XLV
THE IMMORTALITY OP THE INDIVIDUAL [CONTINUED]
Naturalness of the Belief in Immortality — Separability of the Soul
from the Body — The two Ways of Believing — Modern Objections
to the Doctrine — The Objections Answered — Conclusion from
the Biological Standpoint — The Primacy of Psychical Life — The
Problem of Developed Selfhood — Arguments against Natural In-
destructibility — Reality of the Self — Value of the Self — The
Positive Arguments — Significance of the Individual — The Guar-
anty of the Moral Being of God — The Witness of Religious Ex-
perience— The Assurance of the Christian Hope — Concluding
Deductions 516
CHAPTER XLVI
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE
The Conflict of Different Religions — The Christian Conception of the
Divine Kingdom — The Conception of the Church Universal — The
xii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Uncertainties of Scientific Prediction — The Social Ideal — Rising
Spirituality of the Race — The Triumph of the Divine Kingdom . 550
CHAPTER XLVII
SUMMARY AND COXCLUSIOX
Man as potential Son of God — Reality of the Religious Ideal — The
Being of the World as perfect Ethical Spirit — The Harmony of
the Totality of Spiritual Experience 567
PART lY
GOD : THE OBJECT OF RELIGIOUS FAITH
"Blessed are the pure in heart ; for they shall see God." Jesus.
"Worthy art thou, our Lord and our God, to receive the glory, and the honor
and the power; for thou didst create all things, and because of thy unll they
were, and were created." Apocalypse.
"/ vlHI pass then beyond this power of my nature also, ri.'iing by degrees
unto Him who made me ... . Yea, I will pa^s beyond it, that I may approach
unto Thee, 0 sweet Light." Augustine.
" Whom shall we worship but Him, who is the sole King of the seeing and
living creation ? " RiG Veda.
"There is only one thing needful; to know God." Amiel.
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
PART lY
GOD : THE OBJECT OF RELIGIOUS FAITH
CHAPTER XXVI
EMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION
A certain obvious change in the point of view and in the
method of discussion now becomes necessary in order to make
further progress toward a systematic and satisfactory treatment
of the more important problems of the philosophy of religion.
The method of the phenomenology of man's religious experience
is comparative, historical, and psychological. But the method
for determining the truth of these phenomena is critical, syn-
thetic, speculative. As was explained with sufficient fullness in
the last chapter, it is therefore proposed from this point onward
to subject the religious conceptions, beliefs, sentiments, and
practices which humanity has cherished — especially in the
form which they have attained as the result of their highest
development in the past — to the judgment of that supreme
court which universal reason provides.
It is fitting, then, that we should remind ourselves anew of
certain rights which may be considered as already guaranteed,
and not less of certain duties which are both enjoined and de-
manded. Among the former the chief and most comprehen-
sive is the right of the religious experience of the race to fair
4 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and sympathetic treatment from the rational points of view
and by the method of systematic philosophy. Such treatment
guards the conclusions of historical and psychological study
against the more general objections of Agnosticism and Posi-
tivism. As to the abstract possibility of establishing any truth
whatever respecting the realities of man's religious knowledge
or religious faith, the philosophy of religion is under no obli-
gation to argue. This important aspect of human experience
has the same rights as any other to be defended by the critical
studies of epistemology and metaphysics. And we cannot
keep on raising the question over and over again, whether man
can know anything worthy of being called " real," in the fullest
possible ontological signification of that very misty and much
abused word. What we have said in other works, and in cer-
tain chapters of this treatise on religion,^ must suffice to explain
our confidence in the possibility of attaining truth about God
and about man's relations to Him, through the complex but
disciplined activities of man's rational nature.
As to any more definite conception of the Object of religious
faith, whether framed from the point of view held by some one
of the world's great religions or by some one of its various
schools of religious philosophy, the case is by no means the
same. The appropriate and the supremely difficult task of
the critical and speculative method of philosophy is directed
toward every such conception ; the special purpose of the
philosophy of religion is accomplished when some one of them
all is seen to unite most harmoniously and perfectly with that
conception of the Being of the World which is particularly
favored by modern science and reflective tliinking. For ex-
ample, doubt, or the agnostic position toward the problem of
attributing certain moral characteristics to this Being, and,
indeed, toward the effort to unite such conceptions as those of
1 Especially in the "Philosophy of Knowledge" (chap. XVIII and XXI),
and "A Theory of Reality" (chap. XVIII and XIX); and in chapters
XII-XIV of Volume I of this work.
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 5
" the Infinite," " the Absolute," with the fundamental attri-
butions of an ethically perfect Personal Spirit, must be met
by argument and as far as possible removed. It is, then, with
the faith of reason in itself, and yet with a faith which is
chastened by a knowledge of its own limitations, that all fur-
ther approach should be made to the discussion of the problems
before us.
Among the several investigations which the phenomena of
man's religious life and development imperatively demand,
that necessary for validating the religious doctrine of the Divine
Being stands preeminent. Is the conception of God as Abso-
lute and also perfect Ethical Spirit able to maintain itself in the
full light of modern science and modern philosophy ? It is well
to enter upon this investigation with some preliminary apprecia-
tion of its importance for a system of religious philosophy.
The importance of the conception of Divine Being, both for
thought and for life, follows from the very nature of religion
itself. This is true whether we consider religion in its aspect
of belief, or of feeling, or of practice. It is also true if we
consider any particular religion from the point of view of its
development and of the reciprocal reactions between it and the
other related factors of an advancing race-culture. " Now the
character of a religion," says Tiele,^ " and, therefore, also the
direction of its development, depend chiefly upon the concep-
tion which people form of their god or gods, their conception
of what the deity is toward man, and conversely of man's re-
lation to the deity, and of the relation of God, and therefore of
God-serving man also, to the world of phenomena.'' In the
lower, and even in the lowest forms of religious belief, this in-
timate and influential connection is manifest. Wherever the
mysterious, bodeful, and harmful side of nature is deified, and
her superhuman powers are regarded as embodied in poisonous
serpents and ravenous beasts, in destructive storm, or blight
on the crops, or in diseases of men and animals, there we have
1 Elements of the Science of Religion, First Series, p. 752.
6 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
superetitious and magical propitiatory rites, to restrict human
life in its activities by manifold tabus and to make it miserable
with sordid feare. Darkness and cruelty among men correspond
to the dark and cruel conceptions of the superhuman powers
which are over man. When, however, the conception of these
superhuman powers is more helpful and kindly, the beneficent
effect upon the entire life, even of savage or half-civilized
man, through this channel of religious belief is most obvious.
Among peoples who have attained a relatively high degree
of artistic and scientific development, the same important
influence from the conception which the multitude entertain of
their gods, or of their supreme God, remains in force. This
might be illustrated by a comparison of the attitude of mind
toward life, and of the social customs, prevalent in Japan
to-day, with those of the South-Sea Islands or of portions
of Central or Southern Africa, In the former country the
early conception of the gods answering to the word Ifami,
while not of a lofty spiritual and moral character, was of beings
that awakened a certain respect, and kindly sentiments of a
mysterious and quasi-i:esthetieaX quality. Our previous re-
searches have shown how in nominally Christian lands, great
multitudes of the people still cling to these more primitive
superstitions in their conception of the superhuman powera ;
and in this way are their lives profoundly influenced.
Special instances might be noticed to illustrate the influence
of the conception of Divine Being upon the morals of sex and
of eating and drinking ; — for example, the effect of the ideas
respecting Astarte among the Phoenicians and Aphrodite
among the Greeks ; or of phallic worship in " Old Japan "
and of the worship of the lingam in India to-day. The
" liquor-cult " among the early Aryan peoples was undoubt-
edly more truly religious and less degrading morally than our
modern ideas on such subjects niiglit lead us to suppose ; but
we can scarcely believe the worship of the intoxicating juice
of the Soma-plant as " wisest in underatanding," and as a
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 7
guide " along the straightest pathway," to have been devoid
of baleful influence. As to the somewhat similar cult of
Bacchus among the Greeks there is even less doubt.
The influence of the conception of Divine Being upon all
the religious and social life of any people is illustrated in a
notable way by the worship of the greater nature-gods, — es-
pecially of the Sun. Among the early Aryans, where this
luminary was conceived of as the deva, or divine One, the
shining god par excellence, the god of life who bestows chil-
dren, " the active force, the power that wakens, arouses, en-
livens," and the giver of all good things to mortals and to
gods, sun-worship contributed a variety of uplifting spiritual
impulses to the entire life of the people. Thus he is prayed
to as a purifying force : " Do thou from that (viz., foolishness
and human insolence), O Savitar, make us here sinless." So
in Egypt, the sun, deified as the god of light, became a sym-
bol, and to a certain extent a source, of moral illumination
and purifying. Among the unreflecting but warlike and cruel
Aztecs, however, the worship of the sun, regarded as lord of
life and death, bore quite different fruitage. It was to their
sacrifices to the sun that they attributed their successes in war
and the prosperity of the empire. Never did the " imperialis-
tic " conception of the Supreme Being among a warlike and
cruel race bear witness more unmistakably to its own potently
bad influence over social and political affairs. They " pushed
the superstitious practice of human sacrifice to absolute
frenzy." In " the abode " of this god the Spaniards could
count 136,000 symmetrically piled skulls of the victims sac-
rificed since the founding of the sanctuary. But even this
number is small compared with that which might be counted
on the battle-fields on which have fallen the victims of the
conception of Jehovah, or of the Christian God, as the relent-
less " God of Battles."
The important influence over all the social and political life
of the people, both for good and for evil, which flows from the
8 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
more elaborate forms of ancestor-worship in China and Japan
has already been sufficiently illustrated.^ The conservative
power over tlie Chinese whicli their conception of Divine Be-
ing has exercised is almost incalculable.
The scope and strength of the relation between the concep-
tion of the gods, or of God, and all the other tenets of religious
belief and tlie practices of religious life, as well as the influence
of the same conception upon every important factor in race-
culture, increases with the height in the scale of development
reached by any particular religion. The whole religious, so-
cial, and political history of Israel has justly been declared to
be " virtually a development in the idea of God." Where, as in
Buddhism and in much of Hinduism, this idea is characterized
by vagueness and mysticism, such as are descriptive of the
Oriental temperament and habit of meditative thinking, its
very negative character, when considered from the logical
point of view, becomes a powerful and positive influence over
the opinions and practices of the people. It would be difficult
better to describe all this for one who can read between the
lines than to reflect upon the declaration attributed to him who
became " enlightened." " There is, O disciples, something not
born, not originated, not made, not formed. If, O disciples,
there were not this not-born, not-originated, not-made, not-
formed, there would be no escape from the born, the originated,
the formed, the made." (In the Udana, viii, 3.)
Above all in Christianity it is the positive content of its con-
ception of personal life as applied to God, and of personal re-
lations as existing between man and God, which chiefly deter-
mines its superiority over all other religions. Tliis is true,
as respects both tlie satisfactions whicli it affords to the intellect
and to the sentiments, and also as respects the influence which
it exerts over the social and political institutions and life of
the people. We have already seen (Vol. I, pp. 205/f.) how this
conception arose and developed. It derived from that branch
1 Vol. I, pp. 103/7.
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 9
of Semitic religions which Judaism produced, the conception
of Divine Being as the fount and guardian of righteousness.
It owes to the personal experience and unique religious insight
of Jesus that modification of its contents, as they had ripened
and matured in the later Judaism, which brought it near to the
affections of the human heart and immensely increased its
comforting and purifying power. But it also derived from
Greek reflective thinking certain elements which increased its
potency and charm as a stimulus to the imagination and a su-
preme satisfaction to man's aspirations after the highest truths
within the grasp of his rational activities. Where it has been
most free from those superstitious elements that emerge out of
the darkness of primitive times and linger in the beliefs, sen-
timents, and practices, even of Christian communities, and
from those defects of the Judaistic conception which religious
experience has hitherto not quite succeeded in displacing, this
conception of God as perfect Ethical Spirit has been a meas-
ureless influence for good to the modern world.
In subsequent chapters it will be made clear how the con-
ception of God logically and practically determines one's atti-
tude toward all the other principal problems of the philosophy
of religion. Its reciprocal relations with the problem of evil
are obvious at once and from the very nature of this problem.
Without attaining the knowledge or rational faith in the per-
fect divine wisdom and goodness, the problem of evil admits of
no hopeful answer, not to say satisfactory solution. But, on
the other hand, this very problem, when considered from the
historical and ^'Mast-scientific points of view, is the most difli-
cult obstacle in the path to such a faith. Hence it comes about
that all human conceptions of what is really good and really
evil, of the forces and laws which the ethical evolution of the
race exhibits, of the goal of this evolution, and of the prospect
of reaching this goal, are interdependently related to the con-
ception of God. All problems of good and evil — every kind
of good and every kind of evil — are influenced as respects both
10 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the method employed and the conclusions reached in their at-
tempted solution, by our beliefs regarding the nature of that
Being of the World, which religious faith calls God.
The same important relation exists, as a matter of course,
to influence all such contentions of science and religion as are
raised over " nature " and " the supernatural," law and miracle,
order and so-called " intervention ; " and to decide all such in-
quiries as concern themselves with revelation, inspiration, and
sacred scripture, in view of the conceptions which the contestants
entertain as to the Divine predicates and attributes. For these
predicates and attributes are little else than religion's way of
conceiving of the dependence of the physical universe and of the
history of the race upon the Divine Being. What God is, must
be judged by what God seems to be doing in the universe of
things and minds. And what the rational procedure in such
questions can conceive of him as doing, depends much upon
the conception already formed as to his Being, when the ques-
tions themselves are first approached. All this, to be sure, in-
volves a certain logical circle in conception and in argument.
But it is only the same kind of an apparent circle as describes
the form of all human advances in knowledge. It is the ap-
parent return upon itself of the uprising spiral curve.
The importance of the conception of God, in its influence
upon all religious thought and religious life, and even upon
the social and philosophical development of the race, will also
appear in a somewhat startling way when we come to say
the few words which can safely be said upon the problems of
the immortality of the individual and the destiny of the race.
The Universal Life can never be conceived of in any particular
wa}'' without carrying along with the process not a few as-
sumptions and factors which determine the tenets to which
our rational thinking must hold respecting the nature and
final purpose of human life. Neither the descriptive history of
the past, nor any deductive theory from the conceptions which
such a history supports, can afford a wholly satisfactory basis
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 11
for that hope and faith which the religious nature of man
craves and even demands. As a man conceives of God, the
Fountain and Author of Life, so will he believe, with more or
less assurance of conviction, respecting the life hereafter of
the individual and of the race.
But the importance of forming a rational and defensible
conception of God is even greater and more obvious for the
philosophy of religion than for the religious life and religious
development of man, so far as these can be considered inde-
pendently of philosophy. It is the unifying and systematizing
instinct and practice of the reason which makes itself felt here.
It is, indeed, a mistaken and narrowing view of the philosophy of
religion which defines it as the investigation of the foundations
of the conception of Deity " in the principles of belief as ap-
plied to the data produced by science and philosophy." ^ Nor
is any complete identification of the philosophy of religion with
Theism and with the critical examination of anti-theistic theories
satisfactory. Yet this tendency to concentrate reflection and
speculation upon the treatment of the problem of the Divine
Being, as this problem appears in the light of modern evolu-
tionary science and agnostic or positivistic philosophy, is sig-
nificant of an important truth. It is, indeed, impossible to de-
termine the true conception of God by the critical and specu-
lative processes of philosophy, in independence of the facts and
laws of man's religious development. Emphatically true is it
— to repeat the conclusions of our study of the phenomena —
that no man can separate himself from the race in his opinions
and sentiments touching the Divine Being and the Divine rela-
tions to the world of finite things and minds. To attempt this
in the name of reason is to commit reason to an effort which is,
historically and psychologically considered, impossible and ab-
surd.
The central problem of the philosophy of religion is afforded
by the conception of God. The question in debate between
1 So Caldecott, The Philosophy of Religion, p. 3.
12 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Theism so-called and the aiiti-theistic theories is the most im-
portant which the reflective powers of man can undertake to
answer. And the answer given to this question is the more
influential in determining the answers given to all the other
problems with which the philosophy of religion attempts to
deal, the more systematic and thorough such attempts become.
It is, indeed, impossible to develop a system of religious phi-
losophy which shall arrange its theorems after the manner of
the " Ethics "' of Spinoza, or which shall successfully employ in
the solution of its problems the methodology of geometry.
But every theorem in any system of theology or of religious
faith is influenced by the assumptions and tenets displayed
or concealed in its handling of the theistic problem.
The truth of this statement reaches its greatest intensity of
expression when we come to consider, in the light of modern
science and philosophy, the possibility of uniting such concep-
tions as those subsumed under the terms " Absolute," " Infi-
nite," etc., with the conceptions described in the familiar lan-
guage of the domestic affections and of the popular beliefs and
sentiments on matters of ethics. The study of the phenome-
nology of religion has placed before us as our most important
problem the conception of the Being of the World as perfect
Ethical Spirit. But agnosticism contends that no knowledge, or
even rational faith, is possible regarding that Ultimate Reality,
or Infiiute and Absolute Being, about which philosophy has
been accustomed, somewhat over-confidently and with excess
of details, to discourse. And if we dismiss — as we have agreed
to do — this extreme position of agnosticism, as belonging to
epistemology and to general metaphysics, we cannot so easily es-
cape in this connection the next attack from the agnostic posi-
tion. For when we ask oureelves the question which Professor
Howison lias put in this form : " Does a Sui)remc Being, or Ul-
timate Reality, no matter how jussuredly proved, deserve the
name of ' Ood' simply ])y virtue of its Reality and Supremacy ? "
we are obliged to give a prompt and negative answer to this
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 13
question. Certainly, No : if under the title, " God," it is
proposed to cover a conception that shall meet the intellectual,
emotional, and practical needs which all religion expresses to
some degree, and which every so-called " universal " or
" greater " religion must measurably, at least, be able to satisfy.
The conception of God, which the highest development of the
race has adopted, is that of an Absolute or Infinite Being who
is also perfect Ethical Spirit. But not only the agnosticism
which denies the possibility of any philosophy of religion, but
also certain important schools of religious philosophy, deny the
possiblity of a rational union between these two sets, or classes,
of conceptions. It is this and kindred contentions, therefore,
which serve yet more heavily to weight the importance for the
philosophy of religion of the central problem of Theism.
Thus it comes about that from the philosophical standpoint,
as well as from that of history, the doctrine of God as both
Absolute Self and perfect Ethical Spirit, furnishes to the
philosophy of religion its most important and difficult problem.
To establish the conception of an Absolute Self, and the rela-
tions of dependence sustained to such a Being by the world of
finite Things and finite Minds, upon the basis of a critical sur-
vey of the facts experienced by the race, is the supremely
difficult task of metaphysics. The approximately successful
accomplishment of this task includes the discussion of the fol-
lowing questions : (1) What is it to be a person, or Self, as I, the
subject of religion, am a person ? (2) What is it to be a person,
or Self, as God the Object of religious faith and worship must
be conceived of as personal ? and (3) What are the most essen-
tial relations, conceivable and defensible in a rational way,
between me the dependent and finite Self and God the Abso-
lute Self? These questions embody and give form to the
very problems which the historical and psychological survey of
the phenomena of man's religious life and development has
forced upon our attention. But the truth in answer to them
is not of such a nature that either history or psychology can
U PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
either establish or refute it. And until we grapple with the
logical consistency and outological value of the conception of
God as Absolute Self our studies of the religious experience of
the race seem to lead us farther and farther away from any
ultimate and systematic views on the entire subject of religion.
The more we dig into the history and the psychology of man's
religious development, the more heterogeneous does the ma-
terial thrown out by pickax and spade appear to be ; and tlie
more imperative becomes the demand for some kind of critical
testing, which shall separate the refuse from the rich ore and
fuse the ore into some worehipful image of Reality. It is "the
truth or untruth of the Whole " which our rational nature
seeks to know.^ Unless the religious experience of tlie race
leads on in a helpful way toward the apprehension of the ulti-
mate truth of religion, the investigation of the details is of
comparatively small importance. In this respect the science of
religion is not like the other particular sciences ; if, indeed, it
is to be given any place among them. It is the knowledge of, or
rational faith in, the Reality which answers to the central con-
ception of religion, — the conception, namely, of God as Abso-
lute Self and perfect Ethical Spirit — which sets the goal of
scientific endeavor. And here we are reminded of the truth
of what Leibnitz affirmed : "It is at once the easiest and hard-
est thing to become accjuainted with God in this way ; the first
and easiest in the way of the liglit, the hardest and last in the
way of the shadow."
The ])ractical importance of the conception of God in the
beginning of tlie individual's religious experience may i)e indi-
cated by the sUitistics collected by a recent writer on the
subject. Starbuck'' found that from ninety to ninety-four per
cent, of the pei-sons who reported to liim regarded a belief in
God as the central thing in their religious exi)erienee. Next
in importance among the positive Ijclicfs of religion, as tested
> Compare Eurken, Dor WuhrheitsRchalt dcr Religion, p. S.
» The PBycholoKy of ReliRion, Table on p. 320.
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 15
by this somewhat shifty and uncertain but suggestive method,
stood the belief in immortality. " The belief in God," says
he, " in some form is by far the most central conception, and
grows in importance as yeare advance. . . . There is advance
likewise in the quality of the belief. . . . These younger per-
sons are often found in the process of awakening to the
significance of the idea of God. . . . Belief in God as a larger
unnamed Force or Spirit, or as a Power that works for right-
eousness, while common among the older persons, is almost
never given by the younger." These testimonies express the
similarity between the stages of intellectual development as
characterized by this central conception of religion, in the
individual and in the race.
That attitude of mind appropriate to the metaphysics of re-
ligion, or the speculative discussion of the conception of God,
which properly follows from the importance of the subject, has
to contend ascainst a number of current tendencies of thouo-ht
and feeling. These tendencies may be somewhat roughly
classified under the three heads of Indifferentism, Syncretism,
Agnosticism. Neither of these tendencies is, however, either
rational or morally justifiable in view of the immense impor-
tance of the questions raised by the speculative discussion of
the conception of Divine Being. Indifference to this concep-
tion is not only the very essence of irreligion, but it is also
subject to the charge of being an intellectually unworthy and
morally wrong attitude of mind. By whatever name we call
the product of man's attempt to grasp and hold together in one
conception his most fundamental and ultimate convictions and
knowledge respecting the Being of the World, not to have an
interest in this conception is an irrational attitude of mind.
Granting all that can be said as to the difficulty of the process,
and as to the vague and uncertain character of the product,
this supreme effort of human reason to comprehend the Whole,
and to view and interpret the particulars in the light of the
comprehension of the Whole, can never be deprived of the
16 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
right to charm the mind and to command its supreme en-
deavor.
By Syncretism in this connection I mean that attitude of
mind which so frequently follows the first discovery of the
great variety of views with regard to the true and valid con-
ception of God, and of the undoubted general fact of an evolu-
tionary process as characterizing and conditioning this concep-
tion in all the places and periods of human histor3\ A certain
confusion of thought, and a time of hesitation and doubt is
almost certain to follow this discovery. Such a result is not
necessarily discreditable to any inquirer. But when " poly-
theism, monism, and pantheism are supposed to cancel each
other, leaving the enlightened mind with no belief in God,"
the mental attitude of syncretism may become the opposite of
reasonable. In every form of progress in race-culture essentially
the same experience prevails. The phenomena are manifold,
complex, apparently self-contradictory. The truths which they
substantiate cannot be discovered by approaching them with a
tendency to this kind of syncretism. Reality is, indeed, no
patently logical system which appears as such to the first ob-
servations of the chance observer. The rather is it always, at
first sight, and even more at second and third sight, an infinitely
varied play of struggling existences, contending forces, and
diverse and mysterious modes of behavior.
To conclude off-hand that one religion is as good and true
and worthy of a man's acceptance and adherence as another,
that all alike are coins of an equally genuine ring and of quite
completely interchangeable values, is to dismiss altogether too
summarily the obligation of human reason to prolonged and
searcliing criticism as a basis for its fundamental beliefs. The
conceptions of science and of philosophy respecting the Being
of the World have in the past exhibited no less l)afiHng variety
and patent inconsistencies than have the conceptions of reli-
gion. The very metiiphysical categories under which they
subsume the phenomena are scarcely less vague and indefinite
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION 17
than are those with which the religious experience is accus-
tomed to consort. Indeed, the categories which necessarily
claim validity in any Theory of Reality, whether its peculiar
point of departure be derived from science, from philosophy,
or from religion, are substantially the same. Being and at-
tribute, force and causation, law and order, number and quan-
tity, etc., when applied to finite things and finite minds, or to
the so-called infinite and absolute God, are, after all, essenti-
ally considered, equally anthropomorphic, equally valid or in-
valid ontologically. And this sort of loose syncretism is no
more, but rather less, justifiable in religion than in either sci-
ence or philosophy.
There is indeed truth in all religions ; because all religions are
essentially, and by their very nature, the expression in man's de-
veloping life, of an eternal and unchanging truth. But it be-
longs to the growing faculty of the race to criticise and synthe-
size, and to appreciate better the values, of its own experience ;
and thus more and more clearly and comprehensively to appre-
hend what that truth is. This is the express task of the phi-
losophy of religion.
The attitude of mind toward the discussion of the ontologi-
cal nature and value of that conception of God which man's
obligations to his own rational nature seem to command, is, in
the third place, opposed to several of the many forms of Ag-
nosticism. Undoubtedly at the present time it is agnosticism,
rather than any form of so-called false religion or any school
of religious philosophy, from which come the principal ob-
stacles to a rational belief in God. In its extremer form the
agnostic attitude will not admit even the propriety or the hope-
fulness of any effort of human reason to attain such a be-
lief.
That the human mind refuses to remain quiet in the agnostic
attitude toward the conception of God, the history of religion
shows most convincingly. According to the earlier doctrine of
the Upanishads, Atman is the Alone Reality and is forever and
2
18 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
wholly uncognizable by man. But as Deussen^ well says, the
investigating human spirit refuses to stop with this. And
Hinduism, " in spite of the unknowableness of Atman pro-
ceeded to treat of Atman as an Object of cognition ; in spite
of the non-reality of the World outside of Atman it proceeded
to busy itself with the world as ' a real.' " The same truth was
illustrated by the earlier history of Buddhism. Its original
agnosticism was, indeed, rather negative than positive ; it was
practical rather than dogmatic. Of philosophy about the Di-
vine Being there was then in existence enough and to spare ;
but the people were miserable and perishing because they knew
not " the Way." The new voice said to them all : " It belongs
to you of youreelves, and not through the medium of priestly
intervention or of schools of metaphysics, to attain the desired
good. The knowledge most necessary for this does not con-
cern the hidden nature of the gods, or indeed whether the gods
of Hinduism exist in reality or not ; it concerns the way to
live, the way of salvation."
This attitude of the practical religious teacher toward the
ontology of religious faith and religious philosophy has a cer-
tain warrant in the necessities of the religious life. To wait
for the full assurance of a reasoned metaphysics before enter-
ing upon the path of salvation would be for the great multi-
tude of the people, and indeed for every man of a most reflec-
tive turn, to postpone indefinitely the most pressing concerns
of religion. Yet more is true. A certain large measure of
agnosticism is, historically and speculatively considered, the
critic, the foil, and the cure, of a demonstrative and matliemat-
ical theology. Tlie metaphysics of the Divine Being must
grow out of liuman experience historically and reflectively
interpreted. But Buddhism itself soon constructed a positive
doctrine of the gods ; and it afterward gave birth to various
schools of religious philosophy. There are few more interest-
ing studies in the evolution of religious opinions than that af-
> Allgcmcine Geschichto der Philosophic, I, ii, p. 213.
IMPORTANCE OF THE CONCEPTION. 19
forded by the wonderful process by which this agnostic reli-
gion— especially the Northern Buddhism — proceeded upon the
view of Voltaire : " If we had no God, it would be necessary
to create one."
A certain agnostic attitude toward any attempt to unite the
conception of an Absolute Self with the conception of perfect
Ethical Spirit is, undoubtedly, appropriate to the difficulties
inherent in the very nature of the attempt. It is so easy to
juggle with words when reflecting upon such subjects. It is
so difficult to avoid mistaking the glitter of superficial but hol-
low abstractions for great and sublime ideas that have been
derived from a full and rich storehouse of human experience.
It is well not to affirm certain knowledge when only a some-
what hesitating faith is appropriate ; — and this, without accept-
ing the validity of the Kantian effort to remove knowledge in
order to make room for faith. If by "agnosticism" be meant
a somewhat extreme caution about drawing hard and fixed lines
around the conception of God, or about venturing to affirm that
human distinctions and qualifications, negative or affirmative,
wholly avail to define, much more make comprehensible, its con-
tent; then every student of the philosophy of religion may
properly cultivate no small measure of the agnostic attitude.
Such a reasonable agnosticism, which wishes to adjust the
certitude of one's mental attitude toward the object, to the
agreement and clearness of the various lines of evidence, is a
quite different affair from much which goes by this name.
There are, however, two kinds of the agnostic attitude toward
the conception of God which deserve especially to be avoided.
Of these one is that dogmatic agnosticism which we have al-
ready twice or thrice rejected, and which is taught by those of
whom Schurman 'declares : 1 " The burden of their message is
always the incapacity of the human mind to know anything
but the phenomena of the sensible world, or the contradictions
in which it is involved when it essays to reach Infinite and
1 Agnosticism and Religion, p. 86.
20 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Absolute Reality." Such dogmatic agnosticism, when con-
fined chiefly to questions of ethics and religion, and when
coupled — as it often is — with an uncritical credulity toward
the current metaphysics of the physical and natural sciences, is
the very opposite of a legitimate attitude of mind. Legitimate
agnosticism=" Removal of prejudice, intellectual honesty,
judicial temperament."
Yet more disturbing and irrational was the agnosticism which
resulted from the attempt, by Sir William Hamilton and Dean
Mansel, to unite the most negative results of the Kantian
Critique with the orthodoxy of the Church of England.
Fortunately on the whole for the philosophy of religion this
attempt soon spent itself.
It is a current opinion that modem science, historical criti-
cism, and critical philosophy, have placed the assumptions of
the extreme form of dogmatic agnosticism toward the concep-
tion of God upon unassailable foundations. It is true that the
recent advances in scientilic discovery and reflective thinking
have made certain forms of this conception quite untenable.
But it is also true that the same science, historical criticism,
and pliilosoph}', have enormousl}' widened our acquaintance
with every sphere of reality, and thus have j)rovided new ma-
terials for the thought of the race to combine in so incompar-
able and incomparably grand a conception. The lesson of the
hour is not that we should despair of framing any valid idea
of the Being of the World in a way to satisfy the religious as
well as the scientific and philosophical needs of humanity. The
lesson is, the rather, that we should so heighten, deepen,
broaden, and enrich this conception, by use of all the available
material, tliat it shall more adequately than ever correspond to
these magnified needs. For the relation which is sustained by
the way in wiiich the race conceives of God to the entire de-
velopment of the race, and especially to the solution of Die prol>
lems proposed t^) philosophy by the religious experience of man-
kind, is an essentially unchanging relation.
CHAPTER XXVII
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE
In preparation for the critical and reflective examination of
the central conception of religion it is not simply desirable to
estimate adequately the importance of the task; it is also
necessary to comprehend, at least in a preliminary way, the
nature of the evidence to be sought for, and reasonably to be
expected. Otherwise the student of the philosophy of religion
is liable to one of two errors. Either, on the one hand, he may
claim a degree or kind of proof for his conclusions which is
inappropriate to the subject and unreasonable to expect ; or
else, on the other hand, he may esteem too lightly the consensus
of evidence, and the robust tenure of the composite thread of
argument which can be woven to his command. Our present
inquiry may, then, be stated in the following way. Of what
kind and degree of evidence — of argument, or of so-called
"proof" — does the conception of God admit?
Any attempt to estimate the nature and value of the evidence
for the conception of God involves an intelligent opinion upon
these two subjects. In the first place, it requires a correct
view, in general of man's mental activities and products as re-
lated to the different classes of objects, — especially, of the
nature and the validity of knowledge, faith, science, opinion,
etc. But it also involves, in particular, the detailed apprecia-
tion and adjustment of the different lines of evidence which
converge upon the Object of religious belief and worship, —
namely, the conception of God.
The former of these two problems is that attempted by the
21
22 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
psj'chology and philosophy of the cognitive processes. The net
result of the attempt is a body of epistemological doctrine which,
in order to be available for use in the discussion of any partic-
ular application of this doctrine, requires to be combined with
a careful observance of the principles of logic and an acquain-
tance with the methodology of the positive sciences. From this
body of doctrine we may profitaljly borrow the following tliree
tenets. And, first : Knowledge is from its very nature a mat-
ter of degrees, so to say. No degree of knowledge that amounts
to perfectly absolute and indisputable certainty of the reality
of its object can be reached otherwise than by self-conscious-
ness. Even here, the only object thus absolutely and indisputa-
bly known is the " here-and-now " existence of the Self, with
its concrete present object, whether en\'isaged as some state of
the Self or as some manifestation of a not-self. Various theories
of the intuition or intellectual vision of God, or of some mystical
union of the finite soul with the Divine Being, have attempted
to establish the knowledge of God upon this indisputable basis
of self-consciousness. But such a knowledge of God could
come only through a consciousness of the Object as a species
of Self-consciousness ; and this would seem to be intrinsically
impossible, both from the nature of self-consciousness, and also
from the nature of the Object which is alleged to be known in
self-consciousness. On the otlier hand, to refuse to consider
any degree of the cognitive attitude, any manner of knowledge^
as attiiinable with regard to tlie Being of God, is to overlook
the fundamental doctrine whicli regards the cognitive attitude
itself as admitting of an indefinite variety of degrees.'
But, second, the distinction ordinarily made between so-called
knowledge and so-called faith is an unstable and vuiiisliiiig dis-
tinction. Bcliof that rcsta upon no grounds of knowledge, if
such bfiliof is possible even for Iiunian IxMiigs of the lowest in-
tellectual order, certainly is to be rejected by the phihxsophy
> For a furthcT <li.scu.s.sion of this subject, ace rhapter VIII on "Degrees,
Limits, and Kindh of Knowledge" in the iiuthor'K I'liilosophy of Knowledge.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 23
of religion, as without evidential value. On the other hand,
knowledge that does not involve large elements of belief — and
often elements of belief which are varied in character, sub-
tile in origin, and extremely difficult to estimate with regard to
their evidential value — is not to be had by human minds,
whether in the form of religion, or science, or philosophy. The
reasons why the term "faith," rather than the term "knowl-
edge," is appropriate with reference to the verities of religion
in general, and especially when treating of man's conception of
God, have already been made sufficiently clear.^
By combining the two preceding conclusions we arrive at the
following position : In matters theoretical as well as practical,
our attitudes of mind, both those which we are pleased to call
" knowledge " and those which are often deprecated as only
"faith," can claim only a higher or lower degree of probability
with regard to the real existence of their objects. We do not
increase the ontological value of any judgment by bringing it
under the category " knowledge " ; we do not necessarily
diminish the ontological value of any judgment by being con-
tent to let it rest under the rubric "faith." Some men's
knowledges are by no means so rational, or so certain, as other
men's beliefs. And much of the development of the particular
sciences, as well as of the evolution of religious faith, consists
in finding out that what was thought to be assuredly known is
no longer worthy even of belief ; but that many of the insights
of faith have turned out to be anticipations of future assured
knowledge, whether of law or of fact.
From this point of view again it is pertinent to call attention
to the kind of agnosticism which is appropriate to a critical
examination of the religious conception of God. In spite of
his reasoned agnostic attitude toward this conception as an
object of knowledge, and of his continued adherence to the
tenet of a fundamental distinction between the scientific and
the theological, and between knowledge and faith, we find Kant
1 Vol. I, pp. 366^.
24 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
referring to " the supersensible substrate of all our faculties,"
and to " the intelligible substrate of nature both external and
internal, as the Reality-in-itself (^Sache an sich Selbat)."^
Thus, the other way of getting at God, through the postulates
of the practical reason rather than through a demonstrative con-
clusion based upon phenomena of an external and physical
sort, may lead to an attitude as truly and securely cognitive as
any that the fundamental conceptions and postulates of the
particular sciences can boast. And Kant himself, if we may
excuse a certain almost grotesque mixture of precision aud
squeamishness in his use of terms, may be' made to agree witli
a recent writer in holding : " Strictly, to be an Agnostic, is to
be a heathen " (this means, I suppose, a human being who has
not as yet been subject to the influences of religious race-
culture); "and we are not heathens, for we are members of
Christendom." All of which favors a critical and moderate
attitude toward the evidence for the Being of God, rather
than the attitude of an already convinced and dogmatic
agnosticism.'^
The same epistemological considerations may fitly guard us
against another mental attitude which not infrequently goes
under the name of agnosticism. It is the attitude of a vague
unreasoned mysticism, a sort of agnostic sentimentalism. Be-
cause it is held, previous to examination, tliatthe id^a attaching
itself to the contemplation of the evidence must always remain
wholly negative and undefined, both knowledge and faith
are denied their rights in tiie central field of religion.
God as Reality, it is said, can neither be known nor believed
in ; but a certain stirring of sesthetical feeling is permissible
even in the presence of tlio conception of the " Unknowable."
• See the Krifik of Jiidpnicnt, I^enuird's Translation, pp. '2'.\s. and 'JIO.
2 The proiind in dohatc In'twcen Thei.sm and doRmatic ARnostiri.stn has
been »o thorounhly f^one over l)y .such writers a.s riint, " AKnonticisrn,"
Fraser, "Philosophy of Thci.sni," Schurnian, "liclief in God," Ward, "Nat-
uralism and Agnosticism," and others, a-s not to rcciuire further treatment
at our hands.
NATURE OF THE EVIDP^NCE 25
It is certainly obligatory upon the philosophy of religion to
furnish evidence for something more clearly rational than this
feeling. The case is surely one for argument, and for the con-
sideration and balancing of evidence. It cannot be dismissed
with the exclamation :
" Alas! how is it with you
That you do bend youi- eye on vacancy,
And with the incorporal air do hold discourse ? "
The outcome of a detailed examination into the theoretical
and practical problems in debate between Theism and Agnosti-
cism, ends in advice similar to that given in a declaration attrib-
uted to Confucius : " When you know a thing, to hold that
you know it ; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that
you do not know it — this is knowledge." Perhaps we might
modify this advice, as applying to the object of religious belief,
in somewhat the following way : " To have a rational faith in
God, and logically to proceed from, and intelligently to hold
by, the grounds in experience on which that faith is based ;
and when any form of belief proves doubtful or untenable on
such grounds, to decline or postpone accepting it as your
faith ; — this is to have all the ' knowledge ' which is appropri-
ate or possible with reference to such an Object." But is this
so very far, in the last analysis, from what science and phi-
losophy both advise with reference to the attainment and growth
of so-called knowledge respecting all classes of objects ? Only
in tliis way, can religion be made as scientific and rational as its
intrinsic nature admits. But onlj^ in the same way, can science
and philosophy be committed to the cause of religion.
In attempting to co-ordinate and to appreciate the different
lines of evidence leading toward a rational faith in God, one is
met by several claims the testing of which is in a large meas-
ure dependent upon one's views in general, as to the nature of
faith and of knowledge. Among these claims is that of an
infallible intuition, or envisagement, of the reality of the object.
This claim may take either of two principal forms. One of
26 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
these is the more mystical ; the other the more argumentative,
or even rational.
The claim to have an immediate vision of Deity almost un-
doubtedly originated in the experience of dream-life. It is this
experience that gives apparent warrant to the otherwise quite
untenable theory which finds in dreams the origin of the belief
in spirits and in immortality. In its most ancient, and by far
most frequent form, the vision is of some particular god —
divine animal, deified ancestor, or individual member of the
pantheon. Such are the appearances to believers, in their
dreams, of Apollo, Minerva, Venus, and the other Greek
divinities, whether as narrated in the Homeric poems or in
the annals of historians. But it has been shown that such al-
leged visions of the divine beings imply an already existing
belief in the gods. They may confirm the belief ; they do not
originate it. Undoubtedly, however, when the tendency to
believe is undeveloped, or the dreamer has been in doubt, the
evidence of the dream may turn the scale with him. Thus
men have come in all ages of the world to trust the reality of
their conception of Divine Being, because some manifestation
of such Being has appeared to them, has seemed to be actually
envisaged by them, in a dream or in a vision.
Quite different in some important respects, although similar
in others, is the intuition of God which is claimed by the doc-
trine of Yoga, or " mentiil concentration." ^ " He that every-
where devotes himself to Him (that is, Atman as Lord), and
always lives accordingly ; that by virtue of Yoga recognizes
Him, the subtile One, shall rejoice in the top of heaven."
Again: " He that devotes himself in accordance with the law"
— i. e., to avoiding certain vices and attaining certain virtues
— and "practices Yoga," "he becomes sarvagiimin," or "one
belonging to the All-soul." The tradition as to the " illumi-
nation " of Gautama tells us that it was attained by the means
of contemplation, after the process of self-torture and the Yoga-
> Seo Hopkins, Ileligiony of India, p. 262.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 27
discipline had been found unavailing. In both these cases,
however, the envisagement of reality is reached not so much
by way of a vision, or any form of intuition precisely, as by a
kind of absorption into the essence of Reality itself. The
Yoga doctrine teaches that by a process, partly physical and
partly psychical, called " mental concentration," the human in-
dividual may attain union with God ( jugum=yoke) . He who
became " the Buddha," however, found out another equally mys-
tical path to a complete mental satisfaction in the object sought
by religious feeling. And both doctrines agree as to the possi-
bility of putting the faith of the individual upon a basis of ex-
perience which has the immediacy and certainty, up to the point
of an infallibility, which belong to a species of intuitive cogni-
tion. There is, then, a certain amount of truth in the statement
of Professor Flint :^ " To find intuitionists which in this connec-
tion really mean what they say, we must go to Hindu Yogi,
Plotinus and the Alexandrian Mystics, Schelling and a few of
his followers — or in other words, to those who have thought
of God as a pantheistic unity or a Being without attri-
butes."
It was chiefly under the influence of Greek thinking that
the conception of God was itself made more rational, and that
the way of verifying this conception by intuition became more
of a rational process. Outside of Christianity this doctrine of
God as the Object of knowledge by means of a rational intui-
tion came, perhaps, to its highest development, as judged by
ethical and spiritual standards applied to the conception itself,
in the writings of Philo Judseus. As Bousset says :'^ "For the
Greek idealistic philosophy " (that is, as it culminated in Plo-
tinus and the other Neo-Platonists) "God remained, funda-
mentally considered, a pretty barren abstraction, a limiting
concept, the Highest, Unknowable, and Nameless. For Philo
God is, and remains, a highest living Reality." Much of the
1 Theism, p. 356.
2 Die Religion des Judentums, p. 420.
28 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
best of the Old-Testament conception had united with the best
of the Greek philosophical thinking in the conception of Divine
Being held by Philo. "God only is the truest and actual
Peace ;" and although he is " One and All," He is also the
" Good God." Citing Plato in the Timseus, Philo tells us '
that " the Father and Maker " is good. And do we inquire of
Philo, "How do you know this?" We are elsewhere^ in-
formed : " I once heard a yet more serious story from my soul,
when seized, as it often was, with a divine ecstasy. ... It
told me that in the One really existing God there are two
supreme and primary powers (^dwdfieis^. Goodness and Might;
and that by Goodness, he begat the Universe and in Might he
rules that which hath been begotten." It is instructive to no-
tice in this connection that, without any claim to a mystical
intuition or any toleration for the method of ecstasy, but in the
cool and practical manner of his race, the great Confucian
thinker, Shushi, entertained a parallel conception of the Being
of the World, or the Ultimate Reality. But with the Chinese
philosopher Reason embraces the ethical conception of good-
ness, and more. The substantial or more primary Being of the
Universe is Reason; its manifestation, or derived activity, is
Force. By a union of Ri or Reason, and Ki or Force, the
Universe and every particular thing in it exists. And wher-
ever there is Reason, there is also Force. Reason itself is im-
material and invisible ; but all manifestations, whether of minds
or of things, are due to its activities. The Ultimate Reality
is, therefore, active Reason ; and this, of necessity, includes all
moral principles and all social order.
Now nothing is plainer from the historical point of view
than the contention that neither the most successful practicer
of Yoga, nor Gautama who became the Buddha, nor the Chi-
nese thinker Shushi, — not to mention Plotinus and all his more
ancient and modern disciples — did in fact arrive at the con-
1 De Opif. Mtindi i, 5: Sokci fxoi .... iya66v ehai rbv iraripa Kal ironjTtji/.
2 De Cherubim, 9.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 2&
ceptions they held (not now to speak of the claim to know the
extra-mental validity of these conceptions) by way of the in-
tuitive, or mystical, or ecstatic vision of God. They were all
like us, children of the race. The conceptions they came to
hold of God had their roots in the historical development of
humanity. However sudden and immediate their upspringing in
the consciousness of the individual might seem to be, it was
the growth of many centuries of toilsome reflection upon the
witnesses of experienced fact, which bore fruit in the form
taken by the conception.
In estimating the evidential value of the claims to a vision
of God, in the sense of an ecstatic or otherwise intuitive knowl-
edge, two contrasted, not to say antithetic truths must be borne
in mind. On the one hand, in no case does this form of evi-
dence, when critically examined, turn out really to be what it
claims, or at first even seems to be. The subjective convic-
tion is no guaranty to others of the reality of the object ; —
and this is true, all the way from the savage or half -civilized
man who dreams of the gods appearing to him in most gro-
tesque forms, and with the most extravagant messages, up to the
Indian Yogin, the ecstatic Philo, the devotional Christian saint.
Let it be remembered that the question at issue does not con-
cern the use of dreams, and visions, and even — or if you will,
even especially — the " mental concentration " of Yogism, or
the disciplined and self-forgetful contemplation of Buddhism,
as means of revelation. Indeed, from both the historical and
the psychological points of view, that the faith of man in God
has been confirmed and developed in this way is matter of fact.
But this experience is an individual affair. However convinc-
ing it may become to the individual, it can never, on account
of its own intrinsic nature as an experience, be converted into
a universally convincing, not to say indisputable kind of evi-
dence. Indeed, just the contrary is true. This kind of evi-
dence is inherently such as is most difficult to employ in de-
fence of any universal propositions with regard to the existence
30 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and nature of its object. It is also most liable to all sorts of
impure mixtures and misleading and harmful elements.
Still further, if the concrete vision of God were always ac-
cepted at the full value claimed for it by the individual whose
experience it is, it could at best be considered as only one par-
ticular manifestation, — a religious phenomenon. But so varied
and conflicting are these manifestations that, unless they are sub-
jected to a critical testing, they furnish no trustworthy evi-
dence, not to say proof, on which to base a rational conception
of the Divine Being. That the Ultimate Reality, if it be eth-
ical Spirit, might graciously condescend to bring some rays of
a comforting belief about himself to the human soul through
dreams or visions, may be a tenable enough view. But to con-
struct one's conception of God by patching together these frag-
mentary and elusive individual experiences would lead in quite
the opposite direction from a rational procedure.
And, finally, there is no form of intuition or envisagement
of any sort of finite reality — Things or Minds — which cannot
be subjected to analysis, seen to be composite, and to contain
factors of more or less doubtful inference. Immediate cogni-
tion of this sort belongs only to the finite and the particular.
It is only by rational procedure that the mind can obtain and
validate so subtile, complex, and changeful a conception as
is afforded by the Object of religious faith.
On the other hand, it would be unfair to the claims of re-
ligion, and indeed a violence done to the scientific and logical
way of treating similar facts in every sphere of knowledge, to
deny all evidential value to those experiences upon which the
intuitional proof, by way of a vision of God, or union with
God, is based. For here is certainly a pretty persistent and
by no means unimportant phase of man's religious life and
development. Even if this experience were much more largely
pathological tlian it is, a certain evidential value would still be-
long to it. But there are modified forms of this religious con-
sciousness, which to call " pathological " would be promptly to
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 31
go wide of the mark. Doubtless the saying of Jesus — " Blessed
are the pure in heart for they shall see God" — is figurative
and cannot be quoted in support of the intuitive theory, strictly
interpreted. But the truth which it does express lies deeper
still, — too deep and yet too high to be wholly covered by its
figurative expression. That the mind's grasp upon Reality —
That it is, and What it is — should be conditioned upon cul-
ture of the powers employed in the effort to grasp, is good
enough psychological and epistemological doctrine ; and it is
doctrine of universal applicability. The experiences which
have led many of the choicest characters of the race to be per-
fectly confident of the reality of Divine Being, and of the ac-
tuality of Ms spiritual immanence in their own souls, cannot
be considered devoid of all evidential value. It is not simply
the fanatics or extreme mystics in Christianity who have at-
tained to this sort of a vision of God. In the Confessions of
Augustine, as well as of Thomas a Kempis or St. Francis of
Assisi, and in the Memoirs of theologians like Jonathan Ed-
wards, as well as of men prominent in the developments of the
positive sciences, similar experiences are not infrequently re-
corded. After his vision of the risen Jesus — abnormal and
pathological as this vision may have been — the Apostle Paul
expressed the secret of his entire life as a perfect confidence
that he, the man, was in some real and vital way united with
God through faith in Christ. Nor are such experiences by
any means confined to the Christian religion.
That certain experiences should have a great, and even a
supreme evidential value for those minds whose experiences
they are, is not only to be expected as a fact ; it is also in
good measure to be justified in a quasi-s,c\&nt\^G and philo-
sophical way. Their number and quality, and the connection
which they have had with the religious development of the
race, are such, as to constitute an argument for the reality of
the religious conception of the Being of the World. This
argument may, if one choose, be looked upon as a part either
82 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
of the ethical and psychological or of the historical proofs of
Theism. " Religious history," says R^ville,' is " oue unbroken
attestation to God." All so-called proofs may Ije summed up
in this : Religion itself could not be accounted for without
God. There must be such a Being of the World as will
account for the religious life and development of humanity.
The claim to liave an intuitive knowledge of God may take
yet another and more rational form ; it may become a theory
afiirming what is known as a " God-consciousness " in all
men. If by this be meant that the liuman cognitive conscious-
ness has the power of making an immediate seizure, so to say,
of tlie Object God, as we envisage the Self in self-consciousness,
or the something not-self in sense-perception, then the claim is
psychologically indefensible. The argument against tliis view
of a so-called " God-consciousness " is substantially the same
as that already advanced against the other form of the intui-
tional theory. Neither the nature of conscious intuition, psy-
chologically considered, nor the nature of the object of reli-
gious cognition, historically and analytically considered, would
seem to admit of such a theory.
There is much important truth, however, in the evidence
for the Being of God which is customarily offered by the ad-
vocates of this view. What we do really find in the religious
consciousness of the race is a spontaneous interpretation of
experience both internal and external, both of things and of
selves, as due to other spiritual existences ; — with its accom-
paniment of confidence in the ontological value of the inter-
pretation. Tiiis ])rocess is, indeed, the ever-developing source
of tlu; knowledge of God. Thus the One Other-Self comes to
be believed in, or mediately known, as imi)licated in all oui-
conscious cognitive acts. And it becomes the duty of a crit-
ical philosophy of religion to explicate and to estimate the
value of that evidence for the Being of (iod wliii-ii is, indeed,
implicate in the very nature and working of the cognitive con-
1 The Native ReliRions of .Mexico mul iVni (llil)lH'rt l/cctures, l.SSJ), p. G.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 33
sciousness of humanity, and of its progress in knowledge of
every kind.
By an easy and almost inevitable transition the claim to have
an intuitive knowledge of the reality and attributes of Divine
Being passes over into the claim to have demonstrative, or
what Kant called " apodeictic," proof on these matters. It
has for centuries been the ideal of philosophy and theology,
by a process of reasoning which shall start from an absolutely
indisputable major premise, and shall proceed by equally in-
disputable logical steps, to establish deductively the conclusion
that God is, and — at least in some degree — as to What God is.
The author of the critical philosophy,^ on the contrary supposed
himself to have demonstrated once for all the illogical character
of all the existing " proofs " of the reality of God ; and to have
shown in an a priori way that the very nature of man's cogni-
tive faculty makes any knowledge of God impossible. But
like other demonstrations which were to settle for all time the
limits of metaphysics as ontology, this one has been quite per-
sistently disputed both by those who believe — as Kant himself
did — in God, and also by those who are either agnostic or scep-
tical toward the conception.
So far as the claim to demonstrate the Being of God has
taken the form of the so-called " ontological argument," it will
be discussed in its proper place. But there are two or three
somewhat modified attempts at a demonstrative proof which
may fitly receive consideration in this connection. Of these
one may be called the mathematical or geometrical, par excel-
lence ; and this, either because it finds in the nature of pure
mathematics an argument amounting to a demonstration of
God ; or because it aims to demonstrate his Being more mathe-
matico but starting from some JMas^■-mathematical conception
1 Especially in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft; and see per contra the earlier
treatises, Dilucidatio Nova, and Der Einzig Mogliche Beiveisgrund zu einer
Demonstration des Daseins Gottes; and the position assumed in the later
work. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft.
3
84 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
or principle «as its major premise. lu the latter of these two
cases, some conception of "Substance" — as with Spinoza for
example — or of " Pure Being," as in the views of the early
Neo-Platonists, is customarily made the principle of the argu-
ment. Under this head may be cbissed the ancient Platonic
argument from geometry to God. " All the judgments of
geometry," says a modern advocate of this view,' " imply that
there are unchanging relations in the one system of reality which
alone is or can be known, and these unchanging relations con-
stitute the objectivity of that system, so far as it comes within
the view of geometry."
As to this claim to demonstrate God, out of the nature of
pure mathematics or by methods employed in the development
of mathematical conceptions and relations, the objections, if
we adhere to the strict construction of our terms, are quite de-
cisive. Religious conceptions in general are not formed after
the analogy of mathematical conceptions, nor are they arrived
at and confirmed by proof which can be presented in a form
similar to that of a mathematical argument. Indeed, this,
which is the Kantian conception of pure mathematics, and of
its a priori origin and nature, is now thoroughly discredited
among mathematicians themselves. " Pure mathematics," just
so far as it maintains and perfects its " purity," abstracts its
conceptions and propositions from all experience with concrete
realities and their actual relations. Yet, these same concep-
tions and propositions are themselves derived from experience.
Its demonstrations are therefore complete, are indeed, strictly
speaking, ihmonsiratlo7i8, only when it is agreed to accept
some small group of postulates, of -tlie actuality of which it is
impossible to arrive at an tMiii)iri(-al jnoof, iuid proceed with
the strictest regard for the laws of logical deduction. In this
way nothing whatever is demonstratecl as to the nature of
reality, except the mind's own possibility of being logical and,
if logical, of avoiding inherent self-contnidictions. The moment,
» ProfesHor Watson, Christiunily and Mcali.sni. p. X'^Sf.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 35
however, we try to picture reality in terms of these purely
mathematical conceptions and propositions, we find our attempt
developing not a few most stubborn contradictions. All this
might well enough convince us that reality is not constructed
according to purely matliematical conceptions, arranged in the
attractive form of a system of interrelated abstractions. As
Schurman ^ has well said in contrasting this religious concep-
tion with the conceptions of geometry : " God, on the other
hand, who is the ground and source and moving spirit of all
reality, must be the most concrete object of our thought. By
no possibility, therefore, can a theology or science of God fol-
low the demonstrative method of mathematics."^ This conclu-
sion avails also against the somewhat looser opinion of Locke,^
who regarded the demonstration not one whit inferior to
mathematical certainty.
On the other hand, the possibility of applying mathematics
to the experienced realities of the world of concrete existences
and actual relations, is one of the most convincing of argu-
ments for the position that the Being of the World is some
kind of an orderly and rational totality. Or if we take the
position of religious faith and regard the system of minds and
things, of which we have an ever-growing experience, and an
ever-improving conception, as related to God the Creator and
Preserver, we find in the procedure of mathematics, and in the
control which it gives the human mind over the understanding
of phenomena, a very convincing form of evidence that Rea-
son rules Force in the cosmic constitution and cosmic develop-
ment. There is, therefore, no conviction of modern science more
welcome to the philosophy of religion — as it is indispensable to
modern science itself — than the conviction of the unity and
systematic connection of all Reality.
1 Belief in God, p. 39.
2 See also Flint, Theism, Appendix, 425^. on the impossibility of demon-
stration, in mathematical or a -priori fashion, of the Being of God.
3 Comp. Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book IV, chap. X.
36 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The inner connection of all the so-called arguments for
the Being of God is shown again, — as it was shown in the
transition from the claims of the intuitional theory to the claim
of the ontological argument, — when we consider what is really
involved with reference to the nature of the human mind by
the application of mathematical conceptions to concrete reali-
ties and their relations. For another form of the demonstra-
tive argument sees in the very possibility of any knowledge
whatever an unanswerable proof of the Divine Being. That
all knowledge, whatever be its object or the method of its as-
certainment, and whatever the degree and nature of its so-called
evidence, involves a certain theory of reality, may be maintained
successfully from both the epistemological and the metaphysi-
cal points of view. For knowledge is always of reality. The
mind's cognitive attitude toward its object is essentially some sort
of a gmsp — by belief, intuition, inference, primitive and unanaly-
zable feeling, or by all these and other hands and tentacles of the
soul — upon the actuality of the existence and of the relations
of just this same object. Psychologists may try in vain to
agree, or they may quarrel eternally, over the nature of the
cognitive process. A sceptical theory of knowledge may carry
doubt as to the exfra-mentsii validity of knowledge to the ex-
treme of solipsism. But in religion which is invariably, as
we have already seen, a theory of reality, as well as in science
and in philosophy, the confidence in reason as a vital and effect-
ive commerce between the knower and the reality of the object
known will always prevail. Knowledge itself implies indubita-
bly the actuality of certain universal standards of a rational
order. This is true, whatever the specific ol)ject cognized may
be. The same thing is true of all reasoning, whatever the sul>-
ject about which the reasoning is ; and whatever tlio subjective
condition of the cognitive and reasoning mind in which the
process terminates — whether it be affirmation, denial, or doubt.
To this extf^nt a so-called proof of the imnianonni of Kcason
in lx)th minds and things may be drawn from thai experience
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 37
which we call " knowledge." In this experience lie the grounds
of all argument and proof. But to say this is not equivalent to
affirming a demonstration of the Being of God.
We shall see subsequently, however, what a consensus of
evidence is reached by following to the place where they unite,
the particular and partial arguments for the conception of re-
ligion ; and as well by considering the relation in which all
these arguments stand to certain fundamental conceptions of
science — to the categories of Being, Cause, Law, Final Purpose,
etc. In this way the proof amounts to showing that certain
unchanging factors in the conception of God are essential, un-
changing, and necessary features of all human cognitive con-
sciousness. Stated in figurative and somewhat exaggerated
form, the argument then concludes that " To desire to know
God without God is impossible ; there is no knowledge without
him who is the Prime Source of knowledge." Or, to employ
the more philosophical language of Hegel : ^ " What men call
the proofs of God's existence are, rightly understood, the ways
of desciibing and analyzing the native course of the mind, the
course of thought, thinking the data of the senses. . . . The
leap into the supersensible which it takes when it snaps the
chain of sense, all this transition is thought and nothing but
thought." Here we encounter, to be sure, the customary
Hegelian over-emphasis and extension of " thought " as con-
cerned in both faith and knowledge. But tliis is far truer to
the facts of the case, whether the objects of thought be those
proposed as problems to science, to philosophy, or to religion,
than is the sceptical epistemology of the Critique of Pure
Reason. And religious feeling, as well as the sentiment for
the ideal of philosophy, leads us to sympathy with Hegel when he
elsewhere '^ asks : " What knowledge would be worth the pains
of acquiring, if knowledge of God is not attainable ? " Indeed,
1 The Logic of Hegel, Wallace's Translation, p. 103; and compare the re-
marks on the method of demonstration as applied to God, p. 72/.
2 Philosophie der Religion (Edition of Marheineke), I, p. 37.
88 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
all rivulets anil lari^er streams may contribute to swell the river
tliat beai-s humanity toward that ocean of truth which is the
knowledge of God.
It is scarcely necessaiy to show that processes of induction
similar to those by which the particular conceptions or laws of the
chemico-physical and biological sciences are estublished do not
comport with the essential nature of the conception of God.
Yet in the larger, but no less true and valid meaning of the
words, this conception may be placed upon a basis of expe-
rience.
If the proof of the Being of God is to be found neither
in some infallible vision of an intuitive sort, nor in some form
of demonstrative argument, nor in an induction which pro-
ceeds upon a purely empirical basis : Where is proof to be
found? Or must the human mind renounce all effort to rea-
son its way to the truth about this central conception of reli-
gious faith ; not to say, all pretence of being able to prove the ob-
jective validity of the conception? To such questions it may be
answered that the alternative which they imply is neither well
conceived nor fortunately expressed. There is a middle way
between exaggerated affirmations of proof and the negative
position of early Buddhism :
"No god of heaven or Brahma-woild
Doth cause the endless vound of birth;
Constituent parts alone roll on,
From cause and from material spring. "
But this is a childish philosophy, if philosophy at all it can be
called ; it is as inadequate to explain the religious experience
of the race as the childish theogony it would displace was inad-
equate to compete with modern physical science. The sci-
entific and philosophical, as truly as the religious nature and
needs of man, can never be satisfied with so barren a conclusion.
The one inexhaustible source of evidences for the true con-
ception of God is the experience of the race. But these words
must not be interpreted in any narrow and half-hearted way.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 39
This experience must be considered in its totality and as itself
subject to development. This experience is all we have on
which to base any kind of proof; but it is enough, and even
more than enough, to satisfy all the reasonable demands made
upon it. Indeed, in all the lines of evidence, the so-called proofs,
the attempt at a satisfactory understanding of the origin, laws,
historical course, and meaning, of the world can never disre-
gard the origin, nature, needs, destiny, and historical develop-
ment of man as chiefly necessary to its full account.^ The
proof of God for the individual searcher may, therefore, take
some such form of argument as the following : Whatever else
really is, or is not really, in the world, I am here ; and I want
myself explained to myself, made self-consistent and helped in
self-development, in a satisfactory way. This " myself " in-
cludes not only my bodily organism and dependent connec-
tion with external nature and with the race, but also my own
truest and highest self, with its hidden potentialities and aspira-
tions, its hopes, fears, and ideals touching its own destiny.
" With the mass of faculties and capacities and experiences,
which constitute my personal nature," said Cardinal New-
man, " I believe in God."
The generalizations and courses of reasoning by which this
intelligent, but personal faith in God may be converted into a
quasi-scmntifiG and philosophical proof of the validity of the
conception of God, have themselves no other source than the
experience of the race. We may say with Schultz ^ then : " To
be certain of the existence of God means, fundamentally con-
sidered, to recognize as necessary the religious view of the
world." But just what is the truth of this view of the Being
of the World, and how it is so to be stated and expounded as
1 As says Sabatier (Esquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion, p. 120):
"Pour se representer le divin, Thomme n'a jamais eu que les ressources qui
sont en lui. C'est dire que, ces representations varieront avec le progres
g^n^ral de 1 'experience et de la pensee."
2 Grundriss der Christlichen Apologetik, p. 73.
40 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
to harmonize with all the other cognitions and reasonable faiths
of humanity, is a task for the philosophy of religion to accom-
plish. The different lines of consideration wliich it pursues,
and which it endeavors to arrange in logical and at least approx-
imately harmonious and systematic form, constitute the argu-
ments for the trustworthiness of the religious view. But
this experience of the race to which philosophy looks for its
proof of the Being of God must be taken sincerely, sympatiiet-
ieally, and in its totality. With regard to parts of it, that is
doubtless true which Schopenhauer asserted, namely, that the
proof is " Keraunological " rather than purely theoretic ; that
is to say, it is based on needs of the will rather than on notions
of the intellect. But this is only partial truth. The scientific
and logical considerations must not be separated from the etli-
ical, the aesthetical, and the more definitively religious. For as
Professor Howison has well said :' "There will be, and will
ever remain, an impassable gulf Ijetween the religious conscious-
ness and the logical, unless the logical consciousness reaches
up to embrace the religious^ and learns to state the absolute Is
in terms of ahsolute Ought.'''' In a word, the implication of God
iu human experience is not a simple intuition, nor is it a sin-
gle line of demonstrative or inductive reasoning. On the con-
trary— counting only the " moments " which can be explicated
— it is an enormously subtile and complex net-work of consid-
erations. And reason cannot be content with the assumption,
or the conclusion, of an "impassable gulf" between any two
parts of the one experience of the one race.
From this preliminary survey of the nature of the evidence
which may reasonably l^ exp(?cted, and which is in fact attain-
able, for the validity of the religious view of the Being of the
World, we may derive these three practical considerations.
They will serve to guide the subsecjuent examination of the
so-called " [)roofs " to a safer, if a somewhat lower ground.
And, first : The final purpose of the argument is not to domou-
> Introduction to Professor Iloyce'a Conception of God, p. 124.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 41
strate some particular conception of God, as though no history
of religious experience, and of rational endeavor to understand
this experience, lay back of us in the past of the race. We
are not going to assume the airs, or play the part, of "upstarts "
in this field of the philosophy of religion. This belief in God
has been in the world through untold centuries ; it has already
undergone a significant process of development. It has, at
least in certain quarters, been rising into nobler proportions
and purer form, for no inconsiderable part of these untold
centuries. The men of to-day did not create it; and they
cannot undo it. No individual can construct or understand
this conception by trying to separate himself either from the
racial experience which justifies it, or from the more or less
successful students of this experience. New proofs are scarcely
to be expected, except in so far as this ever unfolding experi-
ence affords an unfailing source of such proof. The critical
but constructive attitude toward the arguments for the Being
of God cannot escape from the historical limitations or dispense
with the historical helps. But neither can the sceptical or ag-
nostic attitude. If we men of the hour are not rational beings,
and potential sons of God, but only " moving shadow-shapes ;"
still we must stand in order, where we are " held by the mas-
ter of the show."
And, second, every conception of God must, as a matter of
course, be both anthropomorphic and inadequate. But, prop-
erly understood, the charges usually conveyed by these words
are neither deterrent nor wholly discouraging. The one pos-
tulated principle of an epistemologieal order which underlies
and validates all reasoning on this subject is, indeed, the right
to argue from the human personality to the Divine Person-
ality. Of course, such procedure is anthropomorphic. But,
of course, and in essentially the same way, those who attempt
to answer, to refute, or to criticise the arguments will be an-
thropomorphic, will also personify. Essentially the same pro-
cedure characterizes every form of argument, by which men
42 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
either advance their knowledge or lift up their faith to loftier
heights of purer air and brighter sunshine. It is anthropo-
morphic experience, hurnan experience, which must he ac-
cepted in fact, and accounted for, evaluated, and explained.
It is hiunan thinking which accounts for and explains all this
experience ; it is hiinian ethical and aestlietical feeling which es-
timates the varying values of the different experiences. Such
Anthropomorphism is as truly present in science as it is in reli-
gion. In a word, all growth of humanit3' in knowledge or ra-
tional belief is dependent upon the validity of a certain qiiasi-
personifying process. And when it is proclaimed that this
process may be valid to discover thut God is, but can never re-
veal anything true about ivhat God is, the mind is mocked un-
worthily. To establish by argument that mere undefined or
Unknowable Being is at the core of the universe, is to conclude
the dream about reality with a Fiction so grotesque that we
may fitly find ourselves awaking with an explosion of uncon-
trollable laughter.
Finally, every one of the so-called arguments for the Being
of God, and indeed every one of the natural sources of man's
religious experience, may lead to either valid or wortliless
conclusions, according to the degree of rational elaboration, and
of ethical discipline and refinement wliich it receives. As
Oakesmith says ' of the " sense of personal dependence upon a
benevolent supernatural power" wliich riuturch associated
with tlie teacliings of Demonology : " It maybe identical with
the purest and loftiest religion, or may degenerate into the
meanest and most degrading supei-stition, according to its de-
velopment in the mind of the individual believer." In respect
of everj- moral attribute which religion ascribes to Deity, and
every metapliysical predicate which philosophy assigns to the
Personal Absolute, and indeed with regard to the entiie subtle
and com[)lex conception which answers in different minds, and
in different stages of race-culture, to the name of " God," the
1 Tlic Kelik'ioii of riutarch, p. 171.
NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE 43
same thing is true. Both the monistic and the dualistic view
of God and the World may lead to their respective bad or good
results. Helpful truths or pernicious errors may be logically
joined to many of the factors which enter into either the pan-
theistic or the deistic conception of the Divine. Superstition
is not confined to savage or primitive man. But wherever it
occurs, its cure requires more light from reason and experience,
rather than agnosticism or the denial of the grounds and rights
of religious faith. Superstition is, indeed, a " dimming rheuui ; "
but we must not " knock the eye out for the sake of removing
the rheum." We must not, because false and inadequate views
of Deity accompany all the thought of the race upon the sub-
ject, " turn the sight of faith into the blindness of Atheism."
Both superstition and atheism, as Plutarch held, spring from
ignorance. And Goethe averred that " the profoundest, the
most essential and paramount theme of human interest is the
eternal conflict between atheism and superstition."
Our problem may then be stated anew in essentially its old
form but as seen from an advanced point of view. We seek
for a harmony between that conception of God which the high-
est religious experience of the race has brought into existence —
the conception, namely, of God as perfect Ethical Spirit, the
Father and Redeemer of mankind — and that conception of the
Being of the World which is most tenable in accordance with
the conclusions of modern science and philosophy. We do not
dream of discovering this harmony by means of any infallible
intuition ; or of demonstrating it after the methods of pure
mathematics or of experimentation in the more restricted fields
of the physico-chemical sciences. We enter upon the attempt,
being aware of the limitations of our method and certain of
attaining, at best only a relative success. Our conception of
the Divine Being will be a human conception ; and it will
therefore be inadequate, incomplete, and possibly in some of
its elements lacking in a desirable self -consistency. But we
shall try to remain obedient to the voices of history, and trust-
U PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ful of that liglit of reason which has been always illumining
the race. Yet more : We find warrant for regarding even such
a conception of God as a rational postulate on which converge
so many lines of evidence that it may be accepted with confi-
dence, and held with a firm tenure ; — and this, because it af-
fords the fullest attainable explanation for the experience of
the race, and the fullest satisfaction ft)r the intellectual, ethi-
cal, aesthetical, and spiritual needs of humanity.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED
It has for a long time been the custom of believers in The-
ism to throw the different lines of evidence for the Reality
answering to the conception of God into the form of definite
arguments or so-called " proofs." ^ The nature of these proofs
is manifold ; and each one of them corresponds more or less
accurately to some one or more permanent phase or aspect of
man's thoughts about himself and about the world in which
he lives. It has already been indicated, however, that the true
and conclusive argument is based upon tlie way in wliich the
conception accords with the sum-total of the experience of
the race, and thus assists us in understanding that experience
and in promoting the satisfaction of its needs.
These proofs have been so often and so ably presented and
criticised in their customary form, that any new examination
of this great problem may be excused from the effort to con-
tribute original and important material to their discussion.^ But
they are all so important to an understanding of the nature of
the problem, and so essential to every attempt at its improved
statement and solution, that they cannot be wholly passed over
by the philosophy of religion. We shall content ourselves with
1 The so-called cosmological argument, as it has influenced Christian the-
ology, goes back to Aristotle; the teleological, to Socrates, etc.
2 Among the numerous books on Theism, perhaps none gives a more sat-
isfactory popular survey and criticism of the customary arguments for the
Being of God than that by Professor J. J. Tigert: "Theism. A Survey of the
Paths that Lead to God." The discussion of the Theologian J. A. Dorner,
System der Christlichen Glaubenslehre, I, pp. 173-330, is particularly valu-
able.
45
46 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
a brief attempt to estimate the value wliieh they seem to possess
in their reh\tions as factoi-s to the reconstructed argument.
At the head of the arguments for tlie Being of God it has
been customary to phice the so-called " Ontological." From
its very nature this argument in its more modern form implies
a high development of the speculative and metaphysical in-
terests ;ind aptitudes of man. Historically considered it is,
therefore, of coui-se a relatively late product of his reasoning
faculties. In that more positive stiitement in which it has in-
fluenced theology and the philosophy of religion it was sliaped
principally by The Church Father Anselra (1033-1109) and
by the philosopher Descartes (1596-1650). The distrust of it,
and the partial if not complete overthrow of its independent (?)
influence, was brought about by the trenchant criticism of
Kant. " The conception of God to which, on cosmological
grounds, by a logical ascent from the particular to the univer-
sal, Anselm had arrived in the Monologium, he seeks in the
Prodogium (originally entitled Fides querens Intellectnni) to
justify ontologically by a simple development of the concep-
tion of God." The argument ran thus : Every man, even " the
fool," has in his mind the conception of, or belief in, a good
than wliich no greater can be thought. But that is not the
greatest thinkable good which exists merely in tlie mind, but
does not also exist in reality. Tiierefore this greatest good
must exLst in reality, as well as in the human intellect ; and this
greatest really existent Good is "our Lord God."
The argument of Anselm was considered unsound even by
some of his contemporaries among the believers in Ciiristianity ;
it was estimated as a pure paralogism, especially by tiie monk
Gaunilo, Count of Montigni, in a controversial treatise, Liher
pro TuKipii'iit)'. The ciitical Kant pointed out tliat the onto-
logical argument cannot 1x3 considered as an independent, nnich
less a demonstrative proof. It does, however, enter in an es-
sential way into tlie ontological validity of all the arguments.
It is — to use the phrase of Kant — their nervuB probandi.
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 47
For the system of tliought which Descartes elaborated, the
conception of God was not simply of supreme moral and re-
ligious significance ; the demonstrable ontological validity of
this conception was the bridge over which the human mind
must pass from the last inner retreat of consciousness to a
world of verifiable experienced realities. With this thinker
the ontological argument took more than one form. In the
Third Meditation, Descartes, in accordance with his general
doctrine of Method, proceeds to argue from the perfectly clear
idea of an infinite, eternal, and unchangeable Being to the In-
finite Reality corresponding to the idea. Such an idea de-
mands a corresponding reality as its cause. In the Fifth Med-
itation the claim is advanced that, just as it follows of neces-
sity from the essence of a triangle that the sum of its angles =
2 riofht angles, so it follows from the essence of the idea of a
most perfect Being that such a Being really exists. Existence
in reality is a perfection ; hence God exists.
The essential thing about all these forms of the so-called
ontological argument is the claim that we may conclude with
a perfect conviction — Nay ! that we must conclude — from the
conception of the Divine Being, as it exists in human thought,
to the extra-mental reality of the same Being. In this very
fact Kant found its fatal defect : — namely, that it did, without
additional warrant as it were, pass from idea to actuality ; —
from the object as conceived to the Thing-in-itself. Tiius all
the arguments of theology became the conspicuous instance of
that vain pretence of knowledge, of which metaphysics — in
the sense of ontological doctrine — is perpetually guilty. To
state the objection in the terse manner of Ueberweg :^ The on-
tological argument is a " meaningless tautology ; " and " the
only conclusion which is logically valid is this : so surely as
God exists, so surely is he a real being." On the other hand,
it is complained of such curt dismissal of the ontological argu-
ment, and with reason, that the objection overlooks the very
1 A History of Philosophy (English Translation of 1872), I, p. 3S4.
48 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
consideration on which tlie argument is based ; and this con-
sideration is, the peculiar nature of the conception itself. Cer-
tainly, to borrow the figure of speech with which even Kant
stooped to ridicule this so-called proof, the conceived hundred
dollars tliat are not in my pocket do not add a penny to the
sum that is really there. But if what Descartes set out to
prove is this — " That God is the only sufficient source or
cause of the idea of God, — i. c, the Infinite and the Perfect,"' —
the idleged proof may fall far short of a demonstration with-
out by any means losing all claim to evidential value.
Differently underetood and more fairly rated, this argument
can be so employed as to turn Kant's criticism of it against
himself. For with Kant — and this is the central positive posi-
tion of the critical philosophy — Reality is always apprehended
by the human mind under the formal conditions of a synthetic
judgment a priori. Only then, if we regard the judgment which
affirms the self-existence of the Absolute as a merely logical
and analytical judgment, a sort of equation between adjectives,
can we demolish it in so summary a fashion. But in fact, this
judgment is not merely abstract, logical, and analytical. It is,
the rather, an exceedingly complex synthetic affair., a summing
up of many threads of argument, taken from the complex web
of Reality, and woven together by human thinking. The
grounds, the necessary conditions, and the substance of the
experience, which enter into the argument, belong to the con-
stitution of reason itself. Something like this Kant was him-
self forced to confess in his " Critique of the Practical Reason,"
and even more in his " Critique of Judgment."
In its peculiarly Cartesian form the ontological argument is
therefore, on the one hand, refuted as a demonstration of a
purely a priori sort, and on the other, confirmed as a necessary
and rational explanation of the historical conditions under which,
• This arK^imont is pn>Hciit«l at lon^lh hy (Jnitry in his C'oiiiiHiH^mre do
Dieu: " C'cHt-il-dirc ritl<''C do Dicu, Ia<|ucll(> d^s (|u'clle est ()l)f«Mnjc, prouvo
pur ello-mfime quo Dieu existe." (2 vols., .'■)fh cd., Puris, 1856.)
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 49
slowly and through the centuries and in dependence upon all
the ideal lines of human development, this conception of God
as perfect personal Being has come to the fore. We cannot,
perhaps, say with Principal Caird : ^ " The true meaning of the
Ontological proof is this, that as spiritual beings our whole
conscious life is based on a universal self-consciousness, an Ab-
solute Spiritual Life, which is not a mere subjective notion or
conception, but which carries with it the proof of its necessary
existence or reality." We cannot argue with Anselm and
Descartes that what I conceive of as worthiest of existence is
thereby proved actually to exist. But we may draw in sympathy
near to the truth as Fichte affirmed it : " We must end at last
by resting all existence which demands an extrinsic foundation
upon a Being the fountain of whose life is within Himself ; by
allying the fugitive phenomena, which color the stream of time
with ever-changing lives, to an eternal and unchanging exist-
ence." The World is only intelligible to us, if our thinking is
true thinking ; if it brings us, so to say, into commerce with
Reality. Figurative and poetical ways of stating this meta-
physical postulate, which is entitled to reverse the entire scep-
tical conclusion of the Kantian theory of knowledge, are
abundant enough in the literature both of philosophy and of
religion. " The ' is ' between subject and predicate," said Herder,
" is my demonstration of God." " God is the truth in us,"
said Leibnitz. And Harms declared that " in all finite spirits
the idea of the truth is contained apWori as an original thought
which arises out of the essence of the spirit itself."
In the opinion of Pfleiderer^ the argument from religion and
that from the theory of knowledge were both originally identical
— as seen in the Confessions of Augustine and in the writings
of Anselm — with " the kernel of the ontological argument."
The history of philosophy in its relations to religion seems to
suggest this view. Even in Buddhism, with its fundamental
1 Philosophy of Religion, p. 150.
2 Philosophy of Religion (English Translation, ed. 1888), III, p. 274/.
60 PIIlLOSOPilV UF RELIGION
doctrine that " all the constituents of Being are transitory,"
the distinction hjis to be introduced between "Karma-existence"
and ** Originaiing-existence." ' '' Existence is twofold ; there
is Kanna-oxistcnce and an Originatiug-existence.*' The Wheel
of Existence is indeed without known beginning ; and yet, just
as the ignorant and desiring Mind li;is made it to exist, so the
blessed and wise Mind may cause it to ce;ise to be. Thus also
in the " Discussion of Dependent Origination " between Sakya-
muni and Ananda, where Name and Form are made the cause,
the occasion, and the origin of all dependent existence, both
are personified and deified in the fashion of Oriental mystical
metaphysics. Elsewhere,'- however, in the effort to escape all
ontology, and playing with mere words and symbols and figures
of speech. Buddhism assures us that Form itself is caused by
ignorance, desire, attachment, and Karma ; while Name depends
on the senses and attention.
Man, in a germinal form found everywhere existing but only
ripening along certain lines of development under the more
favorable conditions into the fruitage of a rational Theism,
conceives of and reasons about the Ground in Reality of liis
own being and of the existence of tilings. His conceptions are
thus variously shaped by the effort to give such an account of
his varied experiences as shall satisfy the constitutional and
permanent demands of his own life. What the ontological
proof so-called amounts to is, therefore, this : It is difficult or
impossible, from the point of view of reflective and self-consistent
thought, to regard the conception of God as a purely sn])jective
development. This conception, as human reason luis somehow
succeeded in framing it, seems to the same reason to demand
the Reality of God.
The gist of the Cosmological argument is found in the log-
ical and, as well, the practi(;al necessity of referring the do-
» The qiiotiition.H tire from liuddhiHm in Tnmslution; Hurvurd Oriental
Series, vol. '.i.
> Vifluddhi-Magga, ("haptors XVII imd \X.
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 51
pendent and relative character of finite beings and events to
the Unity of some Independent or Absolute Ground. Its
point of starting is, then, to be located in man's concrete, par-
ticular knowledge of the world ; its impulse proceeds from the
feeling of dissatisfaction with the fragmentary and discrete
character of the explanation which this point of view affords ;
its movement is along the argument from causation onward
and upward towards a resting place in some ultimate or primal
causative Principle. Against this argument, as it has custom-
arily been employed by theology, two powerful objections may
be brought : First, that the argument involves the attempt
at an impossible regressus ad ivfinitum, a search for cause be-
yond cause, and other cause still back of this, — the whole proc-
ess being without power or prospect of ever reaching the end
of the chain of causation. It is also objected, secondlj^ that
any application of the law of causality under which man
knows the phenomenal world, to a region which is qualitatively
different from the phenomenal, involves a misconception of the
principle of causality itself. Both these objections do, indeed,
bear heavily against the cosmological argument, as it has been
customary to employ it ; but they both involve a misconcep-
tion of the principle of causality, and of the use which it is
proper to make of this principle in the reconstruction of the
argument.
The conception of a " World-Ground," or so-called " First
Cause " of all finite beings and events, has been an exceedingly
slow and painful evolution. But the conception is an important
product of man's mental development ; and any inquiry into its
validity requires a criticism which profoundly concerns not
only the faiths of religion but also the rational beliefs postu-
lated, and the conclusions confirmed, by science and by phi-
losophy. For untold ages the race existed without any clear
and reasoned conception of the unit}' and personality of the
Divine Being. Not until late did man aim at the position
from which to frame the conception of a Personal Absolute as
S2 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the Ground of all cosmic existences and events, the Fii-st and
the Final Cause of all Imman experiences. But all the \vay,
in its gropings after the true idea of God, as well as in its
growth of scientific and reflective knowledge, the human mind
has made use of the cosmological argument. This is simply
to say that man has been trying to explain his own expe-
rience, and to satisfy his own needs, by interpreting the world
of things and of selves in terms of a higher and more univer-
sal, real Principle.
In all such work of the interpretation of experience, the
human mind both posits and infers entities that act upon it
and upon one another. This is true of savage man ; it is true
of childish man ; it is true of insane man ; it is true of scientific
and cultured man. It is as true of the Berkeleian idealist, or
the Comtean positivist, as it is of the common-sense realist
or the so-called " reconstructed " realist. Without some such
intellectual movement of a metaphysical character neither
science nor religion could arise and develop.
Our study of the phenomena of man's religious life and reli-
gious development has shown us the truth of the declaration
of D'Alviella : * " The savage, wherever he finds life and move-
ment, refers them to the only source of activity of which he
has any direct knowledge, namely the will." And this will is
never the " pure activity" of "non-being," but the will of
some spiritual ageilt. In this way mythology, whether of the
religious order or not, grows up and flourishes with its in-
structive and yet grotesque and monstrous contributions to
the cosmological argument with reference to the Being of the
World. Of the primitive man Roskoff Hruly says : His con-
clusion is the joining of the plienoraena together, according to
the laws of thought, in tiie relation of ground and conse-
quence ; he operates in general according to the principle of
causality." The same author adds: " This inner impulse has
•Origin iiml Cirowtli of the Conception of CJod p. .Vi.
> Dm Heligionsweaen der rohesten VAlkerstamnif, p. \'2[).
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 53
been called a ' metaphysical instinct. ' " With chastened and
corrected imagination, and enlarged and more penetrating ob-
servation, modern science refers the same phenomena to phys-
ical entities, to masses, atoms, corpuscles, ions, or ether, etc. ;
and it weaves new connections between these entities, of a most
marvelous and incredible intricacy, according to the same
principle of causality.
In one of its oldest forms the cosmological argument led
Aristotle from motion in the world of things to a Being which
must be conceived of as a Prime Mover. Through the Middle
Ages, and in its most subtile and refined modern form, this
argument implies that the rational conceptions of cause,
ground, and law, may be applied to reality in the interests of
a better explanation of concrete human experiences. The im-
plication is undoubtedly true. There is no form of contesting
it that does not either employ essentially the same argument,
or else end in some absurd and self-contradictory form of scep-
ticism in matters of science as well as of religion.
At the same time any use of the cosmological argument
which relies upon the mere recoil of the mind from an in-
finite regressus, and upon the incomprehensible and absurd
nature of the infinite series of causal connections, in order
to justify the conception of a so-called First Cause, deprives
itself of all real cogency. " First Cause," in the cosmological
argument, cannot mean simply, at the beginning in time ; it
must mean, as Mr. Spencer admits^ — " Infinite and Absolute."
The moment this argument separates the Ground of the Uni-
verse from present human experience, and thus conceives of a
God that is aloof from the actually existing world, its ten-
dency is toward a Deism which science rejects as unnecessary for
an explanation of phenomena, and which religious feeling regards
as cold and unsatisfying. The God man needs, if he needs
any God at all, whether to come near to his heart or to quicken
and support his intellect, is not a Being whose living relations
1 First Principles (edition of 1872), p. 38.
54 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
with the world of things and selves lie chiefly antecedent to,
or run mostly separate from, this same known world of things
and selves. On this point it has been well said : ^ " Not a mere
foundation of Being in the abstract .... but a real, actually
existing, primitive Ground (^Urgrund) of all reality," is what
the cosmological argument seeks to establish.
In the use of the cosmological argument it is essential that
we should, on the one hand, guard against such agnostic prej-
udices as render both modern science and critical reflection
wholly doubtful about the nature of Reality ; and, on the other
hand, that we should not accept that extreme of dogmatic con-
fidence which concedes to either physical science or to current
theological systems the exclusive right to give a complete and
final form to their respective conceptions of this Reality.
]\Ioreover, the very terms which both science and theology em-
ploy for the statement of their postulates and their conclusions
are greatly in need of a more fundamental criticism. " Laws
of nature " have no meaning in a world which is not essen-
tially orderly and teleological. " Efiicient causes," or whatever
substitutes the most skillful scepticism may devise for this
complex notion, signify nothing for an exposition of facts that
does not repose upon the experience of intelligent wills. In-
deed, the detailed and elaborate recognition of causal connec-
tions everywhere in the world, taking place under so-called
laws, — this universal fact is the cosmological ai-gument. " In-
telligence endowed with will," said Kant, " is causality." Bet-
ter said : Will, realizing its own inuuanent ideas, — this is what
physical science speaks of in such terms as cause, law, relation,
etc.
The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Design,
may be said in general to proceed from the obviously planful
nature, or orderliness, of particular existences and their rela-
tions, as man has an increasing «!xperience of them, to the
conclusion that they all have their Ground in One Mind.
2 Lindsay, Recent Advances in Theistic Philosophy of Religion, p. 1 13.
CUSTOIklARY PROOFS EXAMINED 55
From this point of regard it may be considered as based upon
the self-confidence of human reason in its ability to know the
cosmical forces, existences, and laws, as they really are and
actually operate. Thus the teleological is an extension of the
cosmological argument ; and both are supported by the onto-
logical postulate which underlies all forms of the argument.
On the value of this argument the judgment of the founder
of the modern critical movement is well known. "It is,"
said Kant,' " the oldest, the clearest, and most in conformity
with human reason ; " and he adds that it would be " not
only extremely sad, but utterly vain, to attempt to diminish
the authority of that proof." Socrates ^ is represented as giv-
ing this argument naively when he convinces Aristodemus
that " man must be the masterpiece of some great artificer."
Plato presents it in detail in the Timseus. But Aristotle's
profounder view justifies us in saying that tlie recognition
which he gave to the immanent end of every object, and of
the Totality, made his doctrine of finality worthy to be " radi-
cally distinguished from the superficial utilitarian teleology of
later philosophers." ^ Bacon, the reputed founder of the
modern theory of the inductive method, declares in his Essay
on Atheism that when the mind of man beholdeth the chain
of causes " confederate and linked together," "it must needs
fly to Providence and Deity." The fact that Kant rejected
the claims of the Teleological Argument to " apodeictic cer-
tainty " need not greatly disturb those who neither seek nor
expect such certainty in an argument for the Object of reli-
gious faith. And the confession — "The old argument from
design in nature, as given by Paley, which, formerly seemed to
me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection
has been discovered " — is even less disturbing for one who
1 Kritik der Reinen Vemunft, in the section, Von der Unmoglichkeit des
physiko-theologischen Beweises.
2 Xenophon, Mem. I, iv; comp. IV, iii.
3 For a note on the history of the teleological argument, see Flint, Theism,
pp. 387^.
56 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
has passed quite beyond the philosophical standpoint of either
Paley or Darwin.
The phrase " superficial utilitarian teleology " may very
fitly give us our point of starting for an intelligent appreciation
of the nature, value, and cogency of the so-called argument
from design. It is an important introductory consideration
that the human mind has always, and of necessity, made use
of the teleological conception in finding its way to a belief in
the object of religious worship. That which does not seem to
have a mind, and at least to some extent to show its mind, can-
not stir or guide the religious nature of man. All our histor-
ical study of religion illustrates this statement.
In order not only to reconcile modern science and philosophy
with the teleological view of the world, but also to commit
them to it, and to the proof wliich it affords of the truth of
the religious conception of the Divine Being, the teleological
argument must, indeed, be apprehended in a generous, broad-
minded, and magnanimous fashion (^nian muss die Frage i?//,
grosseren Stil hehandehi). For such a treatment modern science
has prepared anew the way. Its very efforts to intensify and
to extend the mechanical conception of the universe, and, in
spite of all its splendid success in these efforts, its complete
failure thus to furnish an adequate and satisfactory explana-
tion, have expanded and strengthened this argument. Nowhere
do we find any " dead mechanism," worked upon, as it were,
by blind forces that reside upon the outside. Even the kind
of mechanism which we do find, and of which the particular
sciences can make use for a limited and partial explanation of
phenomena, is itself unthinkable witliout an indwelling final
purpose. What modern science presents is a lively picture of
the ceaseless, indescribably intricate, and richly productive
Life of Nature, regarded as a system of interacting Things and
Selves. In this system tlicre is everywliero present an im-
manent teleology — a vast, complex, and all-comprehensive net-
work of final purposes.
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 57
Into a detailed exhibition of the facts upon which the con-
ception of this universal " immanent teleology " relies, there
is the less need to enter, because it has been so repeatedly and
so fully made. The criticisms which have been most recently
given to the conception in its modern form have abundantly
shown its power to adapt itself to such minor modifications as
the facts require, without losing anything whatever from its
inherent impressiveness. Indeed, the greater number of these
criticisms scarcely touch the nerve of the argument ; much
less do they weaken or destroy it. For example, when one
writer^ maintains that the proof from the observed adaptation
of means to ends, to the intelligence which adapts them, is
either tautological or false, because the very conception of ends
necessarily involves intelligence, his objection, when examined,
comes perilously near to being a mere verbal quibble. The
distinctions, which are then introduced in the effort to substi-
tute for this " argument from design " a so-called " eutaxio-
logical argument " based upon the " reign of law," are, for
the most part, either superficial and unnecessary or inconclu-
sive as to the points at issue. To establish for the world of
human experience a reign of law it is necessary to deal with
the same facts to which the teleological argument appeals.
" Order " and " the reign of law " everywhere imply both
internal and external relations, really existing and actually
effective, among the different parts of the world's individual
beings, and also between those individual beings ; these rela-
tions themselves indicate that the beings do in fact serve, or
oppose, one another as means to the realization of common or
of different ends. The very conceptions of " Order " and
" Law " therefore involve the idea of the adaptation of means
to ends. Nor does the proposal to substitute the conception
of " function " for that of " purpose " either throw any glare of
new light upon the phenomena or avail to weaken the force of
1 Hicks, Critique of Design Arguments, p. vi/.
58 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the teleological argument. For function, too, is a fact from
which we legitimat<,'ly infer a purposing mind ; just as order is
a fact from which we infer an ordering mind. And if things
cannot, without putting viind into them, be conceived of as
ordering themselves, or as performing their several functions
properly, tlien surely they cannot without putting mind into
them, be conceived of as adapting themselves to one another
with the result of constituting a vast system of apparent means
and ends. At this point, of course, it is the vast and even uni-
versal extent of the system which seems to human reflective
thinking to require the Unity of one intelligent First Cause.
Thus the teleological argument extends the cosmological and
ontological arguments.
The objections and concessions of another critic may be held
to affect, as little as those of the writer just noticed, the re-
statement of the argument from the observed " immanent tele-
ology " of man's experienced world to the Being of God con-
ceived of as Intelligent Will. " The argument," says this
critic,' " as popularly pursued, proceeds upon the analogy of a
personal agent, whose contrivances are limited, etc., .... an
argument leading only to the most unworthy and anthropomor-
phic conceptions.'' Yet we are soon t<jld that " the satisfactory
view of the whole case can only be found in those more en-
larged conceptions which are furnished by the grand contem-
plation of cosmical order and unity, and which do not refer to
inferences of the past, but to proofs of the ever-present mind
and reason in nature." And elsewhere,^ the critic of the tel-
eological argument already quoted, does not hesit^ite to say :
" Tiie instiinces in which we can trace a ?<«<> and a purpose
in nature, striking jis they are, after all constitute but a very
small and suljordinate portion of the vast scheme of universal
order and harmony of design which pervades and connects
« Baden IV.wdl, Order of \atiiro, p. 237/.
J IJudcn Powell, Unity of Worlds (2d ed.), p. 1 12.
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 59
the whole. Throughout the immensely greater part of nature
we can trace symmetry and arrangement, but not the end for
which the adjustment is made."
Now the truth which the modern developments of the par-
ticular sciences are enforcing and illustrating is this : Every-
where, in the large and in the small, in the parts of individual
things and in the relations of these things to one another, in
the past and in the present, in the realm of so-called matter and
in the realm of so-called mind, and as respects the relations be-
tween the two, there is increasingly manifest the evidence " of
universal order and harmony of design." At the same time,
the inexplicable facts, and even the facts which seem to con-
tradict the universality of this order and the harmony of this
design, are greatly multiplied. Nevertheless, the human mind,
working anthropomorphically but ever more and more after
the pattern of the Universal Reason, refuses to accept as final
that interpretation of such facts which does not relate them,
too, to the all-ordering and all-harmonizing purposes of the
" ever-present Mind and Reason."
Let it be granted, then, that the so-called teleological argu-
ment may more properly be called " the Argument from an
universal Order." Combined, as it always must be, if it is to
produce a rational conviction, with reasoning from the nature
of the effect to the nature of the cause, and implying the
validity of the ontological postulate, the argument from design
becomes a cosmological argument in a truer, profounder, and
more complete form. It is an argument from cosmic existences,
processes, forces, as man has experience of them, to the Being
of the Cosmos in respect of its real nature. Brie% stated it
runs thus : (1) INlan's experience with the world shows, and
shows increasingly, as the different positive sciences extend
the domain of human knowledge and bring their separate con-
clusions into greater harmony, that IT is an orderl}' totality ;
(2) The proper, rational, and only satisfactory explanation of
this general fact of experience is the postulate of a World-
60 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Ground, conceived of tis ;in absolute Will and Intelligence — an
intelligent Will, a willing Mind.
" Among tbemselTes all things
Have order; and from hence the form which makes
The Universe resemble God."
At tliis point, the purely negative and quite unthinkable
conception of the " Unconscious " intervenes. And doubtless,
the unconscious for us as individuals and for the whole race
of men is by far the greater part of what really is, and of what
actually happens. But the " Unconscious " in general, em-
ployed as an explanatory principle or as the conclusion of an
argument, is the mentally unpresentable ; it is the Unding, the
vast, the infinite envelope of night, in the center of which floats
the expanding dayliglit of man's cognitive strivings and cogni-
tive attainments. The same thing is equally true of such nega-
tive and mystical conceptions as are involved in Eckhart's dis-
tinction of "God and Godhead," which "differ as deed and
not-deed ; " and of all the negative predicates assigned to
the "Godhead," such as "non-spirit," "non-good," "non-
moral," etc.
Emphatically true is it that the net result of the various
theories of evolution, all of which have tended to replace the
older mechanical conception of the world with the conception
of the pliysical Cosmos as a developing Life, has increased
rather than diminished the scope and the cogency of the tele-
ological argument. The Mind and Will which this evolution
of living forms manifests, indicate that the teleological principle
is 80 deeply bedded in the heart of Reality ;us to make it im-
possible for any individual existence to come actually to be,
or even to l>e conceived of as being, without an implied con-
formity to a j)l;iii. If biological evolution starts, as most
modern forms of the theory seem inclined to do, with the funda-
mental princi[)le of variability assumed as a genend fact of all
life, and as a n-sultant from the composite nature of the germ
and the infinitely varying forms of its environment, then science
CUSTOxMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 61
must account for the plan-full, specific limitations of this vari-
ability. The principle of heredity must somehow co-operate,
and must direct the variable along certain lines of development.
But if biology start with heredity, and take for granted all
that goes with this principle in order to secure a plan-full
stability for living forms, then it must also discover some real
principle which will account for the obvious restriction of the
effects of inheritance. Only in this way can the progressive
order and continuity of development in the different genera-
tions having the same ancestor be satisfactorily explained. But
from whichever point of view science takes its start, the final
problem remains essentially the same ; — namely, to get all the
principles so adjusted to one another and to common ends, that
the actual, observed history of the development of life on the
earth shall be adequately explained. And this cannot be done
without the hypothesis of an immanent teleology, an indwell-
ing and ordering Mind. Surely, m the interests of every theory
of biological evolution we cannot say less, even if we cannot say
more, than Weismann ^ has said upon this point : " I neverthe-
less believe that there is no occasion for this reason to renounce
the existence of, or to disown, a directive Power." " Behind
the co-operating forces of nature which ' aim at a purpose '
must we admit a Cause, which is no less inconceivable in its
nature, and of which we can only say one thing with certainty,
— viz., that it must be teleological."
The cosmological and teleological arguments so-called reach
their supreme form of expression in what is denominated, with
a somewhat loose and expansive signification, the " Moral Ar-
gument " for the Being of God. In considering the evidence
of immanent final purpose which the world-order shows, it is es-
pecially important to comprehend, if possible, the teleology of
man himself, both of the individual and of the race. In some
sort, and in spite of no little confusion and much darkness, the
Universe as known to man seems to have realized in his pro-
1 Theory of Descent (ed. London, 1882), II, p. 708; 712.
62 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
duction and development one of its most obvious final pur-
poses. But IT lias made him moral and capable of pronouncing
judgments of value on things and on himself from the moral
point of view. What sort of a universe must " IT " be, which
can bring to actuality the moral being that man certainly
is?
According to Pfleiderer' the moral argument falls into two
parts: (1) "From the existence of the absolute moral law in
our consciousness we arrive at God as absolute lawgiver ;" and
(2) "for the possibility of the realization of tlie moral law in
the visible world, we postulate God as absolute nder of the
world." In one word, only absolute, or independent moral
Being, can serve as the Ground of that ethical nature and eth-
ical development which man knows himself to have attained.
In a more tentative way Wundt'^ finds in human ethical ex-
perience the proof of a principle which seems to demand a
source for itself that can neither lie in the individual animal
or the individual man ; nor in nature, considered as an un-
ideal and unethical environment. How such a principle can
be, Wundt thinks is "one of the questions which we shall in
all probability never be able to answer." We shall subse-
quently express more in detail our agreement with Pfleiderer in
thinking that the existence of such a principle demands the
postulate of an ethical World-Ground.
The so-called moral proof, like all the other arguments, is
not improved or made more theoretically convincing and j)rac-
tically effective by any of the various attempts to throw it into
a demonstrative or intuitive form. Vov example, when one
author'' affirms, " What we are immediately conscious of is,
that the Ultimate Ground of all reality is asserting itself in us,
and revealing to us an objective norm of conduct which is felt
to possess a universality and an authority such as nothing fi-
• Philosophy of Religion, III. \>. Jfil/.
2 Ethics, I, p. MiOf.
8 Upton, h&ses of Ueligioua Belief (Hibbert Lectures, 1897), p. 37.
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 63
nite or created could originate," — he is leaping at a bound the
steps in the argument through which the race has slowly
found its way upward, in the evolution of moral and religious
experience. Neither can we accord the verdict of success to
Kant for his effort, in the " Critique of the Practical Reason,"
to connect the conception of God in a perfectly indisputable
way with the absoluteness of the moral law, conceived of as a
so-called categorical imperative. But undoubtedly, as Schultz
argues,^ the teleological argument is greatly strengthened by the
facts and principles of man's moral life and moral develop-
ment. " Every man," says he, " who believes unconditionally
in moral obligation has in his heart an altar to the unknown
God." The moral argument in truth puts the crown on the
other forms of the cosmological and teleological arguments.
But it can do little or nothing to overcome a determined agnosti-
cism or materialism, because the citadel in which these views
entrench themselves lies on the other side of the moral domain,
so to say. It must, therefore, be taken by siege or by assault
before religious experience can approach the discussion of prob-
lems of an ethical sort in their bearing upon the proof for the
Being of God. " Unless a man really believes in God on other
grounds," says the Roman Catholic writer, R. F. Clarke,'^ " I
should be very sorry to have to convert him by means of the
argument from conscience."
In the conceptions of Deity which are formed by savage or
primitive man, the moral elements are either largely wanting ;
or else they are so uncertain and shifty as only slightly to in-
fluence his conduct or his cult. The same gods — whether con-
ceived of as natural powers personified or in a more definite
anthropomorphic fashion — may be regarded as well-disposed or
ill-disposed to the individual and to the tribe, without calling
into question the purity of the morals, either of themselves or of
their worshippers. But as the development of man raises him
1 Grundriss der Christlichen Apologetik, p. 82/.
2 Existence of God, p. 43.
64 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
in the scale of morality, and elevates and purifies his ideas of
the inviolability of moral principles and of the value of moral
ideals, it also compels him to improve his conception of God
as judged by moral standards.
The argument — if such it can be called — from man's aesthet-
ical sentiments and ideals for the religious conception of the
Being of the World as perfect Ethical Spirit is a part of the moral
argument, in the wider signification of the term. The con-
siderations which belong to this argument may be presented
from two related but not identical points of view : (1) The stim-
ulus which these sentiments — the feelings with which man
greets his ideals of what is admirable, sublime, venerable, or
mysterious, etc., — furnish toward the belief in God; and (2)
the stimulus and the shaping which the sentiments and ideals
themselves receive from the conception of God. Evidence for
the existence of God, as a Being fit to satisfy the higher reli-
gious ideals of humanity, cannot be obtained without taking the
facts of ethics and art chiefly into the account. In some real
and important way, then, it is true that the ethical and aesthet-
ical experience and development of man give God to man, and
in themselves prove the reality of the God whom they give.
They are forms of experience which will never rest satisfied with
a view of the cosmos, and of man's cosmic relations, which re-
duces him to a merely dependent piece of a universal Mechanism,
called "• Nature," or what you will. The Cosmos itself must be
interpreted so as to make room for all that is in man. For who
is it that interprets this cosmos in terms, whether of the cosmo-
logical, or other forms of argument and belief? It is man him-
self. From this truly human point of view, all arguments must
be regarded as only fragmentary parts of one argument ; and
that one argument may properly be designated " cosmological "
— l)ased liowever, on tlio ontolngical postulate wliich expresses
the confidence of the race in its rational and cognitive develop-
ment. To give up the faith that man ma}' know the Being of
the World, in a way, progressively the better to satisfy his own
CUSTOMARY PROOFS EXAMINED 65
enlarged mind, is to adopt a discouraging and dishonorable at-
titude of scepticism.
The Historical Argument is in no respect a separate form of
evidence, or proof, for the Being of God. But, on the other
hand, all the arguments, in order to be presented in the
most convincing way, require the constant recognition of
the value of historical studies. They themselves are, in their
present most approved form, the results — each one — of an
historical process. The proofs are developments, dependent
upon the growing experience of the race, and upon its in-
creasing ability to interpret and evaluate this experience.
The motto of this argument may be stated in these words of
Augustine, which are said to have converted Newman : Se-
cur us judical orhis terrarum. From another point of view it
resolves itself, as evidence, into the objective side of the psy-
chological problems offered by the nature, origin, and develop-
ment of religions, as those problems have already been dis-
cussed. " Given man such as he is, and given the world such
as it is, a belief in divine beings, and, at last, in One Divine
Being, is not only a universal, but an inevitable fact." ^
1 See Max Miiller, Anthropological Religion, Lecture IV.
5
CHAPTER XXIX
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED
The reflective mind cannot remain uncritically "secure" in
the judgment of the multitudes of mankind (the orbis terraruni)
with regard to the being and attributes of God. Tliis judgment
may be claimed for nature-worship in some form, as chronolog-
ically prior to Theism ; or for Buddhism, as to-day more
'• multitudinous " than Christianity. " Collective humanity,"
considered as the subject of religious experience, believes in
the Object of religion, in God, in a very confused and unsatis-
factory manner. The content of its conception, " the accumu-
lation of centuries," is not such as to make it acceptable "in
the raw " to a cultivated reason.
We have, indeed, seen the truth of the declaration that
"• The arguments in question (that is, for the Being of God)
are so fundamental as to have commended themselves to man
as soon as he began seriously to reflect upon religion, and at
the same time so inexhaustible as to admit of continued adap-
tation to the ideas and idiosyncrasies of every successive age."
But this very declaration implies the claim that the same
arguments make upon the human reason a ceaseless demand
for reconstruction, 'ihe total proof will always be an un-
finished work. Its main outlines may remain, indeed, sub-
stantially unchanged in cliaracter ; l)ut tliey are constantly
widening their scope, constantly accumulating the content
with which they are to be filU'd, and constantly challenging re-
newed examination from clianging pointa of view. Indeed,
the Reality corresponding to the conception of God reveals
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 67
itself in no more convincing way than through a critical study
of the history of man's religious development ; for this amply
proves that the essentials of the conception endure through
all the centuries of progressive rectification which the concep-
tion itself undergoes.
Such a perpetual challenge to humanity never to give over
its attempt the better to sound the profounder depths of this
Ideal of the religious experience, and to discover more com-
prehensively and surely what Reality sustains and validates its
development, is enforced by powerful social considerations.
Life^ in the noblest, broadest, and highest meaning of the term,
is impossible without that attitude of filial piety toward the
Being of the World which is the very heart and pulse of genu-
ine subjective religion. The social nature of man, therefore,
becomes an unceasing stimulus of the demand for so-called
proof upon this subject. Indifference is impossible. If I be-
lieve, why argue with myself ? If I do not believe, why argue
with another ? Why should men generally strive so mightily
to convince their fellows that God is, or that he is not ? It is
not my experience which alone needs to be explained. It is
the experience of the race, the universal and typical experience
of mankind. All the rational and social interests which belong
to humanity at large are concerned in the constant inquiry of
the race for a renewed investigation of the grounds on which
reposes its own undying faith in God.
On the other hand, the history of discussion, as well as the
nature of the problems discussed, warns us that no individual
thinker, however fruitful or bold .his thinking may be, need
expect to make any considerable contribution toward the an-
swer to this problem of the ages. At most the individual can
only set forth his own view of the particular considerations
which should, in his judgment, most powerfully influence the
men of his own day to a more rational faith in the Object of
the universal religious experience. This work, like every
work of thought, must be done by the individual thinker ; for
68 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
there is no argument, either for the displaj'" or for the criticism
of any kind of evidence, which is not some indivldiiaV s thought.
At this point it is necessary to recall the nature of the task
which is before us now, and which will remain before us until
the end. This task is (1) to establish the Unitary Being of
God in sucli manner as to meet the legitimate demands of
modern science and philosophy ; and, at the same time, (2) to
vindicate and expound the Spirituality of this Being in such
manner as to satisfy the higher aesthetical and ethical senti-
ments and ideals, and so to afford evidence for the essential
truth of humanity's religious experience.
In the accomplishment of sucli a task, no matter how par-
tially, we are, however, entitled to whatever advantages flow
naturally from certain considerations established by our histor-
ical and psychological studies, and by our previous criticism of
the arguments customarily proposed. One of these considera-
tions is the necessity of combming the historical and the phil-
osophical methods. But as says D'Alviella :' " These methods
do not exclude each other ; nay, each finds in the other its nec-
essary supplement." The rather is it true that these metliods
represent different aspects of the one rational movement of the
race in its effort to attain and to justify a satisfj'ing faith in God.
When tlie inquiry is raised. What conception of God, if it
can be estjiblislied by evidence, whether of the indisputable or
of the probable sort, would best meet tlie intellectual, ethical,
sesthetical^ and social needs of men ? a tolerably sure clue to
the right answer is found in the nature and development of
tlie religious experience of the race. There is undoubted
truth in the observation of Pascal,^ that different minds both
1 Origin and Growth of the Conception of God, p. vii.
2 I'ens<'«s, Partie I, art. x, sec. 3.1: "Ceux qui sont accoutiim(?8 :\ juger
par le Hontimcnt ne oomprcnnent ricn aiix choses de raisonncment; car ila
veulent d'alx^ni pi'-n^'-trer d'linc vuc, ct no snnt point accoutuni(''.s i\ chcrchcr
lea principCB. Et Ics autrcs, au contrairc, «iui sont ac('outuni(''.s h rni.sonnor
par principes, ne comprennent rien aux choses de sentiment, y clicrcbunt
des principes, ct ne pouvant voir d'line vue."
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 69
approach and estimate the truth of this conception in quite
diif erent ways. Inasmuch, however, as the religious experience
of the race — religion when considered subjectively — includes
activities and attitudes of thought, of feeling, and of the life
of conduct, the Object toward which, considered as a Reality,
this experience is directed, must necessarily assume a form to
correspond with the subjective experience. It is desirable at
once, then, to define clearly in the interests of critical and re-
flective thinking, tlie goal which it is intended to reach. This
is the conclusion that the World-Ground may reasonably he con-
ceived of as personal, and perfect Ethical Spirit. The many
difficulties in the way of such a conclusion must, indeed, be
candidly and thoroughly examined. But to forejudge the
conclusion by warning us that " we must not fall down and
worship as the source of our life and virtue, the image which
our own minds have set up; " and to ask, " Why such idolatry
is any better' than that of the old wood and stone?" is to re-
treat before the struggle, and fall back upon the otiose and
unreasonable positions of a worn-out dogmatic agnosticism.
" The image which our own minds set up " is our only standard
of any form of truth, our only medium of commerce with reality.
Man does fall down and worship such an image ; this is one of
the very things chiefly to be accounted for. But that other
image which takes its name from metaphysical babblings simi-
lar to those of the psuedo-Dionysius when he cliaracterizes
Deity as "Super-essential Indetermination, supra-rational Unity,
super-essential Essence, the Absolute No-Thing above all exist-
ence," is quite as much comparable to " old wood and stone "
as are the idol gods of the most intellectually degraded races.
Since the conception of personality, as well as the concep-
tion of Divine Being, has been and still is subject to a process
of development, the effort to combine the two into a self-
consistent and harmonious idea, such as that which is covered
by the term " personal Absolute," must also be, for its per-
fection and rationality, so to say, dependent upon develop-
70 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ment. In religion the conception of God as perfect Ethical
Spirit marks the highest point liitherto reached by one form of
the evolution of mankind. In pliilosophy, so far as philosopliy
deals with the fundamental problem proposed by this concep-
tion, its chief difficulties of the more strictly logical order con-
cern the Idea to be subsumed under such a term (/. e., personal
Absolute'). In order to overcome these difficulties two things
must be made to appear : — First, that the conception of Per-
sonality, or self-conscious Spirit, is not necessarily limited from
without, — ah-extra, as it were ; that it is, on the contrary, the
one positive standpoint (or BJicJcpnnlct) from which all con-
crete realities and actual relations are necessarily regarded ;
and that, when thought out in its most essential and highest
form, it is a sf/f-limiting and 6-e(/'-consi stent conception. But,
second, it must also be made to appear that the Absoluteness
of God is not annulled, but the rather enriched, confirmed to
thought, and made intelligible, by the system of particular and
individual beings in which lie is immanent, and through which
He manifests himself. Thus, in some sort, the problem for the
pliilosophy of religion becomes, not so much whether God ex-
ists or not, as what is the Nature of the Ultimate Reality.
And the best possible solution of this problem is attained, if
we are warranted in conceiving of this Reality as the Ground
of all that we hold true in science, of all that we admire in art,
of all that we esteem most wortliy in morals ; and, as well, as
the valid 01)ject of religious Ix^lief and worship.
The logical process of constructing, on the basis of man's
total and ever-developing experience, the conception of the
Ultimate Reality, or World-Ground, as an Absolute Person,
wliile tliis process in some sort constitutes a unity of argu-
ment, cannot claim for all parts of itself an equally convincing
kind or amount of evidence. Especially is this true when the
attempt is made to incorporate into the conce[)tion those ethi-
cal and .'T'sthetical elements which are most important and dear to
tlie religious consciousness. It is compunitively easy to show
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 71
that all such categories as Force, Cause, Relation, and the more
complex categories of Law, ^Matter, Nature, etc., imply for the
human mind One Absolute Will and Mind as constituting the
Ground of that system of things and of finite selves of which man
has experience. Certain metaphysical predicates, all of which
speak in terms that are meaningless as applied to beings devoid
of self-consciousness, may also be inferred. But at the point
where this conclusion from the data of experience to the
rational conception of a World-Ground, as Will and Mind,
meets the objections derived from the category of self-con-
sciousness, the difficulties of reconciling the absoluteness of
God with his personality culminate in a way to demand a more
searching analysis. It is, however, where reflective thinking
seeks to ascribe the perfection of so-called moral attributes
to the World-Ground, that the difficulties become most per-
plexing and acute. For at this point the dark problem of evil
seems to block the path of reason. And, indeed, this blocking
is effectual, unless it can be agreed to expand the scope of so-
called " reason, " and at the same time to throw the weight of
the argument over upon certain other aspects of human experi-
ence. Hence, while the candid investigator might be able to
say that he knotvs the sum-total of the experience of the race is
best explained by reference to the unitary principle of one
intelligent Will, he would conform his language to his mental
attitude better if he only claimed that there seem to be good
reasons for his faith in the moral and spiritual perfection of
God.
In all that movement of reason, by which it seeks grounds
for a belief in God, it is important to keep the teachings of
history in view. The admonition to do this has already been
several times repeated. It is history which supplies us vnih.
the knowledge of certain of the more constaiit elements in
man's conception of Deit}-. These elements, by virtue of their
very constancy, have a peculiar claim upon the student of the
philosophy of religion. They may be grouped under the fol-
72 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
lowing two heads : The " root-conception," always found on
digging down into human consciousness, is the super-humanity
of God. This conception must not, however, be confused
with that of the super-natural ; much less with the belief that
the Divine Being is so above man as to be unknowable or in-
communicable by way of relations of thought, feeling, or will.
In power, majesty, control over the conditions of space, time,
and causation, in wisdom, justice, and, finally, in goodness and
purity, the Divine is to be esteemed as more than human. At
the same time, and as the complement of the elements just
enumerated, the likeness of God and man is somehow or other,
always either tacitly assumed or openly advocated. Such a
likeness is the only conceivable basis on which any degree or
kind of communion between the two can take place. " That
God is a Spirit is, in brief," says Tiele,^"the creed of man
throughout all ages ; and religious man feels the need of as-
cribing to God in perfection all the attributes he has learned
to regard as the highest and noblest in his own spirit."
We shall now sketch in barest outline the argument for the
religious conception of the Being of the World as it presents
itself in the light of modern science and philosophy, and of
modern life, leaving to subsequent chapters the work of com-
pleting the details, especially at those places where difficulty
and dispute chiefly arise.
" Does the world explain itself, or does it lead the mind
above and beyond itself ? " ^ Science, philosophy, and religion,
all have their birth hi the negative answer to this question.
In some sort, unless we assume that things and selves, as they
appear to the senses under the conditions of space and time,
are not self-explanatory, neither science, nor pliilosophy, nor
religion, could even come into existence.^ But all three —
religion, science, and, especially, philosophy — have been con-
1 Elements of the Science of Religion, Second Series, p. 103.
2 So Professor Flint, Theism, p. 12.
3Comp. Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte d. Philosophic, I, ii, p. 204/.
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 73
stantly placing upon surer and broader convictions the knowl-
edge of the World's Unity as presented in all these forms of
human experience. The path of tlie progress of each of the
three is indeed strewn with hasty and over-confident generali-
zations. The various subordinate unities, whether they are
known as related species of things, or as those more or less
uniform ways of tlie behavior of things which we call laws,
have often enough been misapprehended. Thus it is essential
to progress that the old unities should be reduced to their con-
stituent elements and new conceptions should be formed. But
all the while there has been an increasing conviction, supported
by an accumulating mass of evidence, as to some sort of a Uni-
tary Being belonging to the manifold varied and incessantly
changing complex of existences and events. Indeed, all the
terms in which the growth of any kind of knowledge expresses
itself signify man's undying confidence in this truth. In
some sort, the many are connected ; they are in a system ; they
constitute a cosmos ; there is a " reign of law" ; there is a
real order underlying the apparent confusion ; the world of
man's experience is undergoing a process of interdependent
evolution. The Being of the World is One; or at least, it is
on its way to becoming One.
That this conception of the unitary Being of the World is
a pleasing and helpful postulate for all the particular sciences,
there is no necessity to prove. .That the conception con"esponds
to the reality, the achievements of science tend either to assume
with more confidence or to show with an increasing amount of
evidence. In man's religious development we have already seen
what powerful forces have been successfully at work to compel
his mind to the belief in one God rather than in indefinitely
many gods. Even in the case of the ancient Egyptians who,
as Renouf affirms,^ probably saw no inconsistency in holding
at one and the same time the doctrine of many gods and One
God, there was evolved the conception expressed — in however
1 The Religion of Ancient Egypt, p. 96.
74 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
esoteric form — in the hyiiiii to Anion Ka : " The ONE, Maker
of all that is ; the One, the only One, the Maker of existences."
Philosophy may then appeal to both science and religion, and
may base its appeal upon the achievements in development of
both, when it claims that, either in the course of argument or
in the form of a postulate, some one real Principle must be
arrived at which shall assist in explaining the unitjiry nature
of our experience with the manifold world of things and of
men.
This explanatory Principle must be not merely logical but
real ; it must be believed in, or known, as having an existence
independent of the constructive activity of human imagination
and human thinking. It must serve as the Ground, both of
these activities and of the objects which they construct. To
use the abstract and often misleading, but expressive term of
the Hegelian philosophy, it must have its " Being-in-itself."
And this real principle must be One. It must have some unity
in reality. Since the world of fact and law is constantly re-
vealing itself in human experience as more and more an inter-
connected whole, the real Being which explains this whole in
a fundamental way, must also be conceived of as a unifying
actus. It is the Unitary Being of this principle which accounts
for the interconnection and orderly relations of the world of
man's varied experiences.
When, liowever, such metaphysical abstractions as the fore-
going are examined, it soon becomes obvious how unsatisfac-
tory, if left in their abstractness, they are to account for the
manifold, vital, and intensely real, concrete facts of daily life.
In spite, liowever, of this dissatisfaction which philosophy
shares with common sense and with popular feeling, let us
call for the present that Unitiuy Being which is to serve as a
real explanatory Principle of these varied facts, by the title of
" The World-Ground." Such a term has confessedly an un-
couth structure and liarsh acoustic properties ; but it is, per-
haps, as well fitted as any otlier to express the conclusion of
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 75
the present moment in the argument. For, (1) it is imper-
sonal ; (2) it nevertheless expresses some sort of a unity ; and
(3) it indicates some sort of a real relation, a vital and pro-
ductive connection, between our experience of the world and
the explanatory principle which we seek.
It was Schopenhauer who more clearly than any other modern
philosopher brought forward a thought which, after all, is
necessarily regulative of all the attempts to explain experience
that depend upon the belief in, or knowledge of, a World-
Ground. No conception can explain this experience that does
not incorporate in itself our human but fundamental idea of
causative activity. The World-Ground caiinot serve as a real
and unitary princij^le unless It is itself conceived of as Will.
This contention may be argued in the light of the psychologi-
cal study of that universal experience from which man derives
all his categories of Force, Power, Energy, Cause ; — and what-
ever other conceptions seem necessary to distinguish being
from non-being, doing from not-doing, life from death. It is
in this knowledge of himself as essentially an active will that
man finds the warrant for all these categories as he applies
them to external things. The application is, indeed, made as
a kind of fundamental anthropomorphism. But it enters into
all knowledge ; and without it nothing can be known to act or
even to be.^
The same conclusion may be argued on the authority of
modern science. The conceptions which it has embodied in
the so-called law of the conservation and correlation of energy
are in evidence here. This " energy " of the Being of the
World appears to scientific insight more and more of a kind to
bring into orderly connections and sequences all the separate
manifestations of energy, whether these manifestations are
located, so to say, in selves or in things. To be sure, no one
specific kind of energizing, and no one established formula to
1 This truth is shown in detail throughout the author's treatises on the
"Philosophy of Knowledge" and "A Theory of Reality."
76 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
express the relations of the different centers of energy hiis
been discovered hithertx). Moreover, any expression for the
dynamic relations which seem to be maintained betuyen selves
and things is iis yet a formula so hidden, if indeed it exist in
reality at all, that the mind CiUi scarcely imagine words in
which such an expression could be fi-amed. Still further, the
behavior of radio-active substances, and other physical phenom-
ena, as well as the growing tendency to look on psychoses
themselves as active forces, and the difficulties of reconciling
so static a conception as the " conservation of energy " offei-s
with the evidences that the World is an evolving Life, are just
now shaking the contidence of the thoughtful in the finality
and supremacy of the scientific conception of Energy as a uni-
fying principle. Still the positive sciences cling, and very
properly cling, to their determination to regard the separate
forces as somehow^ resolvable into different forms of the mani-
festiition of that wliichis essentially One. To fill the abstract
and barren conception of One Force with a vital experience
we are obliged to refer to the unifying actus of a single Will.^
In some form the reflections of philosophy have, from time
immemorial, virtually endowed the Being of the World with
that capacity for causal energy which man knows in himself
1 A careful analysis of any of those terms in which modem science attempts
to summarize its views as to the nature of that substantial and ultimate
unity in which it wishes to ground all its explanations of physical phenomena
will illustrate this statement. According to a recent writer the latest con-
clusions as to what is known about this unity may be summarized as follows:
"Ether under strain constitutes 'charge'; ether in locomotion constitutes
current and magnetism; ether in vibration constitutes light. What ether
itself is we do not know, but it may, perhaps, be a form or aspect of matter.
Now we can go one step further and say: Matter is composed of ether and
nothing else." [.\ddre.ss by Professor Etlward L. Nichols on "The Funda-
mental Concepts of Physical Science." l)oforc the Inteniational Congros.s at
St. Ixjiiis; see Popidar Science Monthly, -Xov. 1004, p. (V2.] The "in-itsclf"
being of this Ether, aut of which Matter in the different forms of its manifes-
tation and activity is compo-sed, so far as it is known or knowable is stata-
ble only in terms of Will and .Mind.
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 77
as his will. On the basis of that irresistible experiential proof
to which we have already referred, man believes that such ca-
pacity, although limited and subject to development, is the
fundamental thing with himself. It is the very core of his
being, to will. So must it be, according to the testimony of
the world's reflective thinkers, after an enlarged and more
mysterious fashion, with the Being of the World. With Plato
the Good was conceived of as a fountain of quenchless and ex-
haustless energy. With Aristotle the Prime Mover was the
responsible agent for the changes of which men's senses and
reasonings took account. Witli Kant the Ultimate Reality was
personal Will. And Hegel's " Thought " is no passive entity
or merely abstract arrangement of dead categories ; it, too, is
the energizing of a self-revealing Will.
Although we have no experience from which to derive a con-
tent that shall give the conception of the World-Ground its
right to exist as an explanatory principle, which does not re-
fer to the core of its reality as an actual energizing, the con-
ception of mere Will is quite inadequate. It is both too meagre
and too abstract. Just as our experience is not an experience
of things and minds merely acting and interacting, so its ex-
planatory Principle cannot be a mere Being of the World con-
ceived of after the analogy of Will. Order and adaptation —
as the so-called cosmological argument has already been justi-
fied in asserting — imply that the syntheses of Will wliich
everywhere abound must be directed by Mind. Order and
adaptation are facts. They are facts which require co-operating
energies that are somehow converged, as it were, upon the at-
tainment of an end. Such is the comprehensive conclusion of
the so-called cosmological and teleological view of the world,
from the beginning of human reflection down to the present
time. We have already seen (pp. 45^.) that the nature of the
argument has not changed essentially, from first to last. Essen-
tially considered, it cannot change. When the world of man's
experience was conceived of as " dead matter," as a machine
7H rilll.oSOl'IIV Ol-' KKIJCION
moved ujxni by forc^cs from willidiit, llic Mind which it, dia-
pliiycd, and on wliich it dcjiciidcd for iUs I'mins and hiwH, wuh lo-
ciilfd (i/>-ij(rii, uiid ojM'niU'd upon it from afar, iw it wore, —
alhcit Ihroutjh Huhordinato h^c.'Iumch and Hcu^ondary cauHCH and
ililfiiiH'diary <'X istcnccs. When, however, Ihe siihtler eoMcej)-
tion of a mechanism, moh'cniar and atomic, had .snpphinUid
th(! coarsiM' notion of a worhl made likti u machine;, tho intisl-
lij^cnt Will, th(! willin^^ Mind, was c.oncoivod of as int(M*p(!notnit-
int^ and iMiiii;ineiit in every (h'tail of tin! world's Itein^s and
doings. Vet Hnhth-r is that moro moih-rn eonccplion of the
worhl wliich likcMis it to an indwelling and nidolding Life.
With this eoneeption, Miml hecom(!s, not only lli;it, intelligent
force which makes lliings so lo exist tli;it hiini:in heings can
upjirehcnd and nn(h;rsland tlutm, bnt also that explanaUn-y I'rin-
cij)lc whieli givers IIk; warrant to assei't that things tlunnselves
arc maiiififstl}' all informed with mental life.
l''or cent nries ast I'onomy alfordcd holh the most, inllncnt ial
line of thinking along which men were cai'ried from mytholog-
ical nature-woi'shij) towaid theisti(\ views, and als<» the most
impresHivo argument lor the T.eing (d" (lod. ()f ('onfu(!inH'
U80 of tho Vagne term "lleaven," which he enijtloyeil to win
tiie people from idolatry, Di". Martin allirms :' ''lie ascribed to
the object of his rtivenincc mor(! of p»'isonality than they (his
followers of to-day) arc willing to admit." In th(! ('hinesc con-
coption. Heaven has always posHessed certain indwcdling rn-
paeities of will and mind. The niodiMii Hcic^nces of chemistry,
pliysics, and biology -especially tho latter with ilii mieroseopio
investigation of the (wolntion of (Mdlstructureand etdl-growth —
(liroots oni' altent ion the rather to that, immanent l<ife of tho
woi'ld, whont religion w<Hsliips as th(! " living and life-giving
(lod." ( )n the h'vel of the chemi(!0-j)hyHiral sciences, thi.s
thought is piit into realistic and highly ligunitive language by
a ceh'biated writer on physics, when ho BayH :' " The atoms aro
' Tlio l.on) of Ciith/iy, p. I.'t.
* I,ifo uf Jiiriiofi (Mork Miixwfll, p. IWl.
iiiK AK(;r,Mi;N I" kkconstructki) 79
a very touLjli lot, iiiul ran slaml a L;rt'at. tloal of kiioi'kiui; about,
uiid it is stnuigo to liiula nuinlu'r o( tlioui i'oiul»iiiiii<;' to form a
mail of fiH'ling." And ai;'aiii :' " 1 liavi> looki-d into most phil-
osophical systems, luul 1 haw srcn that nono w ill work w ilhouL
a (u)d."
This vitalistii- view of Natnn^ as implyiuL;- an indwi'Iliiii;
Mind and Will is a return, in tlu" name of si'iiMU'i^ and in vastly
improved anil mon* [trofonndly sis^nilieant form, to tho sauio
point of view from whit'h so unu-h of roligious belief and prae-
tieo tiiok its rise. In this eonneelion it should bo nolieed
that. thoS(^ t'ati'Li'ories under which all seientitie researeh, anil
all tilt" e\[)ositions {)( the seieui'es, ndate their diseovered phe-
ni»miMui, imply essentially the same oouelusion. Causation
miMus nothing iutoUigiblo unless it means lu'tive will endowed
with intelligoueo. Burr Cause, ///<•/•(• Foree or iMu-ri^y, eauses
ami forees and kinds o( ener^-y that are not direeted toward
sonic end, arc not ouly ineoneeivablo as having place in a sys-
tem of oxistenees, but they also arc quito unablo to olToct tho
reality of sueh a systiMu.
If, then, (lod is to 1h> known or knowable as the (i round of
tho World, it i-annot be as bare Will, or as uucimditioued Pri-
mal Causi', or as nuu-e and indelniit«> Principle of existence.
l'\)r the wiu'ld itself, as kni)\\ n or kno\vabK>, is uiit a mere
" lump," si» to say, of »>xisleiu'i>s and oeeurriMiees ; nor ilo its
existences, forees, and so-called causes, o[)iMate upon each t)ther,
or stand together in the totality of tlu» w'i>rld, in an umh>lined,
nnelassiliable, unspeciali/.ed way. This is to say that "causes"
ari> always, and o{ their vi-ry nature, teleolo^ieal. 'rhe\' siU'VO
tlieir own ami one anotlu'r's imuIs. (]i^A is the (Jround o( tho
co-operation o( t»\istene«'s and eaus»\s to whatsoevi'r euils arc -
whetluM' we can *liscoV(>r what thiM' are, ov not -aetuallv being
fultilled. As 1 havi> elsiwvluM'c said,-' in ciiuelusion of a iK>tailed
disi'ussion o( [he i-oni't^pticuis involved: "This is, iiulced, just
» //)h/.. p. IJti,
J .\ 'Thoory oi Ui^nlity, p. M'A).
80 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
what a * principle of causation ' necessarily means — Will energiz-
ing in conformity to ideal forms and a///j,s-."
On the one hand, then, this One Will, the Will of God, is
not something apart from, or wholly beside and above, the
many finite and concrete centers of energy — human wills and
willing things, considered as relatively independent centers of
activ-ity, which by their co-operating bring about the manifesta-
tion of the One Will of God. Or as Professor Royce has
forcefully but not quite adequately stated the case : ' " The
Divine Will is simpl}- that aspect of the Absolute which is ex-
pressed in the concrete and differentiated individuality of the
World.'' But, on the other hand, God as Will is not mere
undifferentiated Power ; in order to " get his will done," this
infinite Power must be translated into many finite powers.
The forms and laws of the translation, as we actually see it
constantly going on in the processes of so-called Nature, im-
plies the immanent presence of Mind. Thus much at least is
demonstrably true.
It is enough at this stage of the argument to say, that the
verj' words and formulas which man is obliged to use in all his
attempts to construct a scientific and systematic interpretation
of his experience, shows him to bo obliged to conceive of the
Ground of it all as an ordering and designing Will, or Mind.
But other experiences enable us to consider this Divine Will
as rising above the blind strivings and desires which the phe-
nomena of nature exhibit, and lead our thought beyond the more
definite specializations of energy, its kinds and laws, with wliich
the particular sciences make us familiar, upward to the con-
ception of moral will as choice ; and this moral will, blended
with emotion, is the Divine Love and the precondition of the
Divine Blessedness.
The argument for the Being of God still remains, however,
in the region of inadequate abstractions. May this Mind-Will
be conceived of as a sclf-oonscious poi-sonal Life, an Abeolute
iThe Conception of God, p. -'OL'/.
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 81
Self in the supreraest meaning possible for these words ? At
this point the argument undoubtedly begins to grapple with
the objections of those who will go only so far as Schopenhauer
and Hartraann, and many others both in ancient and modern
times have gone. If it stops here, however, it rests in such a
largely negative and abstract conception of the Divine Being
as has seemed sufficient to Brahmanical and Buddhistic phi-
losopy, to most of what is called Pantheism in Western think-
ing, and to not a little of both ancient and modern Christian
mysticism. But it fails either to explain or to satisfy the de-
mands of the religious consciousness, both psychologically and
historicall}" considered ; and it denies or minimizes the onto-
logical value of the Object of religious faith and worship, con-
ceived of as perfect Ethical Spirit and so as the Father and
Redeemer of the race. We must, then, in spite of defects in
the cogency of the argument we are following, and of obstacles
from counter-arguments, accept still further the leadership of
the history of the race in its religious experience and religious
development. It may well be that we shall discover that both
science and philosophy, if not wholly able to accept and sub-
stantiate the convictions of religion, are at least unable success-
fully to dispute or to displace them.
It must at once be admitted that we cannot affirm the self-
consciousness, and so the complete Self-hood or Personality of
God, in quite the same way as that in which we are led to
believe that the World-Ground must be conceived of as Will
and Mind. All reasoning about the interactions and relations
of finite things and minds, and all forms of mentally repre-
senting these interactions and relations, imply the immanence
and control of an active, teleological principle in the world.
This truth must be accepted, with all that it implicates, or else all
attempt to give a rational explanation to any form of human
experience must be abandoned. But there are many exhibi-
tions of this principle concerning which experience cannot af-
firm the presence of self-conscious and personal Life, in the
6
82 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
fuller meaning of this terra. Molecules, atoms, ions, as well
as everything animate or inanimate, from expanding iron to
growing cell, from flower in crannied wall to star overhead, are
individual beings whose actions and relations exemplify the
truth of immanent Will and Mind. But that each of these
beings is self-conscious and personal, or even conscious so as
to have any awareness of the ends which it seems to us to serve,
or of an}' ends whatever, we cannot claim to know in any de-
monstrative way.
It has been claimed in the interests of the theistic position,
that the conception of a mind which is not self-conscious or at
least conscious, is like the conception of " wooden iron; " it
involves, that is to say, a contradiction in terms. Now it is
undoubtedly true that all knowledge of the nature of mind is
conscious experience. The results of such knowledge are pre-
sentable and intelligible only in terms of consciousness. More-
over, in order to know what it is to be a Self, or Person, in
the fullest meaning of the word, one must have had the ex-
perience of self-consciousness. It is also true that selfhood,
or personality, is impossible — cannot exist, cannot be con-
ceived of — without self-consciousness. Undoubtedly, too, the
measure of mind which is credited to the lower animals, as
well as to our fellow men, and even to plants and inorganic
things, is realizable for human minds, only in terms of conscious-
ness. All psychology, even that which assumes to deal with
the "unconscious," or the "subliminal," is descriptive and ex-
planatory of conscious states in terms of such states. And
yet there remains the undoubted fact that, so far as immediate
experience or observation can go, the greater part by far of
all the world's liappenings take place Avithout either the con-
sciousness, or the self-consciousness, of finite beings availing to
account for them as an iiniiKiiient cause. These happenings,
too, all make upon the mind tlie irresistible impression of being
manifestations of intelligent will. 'J'his is the lesson of the
religious development of humanity, all the way from the low-
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 83
est stage of unreflective spiritism to the highest form of phil-
osophical monotheism.
Whenever, then, it is proposed to attribute the unifying actus
of a self-conscious Life to the worid at large, or to justify re-
ligious faith in the Selfhood of God on grounds of the obvious
self-conscious and personal characteristics belonging to this
world, the proposal voices certain well-founded impressions,
which can be supported by credible proofs ; but the argu-
ment rests upon somewhat tentative and doubtful grounds.
For, in the first place, the enormous complexity and bewil-
dering variety of causes and happenings which the world, con-
ceived of as a totality, exhibits, seem to made it difficult or im-
possible to unite them in any one event, so to say, like that of
an act or state of self-consciousness. Each atom, molecule,
ion, ovum, thing, finite mind from the beginning to the end of its
development, surely cannot be said always to be self-conscious
and so personal in the higher meaning of the term. Much
less would it seem that the totality of them all, in all their re-
lations, could be demonstrably proved to coexist — not simply
at some one time, but always and essentially — within the grasp
of the self-consciousness or other-consciousness of some one
Personal Life. That the Being of the world shall be explained
as the dependent manifestation of a Personal Absolute, who is
conscious and self-conscious ; that It shall be considered as
only the impersonal term for that Principle which is, essen-
tially considered, the Absolute Self ; — this is, indeed, an ex-
alted conception and one worthy of the most serious and pro-
longed consideration. But there is no safe and sure short-cut
in the argument by which to justify the conception. On the
contrary, there are many and great difficulties which lie along
the way.
The contemptuous manner in which some writers have dis-
missed the rational postulate that the World-Ground is
self-conscious and personal Being is even less worthy of the
thoughtful mind than is the easy-going dismissal of the
84 PHILOSOPHY OF RP:LIGI0N
difficulties involved in its proof. To affirm off-liand that " abso-
luteness " ami " personality " are incompatible and self-contra-
dictory conceptions, or that an Infinite Being cannot be self-con-
scious, because this implies limitiition, is again to mistake
mere juggling with abstract terms for sound t-ritieism of an
impressive argument. Especially is this manner of procedure
impertinent, when it is accompanied by the proposal to make
some purely negative notion play the part of a valid explana-
tory principle. If God cannot be infinite and also personal,
it is a fortiori true that " The Infinite," '' tlie Unconscious,"
" the Unknowable," cannot in any wise be made to take the
place of an infinite, personal God. Neither does it help either
head, heart, or conscience, to proclaim the dictum — so fashion-
able of late — that the Infinite and Ultimate Reality is some-
tliing "more " and "higher" than personal. More and liigher
than all human conceptions of his personal Being, God undoubt-
edly is. This ti-uth has always been insisted upon by the liigh-
est religious experience, and by the most penetrating insight
and elaborate reasoning of the philosophy of religion. But, so
far as human imagination and thought can compass what
that something is like, it must be imagined and thought in
terms of the most perfect self-conscious and personal Life.
It is the Ideal of such Life which sets to humanit}- its stand-
ard of value. Anything higlier and better than this ever-ad-
vancing Ideal is not to be s|)oken of as a substitute for the
Ideal itself. And all the negative and limiting conceptions
proposed as substitutes are quite devoid of cither theoretical or
practical worth.
It is significant to note that tlie one foi-m of religious ])hilos-
ophy wiiich h.as most keenly felt and boldly exi)ressed the
difficulty of conceiving of Ciod as both absolute and self-con-
scious, infinite and personal, lias itself l)een exceedingly vacil-
lating and equivocal in tiie use of its teiins. This foiiii of the
philosophy of religion is customarily called j)antheistieal ; even
when it is not charged willi ]»fing p.inllnMsin outright. Abun-
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 85
dant illustrations of this historical fact might be derived from
the treatment given to this conception, whether as embodied
in the Nous of Anaxagoras and Plotinus, or the Logos of Philo
and of much of Christian mysticism. Even Islam, with its
stern and fanatical assertion of the sovereignty of a personal
God, when its later theological developments brought it face
to face with this problem, fell into the same vacillation and
habit of equivocating. "The anthropomorphic God of Mu-
hammad, who has face and hands, is seen in Paradise by the
believer and settles himself firmly upon his throne, becomes a
spirit, and a spirit, too, of the vaguest kind."^ This rejection
of personal qualifications as limitations inconsistent with the
absoluteness of the One God led such a theologian as Ibn
Hazm to the startling conclusion that all the human and moral
attributes ascribed to Allah by the Koran are 7nere names; they
indicate nothing belonging to the real essence of the Infinite.
To regard these names as ontologically valid would involve
multiplicity in God's nature ; for there would at least be intro-
duced into the Divine Being the distinction of quality and the
thing qualified. Along this path the later Sufis come to the
wholly pantheistic position, which denies the self-conscious
personality of God and identifies God and the world. " It is
part of the irony of the history of Muslim theology," says a
writer ^ on this subject, " that the very emphasis on the tran-
scendental unity should lead thus to pantheism."
In the religious philosophy of India — the reflective thinking
which is, on the intellectual side, the religion of Brahmanism —
the confusion caused by the efforts to unite the factors neces-
sary to the conception of an Absolute Person is conspicuous.
This philosophy, indeed, includes within its entire circuit
every important phase of belief respecting the nature of the
One Divine Being — from Theism to Pantheism, from Material-
1 Macdonald, Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory,
p. 145.
2 Macdonald, Ibid., 233.
86 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ism to monistic Spiritualism. But for this reason, and through-
out it all, it shows the characteristics of vacillation and equivo-
cation. Brahma is variously conceived of and defined in shift-
ing manner, with the obvious intention of escaping the charge
of limiting the conception, and at the same time securing a
fuller satisfaction both to the philosophical and to the religious
consciousness.^ " All this (universe) is Brahmay " This
(universal being) is my ego, spirit, and is Brahma, force (ab-
solute being)." Brahma is "the self-determining principle
manifesting itself in all the determinations of the finite with-
out losing its unity with itself." It is " absolute thought and
being." The world of our experience, which is Maya, came
into existence because Brahma " thought and willed to become
many and accordingly became many." ^ Brahma may even be
called, when the thought of the thinker escapes from the
leashes, "self-conscious spirit." But w^hen the stricter inter-
pretation of the nature of this spirit, with its self-conscious
activity, is demanded, the fear of limiting the Absolute, defin-
ing the Infinite, calls the thought back to the necessity of em-
ploying more vague and flexible terms. Then Brahma is
incomprehensible and is to be described only by negatives.
That the more modern thinking over this problem finds itself
beset at this point with the same difficulties, and tempted to
the same mode of escape from them, there is no need to show
in detiiil, in the present connection.
It is therefore imperative for religion, if it proposes to recon-
cile that philosophical conception of the Being of the World
which is supported by the assumptions and discoveries of the
positive sciences, with the conception whicli it holds respecting
the Object of its own faith and worsliip, that it should arrive at
' For illustrations, see Hopkins, RcliKions of India, p. 221/.
2 Com p. the Vcdantji Sutra, l-f); and, as a modern Hindu writer declares:
"Thus Rationalism (that is of the Vcdanta philosophy) reveals the Supreme
BeinK both as personal and impersonal (The Hindu System of Religious Sci-
ence and Art, by Kishori Lai Sarkar, p. 19).
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 87
some clear understanding of its position in the face of these
difficulties. Is God to be conceived of, not simply as Absolute
Will and Mind, in the vague and shifty fashion in which The-
ism and Pantheism may be now antagonistic and now agreed ;
but, the rather, as a self-conscious Person, a true and complete
Self?
The more recent discussions of this problem have been ac-
customed to minimize its importance by passing it by on the
one side or the other. Those who take the left-hand path, as-
sume that the complete incompatibility of absolute and infinite
Being with the limiting conditions of self-consciousness has
been so established as to make unnecessary further discussion.
Those who pass the same problem by upon the right-hand side
are apt to shield themselves by an appeal to the claim of Lotze^ :
" Perfect personality is in God only, to all finite minds there is
allotted but a pale copy thereof ; the finiteness of the finite is
not a producing condition of this Personality but a limit and
a hindrance of its development." We do not find it, alas ! so
easy on merely metaphysical grounds to settle this contention.
That the antinomies in the conception of an Absolute Self-
conscious Person are largely introduced tliere by those who
find them, or by their predecessors in the same line of research,
we have no doubt. On the other hand, it is well to remember
that Lotze himself came to his conclusion only at the end of a
lengthy discussion of related problems ; and that the conclusion,
as applied in the philosophy of religion, follows from a doc-
trine of the reality of things and of their dependent existence ^
which is by no means either a universally accepted postulate
of science or an undisputed principle of ontology.
What better, then, can philosophy do at this point for the con-
ception of religion than accord to it the favorable consideration
to which, on historical and psychological grounds, it is clearly
entitled? To such a consideration the following thoughts
1 Microcosmus (English Translation), II, p. 688.
2 As given at length in his Metaphysik, Book I.
88 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
prepare the way. iViid, first, there can be no doubt that the
more purely religious beliefs, sentiments, and practical life of
mankind are better satisfied with, than without, the conception
of God as self-conscious Spirit, a true Person, or Self. This
fact is evidenced by the form taken by the highest develop-
ments of religious experience in the past. It is, indeed, in-
volved in a very important way in the most essential charac-
teristics of this experience. The experience itself is one of
pei-sonal and spiritual relations ; the most important beliefs, sen-
timents, and practical life of religion cannot be understood or
justified in terms of a conception which denies self-consciousness
to the Absolute Will and Mind. If the undoubted conclusions
of the particular sciences or of modern philosophy should dis-
cover that the World-Ground cannot be, or rightfully be con-
ceived of as being, a self-conscious Spirit, then these sciences
and this philosophy could not be brought into a rational har-
mony with the supreme product of the religious experience.
But the persistence and development of religious experience,
with its beliefs, sentiments, and practices, is as much a funda-
mental fact as is the persistence and development of either sci-
ence or philosophy. And philosophy is especially charged with
the responsible task of a perpetual effort to bring about har-
mony in the total life of humanity.
But, second, a critical examination of the conceptions cur-
rently subsumed under such titles as Absolute, Infinite, The
Unconscious, Self-consciousness, Personality, etc., shows that
every one of them is in constant need of revision and improve-
ment. Especially is such need apparent in the case of those
vague, negative conglomerates of thought and imagination that
are wont to be clothed in some of these terms. Small wonder,
then, that they refuse to lie quietly side by side in the same
])ed with any rational conception of a self-conscious and personal
existence. It may be possible, however,— and we need not,
at least antecedently to renewed trials, despair of this possibil-
ity,— to remove from these terms some of their more unwar-
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 89
rantable and objectionable factors ; and thus to make them
fitter companions for union with the factors really belonging to
the nature of a Self. Or, even in the last resort : What if one
should feel obliged to deny the absoluteness and infinity of
God, in the stricter meaning of these terms, in order to save
some intelligible and practical concept of his personality ? This
would, indeed, be a disappointing result. It might force the
mind back upon the Kantian position of a recognized power-
lessness to transcend the limits of the cognitive reason ; but, as
Kant held, we might be none the less compelled to believe in
God as Infinite Person, in the interests of moral and practical
reason. And to sacrifice — at least for the time being — some-
thing from our conception of God on the side of his absolute-
ness and infinitude, would not necessarily be more irrational
than to surrender all claim to a belief in Him as Self-conscious
Spirit.
Indeed, even on metaphysical and purely cognitive grounds,
the finger-point of the highest rationality would seem to indicate
that the path to Reality lies in the opposite direction. For, in
the third place, if it cannot be affirmed that all real Being must
be, and essentially is, self-conscious, it can be demonstrated
that man's best-known being, as well as the most highly de-
veloped and valuable form of being conceivable by man, is that
of a self-conscious Person. Whether other apparent beings
have any reality, real unity, or indeed real place in the Universe
of beings and events, or not, our own self-conscious selves are
known to be real and unitary, in a very special and undeniable
way. And what is even more important for the argument :
Self-conscious beings, so far as the human mind can know or
conceive of Reality, stand at its very head in the scale of values.
Or — to express the same truth in a more abstract way — to be
self-conscious, to be-for-oneself, to have " For-Self-Being," is to
have attained the very most distinguished and intensely actual
and profoundly worthy kind of existence. It is such self-con-
scious personal existence, which, in the example of man as a
90 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
species, and supremely in the example of the few most highly-
gifted aud developed of humanity, is altogether the choicest
known or conceivable product of Nature's evolution through
the ages.
It is not of morbid, or of excessive and vain self-conscious-
ness, in the popular acceptance of the term, that we are speak-
ing in this connection. Neither does the argument depreciate
the value and significance of those artistic and constructive
activities in wliich the Self seems to lose itself; or even of
those states of religious contemplation or intuition, in which
a certain immediacy of the knowledge of the object seems
largely or wholly to exclude the reflective attitude. But that
a being who could form no conception of a Self, could never
know what itself was about, could only be mere intelligent Will
without being a self-comprehending Mind, must not be re-
garded as vastly inferior to a developed self-conscious Pereon,
it is impossible to concede. Mind, without self-consciousness,
if such mind could really be at all, would not be 6t'{f-compre-
hending, «<?(f-directing, se^f-determining — all of which capacities
are most essential for the existence and development of a
Self, and themselves stand highest in the scale of rational
values.
It is in order now to notice that the existence and develop-
ment of selves are facts, the account of which must somehow
be found in this same World-Gruund. Even to tiike the
scientific point of view is to accept the warrant for regarding
man himself as a child of Nature. A society of selves is to be
explained as the product somehow resulting, under the laws
which physics, chemistry, and biology have discovered, from
the forces that are conceived of as differentiations of Nature's
exhaustless Energy. For liowever the human species came
to be such, it is in fact composed of self-conscious as well as
intelligent wills. In the cjuse of the individual man it is his own
psychical activities that construct the peculiar type of self-hood
which each individual lias. A true person, or Self, cannot come
THE ARGU:MEXT RECOXSTRUCTED 91
into existence, unless the forces and stimuli existing outside
serve to arouse the dormant will and inchoate reason to the full
measure of an energy that is something more and higher than
that of blind will, or unconscious mind. Only self-conscious
and self-determined activity can create a Self.
When, then, the conception of a Nature which can so bring
into co-operation the external and internal or psychical forces
as to create a Self is reflectively examined, this conception is
found to be no barren and meagre affair. Can an unconscious,
or a non-self-conscious Nature create and develop a race of self-
conscious personal beings? Can mere willing Mind, or mere
intelligent "Will, without experience of the nature, the method,
and the value of personality, serve as a satisfactory explanatory
principle for this human species which is, in fact, self-conscious ;
and for its historical evolution into even so high a grade of self-
hood as man has already attained ? It seems to us that the
only credible, not to say conceivably tenable, answer to such
an inquiry is a decisive No. In order to beget and to nourish
self-conscious existences the World-Ground, or some impor-
tant part of It, must itself be a self-conscious Personal Life, a
true Self. And by so much as the positive sciences are be-
coming confident about the real unity and absoluteness of this
World-Ground, by just so much the more should philosophy be
confirmed in the opinion that its real Unitary Being is that of an
Absolute Self.
The logical conviction that it is impossible to derive the
personal from the Impersonal, a multitude of developing finite
selves from a World-Ground that is wholly lacking in the
possession and appreciation of Selfhood, is strengthened by
considerations which flow from the social life of humanity.
Now the problem which presses for an answer is this : What
sort of Being must the World have in order that it may serve
as the rational and real Ground of a community of selves — a
network of common experiences, a social existence, between
one self-conscious Self and other selves? Here am I — a
92 PHILOSOPHY OP^ RELIGION
Self ; but I am not, and I cannot conceive of myself as being,
a lone Self. Even my physical environment is, fundamentally
considered, a social affair. Even " Things " manifest them-
selves to me as not merely my objects, but as essentially the
same objects for others, whose conscious and self-conscious
experience is essentially like my own. The totality of phys-
ical existences is not for me, or for my fellows, an Absolute
that is a mere aggregate, or lump sum, of things. Much less
is tlie environment of other selves a mere multitude, or gross
number, of the- human species. It is the rather a society, in
which individual persons are bound together by an infinite
number of bonds, both the so-called physical and the so-called
psychical, all of which are knowable and useable, only on the
assumption that the Being of the World in which they have
their Ground, has the nature of a social, a humanly Universal, an
all-embracing Self.
That this is anthropomorphizing, is preparing the image and
ideal of our own thought, in a way fit to be worshipped and
obeyed, may undoubtedly be charged against the argument.
But the word " anthropomorphism " should have ceased by
this time either to deter or to terrify our minds. For all
the sesthetical and moral values which characterize the
conception of God contribute to the weight of argument in
favor of the same truth. Undoubtedly, the reflective thinker
experiences a feeling of awesomeness and of mystery before
such vague conceptions as endeavor to represent the Divine
Being without limiting Him by any terms that apply to
human and finite, self-conscious existence. This feeling is
genuinely worthy and true to reality in the view of any at-
tempt to explicate and defend the conception of God. But it
is least of all appropriate when the very process of thought
which has framed the conception has neglected to introduce
into it those factoi-s that are most appropriately greeted with
feelings of awe and mystery ; and they are just those factors
which can be actualized only in the lives of self-conscious and
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 93
personal beings. Respect for the mystery, the grandeur, and
the worth, of Personal Being is the most rational kind of re-
spect. For Things, as such, there is little or no reason to
have respect ; they are awful and respectable only in so far as
they are means and servants of persons. The religious feel-
ings are appropriate toward things, because religion regards
tliem as somehow being partial and undeveloped selves, or else
as manifestations of the thought and will of the Absolute Per-
son. In living and conscious beings it is not the blind and
instinctive psychical stirrings and strivings which we observe
with most of respect. We feel the mysterious nature and
profound value of these lower forms of soul-life, only when we
regard them as the beginnings of Nature on her way to the
production of self-conscious personality. And even among
men — who differ so enormously in the amounts of self-hood,
so to say, which they achieve — it is those individuals that at-
tain the heights of personal experience and personal develop-
ment, who seem most worthy of an awesome veneration and
of the regard appropriate to what is most sublime. Kant has
nowhere arrived at a more satisfactory position than that
which he assumes when he claims that our human " feeling of
the Sublime in Mature " implies a respect for what in less de-
gree we find in ourselves — the Personal — and which we then
by an irresistible law of our rational activities attribute in su-
preme measure to the Impersonal. It is plainly, to use his
own phrase, a " conversion of respect for the Idea of humanity
in our own subject into respect for the object." ^
There are many other similar considerations derived from a
study of the nature of human knowledge, and from an analysis
and criticism of those fundamental characteristics which the
mind attributes to all reality, — the so-called categories, — that
compel us, finally, to place the argument for the self-conscious-
ness of the World-Ground, the personality of God, upon a yet
surer and broader philosophical basis. No meaning can be
iKritik der Urtheilskraft, I, § 27.
94 PHILOSOPHY OF RP:LIGI0N
given to such abstract terms as " the Absolute " or " the Infi-
nite," unless these adjectival words are further defined by being
attached to some Subject. The only kind of a subject to which
they can be attached in such manner as to make the completed
conception serve the purposes of a real explanatory principle
is that kind of a subject which is known as a self-conscious
Being, a Pereon, a Self. Unity amidst multiphcity and variety,
real Identity of some sort that is compatible with actual change,
Indi%'iduality that maintains its essential being through all
processes of becoming, Law that reigns over things or exists
as immanent idea in things, a Whole that admits of, and de-
pends upon, interactions and causal relations between its parts
— these and all like conceptions and principles under which the
human mind is obliged to view and to interpret its experience,
are, without exception, taken from the experience of a self-
conscious person with himself and with other things and selves.
To try to combine any or all of them in a description of the
Absolute, and to leave self-consciousness out, is to overlook
and to discredit that very experience in which they all origi-
nate ; and for the description and explanation of which they are
appropriate and serviceable. " Self-consciousness " is the one
category which is rich enough in content, and real enough in
its nature, to envelope and validate all the others. This cate-
gory we cannot, indeed, ascribe to all manner of things, organic
and inorganic, or even to all forms of animal life, as though
they were, each one, centers of self-conscious, or even of con-
scious, functioning. Individual self-conscious beings, or selves,
are comparatively i-are ; finite persons, as we know them, are
always developments whose preconditions and antecedents
seem to belong to the realm of the — to us — Unconscious ;
that is=:to the Unknown or the Unknowable. But, when the
mind tries to connect such unconscious individual beings with
those that appear to be conscious, and finally with self-conscious
beings, it can discover no active Principle that seems capable
of uniting them all into a self-consistent and self-regarding
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 95
system, except that which implies the reality of a self-
conscious Absolute Person.
If, then, the argument is carried through it is found to estab-
lish this conclusion : Nothing can be known about the Unit-
a.ry and Real Being of the World, unless this knowledge be
known and stated in terms of a self-conscious Life. All the
terras in which science, philosophy, and the plain man's obser-
vation and reflection express themselves, are based upon this
awareness of self, of other selves, and of so-called not-selves.
These other selves are known or imagined after the analogy
of the self-known Self ; the not-selves are either not-known —
mere negative and barren attractions; or they are known
as imperfect and half-finished selves. And although human
knowledge does not guarantee the right to affirm that each
thing, or part of an individual tiling, is a center of conscious
and self-conscious life, the human mind cannot imagine what it
really is to be an individual, as a dependent part of an intel-
ligible system, without using terms that have meaning only
for self-consciousness.
In conclusion, then, we are obliged to say that the concep-
tion of the World-Ground as unconscious will and mind does
not remove the limitations of human self-consciousness from the
conception. On the contrary, it deprives the conception of
what is clearest and most valuable in all the cognitive processes
of humanity. It proposes to substitute an attempt to conceive
the inconceivable for a thought which, although it is necessarily
limited by the nature of our finite human experience, is, never-
theless, representative of what is intellectually most well-
founded, and aesthetically and ethically most valuable, in this
experience ; its inevitable logical result is a return to dogmatic
agnosticism.
For these reasons the theistic argument is entitled to postu-
late the conception of God as the Personal Absolute, a Self in
the supremest possible meaning of that word. All the various
lines of argument converge upon this conclusion. It is, how-
96 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ever, a conclusiou which needs still further critical examina-
tion with a view, if possible, to relieve the conception from
some of the internal contradictions with which it has so fre-
quently been charged. But the argument is strengthened in a
preliminary way by noticing the very tei'ms employed Ijy those
who deny self-conscious personality to the Being of the World.
What — Pray ! is the real meaning, the meaning for Reality, of
the oft-repeated categories applied to the totality of the cosmic
existences, forces, and processes ? On the basis of a confidence
in the modern chemico-physical sciences, it is styled a " nelf-
explanatory," " se?/-contained," " sc//-maintaining " System.
What, that is intelligible to human minds, can this mean un-
less it be to say : The Cosmos is a Self, whose explanation
comes not from without itself ? Its circuit and content are not
included, as our selves are, in Somewhat greater. Its indepen-
dence is absolute ; for no other than Itself has the task of main-
taining itself. But all this, as we shall see, is precisely what
must be understood by an Absolute Person or Self.
Certain predicates of that Absolute Person, "whom faith
calls God," seem to follow of necessity from the very nature
of the conception. The argument here is not a return to the
ontological argument in the form in which it has already been
rejected. The "proof" does not claim to move demonstra-
tively from the nature of the conception to the reality of the
object thus conceived. The rather does it seem certain that,
if the reality of a Personal Absolute as the World-Ground be
somehow proved or made a sure object of rational faith, then
certain predicates necessarily follow from the al)soluteness of
this Personality. Among such predicates the following five
are chief : Onmipotence, Omnipresence, Eternity, Onniiscience,
and Unity. These qualifications must bo characteristic of an
Absolute Self which shall be so conceived of as to afford a sat>
isfactory real Principle explanatory of the world of things
and of selves. It is an inqjortant task of the philosophy of
religion to expound these predicates in a manm;r consistent
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 97
with the truths of fact and with the nature of the concep-
tion.^
The conclusion that God is a Person in the sense that he is
self-conscious and intelligent Will is, at one and the same
time, the most original and fundamental assumption of the
cruder forms of religious belief, and the most mature and con-
clusive tenet of scientific and philosophical Theism. On the
one hand, the Dakota dialects express " the hidden and mys-
terious power of the universe " by the word waka7i=z^'' the
deification of that peculiar quality or power of which man is
conscious within himself, as directing his own acts or willing
a course to bring about certain results." In the Islands of the
Pacific, too, is found the conception of a wonder-working
power called Man«:= (apparently) "that which is within one,"
the principle of life and motion consciously directed to an end.
But it is the higher religions, and above all Christianity, which
round out this conception of God as self-conscious and per-
sonal Life with the fullness of moral attributes. " God is
Spirit," said Jesus, " and they that worship him must worship
in spirit and in truth."
A study of the ethical nature and development of man un-
doubtedly makes upon philosophy the demand that the Ground
of the phenomena of his moral life should be found in a self-
conscious Personal Absolute. But this is not the same thing
by any means as to say that this Personal Absolute must be
conceived of as perfect Ethical Spirit, in a manner to satisfy
the claims of the highest religious faith. Tlie former conclu-
sion rests upon a tolerably firm and exceedingly broad specu-
lative basis. It is only a further and quite legitimate exten-
1 Pfleiderer's statement scarcely does justice to the nature of the problem
when he affirms that "these predicates do not arise out of philosophical
speculation on the nature of God, but out of the religious consciousness oi
God which they seek directly to describe." They do arise "out of the reli-
gious consciousness," but they are more specifically adapted to treatment
in a speculative way. See his discussion of the arguments, The Philosophy
of Religion, III, sec. II.
7
98 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
sion of the cosniological argument, with its appreciation of tlie
principle of " immanent teleology," and its confidence in the
ontological validity of the work of human reason. In a word :
Because the world of human experience is shot through and
through with facts, forces, and other manifestations, that have
an ethical, or, at least, a ^Ma^st-ethical significance, the conclu-
sion is demanded that the real principle, in whose Being this
world has its Ground, must be so conceived of as to explain
these ethical facts, forces, and other manifestations. But the
further conclusion, which attributes the perfection of justice,
goodness, and holiness, to this same World-Ground, can only
appeal to one side of even the religious experience of the race ;
and this side is shown chiefly by a triumph of faith over many
seemingly contradictory facts, forces, and manifestations.
The undoubted truth of man's ethical history is that some-
how he has come to create for himself ideals of conduct and
ciiaracter ; and that his conceptions of moral laws and principles
seem to him to have a very great, if not a supreme and absolutely
unconditional value. For these ideals and laws he has never
had — and he never can attain — a wholly satisfactory warrant
in his experience of the physical world or of his own social
and political environment. Moreover, religion and morality,
although they are by no means wholly to be identified, have
throughout liuman history exercised an enormous influence
each upon the other ; they have either aided or hindered each
other's development to an almost incalculable extent. " The
best religion as related to ethics is, then, the faith in an Ideal
Personality, whose real Being affords the source, the sanctions,
and the guaranty of the best morality; and to whom reverential
and loving loyalty may be the supreme principle for the con-
duct of life." '
• If an examination be made of these "universals " in ethics
> Vf)l. I. rhuj). XIX,!iii(i for the foUnwiiij^ (niotatioiis not othen^'ise cred-
itcil :i.s well uh u much fuller statement of the sjime argument, see the author's
Philo.soi)hy of Conduct, chup. XXIV and XXV.
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 99
which the philosophy of religion must chiefly take into its
account, they are found to be of two orders : (1) Certain func-
tions of human nature, and their products, which belong to all
men in whatever stage of moral evolution; and (2) certain
ideals which, although variously conceived in respect of their
details and always conceived imperfectly, are shared in by all
men, and are recognized as powerful forces in the moral evolu-
tion of humanity. This moral nature of man, with its func-
tions and their products, but especially with that sort of
activity of thought and imagination which creates moral ideals,
comes out of the larger Nature which has produced, environs,
and develops humanity. The experienced world of moral
facts, laws, forces, and ideas, no more " explains itself " than
does any other part or aspect of this same world. Just as
little, and even much less satisfactory to the demands of the
reflective reason, is it perpetually to revise and to recite the de-
scription of the mechanism, when we are seeking to account
for this form of the evolution of mankind. An unconscious,
impersonal, non-moral Nature cannot be conceived of as pro-
ducing a race of self-conscious personal and moral beings. A
Nature which has absolutely no capacity for appreciating the
value of moral ideals, and of character conformable to these
ideals, cannot serve as the explanatory real Principle of natures
which develop such ideals. A systematic study of those con-
ceptions and principles which control the activities of men's
cognitive faculties shows that " our human way " of knowing
the " Being of the World " conceives of it " after the analogy
of the Life of a Self, as a striving toward a completer self-
realization under the consciously-accepted motif of immanent
Ideas." ^ To Mr. Spencer's question, " If the ethical man is
not a product of the cosmic process, what is he a product of ? "
it must undoubtedly be answered that the psychological and
historical sciences are sufficiently justified in maintaining
this view. But philosophy wants to know what is the last
1 A Theory of Reality, p. 547; comp. Philosophy of Conduct, p. 598.
100 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
word as to the inmost Being of a Cosmos whose process results
in such a product. And it cannot rest satisfied in any answer
which denies to this Being a self-conscious apprehension, and
an appreciation of the value, of what it is about in going
through with this process. From the point of view of ethics,
the best and most valuable known cosmic product is just
this same ethical man, — what he now is ; but more especially
what he may become, when his moral ideals are raised to their
highest potency, and are realized in their best form by a re-
generated human society. That the World-Ground should
have got even as far as it has on its sad and weary way toward
the realization of these ideals, without knowing what it is
about, and without caring for its own success, and without ap-
preciating its own failures or triumphs, is a conclusion which
human reason refuses to entertain. Better no God at all than
one so unworthy of the respect, veneration, and service of '* the
ethical man."
On this subject we can neitlier approve of the critical scep-
ticism of Kant in his treatise of the " Pure Reason," nor of his
critical dogmatism in the treatise of the " Practical Reason."
What our argument requires is not a compulsion to believe in
God as prepared to "back up" with reward and punishment
an impersonal law — itself apodeictically demonstrable — by
an appeal to human wills that may think of themselves as free,
although they can only know themselves as mechanism. What
the argument seeks, is a sufficient reason for the rational faith
in a God who knows and appreciates the value of righteous-
ness ; and who really is somehow the fountain, source, and
reality, of man's moral being and moral ideals. And this faith
is justified — although it must be confessed only in a partial
way, so far as the perfection of ethical spirit is concerned — by
the same sort of an argument as that by which the knowledge
of God as the World-Ground is reached.
The objections to tlio procedure of the theistic argument up
to this point are for the most part essentially those of a dog-
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 101
matic and uncritical agnosticism. The alleged contradictions,
and even the difficulties, which are found in the conception of
God as moral Personality, are chiefly due to the metaphysical
habit of juggling with abstractions. The absoluteness and
infiniteness of the Divine Being are not more inherently con-
tradictory of the characteristics assigned to him as tlie self-
conscious and rational Ground of man's ?woraZ nature and moral
development than of the position which assigns to hiia intelli-
gence and will. On the other hand, the interests of mail's re-
ligious experience and religious ideals demand in a peouliar
way, and with a most imperative urgency, a rational f;iith in
the moral personality of God. In the view of those religions
which have reached the higher stages of development, God is
not God unless he is conceived of after the type of " the ethical
man." Indeed, chief among the works of God, the gesta Del
in which a recent writer^ finds the "religious proof" for the
Being of God, is this same ethical man, with his history of a
moral evolution.
The one objection which may be urged most strongly against
any conception of God as ethical personality is undoubtedly
this: It attributes /eeZm^ to the Divine Being. And upon
this point much of Christian theology, as well as most of the
philosophy of religion, Oriental and Occidental, ancient and
modern, has been really, although not usually in a conscious
and avowed fashion, opposed to regarding God as, so to say,
through and through moral. Religion, as distinguished from
its philosophical and theological statements, has, on the con-
trary, always emphasized the feeling-full nature of God. This
is especially true of Judaism and of Christianity — the pre-
eminently ethical and practical religions of humanity. It is
true also — not less intensely but far less satisfactorily — of the
Muslim faith. It is even true in a vague and indecisive way
of Buddhism.
Of the assumptions which underlay the Catholic orthodoxy,
1 A. Domer, Grundriss der Religionsphilosophie, p. 236/.
102 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
as it formed itself by the end of the third century, Hatch de-
chires ^ : "It is assumed that rest is better than motion, that
passionlessness is better than feeling, that changelessness is
better than change." This view has been fortified in modern
as well as ancient times by the further assumption that weak-
ness, temptation, and the overcoming of these finite and limit-
ing conditions by an act of will, are indispensable to moral
character ; for morality is always and essentially a matter of
development and growth. God, therefore, cannot be both ab-
solute and infinite, and also moral.
The more complete answer to these objections must await a
fuller consideration of the meaning in which, and the extent to
which, moral attributes may be ascribed to God. We remain
for the present in the conclusion that if God is a rational, self-
conscious Will, active in the interest of moral ideals, or moral
ends, then he is properly called an Ethical Being. That he is
such a Being, all the ethical experience of the race contributes
to the argument to prove. And it is true, and grandly true,
that this conclusion necessarily implies that God is a Being of
feeling, as certainly as of mind and will. This latter conclusion
is so intimately connected with the argument, at every stage
and in every form, that if man's reflective thinking is valid for
any factor in the conception of God, it is valid for this factor.
The world of man's experience — things as well as selves, and nat-
ural events as well as occurrences in human political and social life
— is everywhere as truly a manifestation of feeling, and as vividly
an appeal to feeling, as of mind and will. Indeed, the affective
factors can no more be analyzed out of both the knowing subject
and the known object, than can the factors indicative of intelli-
gence and volition. Yet more: Personality itself is not such a
compound of intellect, feeling, and will, as tliat it could still pre-
serve its essential character if only it sliould liappen to lose out
some one of these tlirce groups of characteristics. To be a " i)er-
son," limited or inlinite, dependent or absolute, implies sclf-con-
1 Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, p. 281.
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 103
scious feeling as truly as self-conscious thought, or will con-
sciously directed toward ends. But especially absurd is it to con-
ceive of ethical personality that has no feeling appreciative of
values ; that is neither approving nor disapproving of courses of
conduct and of the aims and ends of conduct. No contradiction
between the absoluteness and the affective nature of the Divine
Being can equal that which emerges in the attempt to think of this
Being as at one and the same time without feeling and yet an
ethical Spirit, — not to say a perfectly righteous, good, and holy
God.
The history of the treatment of this problem of the Person-
ality of God by the reflective thinking of mankind is exceed-
ingly suggestive. Its principal features are well illustrated in
the attempt at a philosophy of religion made by Plutarch.
This attempt, according to Oakesmith,^ was " a compound of
philosophy, myth, and legalized tradition." Plutarch had re-
spect for the conception of Deity embodied in the Demiurgus
of the Timeeus, the One and Absolute of the Pythagoreans,
the UpuTov Kivovv^ the N6i7(rij, or No77(7ea;s v6t]<tls of Aristotlc, the im-
manent World-Soul, or A670S 6iv ry "TX^of the Stoics, etc. But
" the metaphysical Deity thus created from these diverse ele-
ments is made personal by the direct ethical relation into which
He is brought with mankind." " And I am of opinion," says
this ancient philosopher,- " that the blessedness of that eternal
life which belongs to God consists in the knowledge which
gives Him cognizance of all events ; for take away knowledge
of things, and the understanding of them, and immortality is
no longer life, but mere duration.'^ The Divine One must, then,
be conceived of as the life of a Knower who rejoices in his
knowledge, and who is on account of that knowledge an inex-
haustible fountain of feeling worthy to be called blessedness.
It must, indeed, never be forgotten that the difficulty of recon-
ciling a certain acceptance of the truths of the popular polythe-
1 The Religion of Plutarch, p. 87.
2 Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, 351 E.
104 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ism with a somewhat higlily spiritual monotheistic conception
of Deity was for the thought of antiquity, and is for the thought
of the great multitudes of Christian believers in the present
day, by no means the same as that encountered by the Western
philosophic mind. And yet for all minds, and all times, the
problem is essentially the same. Without feeling and moral
attributes the absolute Will and Mind cannot become an object
of religious belief, feeling, and worship. And the conception
of the Absolute as a " self-consistent " One falls apart as surely,
and becomes as intrinsically absurd, if we rule out of it all the
ethical factors as it does if we rule out of the same conception
the factors of rationality.^
The cosmological argument as it advances along the lines
drawn by man's aesthetical conceptions, ideals, and develop-
ment, pursues a course similar to that of the so-called " moral
argument," — not identical with it, or strictly parallel to it, but
crossing it back and forth at many points. Here the facts are,
in important respects, essentially the same. That the race has
created for itself ideals of sublimity and beauty, and that in
thought the mind gives an objective character and apprecia-
tive estimate to whatever, in concrete fonns, seems to embody
these ideals, are matters of undoubted fact. The reflective
treatment of such facts, in its search for a rational ground,
seems to make clear that the race recognizes in whatever is re-
garded as beautiful, or sublime, some manifestation of the
unchanging characteristics of an ideal Personal Life. The
necessity for finding the ontological source and ultimate ex-
planation of this experience in the World-Ground, conceived of
as an absolutely sublime and perfectly beautiful self-conscious
Spirit, is not, indeed, the same as that felt by the mind
when dwelling upon the phenomena of man's ethical develop-
ment. Yet somehow, the " cosmic process " has evolved "■ tlie
I Thia is eminently true of Mr. Hnullcy's elTorts to construct the Idea of
the Absolute as "self-consistent" and yet "non-moral." See his Appear-
ance and Reality, pp. I^Off.
THE ARGUMENT RECONSTRUCTED 105
aesthetical man " as well as " the ethical man." And if man were
not sesthetical, as well as ethical, he could not be the religious
personality which he certainly is. The conclusion that the
source of his aesthetical experience must be found in the
aesthetical Being of the World-Ground is certainly somewhat
vague and difficult to state in logical terms, ^sthetical expe-
rience itself is, essentially considered, largely a matter of inar-
ticulate emotions and sentiments. But the very mysterious,
expansive, and inexpressible character of these sentiments and
ideals fits them the better to suggest and to confirm faith in the
reality of the Object which goes farthest in the direction of
satisfying their demands. Humanity's thirst for the sublime
and the beautiful knows not, indeed, precisely what it wants :
it therefore none the less, but even all the more, is an un-
quenchable thirst.
At every turn, then, along the pathway of exploration into
the conception of God as perfect Ethical Spirit, it will be found
that the combined impulse of aesthetical and ethical feeling is
present in power, and that the ideals of moral goodness, and of
sublimity and beauty, tend to converge and to appear as, after
all, only different aspects of the One Ideal-Real.
In this attempt at a reconstruction of the argument for the
Being of God we shall for the present add nothing by way of
a so-called " historical argument." AU argument, it has al-
ready been said, even the most speculative, must constantly
cling fast to the facts of history, and must proceed on its way
with full allowance of respect for the historical method. In-
deed, from a certain point of view it may be claimed that the
one and only argument is the historical. For the history of
the evolution in humanity of the belief in God as perfect Eth-
ical Spirit is the all-inclusive and satisfactory proof of the real-
ity of the Object answering to the belief.
In order, however, to make this argument, which is both
historical and speculative, the more convincing, it must be sub-
jected to a detailed examination — especially at several critical
106 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
points. In this examination two sets of considerations must
be given the great weight which they deserve. These are (1)
the evidences of a Development, as applied to the progressive
realization of the eudsemonistic, ethical, and festhetical ideals
of the race ; and (2) the more permanent faiths, hopes, and
practical results of man's best religious Experience — above all,
of that which is embodied in the religion of Christ. Argu-
ment and reasoning, logically conducted, there must be ; but
tlie argument must, at every step in its advance, respect the
truths supported by these two sets of considerations.
CHAPTER XXX
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE
The conflict which has been waged from antithetic points of
view, and between contradictory conclusions, through the at-
tempt to use the words " infinite " and " absolute " in relation to
the Object of religious faith, is one of long standing. This fact
is certainly indicative of difficulties inherent in the conception of
a Personal Absolute ; and these difficulties cannot be said to have
been wholly resolved at the present time. But to admit this
truth is by no means the same as to say that all the grounds of
the conflict render its perpetual waging inevitable ; even
less, that the continuance of the conflict hitherto shows the
conception to be self-contradictory or absurd. On the one
hand, history teaches us how the human mind, in its effort to
escape from the limitations, and even the degrading elements,
of that conception of Deity which the lower forms of re-
ligion have espoused has tried the extreme of negation. It has
shaken off contemptuously all the seemingly anthropomorphic
and antlu-opopathic factors. In this way progress toward a
purer and more defensible monotheistic conception of God has
been made possible. But on the other hand, the ethical and
sesthetical demands to which the experience of religion gives
rise, and to which this experience is itself in turn subject, lead
the mind to reject as unsatisfactory the barren and abstract
notion covered by such phrases as " The Infinite," or " The
Absolute." Thus polytheism and pantheism contribute irrec-
oncilable factors to the human conception of God. Periods
of that dogmatism which claims to have sounded to its depths
108 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the Divine Being, and to have systematized for faith all his
attributes and his relations to the world, alternate with an ag-
nosticism which goes to the length of asserting that finite minds
do not know and never can know, anything about God.
Neither of these conclusions, however, satisfies for any long
time the great majority of thoughtful minds.
It is a reasonable claim when we are told^ that Brahmanism,
with its doctrine of the Being of God, and its goal of religion
as a mystical union of the finite Self with God, has truth in it
which Christianity and the philosophy of religion must recog-
nize. What kind of Being, however, must be attributed to
God ? and, How, in view of the answer to this question, must
the supreme goal of religion be understood ? A " metaphysics-
shy, purely practical Christianity," or a purely " pragmatical
philosophy," cannot reply to either of these questions. The
reply which we are trying to establish, rejects the abstract Ab-
solute of Brahmanism and of all similar religious philosophies ;
on the other hand, it defines the Being of God as active, ethi-
cal, spiritual. It affirms that God is at one and the same time,
infinite and absolute, and also perfect Ethical Spirit. By this
affirmation it aims to avoid the errors of agnosticism and pan-
theism, on the one hand ; and on the other, it rejects all forms of
Dualism which find the ultimate Ground of any part of the expe-
rienced world of finite existences and events in some other Being
than God ; — whether in " Law," or the " Nature of things,"
or in some limiting personal existences, such as a kingdom of
evil, or a personal Devil, or what not.
The more recent discussions of such conceptions as are pos-
sible or tenable, under the terms " Infinite " and " Absolute,"
have undoubtedly helped to harmonize differences and to clear
up obscurities. In the field of pure mathematics, where the
notion of infinity has been most easily and properly allowed, as
it were, to roam at large, certiiin valuable restrictions have now
been put upon its use. As a pureli/ negative notion it can no
'See A. Domer, Gnindrisd dor llcligionsphiloaophie, p. IfiS/.
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 109
longer, even in mathematics, be involved in self-contradictions
that are introduced by applying to its treatment the methods
of an a priori and demonstrative proof. To show that Achilles
cannot overtake the tortoise, or that the arrow cannot fl}^, by
an abstract analysis of the notions of infinity and infinitesimals
is to juggle with words, by shifting the content of their meanings,
in and out, with the dexterity of a practiced prestidigitateur. In
mathematics, then, one must always tell what sort of an infinite
— be it line, succession of separate points, series of numbers, or
extension of surface — one is talking about ; and without some
noun of positive content to qualify the negative qualification,
no denial of limit can logically take place. Moreover, in the
argument, the character of the infinity which is, so to say,
made the subject of the argument, must remain unchanged
throughout.
The advances of physical science in the knowledge of the
world as a system of interrelated and interacting things and
minds, as well as the psychological analysis of the cognitive
act itself, forbid all attempts to treat the conception of the
Absolute as purely negative and unlimited. First of all, and
in importance above all, must the true doctrine of God as In-
finite and Absolute be distinguished from the negative doc-
trine of the ancient Greek and Hindii philosophy ; and as well
from the fast vanishing, purely agnostic or pantheistic type.^
The motto of the latter is ever No, No ; and whatever goes
beyond this is held to be significant of illusion or self-deception.
The absolutism of the theistic conception is, on the contrary,
in the form of an ever enlarging, loftier, and more comprehen-
sive affirmation.
1 According to Tigert (Theism, etc., p. 39/.), with one exception, "Per-
haps no competent thinker of the present day holds that our notion of the
infinite is (merely?) negative." Although there is no doubt much histori-
cal warrant for the charge of Max Miiller (Anthropological Religion, p. 101)
that Christian theology has held the negative conception of God, it cannot
now be urged against its more gifted teachers.
110 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The hai-sher contradictions and graver difficulties which have
been introduced into the conception of God as Infinite and Ab-
solute Person are removed when the following three considera-
tions are borne in mind. Without some preliminary agreement
the disputants cannot, in any intelligible way, take even the
first steps in this argument. For it is only when starting from
points of view thus established, that argument is appropriate
to the problem at all ; or, indeed, that any problem can be set
clearly before the mind.
And first : To identify the Infinite or the Absolute with the
Unknowable or the Unrelated is absurd. To know is to re-
late ; and all knowing is, in respect of one group of its most
essential elements or factors, relating activity. Thinking is
relating ; and although thinking is not the whole of knowing,
knowledge and the growth of knowledge are impossible with-
out thought. Moreover, all human knowing is finite ; man's
knowledge of the Infinite and Absolute God is a very finite
and relative kind of knowledge. But to speak of the knowl-
edge of God, the Infinite, as impossible, because the knowing
mind is finite ; or of God, the Absolute, as impossible, because
knowing is essentially relating ; — this is so to mistjike the very
nature of mental life as to render the objection nugatory and
ridiculous. This strange psychological fallacy, although it so
frequently entraps writers to whom credit must be given for
ordinar}'- acquaintance with mental phenomena, scarcely de-
serves other treatment than a reference to the most elementary
psychological principles. Man's cognitive capacity is not to
be compared with the capacity of some material vessel ; the
content of the mind is not to be likened to the contents of a
wooden measure. As to " Tlie Infinite "=" the Unknowable,"
or " The Absolute "=" the Unrelated," we are indeed warranted
in affirming : " Such a metaphysical idol we can never, of
course, know, for it is cunningly devised after the pattern of
what knowledge is not." '
> Schurman, Belief in God, p. 117.
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 111
But, secondly, the words " infinite " and " absolute " as ap-
plied to God cannot be used with a merely negative significance.
Absolutely negative conceptions are not conceptions at all ;
thinking and imagining cannot be wholly negative ; words that
have no positive meaning are not words, are not in any respect
signs or symbols of mental acts. Preeminently true is all this
of an Idea so infinitely rich in content as that arrived at by
thought, when, refl.ecting upon the significance for Reality of
man's total experience, it frames the ultimate explanation of
it all in terms of infinite and absolute self-conscious and rational
Will. In arguing about the possibility of an Infinite Personal-
ity this rule, which forbids laying all the emphasis on the ne-
gation, must always be rigidly observed. Personal qualifi-
cations do not necessarily lose their characteristic personal
quality, when it is affirmed that certain particular limitations,
under which we are accustomed to experience them, must be
thought of as removed. No removal of the limit destroys, as a
matter of course, the essential nature of the qualification it-
self.
Yet, again, — to express essentially the same cautionary' truth
in another way — the words " infinite " and " absolute " as ap-
plied to God must always be taken with an adjectival significa-
tion ; they are predicates defining the character, as respects its
limit, of some positive factors of the God-Idea. " The Infinite,"
" the Absolute," — these and all similar phrases, when left wholly
undefined — are barren abstractions ; they are, too often, only
meaningless sound. The negative and sceptical conclusions,
which it is attempted to embody in this way, are controverted
by all the tendencies of the modern sciences — physical as well
as mental. All these sciences, in their most comprehensive
conclusions and highest speculative flights, point toward the
conception of a Unity of Reality, a Subject (or Trager~) for
the phenomena. The Oneness of all beings that are "real,"
we may call the Being of the World. But, as has already been
seen, we can not rest in this abstraction. What really is this
112 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Being which has the manifold qualities, and performs the varied
operations? This Subject of all the predicates, we desire more
positively to know. Meantime, we call it Absolute ; because,
Itself unconditioned, It is the Ground of all conditions. We
call it Infinite; because. Itself unlimited from without, or
Self-limited, It sets the limits for all finite and dependent exis-
tences.
In speaking, then, of God as Infinite and Absolute Person,
or Self, it is not meant simply to deny that the limitations
wliich belong to all Unite and dependent things and selves ap-
ply to Him ; it is also meant positively to affirm the confidence
that certain predicates and attributes of Personal Life reach
their perfection, and are harmoniously united in the self-
conscious and rational Divine Will. It follows from tliis that
the conceptions of infinity and absoluteness apply to the differ-
ent predicates and attributes of a person, in quite different
ways. Thus a Personal God can be spoken of as " infinite," in
an}' precise meaning of this term, only as respects tliose as-
pects or activities of personal life to which conceptions of
quantity and measure can intelligibly be applied. His infinite-
ness of power for example becomes his onmipotence ; his in-
finiteness of knowledge his omniscience ; his complete freedom
from control by the limiting conditions of forces that act in
space becomes his onmipresence, etc. To such moral attri-
butes, however, as wisdom, justice, goodness, and ethical love,
the negating aspect of the conception of infinity does not ap-
ply, except in a figui-ative way whicli, by being mistaken, may
become misleading. It is at once more intelligible, appropriate,
and safe, to speak of the perfection of God in respect of these
moral attributes. For the very conception of measure and
quantity, strictly understood, has nothing to do with moral
dispositions or attributes, as such ; but only witli the number
of the ol)ject8 toward which tlio corresponding acts of will
go forth. An infinitely wise person is one wliose wisdom is
perfect as respects all other beings ; but this perfection of
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 113
wisdom could not be unless the same person were omniscient,
omnipotent, and perfectly good.
By calling God " absolute " it is meant, on the one hand, to
deny that he, in respect of liis Being or of any of its manifes-
tations, is dependent on any other than his own self-conscious,
rational Will. No others, no finite things and selves belonging
to the world of which man has experience, constitute the original
ground and reason of the divine limitations, whether of power,
knowledge, wisdom, or love. He is, in his essential nature,
aJ-solved, absolute, as respects dependence upon others. But,
positively considered, his absoluteness is such that He is
the One on whom all beings, both things and selves, are
dependent. In his self-conscious rational Will, finite existences
and events have their Ground. Outside of this self-conscious
rational Will, no real uniting principle for the cosmic existences,
forces, and events, can anywhere be found.
In brief, by speaking of God as Infinite and Absolute the
philosophy of religion means to affirm that there are no limi-
tations to the self-conscious rational will of God which can
arise elsewhere than in this same self-conscious rational Will.
God is dependent on no other being for such limitations as
his will chooses to observe. God wills his own limitations.
And he would not be infinite, or absolute, or morally perfect,
if he did not. Will that is not self-controlled, or limited by
the reason or purposes known to the Self, is not rational, or
morally perfect will. On the other hand, all finite and de-
pendent beings and events do have the original ground and
final purpose of their being and happening in this same Divine
Will. AU the many finite and dependent beings have the
only satisfactory explanation of their existence and their na-
tures in the Infinite and Absolute One ; and this infinite and
absolute Being is the Personality whom faith calls God.
The objections to so thoroughgoing a doctrine of the infinite-
ness and absoluteness of the Divine Being arise chiefly on
two grounds. They are either predominatingly metaphysical
114 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
or — perhaps it would be more accurate to say psychological ; —
or else they are ethical. The metaphysical objections revive the
claim that self-conscious pei-sonal Being cannot be infinite and
absolute ; the ethical objections interpose cautions and fears
connected with the integrity and practical value of the moral
and religious life. The former may be removed by a pro-
founder metaphysics based upon a truer psychological analysis;
the latter may be reassured by showing the way to a more
philosophically satisfying and tenable kind of faith.
In considering criticall}'" the first class of objections the
thought is brought back to the point at which the argument
was left unfinished in the last Chapter (see p. 83/). It can now
be made clear that these objections derive their power to con-
fuse and deter the mind, largely through their misuse of the
terms " infinite " and " absolute." That a self-conscious and
personal being cannot be also conceived of as infinite and
absolute turns out by no means the self-evident proposition
which it is assumed to be. Indeed, certain indications point
in the opposite direction. Even our human, finite, and de-
pendent self-consciousness does not have its essential charac-
teristics described by such terms as finite and dependent;
much less hy such meaningless terms as wo^-mfinite or not-
absolute. In other words, there is nothing in the essential na-
ture of self-conscioasness, as we know it, to sliow that the
range of its grasp, either as respects the number of its objects
or its speed in time, determines the possibility of its very
existence. On the contrary, the more perfect our self-con-
sciousness becomes, the more manifold are tlie objects which it
clearly displays within the gi'asp of the one activity of appre-
hending the Self. Human self-consciousness is, indeed, a
development; and at its highest degree, whether considered as
respects the multitude of its objects, or their relations to each
other and to the Self, is a meagre, a limited affair. It is
always dependent upon conditions over which the self-con-
scious Self has no control, cither direct or indirect. But in it
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 115
is the very type and supreme example of clear, certain, and
ontologically valid knowledge. The amount of the small ap-
proaches, which the human mind can make in the direction of
becoming like the Infinite and Absolute Mind, is tested by the
increase, and not by the decrease, of the region covered by the
individual's self-conscious life. The richer and more compre-
hensive the individual's self-consciousness becomes, the more
do the limitations of his finiteness recede. The more the Self
immediately and certainly knows of itself, the more it is ca-
pable of knowing about other selves and things. Thus does
the individual Self become a larger and clearer " mirror of the
World." For example, in cases of intimate friendship between
human beings, the one person may come to know another per-
son with a suddenness, clearness, and certainty of intuition,
which converts the ordinarily slow, obscure, and uncertain
inferences that serve us men for knowing, or rather guessing
at, the thoughts of others, into the semblance of a satisfactory
and genuine self-consciousness. And great minds, who ob-
serve with a loving sympathy the transactions and laws of the
physical world, rise at times to ex^^eriences which seem to
approach, it they do not attain, the likeness of an intuitive
envisagement of Nature's deeds and of the meaning of those
deeds. In general, the more of objects and relations the
human mind can take up into its own apperceptive and self-
conscious experience, the more freed from limitations this
finite and dependent mind becomes. Tlie perfecting of self-
consciousness tends to raise the mind toward a more boundless
and absolute knowledge.
But it is urged that self-consciousness, since it involves the
distinction of subject and object, and implies the setting of the
Self over against the non-self, is essentially an affair of limita-
tion and of dependent relation to some other than the Self.
That self-consciousness is, in fact, for all human selves thus
limited and dependent, may be admitted as often as the ob-
jector will. Why need keep on repeating that, of course,
116 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
this is so? But when this human limitation and dependence,
in fact, is converted into an essential characteristic of Self-
Being as such, the argument violates every truth with which
the study of the phenomena seems to make us familiar. And
the use of the words infinite and absolute reaches the height
of their misuse, when the object of self-consciousness becomes
invested with a sort of mystical negating and limiting power.
Thus, my Self considered as object, is declared in some sort to
hedge in and confine the activity of my same Self, considered
as subject. Under this view, the more the extension of the ob-
ject is increased, the more the intensity and realit}' of the sub-
ject should be diminished. On the contrary, in the growth of
a Self, the subject becomes more real according as it is able to
unite in the grasp of its conscious life a greater number of ob-
jects,— whether these, its objects be its own states or so-called
" external objects." For in the cognitive act the relation of sub-
ject and object is not, essentially considered, one in which the
two limit each other ; it is, the rather, a relation whose essence
is a living commerce of realities. In the knowledge of self-
consciousness this commerce is between different aspects of
essentially one and the same reality.
It is, therefore, the perfection of the self-consciousness of God
which makes it possible to predicate of Him that He is infinite
and absolute. Only this conception of Him as self-conscious
Spirit enables tlie mind to transcend the inscription on the
shrine of Athene-Isis at Sais : " I am all that was, and all that
is, and all that shall be ; and my vail hath yet no mortal raised."
But this affirmation of the infinite and absolute character of the
self-conscious Personal Life of God is not the equivalent of an
identification of all particulars under some abstract term which
can only assert, but cannot account for, their unity. It is, the
rather, the positing of sucli an all-comprehending and unifying
Principle as only the conception of a Personal Absolute can sup-
ply. It permits the mind to conceive of God's knowledge as
always having that perfect immediacy, comprehensiveness, cer-
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 117
tainty, value for truth, of which man's faint, limited, and meagre
self-consciousness is, nevertheless, the highest type of our hu-
man experience. It also bids the mind to regard all finite
beings and events as essentially and constantly dependent upon
the self-conscious and rational Will of God. Thus all objects
become objects of the Divine Self-consciousness.
The ethical recoil from certain conclusions, to leap to which
from the standpoint of such a postulate of the infiniteness and
absoluteness of God seems required by logical consistency, is
deserving of the utmost tenderness and patient consideration.
Further treatment of this objection must be deferred to the
discussion of the moral qualifications, and of the ethical rela-
tions to the world, which religion attributes to God. But one
most fundamental truth should be stated in this connection.
No one of the predicates or attributes of personal being can
be conceived of in a perfectly unlimited or absolute way. No
one of them is a solitary affair. Of necessity, they limit each
other ; and both in their essence, and in their manifestation,
they are mutually dependent. Selfhood is not a merely unre-
stricted aggregate of independent activities. And instead of
its perfection requiring or permitting the increase of the un-
limited and independent exercise of any of these activities, the
truth is quite the contrary. No finite Self makes progress to-
wards an escape from its limitations by letting its psychic
forces loose from the control of wisdom and goodness. Neither
can wisdom and goodness grow in any human Self while the
core of selfhood, the control of will, is slipping away. The
very constitution of personality is such that its different attri-
butes are mutually dependent, reciprocally limited. And the
nicer and more harmonious the adjustment becomes, in which
wisdom and goodness guide power, and power greatens under
their control, and for the execution of their ends, the nearer
does personality approach toward the type of the infinite and
the absolute. Or — to cease from so abstract a manner of
speaking — growth toward the perfection of personality can be
118 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
attained, only as the various forces of personal activity, not only
become greater in amount, but also more harmoniously active
in the unity of the one personal life.
On applying these considerations to the Divine Being our
conclusion is not hidden, nor does it lie far away. Because
God is essentially personal, a self-conscious and rational Will,
the different predicates and attributes under which he must be
conceived, are s<'{/'-liiniting and s(?(f-consistent. This is to say
that they limit each other according to that conception of per-
fect personality which is realized alone in God. But the ground
of this limitation is, in no respect, essentially considered, outside
of, or independent of, God himself. God's infinite power is not
blind and brutish force, extended beyond all limit wliatsoever
in a purely quantitative way ; God's infinite power is always
limited by his perfect wisdom. Neither is the divine omnis-
cience an ability to know, or mentally to represent, as real and
true, what is not real or what is irrational. God's knowledge is
limited by the laws of reason ; but in the case of the omnis-
cient One, these " laws " are only the forms of his absolute, ra-
tional Life ; Reality is only that to which tliis Infinite and
Absolute Will imparts itself according to these rational forms.
But, in even a more special way, it is to be said that the
moral attributes of God are self-consistent limitations of certain
of the metaphysical attributes. If the divine justice or good-
ness is to be considered as perfect, then these moral attributes
must constantly and completely qualify the divine omnipo-
tence. And to say that God "cannot" do wrong, when once
one is satisfied that his righteousness is perfect, is not to limit
the divine power from without, or to render it any the less
worthy to be called omnipotence. In all discussion of the
problems evoked by the attempt to apply such terms as " infi-
nite" and "absolute " to God, it is the unifying and harmo-
nizing nature of his Pei'sonulity — or perfect self-dependent, and
self-consistent Self hood — wliicih affords both the theoretical and
the practical solution of the same problems. How can God be
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 119
infinite and absolute, and at the same time personal ? To this
inquiry one may answer : Just because he is personal. How
shall self-consistency be introduced into this complex of meta-
physical predicates and moral attributes with which man's
religious feeling and philosophical thought have filled the con-
ception of God ? By more and more expanding and perfecting
this same conception as that of a perfect, and therefore infinite
and absolute Self.
The growth of that Ideal of the Being of the World, which
is represented by the conception of God as Infinite and Ab-
solute Personal Life, has its roots deep down in rehgious feel-
ing and also in philosophical reflection. The impression made
upon the mind of man by his total environment is one of mys-
tery, majesty, and illimitable extent of force, in space and in
time. What is greater than all his eye can see, or his hand
touch, or his intellect measure and comprehend, but this Being
of the World ; in the midst of which he is set, and of which he
seems to himself so significant a part ? In these vague feelings
religion and art have their common impulse ; and later on, if
not at once, philosophy as well. But science and philosophy
aim not simply to feel, but also to comprehend, this mysterious,
majestic, and infinitely extended Being of the World. And
by their studies of IT, through centuries of time, they arrive at
the conviction of the Unity of its Reality. Tliis Being of the
World is not only real, but it is the exhaustless Source of all
that is actual ; and It gives laws and life to all the forms and
relations of finite realities. Such is the reasoned conviction that
comes to enforce the feeling of mystery, majesty, and limitless
power and extent, in space and time, that is called forth by man's
experience of the cosmic existences, forces, and processes.
In what terms, then, shall the mind best express its grasp
upon the Object of this " reasoned conviction " ? That it is a
perfectly comprehensible, not to say a perfectly comprehended,
conception, cannot, of course, be maintained. The most dog-
matic theology, or self-confident philosophy, or boastful science,
120 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
would scarcely venture to aflSrm as much as this. With some-
what different meanings, and yet in substantial unison, they
all confess : " There was the door to which I found no key."
Inasmuch as no finite thing, however mean, and no casual
event, however trifling, offers itself to man's mind in a way to
ensure a complete comprehension, one may be the more ready
to hasten the admission : " It is as high as heaven ; what canst
thou do ? deeper than hell ; what canst thou know ? " This at-
titude of reflection is everywhere met in the history of human
experience ; it is the inevitable and logical result of contem-
plating the problems offered by this conception of God as in-
finite and absolute ; it is found alike in pantheistic theosophy
and in Christian mysticism. Hence it is that Pistis Sophia,
whose very title is significant of the determination to resolve
faith into an esoteric theory of the Divine Being, makes Mary
Magdalene, when Jesus has solved for her the first mystery, in-
quire : ^ " Now, therefore, O Master, how is it that the first mys-
tery hath twelve mysteries, whereas that ineffable hath but
one mystery?" And the Upanishads, whose discovery, says
Professor Hopkins,^ is " the relativity of divinity" abound in
passages declaring the incomprehensible character of God.
Scarcely less true, however, is this of the Biblical writings.
" But men," declares a modern Hindii writer,^ " for the practical
purposes of their existence, need to get God and not merely to
have a knowledge of Him."
Neither this, nor any other rational view, regarding the in-
comprehensible nature of the conception of God as Infinite and
Absolute is the equivalent of the doctrine that the tenet itself
is "inconceivable," in the meaning in which this word is so fre-
quently employed. The infiniteness of God cannot, indeed, be
conceived by repeated cunmlative activities of the mind in a
1 See the Translation published by the Theosophical Society (London,
1896), p. 235.
2 The Religions of India, p. 224.
3 Kishori Lai Sarkar, The Hindu System of Religious Science and Art, p.
L37.
GOD AS INFINITE AND ABSOLUTE 121
time-series ; or by pushing imagination, as it were, to transcend
at a bound the limitations of spatial perception or of the numer-
ical expressions for sums of energy. But the relief from such
futile attempts is by no means to be found in a sluggish re-
pose of intellect, or in so-called faith in a Reality which is
inconceivable, because such faith implies the effort to grasp to-
gether, in a single ideal, mutually exclusive or self-contradic-
tory ideas. An irrational faith is no worthy substitute for an
irrational thought.
The valid conclusion of our discussion is, the rather, that we
may — nay, must — both believe in God, and think God, in terms
of self-conscious and rational, that is, personal Life. And this
we may do without fear that the course of our belie\dng and
thinking will be compelled to end, either against an impassable
wall at the end of a blind alley, or in a bottomless and dark-
some bog, where shadows of abstractions allure the mind on to
increased dangers, but can never lead it out into a region of
light and safety. The conception of God as Infinite and
Absolute is, indeed, an ideal which can never be exhaustively
explored, or fully compassed by the finite mind. But just
as modern science, while it is learning more and more the limi-
tations which beset its utmost efforts to expound its own
fundamental conceptions and postulates, nevertheless un-
derstands better and better these conceptions, and continually
validates more satisfactorily these postulates ; so may it be with
the philosophy of religion. From similar efforts, when directed
toward the Object of religious faith, the reflective thinking of
mankind can never be deterred, whether by agnostic fears, or
by awe in the presence of incomprehensible mysteries. This
conception of God justifies, while it does not destroy but the
rather enhances, the profoundest eesthetical and religious feel-
ing. And it is at the same time so increasingly satisfactory
to the reason, as the reason is employed in the growth of science
and in the speculations of philosophy, as to entitle its conclu-
sions to the position of an accepted theory of reality.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES
A distinction has already been made (p. 96) between those
ascriptions which, in the aim to define the conception of God,
arise out of the reasoned conviction that He is an Infinite and
Absolute Person, and those which have their origin rather in
the attempt to satisfy the emotional and practical interests of
religion. The former we have called " metaphysical predi-
cates;" the latter, "moral attributes." And these predicates,
which our thought must ascribe to the Divine Being, in order
to conceive of Him as Infinite and Absolute, are chiefly his
omnipotence, omnipresence, eternity, omniscience, and unity.
Each of these predicates, since each involves an attempt of the
human mind to render certain characteristics of human per-
sonal life in terms that imply the removal of the limits of
human experience, leads to what is essentially mysterious and
not fully comprehensible. But each of them has, and retains,
its positive character and so contributes its quota of the ele-
ments necessary to the complete conception.
All religions, which have developed beyond the very lowest
stages of that vague belief which characterizes an " unreflect-
incr spiritism," attach the same predicates to their divine be-
ings, while not in an infinite or absolute degree, at least in a
degree relatively superior to that in which human beings pos-
sess the same attributes. Tlie gods are universally esteemed
to be powerful, superliu manly so ; tliey liave means of getting
a]>out, so to say, and thus of being immanent in things and
near at all times to the worshipper, which are superior to
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 123
those ordinarily in use among men. The gods also know cer-
tain matters which are hidden from man ; and the knowledge
of these matters may best be obtained by petition and propitia-
tory offerings, either directly by revelation from them, or
through some one of their specially favored means of communi-
cation. If the gods are not immortal, in the stricter meaning
of this word, they are at least blessed with lives more enduring
than are human mortals ; the generations of the gods are supe-
rior to those of mankind. It has, indeed, required a long and
painful process of reflection to bring the mind of the race to
the conception, in any worthy and intelligent way, of the unity
of God. This conception, even as applied to the human and
finite Self, is shifty and late in its attainment of any rational
form. But the growth of man's belief in the Oneness and
Aloneness of the Divine Being is the most notable thing, from
the intellectual and scientific point of view, about his religious
development. In power and knowledge, in escape from the
limiting conditions of space and time, the divine beings are
held to be superior to man. And, indeed, it is chiefly for this
reason that they are esteemed and worshipped.
It has alread}^ been shown that the idea of Poiuer is the cen-
tral idea of the beings regarded by mankind as worthy to be
considered as divine. Among primitive peoples, says Brinton,^
" the god is one who can do more than man." The exciting
and nourishing source of this belief is found in those natural
phenomena which exhibit energy ; and in the cruder stages of
religion, especially in such happenings as thunderstorms,
earthquakes, and tidal waves, where the manifestations of
enormous energy are most impressive, most completely beyond
the control of man, and most fatal to his interests. To see
infinite power displayed in the dewdrop, the living cell, the
growing child, the corpuscle or ion sending out its emanations,
and especially in the spiritual control and elevating of human
souls, requires a scientific development and an insight quite
1 Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 81.
124 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
beyond the possibilities of the uncultured mind. It is not
strange, therefore, that we find the Australians saying that
Mumpal, the Thunderer personified, is the universal creator;
or that Parjanya, the rain-cloud personified, is the " mighty
one " among the Vedic gods. In Hebrew, Elohini or the
" strong ones " becomes the title of Israel's God ; and Yahweh
is extolled for his might and majesty which are supeiior to
that of all other tribal divinities. In Egypt and Assyria the
deity is clothed with the attributes of a mighty monarch. In
the former country this conception is degraded to the extent
of providing the god with a royal harem and other equipments
of royalty as known among men'. In this most ancient re-
ligion the local divinity might be called " Lord of Abydos," or
" Mistress of Senem ; " or might be hailed as " the Migiity,"
" the August," or " the Beneficent " — not ethically, but from
the point of view of a grand and lavish monarchy. Thus
Osiris was " the Great One " at Thebes and " the Sovereign "
at Memphis. On each of the massive blocks of limestone,
with which the broad way leading from the East side of the
palace of Nebuchadnezzar is paved, centuries ago was inscribed
this witness : " The highway of Babylon for the procession of
the great Lord Merodach." The gods of the Greek and
Teutonic mythologies were the "powei-s of nature," or the
" strong ones," etc. In the naive monotheism of Islam the
omnipotence of God is affirmed in the question : '^ "• Is not he
who hath created the heavens and the earth able to create the
like thereof ? Yea ! He is the knowing Creator ; His bidding
is only, when he desires anytliing, to say unto it : Be, — and
it is."
That conception of the Omnipotence, or unlimited and ab-
solute power, of the Divine Being, which is warranted not
only by physical science })ut also by the reflections of philosophy,
and wliich supports and satisfies religious experience, has both
1 See Erman , iE^yptcn uiid iEgyptisches Leben in Altertuin, p. 400.
2 Koran, Sura XXXVL
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 125
its negative and its positive aspect. Negatively taken, this
predicate denies that there is any limitation to the divine
power which arises, or can arise, from without the Divine
Being. Conceived of as Power, God is absolute and infinite.
For the possession and for the exercise of his energy he is de-
pendent on no other ; he is bounded by no other. This is
true of its amount, direction, occasion of expenditure, and
whatever other conditioning characteristics belong to all finite
displays of energy. Negatively taken also, the conception of
the divine omnipotence denies that all the hitherto actual, or
all the conceivable exhibitions of power, exhaust this source
of them all. The Divine Energy is to be thought of as 7iot
limited. It never has, nor will, come to its limit or its end.
It is only, however, when the predicate of omnipotence is
positively conceived that it affords the requisite satisfactions
to the emotions and practices of the religious life of man. By
calling God omnipotent it is meant to acknowledge that all the
actual and possible energy of finite beings, Things and Selves,
has its source in Him. The inexhaustible fountain of all the
cosmic manifestations of energy, from the innumerable suns
rushing with incredible velocity through boundless spaces, to
the radio-active performances of those beings whose magnitude
lies far below the highest powers of the microscope, is the Will
of God. From this same source comes all the energy which
characterizes the experience and behavior of the human Self.
In the Will of God, and only in His Will, our finite wills find
the explanation of their secondary and derived energizing.
They are not omwzpotent: the potency they have is from the Om-
nipotent. In a word, all the self-limiting and self-determining
as well as reciprocally determining, activity of finite beings
is a derived power — a loan from the inexhaustible resources
of energy which belong, of native and inalienable right, only
to the Being of the World.
In the experience of religion this view excites and supports
those feelings and that conduct which are appropriate to each
126 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
particular case. If the experience is filial piety, trust, and
hope ; then the human heart finds its most rational and satis-
factory support in this view. If the experience, however, is
one of opposition, distrust, or despair, then the painful disci-
pline necessary to bring the subject of the experience into a
right adjustment toward his cosmic, social, and ethical environ-
ment is inevitable. For the Omnipotent Will is sweet or bit-
ter to the taste according to the way it is taken. And the
essential good of religion is the increasingly better " squaring "
of the human Self, to the larger, the environing and supporting,
Infinite and Absolute Self.^
The very nature of the metaphysical predicates of God is
such that they are, like the so-called categories of Being and
Thought, both mutually dependent and yet, each one, irre-
solvable into any other. This is especially true of the divine
omnipotence and the divine omnipresence. Xegatively taken,
the Omnipresence of God denies all limitations from space and
spatial conditions, to his will and to his knowledge. Nothing
is, and nothing haj^pens, where God is not in the fullness of all
his divine attributes. This process of freeing the Divine Be-
ing from the limitations under which tlie conditions of the
spatial attributes and spatial relations place the human body
and mind has gone on throughout the centuries of man's reli-
gious development. It is a process contributed to by the
scientific requirements and philosophical aspirations and re-
flections of the race. It has been sometimes checked and
hindered, and sometimes favored and refined, by those religious
feelings which demand the nearness of God to the human soul.
The earlier and cruder forms of religion conceive of the
gods as, temporarily at least, embodied in some extended ob-
ject, or as especially present here, to the impairment or the
exclusion of their presence there. The gods may be thought
of as local divinities. Only in this way c an the untutored
* This thought is admirably wrought into Professor Roycc's discussion of
"The Union of God and Man," The World and the Individual, chap. X.
THE I^IETAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 127
mind satisfy the heart's craving for some very special and def-
inite manifestation of God. Men want their god to be in their
neighborhood. Even Yahweh was conceived of as a local
divinity by his worshippers — present especially, and partic-
ularly powerful, in certain localities. His people could not
offer sacrifices to him in Egypt, for they were in a " strange
land." The prophets themselves considered it offensive to
God to worship him away from the appointed place. And
Jesus proclaimed a heresy, when he told the Samaritan woman
that the true worship of the Father was " neither in this moun-
tain nor at Jerusalem."
When the growth of scientific knowledge and the conquests
of reflective thinking have succeeded in banishing, even par-
tially, from the minds of man, the conceptions which are con-
trary to the belief in the omnipresence of God, his thinking is apt
to take either a deistic or a pantheistic form. The deistic con-
ception virtually denies the divine universal presence by con-
ceiving of God as over against the World, separated from it
in a ^uasi-spatial and temporal way. There is, indeed, the
World a7id God ; but the former is, at least so far as our knowl-
edge about it goes, the construction and reconstruction of beings
and forces, that, whatever their original source may have been,
are now to be thought of as independent of the univei"sally
present Will of God. The pantheistic conception, on the con-
trary, identifies God and the World in such manner as to save
the omnipresence and omnipotence of his Being, at the sacrifice
of his self-conscious, ethical, and personal Life. All attempt
to adjust the claims of so-called " naturalism " and " super-
naturalism," in their efforts to define the relations of God to
the sum-total of finite things and finite selves, must be for the
present postponed. It is enough in this connection to repeat
that a self-consistent conception of God as Pei-sonal Absolute
is impossible without involving the denial of all limitations of
a spatial order to his power and to his presence.
Positively taken, the predicate of omnipresence as applied to
128 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
God repeats the truth ah-eady stated from other points of view ;
everywhere is tlie present power and co-conscious mind of the
Divine Being. Poetically stated/ He is the One, —
" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man."
But the deeper significance of this truth is seen only when the
ontological value is recognized of those mental activities, and
of those constitutional forms of mental life, in which all human
space-perceptions and space-notions have their origin. These
perceptions and notions compel the assumptions : (1) That a cer-
tain way of construing the being and the relations of all things
and all selves is native and inevitable for the human mind ; and,
therefore, (2) that this way has its ground, not solely in the
human mind, but in the nature of that reality which is thus
construed. " In these two assumptions we recognize again the
Self as a constructive and differentiating principle, which acts
according to its own nature in its apprehension of a World of
Things." And when the final ground and explanation of this
agreement between Self and the World is sought, the conclusion
is confirmed : " The category of space must be referred for its
trans-subjective ground to a World-Force, that arranges in a
determinate way all the different beings of the world, including
each Self whose pictorial representation of the spatial qualities
and spatial relations of things is determined by this same Force."' ^
Or, in the words of Pfleiderer ^ : " God is neither in space, nor
outside of space, but himself spaceless, founds space — that is,
embraces in himself all that is in space as mutually related, and
connects it in himself to the unity of the articulated whole."
1 So in the Pharsalia of Lucan (?), IX, 578, Cato is made to ask:
"Estque Dei sedes, ubi terra et pontus et aer
Et coelum et virtus. Superos quid quacrimus ultra?
Juppiter est f|uodcumc|ue vidcs quocumque moveris."
2 For these rjuotatinns and a detailed di-scussion of the category of Space,
see the author'.s ".\ Theory of Reality," chap. IX.
3 Philosophy of Religion, III, p. 297.
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 129
Rightly understood, this view of the omnipresence of God is
the only rational and satisfactory explanation and support of
the higliest and most valuable religious feeling. The shock of
vulgar prejudice which follows the definite application of this
profound and holy truth to concrete instances passes away,
when the reason is lifted to the loftier and diviner point of
view. Is God indeed here, in the fullness of His presence,
in this stone which I build into my dwelling; in this clod
which my ploughshare turns or on which my careless foot is
treading ; in this bodily system of pulsating brain and beating
heart and — it may be — even disordered and diseased system,
which I am myself so likely to prostitute to uses unworthy of
its divine origin and significance ? Yes, indeed, this is so.
And modern science is doing royal service, as it explores more
profoundly with microscope and physical and chemical analysis
the nature of these " common " things, to extract all sting of
degradation or frivolity from such admissions as these. That
stone, that clod, or even that diseased bodily organ, is no dead,
insignificant bit of worthless " matter " so-called. It is instinct
with the universal Life ; it embodies all the mysteries of exist-
ence ; it may at any moment become a most important factor
in shaping the history of the Universe and of the race of
man.
As to the body of man, nothing can be more salutary from
the point of view of practical religion than the reminder of
the eminently Christian doctrine that it is the temple of the
Holy Ghost. And he who can intelligently say, and live as
though he knew the meaning of what he is saying, — All my
life of body and soul is z'w God, is a manifestation of his in-
dwelling presence in wisdom and in power, — has conquered
the inner citadel of obstacles to complete filial piety. " Dost
thou not see," says the Koran, " that God knows what is in
the heavens and what is in the earth ? and that there cannot
be a privy discourse of three but he makes the fourth ? " " If
I ascend up into heaven," says the Psalmist (cxxxix, 8/.)»
0
130 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
" thou art there ; if I make my bed in Sheol, behold, thou art
there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the
uttermost parts of the sea ; even there shall thy hand lead me,
and thy right hand shall hold me."
Negatively taken, the predicate of Eternity does much the
same thing with the temporal limitations of Divine Being,
which the predicate of omnipresence does with the spatial
limitations. And yet there is an important difference between
the two. God is eternal, because his Being, attributes, and
activities, are not subject to the limitations of time. He had
no beginning in time ; nor will He cease to be in time. The
conception of a " coming to be," a development in time, does
not apply to the Infinite and Absolute, as it certainly does
apply to the entire system of finite things and finite selves.
" Lacking the idea of eternal duration," says Frazer,^ " primi-
tive man naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like him-
self." But so-called "primitive man," although he knows
that he is himself mortal, does not believe that death ends all
with him. On the contrary, he has little doubt that he shall
survive death, as he believes his deified ancestors have done.
Nor does the divine soul perish, even when the sacred tree or
stone, or the animal body, which was worshipped because of
its indwelling there, ceases to exist. The divine ones may in-
deed die ; that is, they may, like other invisible spiritual ex-
istences, be driven out of their temporary abodes. But they
die hard, as it were ; or they are regarded, as they rise in the
scale of life which corresponds to the improved and exalted
conception of their nature, as essentially immortal. And
when this conception attains the moral dignity and the philo-
sophical consistency of a Personal Absolute, the eternity of
God l^ecomes one of those predicates which are inevitably in-
corporate in the conception itself. To make Him subject to the
limitations of time would be to sacrifice all the essential char-
acteristics of liis infiniteness and absoluteness. Therefore the
I The Golden Bouj^h, II, p 1.
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 131
mind denies that these limitations are applicable to its idea
of God.
The denial, however, does not mean that the self-conscious
Life of God is to be described as an " eternal now " ; or that
the time-concept has no applicability whatever to man's neces-
sary and true thought about the nature of this Life. Let it
be confessed at once that in its negative aspect this phrase, an
" eternal now," covers a thoroughly vain and foolish attempt
at thinking away one of the most indispensable and absolutely
immovable conditions of all thought. To conceive of God's
Life as an eternal-now is as impossible as it is to conceive of
God's Being as essentially unrelated to the cosmic processes
and to human history. Indeed, such an attempt, if it could
succeed, would result in the destruction at once of all the es-
sential characteristics of personality. " Wooden iron " is not
a more intolerable conception than " eternal now," in the nega-
tive meaning which theology and philosophy have too fre-
quently attempted to attach to this phrase.
It is in dealing with the thought of the divine omniscience
that this conception of the divine freedom from all time-
limitations has its most important influence. Taken in the
negative meaning which denies any application of the time-
concept to the self-conscious Life of God, the conception of
his eternity would at once annihilate the conception of his om-
niscience. Knowledge, whether of self or of things, is incon-
ceivable apart from their time-form. God's consciousness of
the world could be true, could be knowledge, only if God knew
the world as He wills it actually to be, — namely, a develop-
ment in time. But what is meant — if anything even abstractly
conceivable is meant — by denying that the divine knowledge
is limited by time, is the assertion that all this knowledge is
after the type, in its perfection, of that which in man's case
reaches its highest pitch in Self-knowledge ; and this is imme-
diate knowledge of what is the here-and-now object of cogni-
tive activity. It is demonstrably certain that it takes time for
132 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
us to corae to self-consciousness, or to achieve a so-called sense-
intuition of any particular thing. But with God it is not so.
In its positive significance the predicate of eternity expresses
the confidence of the human mind in two truths which are of
great importance, both for its own theoretical self-consistency
and also for the assurance of religious faith. Whatever God
is essentially, that He is in an original and unchanging way.
This is not the attribution of an inconceivable and practically
worthless statical nature to the Divine Being. Science and
philosophy, as well as religion, require a living God. Life in-
volves activity ; and activity involves change. But the succes-
sive manifestations and phases, if we may so speak, of this liv-
ing God are all self-consistent, self-regulated, and independent
of the compulsions and limitations which affect our human life
in time. " God is eternal," says the Koran,^ in that chapter
which is declared to be equal in value to a third part of it all.
He is " the everlasting God ; " He is God " from everlasting
to everlasting ; " He is the " living God, and an everlast-
ing king ; " " the King, eternal, immortal, invisible : " — if,
say the writers of the Old Testament,^ the Personal Absolute
is ever omnipotent, omniscient, just, wise, holy, etc. ; then he
is this, and is all that he essentially is, in an unchanging and
original way.
There is, however, a yet profounder significance, in a posi-
tive manner and from the point of view of an ontological phi-
losophy, which belongs to the predicate of eternity as applied to
God. The ground of all the happenings in a time-series of
that world of things and selves, of which the race has expe-
rience, and which science aims to know and philosophy to ex-
pound in a fundamental way, must be posited in the Divine
Being. These finite beings and events condition and, from
man's point of view, produce one another in the order of a
time that applies to them all — a universal category, so to say,
1 Sura CXII.
2 Gen. xxi, 33; Ps. ciii, 17; Jer. x, 10; I Tim. i, 17.
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 133
of a serial order. That there should be any time-order at all,
and that the time-order should be in each particular just what
it is, as well as that this order should be apprehended in the
same way by different minds, and as a matter of objective
certainty and validity, — all this must have its ultimate expla-
nation in the nature of the World-Ground.
Facts of universal experience, therefore, compel the ques-
tion : " What sort of a Being must the World have in order
that it ma}'^ satisfy the conditions imposed upon it by this
category of Time ? " In answer to such a question it would
seem that no better conclusion could be reached than that
which requires statement in somewhat like the following
terms : ^ " The world's absolute and universal time is the actual
succession of states in the all-comprehending Life of God. If
then one is willing to substitute for the mathematical symbol
of 00 the conception of the Life of an Absolute Self, one may
validate both the popular and the scientific assumption of an
absolute time in which all the events of the world are ever
taking place. This conception is that of a series which must
be conceived of time-wise and yet involves the denial of a be-
ginning or end to itself ; a series that, from every ' noiu ', or oo i,
reaches both backward and forward to oo n. The trayiscenden-
tal reality of time in the all-comprehendiiig Life of an Absolute
Selfr
" Our time-consciousness is, indeed, limited ; its present grasp,
its recall of memory, and its anticipatory seizures of the future,
are all feeble and defective enough. But really to be in time is
not per se to be finite and limited. And surely the conception
symbolized by a simple oo (the eternal now) is no grander or
more absolute than that symbolized by a series, oo i, oo o, oo 3,
.... 00 w. Just as surely is all human thought about Reality
made grander and more worthy to stand, when for this sym-
bol, 00 , there is substituted the conception of the Life of an
1 Quoted from A Theory of Reality, p. 212/., in which Treatise, chap. VIII,
the whole subject is discussed in detail.
134 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Absolute Self. At any rate, only this conception seems able
to validate the category of time in that trans-subjective and
universal application of it which the development of human
knowledge presupposes, demands, and perpetually confirms."
There is much to justify the contention of Professor Royce '
that the Omniscience of God constitutes not simply a, but the
most fundamental predicate of his Divine Being. It is not
possible, indeed, to derive the other predicates from this, or to
resolve them all into it ; nor does omniscience alone fully
serve the purpose of even a " preliminar}'- definition " of God.
From the point of view of science and of naive religious ex-
perience alike, it is power which constitutes the central factor
in man's conception of Deity. But omniscience is so related
to the other metaphysical predicates, on the one hand, and to
all the moral attributes, on the other, that it seems, in some
sort, to include the possibility of them all within itself. God
could not be omnipotent if he did not know all ; nor could he
be perfectly just and good, without perfection of knowledge,
in his position as moral ruler of the world.
Like all the other metaphysical predicates, that of omniscience
has its negative as well as its positive aspect. It involves,
first of all, a denial that any of the limitations, which apply to
finite cognitive processes, apply to the knowledge of the Per-
sonal Absolute. In making and interpreting this denial, how-
ever, we are to beware of the sophistry which finds in the essen-
tial nature of knowledge, whether as cognitive Self-consciousness
or as Other-consciousness, such internal and irremovable con-
tradictions as make it absurd or unmeaning to apply this
predicate of omniscience to God.
The historical development of the belief that God is om-
niscient has followed essentially the same lines as those which
mark out the progiiun of thought concerning all the other
divine predicates and atti'ibutes. This conception also has
been dependent upon essentially the same conditions of ad-
' See The Conception of God, pp. 7//.
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 135
vancing race-culture. As has already been repeatedly pointed
out, the most important of these conditions are determined by
the stage in self-knowledge and self-culture at which the race
has arrived. What it is to be a Knower — a person, as respects
the cognitive activities and attainments of personal existence —
is an inquiry which can be answered only with increasing full-
ness and depth, as tlie experience of self-conscious beings pro-
vides the answer to themselves. As far back in history as the
time of Esarhaddon, the priest who acted as mediator for this
monarch when he was hard pressed by a group of nations to
the Northeast of Assyria, inquired into the future with
the prayer : ^ " Thy great divine power knows it. . . . Is it
definitely ordained by thy great and divine Will, O Shamash?
Will it actually come to pass? " The Koran has reached the
conclusion with respect to Allah : ^ " With him are the keys of
the unseen. None knows them save He ; He knows what is
in the land and in the sea ; and there falls not a leaf, save
that He knows it ; nor a grain in the darkness of the earth ;
nor aught that is dry, save that this is in his perspicuous
book."
The doctrine of the divine omniscience denies that the
limitations of space and time apply to the knowledge of God.
Thus, the omniscience becomes interdependently connected
with the omnipotence and the omnipresence of God. Distance
puts no obstacle in the way of his knowledge. Being equally
present and powerful everywhere, he is also cognizant of all
events and causes, as man, on account of his spatial limitations,
cannot possibly be. Since he is eternal, the time-limits of
human cognitive activities are not applicable to him.
Again, limitations of content, and of clearness and accuracy,
to which all finite experience of knowledge is subject, do not
apply to the absolute and infinite knowledge of God. The
gi-asp of human cognitive consciousness, whether its activities
1 See Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 334.
2 Sura, XXXVII.
136 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
are regarded as intuitive or ratiocinative, perceptual m- con-
ceptual— and whatever form of so-called knowledge or so-called
faith is invoked — is narrowly circumscribed. It has a certain
capacity for extending its range ; and certain men have, when
they are compared eitlier with their fellows or with the lower
animals, a relatively large range of cognitive experience.
Aristotle and the Busiiman, or Aristotle and his dog, are in-
deed far apart in their intellectual powers and accumulations.
But as compared with the knowable, the known by Aristotle
is as a drop to the ocean, a coi-puscle to the universe. So, too,
is all human knowledge infected with obscurities, and charged
with the risk of errors. All man's clearest seeing is in part ;
all his surest knowing falls short of the infallible. But in the
self-conscious, rational Life of the Personal Absolute, these
limitations, too, are thought of only to be removed.
In attempting, however, to form a positive conception of the
Divine Omniscience, certain peculiar and, indeed, irremovable
difficulties stand in the way. These difficulties, when prop-
erly understood and fairly criticized, do not indeed avail to in-
volve the conception in hopeless confusion through convicting
it of inherent contradiction ; but they do emphasize its in-
comprehensibility in respect of certain of its most essential
factors.
If the conception of omniscience is not to remain purely
negative, and so of little use for the attempt to establish a
rational faith in the object of religion, all its more positive
factors must be derived from our most highly developed ex-
perience with ourselves as self-conscious Innings. It is only in
this experience that human knowledge readies the highest
possible, and even conceivable type of imnied lateness, cer-
tainty, clearness, and fullness of content. It would seem,
therefore, that the omniscience of God must 1h' conceived of,
if positively conceived of afc all, as infinite, absolute, and per-
fect Self-consciousness. This is to affirm that (iod's knowl-
edge h;is in perfect dcgicc those qualities (»f alisoluteness,
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 137
which in man's case reach their liighest form in the develop-
ment of his self-conscious experience ; and that this knowl-
edge extends to all actual and conceivable objects of knowledge.
Such a conception is not, indeed, picturable or fully compre-
hensible by the human mind. But it may be elucidated in a
way by the following considerations.
Since all that is and that happens depends, without limita-
tions of space or time, upon the Infinite and Absolute Will of
God; and since nothing can arise, or exist, or occur, in inde-
pendence of, or separation from, this Will ; there is a profoundly
significant and true meaning to the declaration that, with God,
all knowledge is essentially self-conscious. All beings and all
happenings are in Him ; all beings and all happenings are known
hy him as in Him. With God all knowledge is self-conscious
knowledge. After having gained, for the defense of a rational
faith in God as perfect Ethical Spirit, the position that the
World-Ground must be self-conscious and personal, we can-
not relinquish this position in the face of the difficulties
caused by the attempt to comprehend the Divine Omniscience.
That God knows what he wills, and feels, and thinks, — to
speak after the only manner which can give positive content
to the conception of Him as Person, — is now no longer to be
denied. God knows Himself — to the very depths of his, to us,
incomprehensible being, and to the utmost extent of his infi-
nite activities.
But the Other-consciousness of God, or his knowledge of the
existences, relations, interactions, and changes, of the universe
of finite things and finite selves, is embraced in the infinite
grasp of his self-consciousness. The world-consciousness of
God, too, is self-consciousness. Indeed, since the world has,
without ceasing, its dependence upon God's Will ; and since
its indwelling forces are forms of the manifestation of this
Will ; and since its immanent teleology — the world-order — is
the expression of his Mind ; God, in order to know all truly,
as things and souls really are, and as events actually happen,
138 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
must know them all as being and happening " in Him." In
whatever sense they really are in Him, in that same sense they
are truly known as in Him.
Objections to that positive conception of God's omnis-
cience which identifies it with his infinite and absolute self-
consciousness, apart from those which arise from a false concep-
tion of the nature of a Self, are chiefly three : One is mainly
ethical, one psychological, and the third is more definitely meta-
physical. These objections can best be answered, so far as answer
at all is possible, only when all the evidence has been examined
which bears upon the religious doctrine of God as perfect
Ethical Spirit.
None of our ideas of value are disturbed, and none of the
ethical, eesthetical, or religious feelings are hindered or de-
graded, by regarding Things as so dependent upon God's will
that his knowledge of them may be thought of by us as a spe-
cies of self-consciousness. But undoubtedly the case of other
selves is by no means precisely the same. To preserve the in-
tegrity and quasi-indepeiidence of man's selfhood seems to the
highest forms of religious experience a matter of the utmost
ethical importance. How can the human being be so related
to the Divine Being as that his self-conscious, cognitive life and
development shall all be open to the divine self-consciousness,
without impairing, or even destroying, the reality of his
moral and religious character? In reply to this question it
ma)^ be said that, so far as the conception of omniscience is
concerned, the difficulty is scarce!)'- an ethical one at all. Man
certainly, can, and certainly will, have just so much, and no
more, of independent and self-conscious existence as God wills
that he should luive. Wliether this shall be enough to con-
stitute him a truly moral being, and to make it possible to re-
gard his relations to God as truly moral, in so far as these re-
lations affect the independence of man's will, this, too, depends
upon the same Divine Will. If God's Will is " Good Will,"
— in the supremely ethical meaning of this term, — and if this
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 139
Good- Will wills that man should have and exercise such at-
tributes, including moral freedom, as are necessary to moral
relations between the two ; then God maj'- know man as a true
finite Self and at the same time as a dependent factor in his
own all-embracing Self-consciousness. In a word, the true
ethical problem is one that concerns a relation of wills.
From this point of view, therefore, the entire objection to
making God's omniscience identical with his perfect and abso-
lute self-consciousness becomes, the rather, a psychological dif-
ficulty. The inquiry becomes one of a modus operandi. How
can the Infinite Self-consciousness embrace the consciousness
of a finite self-conscious being, in such manner that both con-
sciousnesses shall, from their respective points of view, corre-
spond to the reality ? I am conscious of myself as thinking, feel-
ing, willing thus and so. In spite of all psychological juggling
with this complex and yet fundamental experience, I am certain
that this knowledge is of a Self, that is my Self and no Other;
and that it is immediate, certain, and indubitably true. After
the pattern of this experience I construct — feebly to be sure, and
yet as best I may — the ideal of an Infinite and Absolute Self-
consciousness. But now I am asked to believe that this Other
conscious Being, whom my self-consciousness refuses to iden-
tify with me, is after all conscious of me as a " moment," so
to say, in his own all-embracing self-conscious Life. Thus the
psychological objection resolves itself into a metaphysical puz-
zle. Can a multitude, a social community of finite selves exist
and develop in ontological dependence upon, and in truly moral
relations with, an Infinite and Absolute Self? The more de-
tailed argument in defense of an affirmative answer to this
question requires the reflective study of all those problems
which are raised by the religious doctrine of " God and the
World." But the conclusion of the argument may be antici-
pated by saying that just this ontological relation is the ground
and the guaranty of all truly moral relations. Only an
Infinite and Absolute Self, embracing in his omnipotence and
140 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
omniscience all other selves, could be God over, and God in,
all beings existing in the one World.
If it were necessary to leave this puzzle as it is stated in the
most harsh and uncompromising way, it would not even then
amount to an inherently self-contradictory conception of man's
complex experience with himself and with other selves. For
in the essentially mysterious, subtile, and tangled web of this
experience, the whole of it may be regarded from several points
of view. The individual's self-consciousness is everywhere
penetrated with factors which are often spoken of variously
as " social consciousness," or " race consciousness," etc.; and at
its base, even when its apex is in the highest heavens and
clearest sunlight, there is always a vast deal that requires to be
classified as "instinctive," " subliminal," or under other similar
obscure terms.
In general, it is psychologically true that eo-consciousness and
8f(/-consciousness are by no means mutually exclusive experi-
ences ; they may be regarded as different aspects of one undi-
vided experience. Even in man's limited way of knowing,
there is that which illustrates this possibility. In the case of
any two most intimate and familiar friends, for example, the
cognitive consciousness of each tends to become more immedi-
ately and surely representative of the other; and this tendency,
instead of limiting or destroying the self-consciousness of each,
may even have the effect of enlarging and reenforcing it.
For self-consciousness is not an abstract awareness of the Self
as out of all relation to other selves. Without other con-
sciousness, self-consciousness cannot develop. In man's case
this other-consciousness is of things and selves that exist in-
pendent of his will, and that are therefore known, not only as
related to the Self, but as somehow essentially not-self. But
as we have already said, tlie more intimate becomes the indi-
vidual's knowledge of tliose wlioare most completely of his own
kind, or kinsliij), the more does his self-consciousness tend to
blend perfectly with the objective consciousness which has ref-
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 141
erence to other self-consciousness. I know my fellow in know-
ing myself; because of the perfection which my knowledge of
him has attained. At one and the same time this state of
knowledge is self-consciousness, and also consciousness most
perfectly representative of another Self. In a word, the slow
and doubtful process of interpreting signs from the outside, as
it were, is being replaced by an intuitive knowledge, a sympa-
thetic consciousness, or co-consciousness.
What is somewhat dimly adumbrated in certain choicest
human experiences may well enough be thought to be perfectly
realized in the self-conscious Life of the Personal Absolute.
Is there consciousness, or self-consciousness, anywhere in the
wide world of things and selves, from star to starfish, from
starfish to man, and from the most degraded savage to the
most comprehensive, spiritual individual among men ? In this
consciousness, or self-consciousness, God is co-conscious. From
one point of view, every state of the finite being, if it has
attained the sufficient degree of development, may be realized
by this being as his own state ; but from another point of view,
every such state is also to be regarded as known by the Abso-
lute Being through this, His universal and all-embracing co-
consciousness. Here, again, the mind is thrown back once
more upon the ethical difficulty, only when the attempt is
made to adjust the relations of human wills and the Divine
Will, so as to save both the moral freedom of the former and
also the absoluteness of the latter. But this problem is, ulti-
mately, not the concern of the metaphysical predicate of om-
niscience, but the care of the moral attributes of justice, good-
ness, and ethical love.
The conception of the Divine Omniscience as a species of
cognitive activity which is at one and the same time "Self-
consciousness," and " Other-consciousness," in the form of an
all-embracing co-consciousness, meets with its supreme psy-
chological objection when it is applied to God's knowledge
of the future. What has been, and what is, may, with com-
142 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
parative self-consistency, be regarded as all known in every
" moment " of that omniscient and eternal Life which has been
jBguratively represented as Qo 1, 002, 003, . . . . qo71. But how
can God know the future in any such manner as to warrant
us in representing this knowledge as having the immediacy,
certainty, and perfection of self-consciousness; and if He
knows the future in this way, how can man be free, and how
shall be preserved the ethical interests about which religion
is chiefly concerned ? In answer to all such inquiries, the
mind is compelled to resort to a species of thinking which
suggests a real truth that, however, cannot be pictorially repre-
sented in its perfection by the imagination or fully compre-
hended by the intellect.
In man's case we hesitate about speaking of his mental atti-
tude toward the future as one of knowledge in the fullest mean-
ing of that word. On the other hand, an analysis of any act
of cognition shows that without a reference to tlie future, and
indeed to the " timeless " character of the cognitive judgment,
no knowledge of any sort can take place.' Nor is this future,
or timeless character, of the reference to reality which belongs
to every cognitive judgment, an affair wholly of hesitating and
doubtful calculation. The more human knowledge grows, the
more does all of it become a sort of insight into the nature of
Reality, which makes the certainty of what is known inde-
pendent of the limitations of time. To say this is in no way
to deny the growth of knowledge ; or to depreciate the develop-
ment of the mental activities and mental achievements of the
human race. But the very principles which underlie this
growth, and the fundamental postulates of this development,
are themselves evidence of man's undying conviction that it is
possible to put knowledge on a basis which shall not leave it,
as respects the future even, what it now most evidently is, —
namely, a species of more or less probable calculation as to what
is more or less likely to l)e and to take place.
I See the author's Philosophy of Knowledge, p. 263/.
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 143
We are not, then, to regard the divine omniscience in its
reference to the future as a kind of calculation, which is made
accurate only by the extent of the same omniscience with ref-
erence to the present and to the past. God — to speak more
humano — does not need to take account of his present stock of
information, and to figure out a balance sheet, when he wishes
to know how the business of his world is coming out. We
may, indeed, be unable pictorially to represent or fully to com-
prehend the modus operandi of a knowledge of the future
which takes the shape of an immediate, certain, and perfect
cognitive attitude in the self-conscious Life of the Personal
Absolute. But the possibility of such knowledge cannot be
denied on grounds that belong to the inherent nature of
knowledge. On the contrary, certain human experiences
suggest its possibility. In the highest flights of the finite
mind, in the intuitions of genius, — whether they occur in
prophecy, science, or art, — something approaching this seizure
of the truth of Reality which escapes the limits of time, becomes
an affair of actual experience. That it should always be so
with God we are lead to affirm, both in the interests of the
self-consistency of our conception of Him as the omniscient
One ; and also in support of our religious feelings as they are
appealed to by the idea of an all-sufficing moral government
of the World. And here again the difficulty of making the
predicate of omniscience square with the valid ideal of moral
government becomes the problem of adjusting the relation of
finite free-wills to the Will of the Personal Absolute.
All the metaphysical predicates are gathered together and ex-
pressed in their mutual relations, and in harmony, by the con-
ception of the Unity of God. This unity is the unitary being
of an Absolute Self. At this most comprehensive idea of
Selfhood the race has been slowly arriving through many cen-
turies of religious, scientific, and philosophical development.
" He is God Alone," says the Koran : " Nor is there like unto
him any one." So far, however, has this process of evolution
iU PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
now been completed that the negative aspect of the doctrine
of the Divine Unity needs comparatively little consideration.
Negatively taken, this predicate denies all polytheistic or diial-
istic conceptions of God. It is this denial which a philosophi-
cal monotheism puts forth as the confident conclusion of its
survey and interpretation of the facts of the religious history
of mankind ; it is the goal of man's speculative endeavor to
give a rational explanation of the world that shall harmonize
the conflicting elements. There cannot be two or more In-
finite and Absolute Beings.
But positively taken, the conception of God as the Personal
Absolute is the conception of One, the Alone God. And this
involves much more than the denial of a plurality of divine
beings in the absolute sense. No other being is to be put be-
side Him as comparable with Him in respect of the relations it
sustains to the world of finite things and finite selves. When,
however, the inquiry arises, What kind of unity, or oneness, is
that which characterizes the Divine One? there is no other
satisfying or even intelligible reply than this : God's Unity is
the Unity of a Person ; and it is perfect because He is the one
Infinite and Absolute Person. All those abstract and imper-
son;il conceptions of oneness, which some philosophical systems
have ascribed to the Divine Being are quite as powerless and
inappropriate as are the crude notions of animism or of polythe-
ism. The same thing must be said of those trinities of divine
beings which either implicitly, or obviously, deny the personal
Unity of God. They all show their instability by their con-
stant vacillation between a doctrine of different aspects, or
manifestations, of One Divine Being, and a relapse into the
tenets of a virtually polytheistic theology.^
1 Thistnithis curiously ilhistrated by the conceptions and practices of the
Chinese. In the Buddhist temples of China, the common people suppose
that the three gigantic images of the "San Pfio" ("Three Precious Ones")
are repreaentjitions of tlirec different divinities; in reality, however, accord-
ing to Legge (The Religions of China, p. IGC/.) they represent (1) "Intelli-
THE METAPHYSICAL PREDICATES 145
All, therefore, that this predicate of Unity guarantees and
expresses can only be conceived of, in terms of the Infinite and
Absolute personal Life. But it is such life, and only such
life, in whose native activities and experiences any true unity,
whether of subject or object, whether of Self or of Things, or
of the one World of many selves and things, can possibly be
found. To expound this Unity is to elaborate the doctrine of
the Being of God and of his relations to the Cosmos ; to com-
prehend fully this Unity would be to know the Infinite and
the Absolute through and through ; and this is not knowledge
accessible to finite minds. But to know about this Unity in
any degree is to lay the basis in knowledge for a rational faith
in the Object which is presented to man for his supreme ado-
ration and service in the religious experience of the race.^
gence personified in Buddha; (2) The Law, and (3) The Church." In the
Taoist temples of the same land, however, the San Ch' ing (or "Three Pure
Ones") are, each one, called Shang Ti, or God. They are (1) Chaos person-
ified; (2) the "Most High Prince Lao" deified; and (3) the "God of mysteri-
ous existence." That is, they are not trinities in any proper meaning of the
word.
1 Says Sir Isaac Newton in the celebrated scholium at the end of his Prin-
cipia: "Deus est vox relativa, et ad servos refertur; et deltas est dominatio Dei,
non in corpus proprium, uti sentiunt quibus deus est anima mundi, sed in ser-
vos. Deus summus est ens cetemum, infinitum, absolute perfectum; sed ens ut-
cunque perfectum sine dominio non est dominus deus."
10
CHAPTER XXXII
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
It is well yet again at this point to recall the goal toward
which our entire course of reflection has been leading. The
conclusion which has already been reached affirms that the only
real Principle, worthy to be considered as a World-Ground, must
be found in the unity of an absolute and infinite Personal Life.
This conclusion seems to involve tue following four important
philosophical tenets : (1) All beings and events are united, in
respect of their real relations and actual history, in the Will of
God ; (2) All physical beings and events are immediately
known to God, are "moments " in the cognitive consciousness
of God ; (3) Of all the conscious and self-conscious life of
finite beings, God is co-conscious ; for his omniscience is an
essential of his Unity as a Person ; and, therefore, (4), the
World, or Universe of tilings and selves, with all their inter-
relations and changes, lies " mirrored " perfectly in the unity
of the rational self-consciousness of God.
But the ultimate purpose of our study, lies yet beyond all
this. It is to test the reasonableness of a faith in the Object
of religious experience, as this Object is conceived of by the
highest reflective developments of that experience. In other
words, it is to establish, if possible, a rational belief in the
Being of a God, to whom may be attributed in perfection the
moral attributes of justice, goodness, holiness, and ethical love.
Across the pathway to tlie realization of this puipose lies the
jiroblem of evil. And it cannot Ije denied that the i)hilosophi-
cal conception of God as absolute and infinite sell'-conscioua
110
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 147
Person, makes, in several important respects, the completed
realization of this purpose increasingly difficult. This state-
ment will become more obvious, the further the discussion of
the problem of evil proceeds.
Another important feature, if it be not a defect, in the argu-
ment by which religion supports its faith in God as perfect
Ethical Spirit, is its plainly " circular " character. No satis-
factory approach to a solution of the problem of evil can be
made without giving a generous confidence to the evidential
value of the faith of the highest religious developments, that
there is indeed a perfectly just, good, holy, and loving God.
But on coming to examine the grounds on which this faith it-
self depends, it appears that the evidential value of the faith
is not wholly or chiefly objective, but is chiefly subjective, —
that is, consists in the faith itself. Or, to state the case of
this circulus in arguendo more bluntly : When we ask, How
do you solve, even partially, the problem of evil? the answer
of religion is : By the faith in a perfectly good God. And,
then, when we further ask : How do you arrive at and justify
this faith ? we are virtually told that it is because the faith
either solves, or greatly relieves, the problem of evil.
It may as well be confessed at once that the relation be-
tween the problem of evil and the problems offered by the faith
of religion in the moral perfections of the Absolute Self, whom
this faith recognizes and worships as God, is a relation of re-
ciprocal dependence. If evil is actually supreme, or even on
a par with the good, then no man can reasonably believe in a
perfectly good God. But if one cannot believe in a perfectly
good, as well as an omnipotent and omniscient God, then how
shall one believe in the supremacy and final triumph of the
good? All this shifting of the argument's point of view shows
that religious faith in the Divine Being as perfect Ethical Spirit
is a postulate which cannot be placed on independent grounds
so as to afford a strictly scientific solution of the problem of
evil. It does not follow, however, that it cannot be made rea-
148 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
sonable ; — chiefl}^ on the ground that it most perfectly satisfies
man's ethical, cBsthetical, and religious sentiments, and most
effectively secures the ontological value of his ethical, aestheti-
cal, and religious ideals.
Does, then, the problem of evil admit of any solution ? Cer-
tainly not ; if by its solution we mean to indicate the possi-
bility of explaining by any scientifically established law, or
general truth, the actual experience of the race with the really
existing amount and kinds of evil. If, however, one becomes
willing to accept at their full evidential value the sentiments
and ideals, which both produce and justify the faith of religion,
then one may find the solution which this faith proposes, the
best attainable, not to say the perfectly satisfactory, answer
to this dark and meaningful problem. Nor will evidence in
favor of this solution, which lies somewhat outside of the ex-
perience of religion, be wholly wanting. '•'' Solutions ''\ne) so-
called, which go beyond this modest claim, are sure to be un-
tenable as theories, and likely to prove injurious to practical
morality.
As to the fact of the existence of evil, in vast amount and
widely, or even universally distributed, both temporally and
territorially, there can be no dispute. From the point of view
of the impartial investigator, as well as from the religious
point of view, the customary distinction may be maintained
between the two related, but by no means identical, forms of
evil. This problem, then, faces the facts of evil as either
suffering, or else as moral failure ; or — to use the term of re-
ligious experience — as sin.
If inquiry' be made whether, on the whole, the amount of
evil as suffering exceeds the amount of good as happiness, it
seems, on examination, to prove not only unanswerable, but
even vain and idle. The estimate for which it calls, must al-
ways be made from the point of view of s(jine individual's
experience. Thus the result, since suffering is essentially sub-
jective and no adequate objective and universal measure of its
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 149
amount can be obtained, is liable to both exaggerations and ex-
cessive minimizing, in dependence upon temperament, mood,
personal experience, and, especially, the adopted point of view.
How can the opinion of the comfortable well-fed Englishman,
who is perfectly certain that, if any future after death is in
store for him, it is immediate entrance into a condition of beati-
tude, or the judgment of the successful American man of busi-
ness, whose highest ideal is no other than just this sort of
success, agree with the opinion and judgment of the ascetic
Brahman or of the starving millions of India? As a matter of
fact, the two opinions do not agree. Again, with the Buddhist,
existence itself seems so fraught with inescapable evil that to
get out of it, to get " off the wheel," is esteemed the supreme
good. And to attain this good, the way is not through the
gratification but, the rather, through the extinction, of desire.
Valid considerations, based upon facts, may be opposed to
both extreme views of this problem. To those who estimate
the evil of suffering as greatly preponderating, it may be op-
posed : (1) That the physiological and psychological constitu-
tion of animal life is such as to set limits, both of time and of
degree, to the endurance of suffering ; (2) that, on the contrary,
there is everywhere a more abundant provision for the ease-
ment of pain and for the promotion of a variety of kinds of
pleasure ; (3) that the animals, the lower races, and the chil-
dren of the more sensitive races, do not in fact suffer at all as
the hypersesthetic observer imagines that they do ; or, when
reflecting in quiet and ease upon the unutterable woes of
total humanity, the confirmed aesthete imagines that they must.
In fact, the fearsome burden of unrewarded and unappreci-
ated toil and service, of egoistic or sympathetic pains, of dis-
appointed ambitions and hopes, of superstitious or well-founded
fears, does not prevent the life of the multitudes from be-
ing, on the whole, an -experience of prevailing comfort and
large and somewhat varied happiness. While those who seem
to have been especially selected victims of an unusual and
150 PHILOSOPHY OF RKLIGION
seemingly intolerable load of suffering, most often manage to
secure that greater measure of cheerful endurance and trium-
phant faith, which might well enough make them the objects
of envy by ordinary mortals.
But, on the other hand, let one maintain that, after all, hu-
man suffering is in amount relatively insignificant and greatly
exceeded by the gross sum of human happiness : then one
stands convicted, either of an insensitive and unsympathetic
mind, or of a lack of varied and comprehensive experience.
For (1) that very physiological and psychological constitution
which, as it were of necessity, sets limits to the sufferings of
animal and human life, is so elastic and enduring that these
same limits admit of a quite unbearable amount of suffering
as judged by finite capacity. In other words, most men have
about all of suffering they can bear. (2) The same pro-
vision of a nervous system, however rudimentary or highly
developed, which is made for the enjoyment of a suitable en-
vironment, when itself in healthy condition, is just as certaiidy
adapted for painful reactions whenever the environment is
unsuitable or the apparatus itself is out of tune. And (3) there
is much evidence in support of the contention of Schopen-
hauer ; — namely, that the very conditions which favor the ad-
vancement of the race in what is called civilization are essen-
tially such as to provide for a large increase in certain forms
of suffering. They who vibrate most rapidly and intensely be-
tween the opposite poles of painful craving and painful satiety
and ennui, are not the lower animals, or the lower races, or the
children of the more sensitive races. In a word, the develop-
ment of the capacity for happiness is also, in even greater degree,
a development of the capacity forsuffering. Moreover, the very
mofif and desired end of religious faith, so far as tJiis faith takes
account of tJiis two-sided human capacity, is to furnish satisfac-
tions for the soul in such manner as to increase the one and
abate the other. For this filial attitude toward the omnipo-
tent, omniscient, and ethically perfect Will of God (" sweet"
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 151
and "holy" Will), brings the finite spirit into such relations
with the Infinite Sufferer, that the woes of mankind are more
keenly and painfully felt. It was just this highest refinement
of altruistic suffering which made that Apostle, who was al-
ways ready " to be offered," declare : " The whole creation
groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now," — a
figure of speech taken from the extreme of human anguish.
It was the same experience which wrung a bitter cry from
Jesus, and forced the temporary obscuration of his sense
of complete union with God, as he hung upon the sacrificial
cross.
The facts, then, furnish sufficient reason for that vacillation
of mind with which one passes from observing certain kinds
of experience to the observation of other and seemingly con-
tradictory kinds, — in the lower animals and in men, — as inter-
preted by a variety of so-called laws, physical, physiological,
psychological, economical, and social. Confusion seems to be
rife in the phenomena. The sympathetic soul is torn asunder
by the evidences of this cosmic strife.
The difficulty of estimating amounts of happiness and suffer-
ing, of making up a satisfactory balance sheet, and of debiting
and crediting the appropriate sums to the different kindly or
malignant forces of nature, is made more profound, if not more
unanswerable, by the discoveries of modern science. Biology
reveals the astonishing fact that innumerable destructive liv-
ing forms — bacteria, bacilli, and germs of various kinds — have
been provided for all sentient, and especially for human life ;
these instruments of torture and death have made for man an
inescapable environment of incredible suffering. The constitu-
tion of the world in which man lives has monstrous pain firmly
embedded in its very texture. What biological science has
demonstrated in its most convincing way, the anthropological,
economical, and social sciences have also adopted as a theoreti-
cal tenet. The evolution of animal life, the progress of the
race in every form and degree of race-culture, is purchasable^
152 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
only by the payment of enormous sums of suffering. The his-
tory of art confirms the testimony of the sciences. The poets
"learn by suffering what they teach in song." The greatest
painters, sculptors, and musicians proclaim the same truth.
The highest art culminates in tragedies, in passion music, in
the graphic or plastic delineation of suffering heroes. That
this must bey all modern science is agreed in proclaiming. •
More slowly, and as yet not quite so surely, has this same
science been making clear that similar instrumentalities for an
increased amount, and higher kind, of happiness are embedded
in the same constitution of the world. Biology is talking of
the beneficent, as well as of the maleficent, bacteria and other
forms of lower life, very much as " unreflecting spiritism "
was wont to talk of good and bad spirits, of kindly and hate-
ful gods. So do the other sciences of human life try to dis-
cover how the evils of iniquitous government, the inequalities
of social life, the horrid barbarities of war, and the monstrous
suffering inflicted by the severer " acts of God," by earth-
quake, volcanic eruptions, pestilences, etc., somehow " work
together " for the greater good. And with these sciences,
" greater good " means more of human happiness.
When, again, the mind tries to estimate the fact of moral
evil, and to do sums in its measurement with precision some-
what approaching the mathematical, its failure is even more
complete. It is no mere liking for a defunct Augustinian
theology, in its excess of judgment over the Pauline type,
which compels the moral consciousness, when viewing certain
classes of facts, to feel : " There is none that doeth good, no,
not one ;" " Tliey are all gone out of the wa}', they are together
become unprofitaljle." But, given more of insight and of
human sympathy, there are other classes of facts which show
how iiiiich native capacity for certain virtues, and for a re-
sponse to any upi)eal made in the name of the higher moral
and rtiligious ideals, characterizes human nature in gonerul.
Thus the arguments for " total depravity," in the theological
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 153
meaning of this term, serve very largely to cancel those for the
native goodness of humanity. Taken together, they leave our
judgment as to the relative amounts of moral evil and moral
goodness in the same uncertain state. The conclusion seems
inevitable ; the problem as to the preponderance of good and
evil, in fact, is unanswerable by any species of calculation.
Whether there is more of happiness, and of essential moral
goodness, in the human race now than was four thousand
years ago is no easy sum in arithmetic or algebra : it is much
too big and abstruse a problem to be solved by collections of
economical and social statistics.
When the different abstract solutions of the problem of evil,
which leave largely out of account the religious experience of
humanity as enforced by the doctrine of development, are ex-
amined, they are all found to be very far from satisfactory.
Especially true is this of any theory which denies the reality of
evil — whether of suffering or of sin. Such theories are accus-
tomed to start out with the sonorous declaration that evil, both
suffering and sinning, is only relative and negative. To this
one might oppose the equally untenable declaration of Schopen-
hauer that pain is the only positive thing, and that pleasure or
happiness is only negative. Man's experience with suffering
and with moral obliquity is, like all his experience, a relative
and, in some sort, a negative affair. Both pain and pleasure
imply relations ; they depend upon reactions that are relative
to the condition of the subject in his objective environment.
In this meaning of the words, it is not true that " Mind can, in
itself and of its own place, make a heaven of hell, a hell of
heaven." Pain negates pleasure ; suffering negates happiness ;
moral badness negates moral goodness ; and sin negates holi-
ness. Even these unproductive and figurative uses of the terms
" relative " and " negative " are subject to the undoubted fact
of human experience that, for the individual and for the race,
life is always a strange and confusing and largely inexplicable
mixture of good and evil, of suffering and happiness, of wroag-
154 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
doing and right-doing, in the same individual, the same com-
munity, the same social status ; and even in the same conscious
state.
To actual human experience, and to the reflective thinking
which deals seriously with this experience, all solutions of the
problem of evil which deny the reality of evil must always seem
no better than juggling with words. With the religious point
of view such optimism, and its opposite of pessimism, are alike
untenable. The conclusion of religion is substantially ex-
pressed in Voltaire's poem, Le D^saatre de Lishonne : —
" All will one day he well, vre fondly hope;
That all is well to-day, is but the dream
Of erring men, however wise they seem,
And God alone is right."
Much more helpful is that attempt at the solution of the
problem of evil which regards both suffering and moral failure,
or sin, as instrumental, as means, and even as necessary means,
to a higher good of happiness and of moral purity. This view
undoubtedly seems to relieve the problem of some of its more
difficult and dark features ; but it does not afford a completely
satisfactory solution, especially of the problem of moral evil.
Indeed, unless the postulates of religious experience, and the
anticipations of a theory of evolution which shall give the
fullest expression to the value of the religious ideals, are both
taken into our confidence, the " instrumental theory " of evil
fails of offering even a partial solution of its problem.
That pain is a necessary means to the development, and
even to the existence, of all finite, spiritual, and self-conscious
life has been held by various writers. " Without it," says Sa-
batier,' " it does not seem that the life of the spirit could arise
from the physical life." Indeed, there is reason for declaring
that, with man in his present environment, the consciousness
of self and the separation of the soul from the organism, as a
1 Esquiase d'une Philosophie de la Ileligion, p. 15.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 155
self-cognitive reality with interests and ideals that someho-w
transcend the organism, could not take place without pain.
Thus the thought is led on to estimate highly the value of
suffering of various sorts as disciplinary, and as means to the
arousing and cultivation of the higher powers of man's spiritual
life. Such a solution of the problem of evil seems to agree, of
necessity, with religion in rejecting a purely eudsemonistic
ethics. It affirms the value of happiness, either positive or as
freedom from suffering, to consist largely in its instrumental
relations to the realization of a higher form of Good. Pain is
means to an end that is higher than happiness. Thus this
theory reverses the position of all utilitarian systems of ethics ;
only thus does it prepare the ground for considerations which
help to establish a theodicy from the religious point of view.
" It is difficulties," says an ancient writer, " which show what
men really are. Therefore when a difficulty falls upon you
remember that God, like a trainer of wrestlers, has matched
you with a rough young man. For what purpose ? you may
say. Why that you may become an Olympic conqueror ; but
it is not accomplished without sweat."
We have already seen how the theory of evolution, as ap-
plied to every form of life and of human progress, emphasizes
the instrumental value of arrangements which are inevitably
connected with an overwhelming amount of suffering and of
death. Science, the philosophy of art, and the philosophy of
religion, are all coming to agree as never before, in realizing
the immense and seemingly indispensable utility of struggle
and pain ; and also the ontological value of ideals, the effort
to reach, and even to approach, which has caused the race so
much of struggle and pain.
The instrumental worth of moral evil, or sin, is a much more
difficult thesis to maintain. Man learns, indeed, by trials ; in
trials, mistakes are inevitable ; and where conduct, or action
that has moral concernment, is the stake, undoubtedly the
facts justify the contention that much conduct which is moral
156 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
failure, or sin, is the inevitable concomitant of progress in
the realization of moral values.^ It may, of course, also be
said, that the very moral freedom — whatever " moral freedom "
may mean, and however much or little of it man can attain —
which makes possible moral goodness and the progressive ap-
proaches to rising moral ideals, makes also possible moral evil
and the supreme and final failure to attain these ideals. In
view of the subjective limitations of man's constitution and
the nature of his physical and social environment, speculative
ethics seem compelled to maintain that much moral evil is in-
evitable. When the conditions of man's ethical progress are
viewed from the developmental point of view, moral failure
and obliquity, and even moral disease and death, in overwhel-
ming numbers of the human race appear to have served as means
to the spiritual uplift of humanity. The essential value of
struggle with temptation, and of experience with the results of
yielding to temptation, may also be estimated in a way greatly
to reinforce the claim that much sinning is an indispensable
prerequisite to some holiness.
Even to admit all this, however, leaves the mind far indeed
from a solution of the problem of evil. In fact, there would
seem to be much truth in Eucken's contention ^ that the
" medicinal " theory makes the whole subject yet more of an
insoluble riddle. This it does most effectually for minds that
will not accept the postulates of the supremest religious ex-
perience of the race. For these are the postulates that guar-
antee the hope of Redemption.
The instrumental theory, with its proposed solution of the
problem of evil, does not bear altogether well being submitted
1 This thought is beautifully expressed in the following stanza from a Ger-
man poem: —
"Wer nie sein Brod mil Thranen ass,
Wer nie die kummcrvolle Ndchte,
Auf seine7n Jiette weinend sass,
Dcr kcnnl Euch nicht, Ihr himmlischen Machte."
2 Wahrheitsgchalt dcr Religion, p. 388/.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 157
to the testing of the facts of experience. These facts support
its critics in making the following objections : (1) Much pain
does not appear to serve the ministrations of a higher good,
whether of happiness or of moral purity. Indeed, in the ac-
tual experience of the multitude of the race, it is just this in-
evitable and overwhelming amount of suffering which prevents
the higher and more valuable forms of intellectual, social, ar-
tistic, and even of ethical and religious satisfaction. That it is
suffering, either through bodily pains, unsatisfied cravings, or
satiety and ennui, which leads to much, Nay ! to most, of the
prevalent moral evils, there is little reasonable doubt. But
(2) the way that suffering is distributed constitutes, perhaps,
the darkest part of the problem of evil. It cannot be said with
any confidence that most of suchevilcomes, either to those who
most deserve it, or to those who can best endure and profit by
it. (3) Without accepting the postulate of a continued and
improved existence for the race after death, much of the co-
gency of the argument which justifies suffering as instrumen-
tally necessary for human development is lost ; but this postu-
late itself depends upon the acceptance of the religious
conception of the Divine Being as perfect Ethical Spirit.
When the attempt is made to apply the instrumental theory
to the solution of the problem of moral evil, the mind is met
by yet more serious objections. All three of the objections
just recited recur with added emphasis. At this point, too,
appears the gravest danger of undermining the very founda-
tions of ethics ; and so of invalidating the higher forms of re-
ligious life and development. These attain their supreme
worth, only if they are regarded as ways of freeing the Self
from the thralldom of moral evil, of triumphing completely
over it, rather than chiefly of making use of it as means to a
higher moral good. And when the instrumental theory of
moral evil is affiliated with the deterministic doctrine of the
will and with a quasi-, if not quite completely mechanical view
of the development of the race, its logical outcome is antithetic
158 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
to the interests of religion ; it is even abhorrent to Christian
experience.
The mind of man, when reflecting most intelligently and se-
riously upon the problem of evil, whether as suffering or as
sin, naturally and inevitably turns to religion for a solution.
Thus the problem of evil becomes a theodicy. The more the
so-called " goods " of human living increase, and the more
what is called (oftentimes with hypocrisy, often with cynicism,
oftenest with flippancy) " modern civilization " advances, the
more does the consciousness of evil deepen and greaten in
thoughtful minds. Thus the demand for relief from life's bar-
dens, theoretical and practical, gains in insistency and empha-
sis. For the ideal good, which the higher religions promise and
expect, the need of humanity increases rather than diminishes
with advancing race-culture. " It is the yearning cry," says
Wellhausen, remarking on the dark side of the modern world,
" that goes through all the peoples ; as they advance to civil-
ization, they feel the value of the goods they have sacrificed
for it."
In treating the Problem of Evil as a Theodicy the following
three considerations require to be kept constantly in view.
And, first, monotheistic religion is compelled to find the ulti-
mate origin of the facts which constitute the problem, in the
Will of God. Whence comes the evil of the World ? For re-
ligion this pressing question cannot be confused by logical ab-
stractions or metaphysical evasion. Evil is not a bulk of being,
a lump sum of existence, or an impei-sonal entity. It is nothing
else than the actual misery and degradation of sentient and,
especially, of human life. So far, then, as its problem can be
made an ol)jectof investigation, the origin of evil must be found
in the nature of sentient and self-conscious life as necessarily
related, in its being and in its development, to its environment.
And it is just this necessity, which the medicinal or instru-
mental theory emphasizes, in the thought tluis to help out the
solution of the problem, that makes the theistic answer all the
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 159
more difficult. The pantheistic and pessimistic theories of
Schopenhauer and of Hartmann allow of making the irration-
ality of blind Will, or the unconscious striving of an iramanently
teleological, but impersonal Will, responsible for this necessity.
But monotheistic religion, and especially Christianity, regards
God as the Creator, Preserver, and Moral Ruler of the Universe ;
the existence of evil, with all its enormous amount and seem-
ingly inevitable character must have its ground, therefore, in
his Will. This " ultimate responsibility " of God constitutes
the fundamental problem of every theodicy.
In God also must the solution be found, if found at all.
Plato saw this truth ; and his solution of the problem of evil,
in the Republic (book x), is in all essential respects a theistic
and Christian theodicy. The Stoics added the conception of
a more perfect necessity, which so binds together the evil and
the good that the former cannot be removed without destroying
also the possibility of the latter. And Christian theologians ^
have quite generally held, that the fundamental and chief, if
not the sole, principle of a theodicy is faith in the supremacy
of God as " Absolute Reason," which may be identified with a
" scientifically ordered system." The conception which the
philosophy of religion vindicates — namely, that of God as In-
finite and Absolute self-conscious Person — leaves no escape
from the conclusion that the only possible theory of the origin
of evil is some form of a theodicy.
In the second place, the possibility of a theodicy rests upon
and embraces the postulate, or the proved truth, that the world
is a moral system. Here the thought of Martineau is most
pertinent. " We seek," says he,^ " to know whether the system
to which we belong corresponds to the righteousness ascribed
to its author. Well, then, by hypothesis it is to be a moral
system, and must comprise the requisites for the formation,
1 See, for example, S. Harris, God, the Creator and Lord of All, I, p.
210/.
2 A Study of Religion, II, p. 54.
160 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the exercise, and the discipUne of character.''^ This assumption
underlies all human attempts to judge God by his doings ; thus
it leads to the strange antithetic attitudes of such writers as
John Stuart Mill, on the one hand, and Dean Mansel on the
other. For piety agrees with the testimony of science and of
experience, when they furnish evidence of the justice and good-
ness of God ; but piety has always espoused the cause of God
against the evidence, on the ground that God is too high, and
his ways too mysterious, for human judgment. Meantime all
the arguments pro and con^ and the very effort to erect or to
destroy a tenable theodicy, agree upon the postulate that the
Universe is a subject for moral judgments. Indeed, were
this not so: How could the Universe give evidence either for,
or against, the justice and goodness of God ?
And, third, the problem of a theodicy cannot be satisfactorily
discussed at all without the constant, intelligent, and well-
informed effort to consider the subject in its totality. But
herein is the vastness of it ; here extends the valid ground for
the plea that much must be left, and even no little positive
force given, to the " argument from ignorance." In viewing
the problem of evil — and especially when this problem is viewed
as a theodicy — the World must be taken as a whole ; it must
be considered as that kind of a connected and interdependent
totality which it is on good grounds assumed, but only very
partially and imperfectly known, to be. Its totality embraces
the boundless stretches of the "World's time, not only back-
ward but into its prospective future. The problem of evil is,
therefore, not the problem of any individual existence, or
particular set of relations ; it does not concern simply some
group of individual human beings, whether particularly favored
or especially unlucky. It is, the rather, the problem of the
universe's construction and history ; it is the problem of the
race. It is not the problem of an hour, or of a day, or even of
a single century ; it is, the rather, the problem of all the
countless centuries. It can be solved, if solved at all, only by
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 161
the realization of an ultimate purpose, — a purpose which deter-
mines the evolution of the race, regarded as a divinely ordered
and divinely conducted process.
When, then, certain individual experiences or particular sets
of facts seem to oppose those postulates of religious faith which
sustain the conviction that God is perfectly wise and good, the
so-called " argument from ignorance," illogical and unscientific
as such an argument often is, seems by no means necessarily out
of place. Indeed, without a similar use of the argument, there
are few of the conceptions and laws of the physico-chemical
sciences which can establish themselves. These conceptions
are uniformly based upon partial evidence ; they make an ap-
peal for patient waiting for further evidence, in order to accom-
plish the removal of antithetic conclusions, and so to bring about
a perfect internal harmony. These so-called " laws," too, are
customarily honeycombed with holes or flaw-like specks, which
indicate the gnawing corrosion of exceptions^ or the vanishing
mould of discarded /aZZacz'tiS. Above all is the argument with
which modern science supports its conception of the vast com-
plex of obscurely related beings, and of unexplained and inex-
plicable transactions, as an orderly Whole, a true Cosmos,
obliged to make constant and extensive appeal to human igno-
rance. Many things in this vast complex do indeed indicate
that it has the nature of an Orderly Whole ; but many other
things look as though " chaos and old night," instead of the
" reign of law," were in supreme control. It is largely because
reason, and more especially moral reason, will not contentedly
tolerate the idea of "Chaos," but insists on the supremacy of
its ideals, that the conclusion of a universal Cosmic Order
wins the human mind. Science always espouses the cause of
Order even against the evidence ; — and it has often justified
this breach of strict logic, on the ground that Nature is too
vast and mysterious, and as yet unexplored, to be fully com-
prehended by human judgments.
It cannot be denied, however, that on the whole the progress-
11
162 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
of modern science is in the direction of increasing, not only
our wonder and admiration before tlie vastness and mystery of
the Cosmos, but also our insight into the wisdom and benefi-
cence of its contrivances. It is no longer possible to explain
the performances of natural objects after the type of a machine,
or even of an infinitely intricate molecular mechanism.' The
very elements of all living beings seem themselves to be en-
dowed with a selective and purposeful self-activity. No known,
— and we may well say, — no conceivable combination of laws
will explain, for example, the behavior of the white blood-
corpuscles in their phagocytic functions, as they suddenly de-
velop the power of adapting themselves to situations and per-
formances which are as new to them as they are obscure and
Intricate to human observation. These cells behave like con-
scious, purposeful, and benevolent living souls, rather than like
merely mechanical structures. They are, of course, dependent
upon their own structure and upon the means to their hand,
so to say, for their ability to discharge wisely and well their
peculiar functions. But so is man himself. The spermatozoa,
too, seem to know well how to proceed upon the way to the
execution of the purposes for which their structure, when the
opportunity comes, has previously fitted them. They, too, l)e-
have like living and embodied souls, rather than like merely
mechanical existences. And the ovum which they fertilize
goes straight about its incredibly intricate and mysterious busi-
ness, marshalling the corpuscles upon which it can lay hold
and building, with marvellous intelligence and wisdom, on the
whole, and yet not without many incidental and evil mistakes,
a structure infinitely more complox than anything within the
power of human wisdom and skill. Nay ! the very atoms
themselves can no longer be considered as simple and structure-
1 For the confesHinn of the failure of modern science to "re-express any
vital phenomenon in terms of physics and chemistry," see Professors J. Ar-
thu' Thomson and Patrick Geddes, and the authorities they quote: Ideals
of Science and Faith, p. 51/.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 163
less beings, that are driven hither and thither by external forces
in accordance with fixed laws imposed from without. Each
kind, and even each individual of its kind, appears to have a
constitution and a mission of its own ; appears also to know
how to make use of this constitution in the fulfillment of its
peculiar mission. Each one of these atoms is forever solving
wholly new problems, by entering into wholly new combina-
tions ; — and all this is done in the interests of that vast Whole
of which each atom is an incredibly minute and yet quite
specially significant part.
The modern scientific view of the good and the evil that
have been, and are, in the world, and of the manner and di-
rection in which the world's infinitely numerous beings are
co-operating to the apparent realization of some vastly pro-
found and vastly remote end, does not, indeed, completely
effect a solution of the problem of evil. But it may well make
our minds the readier to listen to what religion has to offer in
the way of at least an improved mental and practical attitude
toward this problem.
The attitude of religious experience toward the problem of
evil depends, of course, upon the kind of religious belief and
sentiment in which the experience consists. And this varies
greatly in dependence upon the stage reached by each religion
in respect, especially, of its intellectual and ethical ideals. The
religions which were grouped together under the vague title
of an " unreflecting spiritism," cannot even raise the questions
involved in this profound problem. For their ethical stan-
dards are too low and too little integrated with their religious
beliefs ; and their reflective thinking, or philosophical cul-
ture, is of too primitive a type. Even "polytheism," says
Tiele,^ " found no difficulty in answering this question." Its
world of gods is of too classes. There are evil spiritual
powers that need to be propitiated and must be feared. And
there are kindly and good gods with which man may have
1 Elements of the Science of Religion, Second Series, p. 9L
164 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
more or less of friendly intercourse, — at least, if one knows
how to keep on good terms with them. Of Shinto, as says
Griflfis,^ " it is to be noted that in the god-way the origin of
evil is to be ascribed to evil gods. These Kami pollute, and
pollution is iniquity. From this iniquity the people are to be
purged by the gods of purification, to whom offerings are duly
made." All kinds of mischief and trouble come from the bad
Kami. Physical and moral or spiritual defilement were thus
identified; and out of this identification grew many cruel,
and also some sanitary and beneficent, customs. The position
of all the religions at a certain stage of their development is
essentially similar on this matter.
But indifference to the problem of evil, and so crude a way
of attempting its solution, cannot abide the tests which the
advances of race-culture bring to bear upon religious belief.
As an inevitable result of this advance, the great importance
of the problem becomes heightened ; and the process of the
unification of knowledge brings the attempts to solve the
problem into more immediate relations with the conception of
Divine Being. In this way a sort of ethical Dualism is the in-
evitable result. It now appears plain that there are immanent
and effective in the World of man's larger experience, certain
forces — powerful, mysterious, and inescapable — which make for
good ; and that there are others — even more powerful, and to
the awakened moral consciousness more mysterious, while no
less unavoidable — which make for evil. These two sets of
forces seem to work in a sort of internal harmony of action
with themselves ; but with antithetic tendencies, and indeed
in the form of a fierce and passionate struggle, between the
two sets. Hence the mind concludes that there is a unity to
evil, and a kind of opposed unity to tlio good. There is a
kingdom of happiness, purity, and life ; there is a kingdom of
suffering, sinning, and death. There is God, and there is the
Devil, — personified Good in its totality and personified Evil in
1 The lieligions of Jupan, p. 78.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 165
its totality ; and there is eternal warfare between the two.
Nor is the question as to which is superior and likely, or sure,
to win the final victory, easy to solve. For the mind that
clings persistently to the empirical points of view, especially
when these points of view set a high value upon the good of
happiness, it is easier to believe in many devils than in one
perfectly good and holy God. The question of the suffering
and puzzled patriarch Job : " Why do the wicked live, become
old, yea, are mighty in power?" becomes an unanswerable
question. " How canst thou," asked Theognis, " O son of
Saturn, put the sinner and the just man on the same footing ?"
But even at this stage of reflection over the diverse phenomena,
and of immaturity in ethical conceptions and ideals, the faith
of religion espouses the cause of God against the evidence of
facts.
The resulting Dualism of religious philosophy may take
either one of two principal forms. It may associate the good
divine beings and the evil ones, respectively, after the manner
of a human social organization ; or it may hypostasize each of
the collective superhuman powers for good and for evil in some
one Divine Being, — thus representing both these two sides,
or aspects, of human experience. But in either case the ten-
dency of the improved religious consciousness is to make the
Good superior in power to, and finally triumphant over, the
Evil. The highest and typical example of this dualistic
tendency is given by the Persian religion in the form in which
it was established by its great religious teacher. " The pecu-
liarity of the reform of Zarathustra," says Pfleiderer,^ " appears
to have consisted in this, that he placed the opposed spirits of
the Iranian nature-religion in two hostile kingdoms, each pre-
sided over by a spiritual power ; and that by his exalted idea
of the nature of the good God and Creator he approached closely
to monotheism." According to the Bundehesh, the Eternal
and Absolute Being, or First Cause, produced out of his own
iThe Philosophy of Religion, III, p. 79/.
166 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
substiince two great divine beings. Of these one, Ahura-^Iazda,
was good and true to his Creator, a King of Light ; and he be-
came head of all that is pure and good in the world's existence.
He, indeed, is himself to be praised as the creator and preserver
and sole lord of the world. But the other was Ahriman, King of
Darkness, head of an army of bad spirits, and bringer of all kinds
of evils into a good world. Between the two a great world-
struggle takes place and continues through immense stretches of
time. But at the last Ahura triumphs over Ahriman. For, in
truth, Ahura is rather the true and only absolute divine being ;
Ahriman is but a limitation, a barrier, which will cease in time,
to his perfect and absolute goodness. And thus the Persian
religion comes very near to the doctrine of a creation by a good
God, that is somehow doomed to " groan and travail together,"
while it waits for the completion of the process of redemption.
In cruder form the North Germans and Scandinavians looked
on human experience of good and evil as though it could be
explained by a struggle of " the good world-preserving gods
with hostile elemental powers." And the Manichaean heresy
regarded evil as so deeply and extensively bedded in the world
that it is impossible to regard a perfectly good God as the
Creator and Redeemer of mankind.
All such Dualism, however, great as is the temptation to
cling to it as a needed explanation of man's complex experi-
ence, and enormous as are the difficulties which any logical
and consistent Monism finds with the problem of evil, is un-
able to endure the strain of tlie uprising and uplifting reflec-
tion of the race. The problem of evil as a theodicy may, in-
deed, be intensified and made more profoundl}' mysterious by the
liigher ethical conceptions of God. But the optimistic faith of
religion, confirmed or assisted by pliilosophy, seems to increase
its strength of persuasion and power to convince, in even greater
ratio.
The different forms of a monistic philosopliy of religion offer
to religious faith the solution of the problem of evil in different
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 167
ways. In general, however, a doctrine of salvation is its solu-
tion. In the theodicy of Hinduism the conception of Brahma
is the fundamental postulate. All is one ; and as Anaximander
long ago said : " Whence is the origin of existing things, thence
also in their passing away, according to an inner necessity."
From this point of departure it is but a step to the Heraclei-
tean doctrine of the periodic destruction and reconstruction of
all existences through Brahma. " All comes from One, and
One from All." But this doctrine must be harmonized with
the other doctrine of the Upanishads, — namely, that man's
soul is an eternal and indestructible entity ;^ and that it is of
such nature as to carry over the consequences of conduct
from one to another of the stages of its eternal existence.
This, however, is an ethical postulate. The assumption is
therefore made that Atman, or the true Self of things, is the
alone real ; the world of appearances in space and time is
Maya, an illusion, a deceptive image of the true. It is, then,
the mistaking of the illusory for the true and the real, of that
which is only maya for Atman, which is the source of all evil,
both physical and moral. The essence of evil is ignorance, is
illusion. How, then, sliall salvation or the rescue of the soul,
the triumph of good over evil, be attained ? By being disillu-
sioned ; by coming to know Atman as the Alone Real. Through
the knowledge of God the soul triumphs over all evil ; for to
know Him is to know that there is no real evil. God, when
known, is his own theodicy. The glad tidings come announc-
ing to the seeker for relief from evil : " I have heard it said
that he who knows the Spirit passes beyond grief ."^ Naturally
enough, this way of resolving the problem of evil is too high
1 See Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, I, ii, pp. ISff.
2 See Deussen, Ihid, pp. 68/7. The same thought is expressed in the fol-
lowing lines: —
Durch Wissen steigen sie aufwarts
Dorthin wo das Verlangen schweigt;
Nicht Opfergabe reicht dorthin,
Nicht Busse des Nichtwissenden.
168 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and steep for the naked and bleeding feet of the millions who
toil over the rough pathway of life. And the popular Brah-
manic faith emphasizes for them the need of strict compliance
with ritual and of obedience to the priest.
Buddhism ' modifies essentially the Brahmanical doctrine of
evil and its dependent doctrine of the way to escape from the
evil — the way of salvation. For the philosopher it calls in
question his conception of the reality of soul. As to the atmau
of the individual man, Buddhism altogetlier denies its reality ; as
to the universal Atman, tlie World-Soul, it is sceptical or ag-
nostic. Evil is, therefore, no longer conceived of simply as
maya, the illusion which mistakes appearance for reality, and
which knows not the One Alone Real. The real evil is Karma,
or the resultant of mental and bodily actions, considered as
though it were an indestructible entity — the deathless self-
inherited character which results from bad deeds. Tlie way
of overcoming this evil, the way of salvation, is therefore
neither the intuitive nor the contemplative knowledge of At-
man, with a view to union with him ; nor is it the cultivation
of elaborate ritual, or of obedience to the priesthood. It is
rather the life of purity and love. By perpetual cultivation
of Self in the eightfold path, one may at last obtain release
from the ceaseless round of rebirths, — may reach the goal,
NirvSna. Then he can use the words of an ancient poem :
" My heart as it is, is Buddha, the living Buddha,
And there is no water apart from the billow."
The proljlem of evil has always weighed heavily upon the
brain and heart of Bralimanism and of Buddliism. Both find
its oiigin in that Being of the World with which human weal
and woe is so inextricably boimd up that the responsibility
for the evil must somehow be divided l)etween God and man.
Both offer the liopc of relief from evil oidy to tliose few who
can somehow so enter into union with this Btiing of the World
•See further, Vol. I of this work, chap. XXII: The Way of Salvation.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 169
as to lose their selves in It. And if we consider the later
philosophical developments of Buddhism as they are recorded
in the Greater Vehicle, and as they have constituted the
various sects and schools of Japan, and compare them with
the whole round of doctrines taught in the Upanishads, the
main features of all these attempts to solve the problem of evil
do not differ essentially.
Strictly speaking, then, neither Brahmanism nor Buddhism
offers any solution of the problem of evil. Their doctrine of
the Divine Being is not a theodicy ; that is to say, it does not
find in God an explanation of all existing evils which makes it
possible to have a rational faith in Him, not only as their ulti-
mate origin, but also as the guaranty of their overcoming by
the development of that Kingdom of God which is the goal of
the Universe and its all-inclusive Good. The same thing
must be said of Islam and of all those forms of Christianity
which, like Islam and like popular Hinduism and Buddhism,
fail of finding the essence of the Divine Being in ethical love,
and of fixing the goal of man's creation and history in the
perfected Divine Kingdom. It is, indeed, in some sort true
as Eucken ^ has said, that the religious solution of the problem
of evil does not attempt to annihilate evil or even to lessen it ;
it strives, the rather, to secure an inner triumph over the evil,
and thus to raise humanity above every form of evil into par-
ticipation in the Supreme Good. On the other hand, it is also
true that the complete and final triumph of Divine Love over
every form of evil must be made an invincible faith of religion,
if religion is to afford any satisfactory help in the solution of
the problem of evil. Later Buddhism saw this ; and it ac-
cordingly teaches that the attainment of Nirvana by the indi-
vidual is not enough to satisfy him who has the true spirit of
the Buddha (or the "enlightened"). The individual can
find the solution of the problem for himself only in a faith and
a service which accept the same solution for the race. Chris-
1 Dcr Wahrheitsgehalt der Religion, p, 387/.
170 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
tianity, too, after many sad departures from its own better and
truer conceptions of God and of His Kingdom, shows signs of
a return to the same faith : God is perfect Ethical Spirit, and
His plan of Redemption is all-inclusive.
It is unnecessary to add much in this connection to what has
already been said in treating of the Christian doctrine of the
Way of Salvation.^ As to the origin of evil, Christianity has
been encompassed by the same theoretical and practical dif-
ficulties, from which only partial deliverance is to be found in
an improved philosophy, as those that have encompassed other
forms of religious faith. In Christ's time the current views
on demonology are made apparent in the Gospel narratives.
Indeed, " the present dominion of evil demons, or of one evil
demon, was just as generally presupposed as men's need of re-
demption, which was regarded as a result of that dominion."
And this opinion, which comes down substantially unchanged
thi-ough all the centuries of man's religious development, has
always maintained a firm hold upon the popular, and even upon
the more technical theology of Christian communities. But
with this theory another related but not identical theory was
combined ; and " the obvious difficulty which the actual world,
with its failures and imperfections, presents to all theories of
evolution which assume the existence of a good and perfect
God, was bridged over by the hypothesis of a lapse." ^ One
section who held this hypothesis carried back the fall out of
original righteousness " from the earthly Paradise to the sphere
of divinity itself." So Valentinus taught; and Marcion was
even accused of speaking of " two gods." Another section held
the less heretical view — corresponding to that of Milton's Para-
dise Lost — that there had been a revolt .among the supernal
powers. And, indeed, this opinion seems to be that of the
deutero-canonical book of Revelation (xx, 1-3).
1 Vol. I, chap. XXII.
2 See Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian
Church, p. 193/.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 171
No such solution of the origin of the evil could, however, be
accepted by the more thoughtful and logically consistent
theologians of the Christian Church. Any " fall " from origi-
nal righteousness, and the consequent prevalence of evil in a
world that came from a good and perfect God, must have some-
how originated in this world itself. But how could this be,
and yet the sovereignty and perfection of God remain unim-
paired ? Two hypotheses were indeed at hand : (1) That evil
was inherent in matter ; or (2) that the world was itself created
by subordinate and imperfect agents. But as the conception
of the unity and absoluteness of God developed, in reflection
upon a basis of extending experience as to the nature of the
world, it excluded more and more decisively both these ex-
planations. Thus the view which may be called, of all others
the most distinctly Christian, came to prevail. God made the
world by the power of his Logos, or the divine and rational
expression of his Will ; therefore this world is good in its es-
sential nature. But man, by the wrong exercise of his own
free will has brought evil in the form of sin, and its conse-
quences, into this good world. Perhaps, no better answer
from the religious point of view will ever be devised for the
problem of the origin of evil. It is an attempt to adjust the
various elements that enter into that religious experience which
reaches its culminating expression in the Christian conscious-
ness. This experience affirms man's exceeding ill-desert, and
also the incomparable Divine graciousness. God made a good
world and made man good ; but man made himself evil, and
thus brought much evil into the world.
From the modern point of view as held by science, and by a
philosophy based upon the particular sciences, the religious
doctrine of the origin of evil is, indeed, partial and unsatis-
factory. But thus far the utmost insight and profoundest
reasonings of man do not take him beyond these conclusions :
In God's Will, as expressed in the constitution of nature and
of man, must be found the ultimate Ground of both that which
172 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
seems to us evil and of that which seems to us good. Yet
somehow or other, man is now astray and the world is now awry.
Both in religion and in science and philosophy, the mind seeks
reasons for the faith that the end will finally vindicate the
'perfect wisdom and goodness of God.
For the individual believer the problem of evil is solved by
his changed estimate of the values of the different goods, and
by his faith that the changed attitude in which he stands to-
ward God secures for him the supreme and all-inclusive good.
This attitude is a voluntary, ethical, and spiritual union with
God. Indeed, all the higher religions make this good, which,
in the scales of a mind that can see truly, outweighs all the
evils of life, to consist in some sort of communion with the
divine beings. Even the lower forms of religion show intima-
tions of the same confidence. In Greece, to dwell with the
gods on Olympus was the highest wish of good fortune for
the believer after death. The supreme desire of the old-Vedic
Rishis was to be united with Agni, Varuna, or Indra. And
when the impersonal principle Brahma is elevated above the
gods, the gods themselves are only gateways to the soul that
longs to be absorbed in the higher good of Brahma. But above
all does the Christian faith convert the bearing of all suffering
for the individual Self into a loving and cheerful submission
to the will of God, and the triumph over all moral evil, how-
ever much of painful self-sacrifice it may involve, into a loving
divine service. Thus there is sometliing of the fine Stoicism
about it, with which the crippled slave philosopher Epictetus
referred to God's dealing with liim: "What about my leg
being lamed, then?" "Slave! do you really find fault with
the world on account of one bit of a leg? Will you not give
that up to the universe? Will you not let it go? Will you
not gladly surrender it to the giver? " But there is also some-
thing yet finer in the way that Christian faith answers, for the
individual believer, the dark pro])lem of evil. As seen from its
point of view, the minutest details of the life of the pious man
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 173
are under the merciful and loving care of a Heavenly Father ;
and suffering is only a filling-up of the measure which Jesus
had poured so full from the fountain of his self-sacrificing
love.
Thus, for a humanity that has the fullness of the Christian
faith, God is so conceived of as to be his own theodicy. But
the question recurs as to the basis in fact upon which this faith
is reposed ; and as to the rationality of the faith itself, when
taken in that large way which is necessary in order, even par-
tially, to compass the problem of the World's suffering and
moral failure. To this question there are these three consider-
ations to be advanced. First, and now most important of all,
the appearance and growth of religious experience itself is of
immense value in support of the claim that God is indeed per-
fect Ethical Spirit. The experience is a fact. It is one of
those facts of an abiding and rising confidence in the reality of
human ideals, which constitute the most significant and influen-
tial factors in human history. The grand conceptions of a per-
fectly good God, and of his Kingdom, are with the race.
Whence did they come ? To tabulate, to estimate and to criti-
cise, the empirical sources, does not suflSce to account for the
conceptions themselves. The experience claims to be aboutyOr
of, the World-Ground; its ultimate sources must be sought and
found, if found at all, in the reality of the World-Ground. If
the World-Ground can be convicted of producing so comforting
and lofty an illusion, then it is surely capable — given time
enough — of vindicating its own character and of proving that
the faith is not an illusion but an insight into the Reality cor-
responding to its own Ideal. Such testimony from religious
experience, and especially from the highest Christian con-
sciousness, is not indeed a demonstration. But it is of essen-
tially the same nature as all of the complex argument by which
we are compelled to establish the rationality of man's faith in
God. Only this particular experience is still in the making,
as it were ; and the problem, to the better solution of which
174 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
it promises its contribution, is so deep, and high, and vast in
extent, and so dark, that a few centuries can scarcely be ex-
pected to contribute a complete empirical solution. Have all
the countless records of the countless biological ages served
as yet fully to answer the problems of biological evolution ?
In saying this we touch upon the second of the more impor-
tant suggested considerations. The nearest which human rea-
son can come to any theoretical solution of the problem of evil
must be found in a doctrine of £ecoming^ — in a theory of the
development of the world within which man's total experience
lies. Such a theory must be founded upon facts ; and the facts
upon which it is founded, if it is to have any value beyond
that of a pleasant dream or a fanciful hypothesis, must be facts
of the world's actual history. Among these facts, however,
and by no means of least account in determining the character
of man's evolution, are those which pertain to the religious
and moral history of mankind. Christianity's doctrine of this
development regards it all as somehow falling under the di-
vinely ordered scheme of redemption ; it is all the history of
the coming in its perfection of the Kingdom of God.
It must not be forgotten, however, that Christianity — like
Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, in this respect —
does not offer itself as an immediate and direct cure for all the
evils of the world. Neither does it promise any indirect and
final cure in this life for all those experiences which are es-
teemed evil by man, and which are really evil from the point
of view of his sentient nature and natural desire for happiness.
Salvation offers primarily a cure for man's sinful attitude
toward God, and for its evil nature and consequences.
The reasonableness and hopefulness of this offer is supported
by two tenets of faith, in which all the greater religions have a
share, but whicli Christianity has perfected in their more elab-
orate and logically consistent form. These are the doctrine of
the Future Life, and the related doctrine of the final triumph
of the Social Ideal. In general, the religions which have,
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 175
partly through other considerations, arrived at the belief in
immortality, have felt the need of this belief in order to main-
tain any satisfactory view of the problem of evil. " Thus,"
says D'Alviella, "most peoples have sought in doctrines of a
future life the means of repairing the evils and injustices of
the present." It is Christianity, however, which, by its un-
folding of the belief of Judaism in a social redemption of the
righteous and the faithful, has offered for the solution of the
problem of evil a faith in the progressive and finally perfected
triumph of the Kingdom of God. But these tenets of religious
faith await the critical and reflective but sympathetic treat-
ment offered by the philosophy of religion.
In conclusion it should be noticed that, for the faith of re-
ligion, much of the evil of the world can scarcely be said to be
evil at all. So far does religion go in its use of the instru-
mental theory of the evil of suffering, and even of sin. Re-
ligion itself is, indeed, born in humanity through the travail
of desire to get rid of the evil — both the evil without and the
evil within. As the development of religion proceeds, the
moral purification and spiritual insight that lead to commun-
ion with God, and to a union with Him which — we might al-
most say — is " for better or for worse," become the things of
highest worth to the religious mind. This longing for deliv-
erance then develops that despair of self-deliverance, or of
other deliverance at the hand of man, which is, on its other
side, the yearning for redemption. The great and final func-
tion of religion is the ministry to this yearning ; this is the
Work of Redemption. To this subjective attitude religion
holds out the hope of vanquishing the evil. The evil of suf-
fering is to be overcome by piously bearing it as an expression
of God's will under the conditions of living assigned to the
individual ; and by doing what can wisely be done to remove
it from others, by use of means that accord with tlie Divine
righteousness. The evil of sin is to be vanquished by availing
one's self of the Divine help, and by helping others to escape ; in
176 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
a word, by conforming to the conditions set by God's good
Will for the establishment, growth, and final triumphs of his
Kingdom among men.
Let us, therefore, be content at present to put the solution
of the problem of evil which religion offers, in hypothetical
and negative form. Unless the historical evolution of the
human race, as a part of the World- All, may be believed to
be directed toward, and to be secure in, the final triumph of
that all-inclusive Good, which all the other great religions
dimly foreshadow, and which Christianity denominates " Eter-
nal Life in the Kingdom of God," there is no possible solution
to be discovered or even imagined for this dark problem. The
summation of what is called "earthlj'^ good," were it possible, as
it is not, that it should be attained for the race under the fixed
conditions of its earthly environment, would not abolish the
conflict between good and evil, and the resulting schism in
man's soul. The hope of an Ideal Good, that is spiritual and
collective, is held out by religion. The faith in the securing
of this good as the fixed purpose of God, through a process of
development, is religion^s solution of the problem of evil. Con-
firmations, that find a certain broadening basis in our experi-
ence of the world, are accumulating in the storehouses of the
particular sciences. And although the evidence is far from
being theoretically complete, its general nature is similar to
that upon which repose tlie most important postulates of man's
intellectual and practical life and development.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES
It is impossible logically to explain and defend, or to make
practically effective, the demands of religion upon the soul of
man for a right attitude toward the Object of religious faith,
without endowing the conception of this Object with certain
moral attributes. In a word, God cannot be realized as God
in man's life, if conceived of as devoid of all ethical qualifica-
tions. This is true, however obscure, meagre, and abstract,
that conception of the Divine Being which is presented in or-
der to arouse the feelings and control the life. If, for example,
the Chinese conception of Heaven and Earth as Shang Ti is of-
ten made to appear as distinctly impersonal, and at best is never
fully personal ; none the less are Heaven and Earth treated in
Chinese thought and practice, as worthy, for their justice and
beneficence, of the adoration, confidence, and service of man.
The vaguest pantheism of India is customarily most pro-
nounced in that kind of " emotionalism " which is impossible
without some belief in the quasi-movdl character of its object.
" When one loves Him, fixes himself on Him and makes him-
self at one with Him, then comes about the cessation of the
world of delusion"^ (that is, salvation). But especially in
Judaism did the " risrhteousness." and later the " loving kind-
ness," or mercifulness, of God serve, above all other attributes,
to define and commend Him to the believer's faith. While
Christianity reiterates and enforces the declaration that God is
most essentially, — not omnipotence, and omniscience, and omni-
presence (although He is all these), but Ethical Love.
1 See chap. I, of the Upanishad of the Krishna Yajur Veda.
12
178 I'lIIJ.OSOI'IIV OF KKLKJION
In tlie case of all tin; so-called " moral attiibiitoH," Ixifore
api)nja(;hiiig the problem of ilicir applicability to the Divine
Ii(;inj^, it is of |)rimary impoitanee to undcMHtaiid precisely
what it is j)roj[)oHcd to attriljiitc. And here Ihc iin|iiiry \h im-
mediately involved in Kej'iouH dir(iculti(!H that ari.sc; fi-om two
Homewhat antithetic positions, and that lead in two opposite
dir<;ctions. On the one hand, if the ordinaiy and nncriticised
erjiiceplions of IIk; moral attributf^s of what it is, to Ix; " p(!r-
fectly just aJid go(jd " — are applied to the Personal Absolute,
the imnj(!nsity of the j)rf)bl(5ms su^'j^ested is such as to surpass
the limitations of human thinking and imagination. In their
range over vast nndtitudcs, tlirou;^^h incalculable stretches of
space and time, and with so many considerations that are ob-
scure, or wholly hidden, these probhuns are (juite unmanage-
able by tli(! empirical method. We end by saying : God may be
perfectly just and good ; but it cannot b(; told "how" in terms
of oui huitian experience with ethi(;al conditions, maxims, and
ideas. Uut, on tlu5 other hand, if we follow tlie unfortunate
iiKithod which makes a (hiuiand Utv J'ni/h in (iod's perfect jus-
tice and },;oodncss, after (iod has virtually Ixtcn convicted of
injustice and cruelty, we disturb in a yet more serious way the
very foundations of ev(!ry degree and kind of religious knowl-
ed'/e.
What has just becju said is particidarly true of so vague; and
shifty, 3cL fundamental, a conception as that <jf Justice. The
world over, in modern times, all classes of men are coming to
regard the claim to "justice " as an inalienable right of hu-
manity ; in the name of justice they are passionately demand-
ing such a HMlistribution of the "goods "of life as would seem
tol>e irdHurjntly inconsistent with the V(!ry nature of tluur phys-
ical and social enviroinnent. What wonder, th(;n, that (lod
Heems unjust, when tlu; same conception of the right to just
treatment, with its accompanying demand, is transferred to
Ilim? In the same way, and largcily iis due to the same
causes, (he notion of mankind as to what it is to be perfectly
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 179
" good " and " kind " has undergone important changes. No
serious student of the fundamental conceptions of ethics can
for a moment admit that all these changes are for the better.
When men call by these titles those persons, laws, and institu-
tions, which for the time being at least seem to contribute most
abundantly to their own individual liappiness, how shall one
manage to con^'ince them that the omnipotent and omniscient
God is perfectly good — after the same low and unworthy pat-
tern of goodness ? A preliminary examination of the nature
of these moral attributes themselves would seem, then, to be
indispensable to a theodicy.^
The psychological origin and character of the conception of
Justice, as well as its historical evolution and progressive ap-
plication to the Divine Being, are very complex and, in many
important respects, obscure. In general, however, the concep-
tion of this moral attribute has followed the same law which
has characterized tlie evolution of the conceptions attached to
all the other so-called virtuous forms of human conduct. Its
progress has been in the direction of recognizing the essential
unity of the virtues, and the essential spiritual unity of the
human race. In this way a certain imperfect and faulty prac-
tice of justice has been extended, from its former application
to favored classes, to a more general application over a larger
proportion of mankind. Yet nothing ever done by the most
savage people can exceed the essential injustice, which is
still done in the name of justice by the so-called "superior"
to the so-called " inferior " races ; and by the favored classes
in the most civilized nations, to classes that are less fortu-
nate.
When we ask ourselves. What are the essential marks of
the most rational conception of justice as men apply this term
to their own behavior toward their fellows ? these two con-
siderations become important. First, the conception of even
1 For a fuller treatment of these topics see the author's Philosophy of Con-
duct, Part Second, "The Virtuous Life."
180 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the lowest savages is much superior to their practice. " Their
notions," says Mariner of the Tongan Islanders, " in respect to
honor and justice, are tolerably well-defined, steady, and uni-
versal ; but in point of practice, both chiefs and people are
irregular and fickle." What better, however, can be said of
" both chiefs and people " of America or of Great Britain,
where the acknowledged rights of justice have perhaps reached
their highest development? But, second, the so-called "even-
handed justice " which
" Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips " —
as well as to the lips of others, is not the equivalent of perfect
justice, in the higher meaning of tlie words. The higher
meaning recognizes the compatibility of this moral attribute
with the attributes of kindness, goodness, and benevolence.
It is the " higher justice " which Aristotle recognized ^ as a
" complete virtue, although not complete in an absolute sense,
but in relation to one's neighbor." Such justice is "not a
part of virtue, but the whole of virtue ; " it is " the chief of
virtues ; " it is so supreme a quality of personal life that " nei-
ther evening nor morning star is so lovely." It is such jus-
tice, then, that the most developed religious faith attributes, in
its perfection, to the Divine Being.
From tliis point of view, justice is conceived of as an ideal
virtue, worthy to determine all the relations and behavior of
men to one another. It is " the voluntary judgment (and
corresponding j)ractice) which duly apportions to individual
men their share of the goods and the evils of life, so far as
these goods and evils are dependent upon liunian conduct."*
But all attempts at perfect justice among men are doomed to
failure because of the inescapable limitations, in spite of the
})est intentions, both of wisdom to determine what this fair
share is, and also of power to carry out the apportionment of
» Nicom. Eth., liook V.
* Quoted from the author's Philosophy of Conduct, p. 2S7.
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 181
the goods and evils of life in accordance with the wisest and
best judgment. When, then, inquiry is made into the per-
fection of God's justice, the essential limitations to it which
come from man's lack of wisdom and power have already been
theoretically set aside. But the difficulties which these limi-
tations impose upon man's critical estimate of this perfection
remain irremovably attached to the very conditions of the
problem. What are these " real " goods ; and what these
"real" evils? What is each man's fair share? How and
when should the distribution take place in order to vindicate
the perfection of Divine Justice ?
This, then, is the question which the religious faith of hu-
manity presents to experience for an answer : " Art Thou,
then, perfectly just after the pattern of my heart's highest and
noblest ideal ? " The history of man's religious development
shows that the answers to this question have depended upon
the ethical attainments, and ethical ideals, which have charac-
terized the different stages of this development. There is
always something strange and paradoxical about man's belief in
the Divine Justice. The very experiences which make it so diffi-
cult to believe that God is perfectly just are the experiences
out of which has chiefly arisen the belief in His perfect justice.
Were not man's social environment in this life so full of the
oppressive marks of iniquity and injustice, there would be
little or no impulse to appeal from earthly and temporal ex-
perience, to the justice to be done in the future life, to the
justice of heaven, or of God. Were perfect justice possible of
realization at the hands of men, then men would not look else-
where in prayer, faith, and hope, for any nearer approaches to
such justice. " May neither I nor my son," sings Hesiod,^
" now be just among men, since it is an evil thing for a man
to be just ; if indeed the unjust are to secure the larger rights.
Yet I do not hold that Zeus, who exults in the thunderbolt,
will allow this." The most lofty ascriptions of this virtue to
1 Works and Days, 270-273
182 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the gods on the part of the early religions of Babylonia and
Assyria are incantations. They attribute it to the divine
powers in the hope that these powers will assist the believer
in getting justice done to him by his fellow men.
The belief in the Divine Justice, which has always so largely
had its origin in the experience of injustice, has undergone a
development in dependence upon the rising grades of race-
culture, especially in the form of an improvement in civil and
political morals and in moral ideals. In the stage of unre-
flecting spiritism little demand for this virtue is made upon
the invisible superhuman powers. But, as says D'Alviella,^
" man comes at last to ascribe to his deity only the two loftiest
sentiments of the human soul, justice and love." The im-
proved expression and stability of the conception of that vir-
tue which Aristotle called "general justice " is the effect of
growth in those moral elements of political and social life
to which these sentiments correspond. It was a slow and weary
climb of religious belief to the place where this moral attribute
became an essential factor in the conception of the Divine
Being. Israel did not reach it, as the teachings of the Old
Testament plainly show. Yahweh was indeed a righteous
God ; but his righteousness did not exclude passionate resents
ment, jealousy, love of praise, and partiality.
In the earlier centuries of the development of Semitic re-
ligion the type which prevailed among the Babylonians and
Assyrians had reached certain expressions — although in the
form of incantations — which are quite upon a level morally
with most of the teachings of Judaism. In one of tlie h3mns
to Shamash, the sun-god, he is addressed as tlie judge of all
mankind^: —
" The law of mankind, dost thou direct,
Eterniilly just in tho heavens art thou,
f)f faithful jud^inout toward all the world art thou.
Tlioii kiiowcst wliiit is riplit, thou knowost wiiat is wrong."
1 Origin and Growth of the Conception of God, p. 202.
2 See Jastrow, Religion of Bahj'lonia and Aasyria, p. 300/.
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 183
On ascending his throne Nebuchadnezzar addresses the great
God Marduk : '' Guide me on the right path Cause
me to love thy supreme rule." And an elaborate hymn to
the moon-god Sin affirms : " Thy strong command produces
right and proclaims justice to mankind." To the early gods
of India, on the contrary, justice is seldom or never attributed.
The sun-god, addressed as Savitar, is called " He who distrib-
utes gifts unto the sons of men," and is appealed to for the
best of all gifts to mortals, " a long enduring life." Of Indra
it is said : " What he hath established, there is none impairs
it." And of Agni it is affirmed : " Thou doest good to every
man that serves thee. Although in the later beliefs Dharma,
or personified Right, " takes his seat with shadowy Brahma
among the other gods," and although the conception persists
as Dharma Vaivasvata, or Justice, the belief in a perfect over-
ruling Divine Righteousness has never, down to the latest
times, been vital and potent in the indigenous religions of
India. " Few of the older gods are virtuous," says Professor
Hopkins,' " and Right, even in the Rig Veda, is the moral
power, Right as Order, correct behavior, the prototype both of
ritual and of dcura, custom, which rules the gods." The doc-
trine of the Chinese, however, as might be expected, holds to
very strict tenets respecting the application to human affairs
of the perfect justice which belongs to Heaven, as the Su-
preme Lord. Confucius taught that if the people cease to
follow Tao (" the heavenly way "), Heaven will in its turn
upset the cosmic order. A proclamation of the emperor Yong-
Tcheng, 1731, declares : " Justice, originally aroused by
heaven and by man, answers more swiftly than the echo.
The floods and droughts, or disasters, which trouble all the
earth come from the acts of man."
Among the Greeks, in the period of the greater tragedians,
faith in the perfection of the divine justice was growing in the
minds of the thoughtful. Hesiod had indeed declared that
1 Religions of India, pp. 249/., 554/. and note.
184 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
" Justice is the virgin daughter of Zeus, honored and revered by
the gods who hold Olympus." "If the gods do aught that is
base," said Euripides, '• they are not gods." But it was Plu-
tarch who reached the height of intelligent conviction when he
could affirm : " God, being perfectly good, lacks not any virtue :
and least of all in what concerns justice and love." Indeed, the
theodicy ^ of this Greek theologian is, in respect of philosophical
insight, moral spirit, and courageous facing of the facts, quite
superior to that of Leibnitz. Among the Romans, the tendency
early developed to personify the ethical attributes Jind assign
them to separate gods ; this tendency led to the conception of
Fides who, according to Preller, was attached to Jupiter, Con-
cordia to Venus, Pudicitia to Juno, etc. But the Roman mind
seemed unable to develop the conception of one perfectly just
and loving Divine Being. Among the early Teutons, a con-
ception of the gods as representing and enforcing principles of
order, and certain rude and cruel practices connected with the
execution of justice, were not wholly wanting. " In the popu-
lar assemblies," says De la Saussaye' "at full and new moon,
the functions performed by the priest were, next to the influ-
ence and authority of the leaders, almost the only element that
brought some degree of regularity to the frequently unorderly
deliberations." In some sort, the gods and their earthly j epre-
sentatives took the part of an attempt at justice in the distri-
bution of the goods and evils of life. But up to the time when
the Teutonic tribes accepted Christianity, and for the multitude
long after that time, the conception of God as the Source of
even an imperfect justice was scarcely formed. In general, the
pagan deities were, as respects the standard of their moral
character, below rather than above that set by the lives of the
leaders or by the councils of the people. Christianity itself
"was not preaclied to tlie Noi^^eman as a new (and higlicr)
1 De Sera Xumiiiis \'iM(liftii, uiul compare Oakesmith, The Religion of
Plutarr-h, p. 101 and note.
2 The Religion of tlie Teutons, p. 103.
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 185
moral ideal." " Put your faith in God, and believe that he is
so merciful that he will not let us burn both in this world and
in the next " — is an exhortation which measures the purity of
their best conception of the Divine moral rule.
By the moral attribute of Goodness as applied to God, men
mean something more than justice as this latter word is ordi-
narily understood ; and yet goodness cannot exist apart from, or
to the exclusion of, the attribute of justice. The " general
justice," which Aristotle considered the complete virtue so far
as the relations of an individual to his neighbors are concerned,
is nearly, if not quite, the equivalent of " being good " in the
fuller meaning of the term. But goodness emphasizes the
kindliness, the positive well-wishing and active disposition to
benefit others, for which, when the attribute is applied to Deity,
the title of benevolence or love (in the theological meaning of
the words) often seems more appropriate.
The history of the evolution of religious faith in the good-
ness of God corresponds, in all essential points to that of faith in
his justice ; indeed, the conception of justice and goodness go
forward hand in hand, although not always with an equal
step ; and both represent a slow and painful uplifting of man's
reflective thought in his effort to account for his total expe-
rience. In the lower stages of an unreflecting spiritism, the
impressive thing is the consciousness of the powers of evil that
reside somewhere in the external world and are beyond the
control of man's will. It is, therefore, much easier for man
at this stage to believe in many devils than in a few good and
controlling divine powers. Faith in One perfectly good and
loving Divine Being is still far away from either the grasp of
intellect or the seizure of emotion. The persistence of devil-
worship in Ceylon, Burmah, and elsewhere, and of prophylac-
tic ceremonials in China and other lands, where the kindly
religion of Buddhism has been dominant for centuries, illus-
trates the same truth. The widespreading existence of incan-
tations, of magic, and propitiatory prayers and sacrifices, does
186 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
not have its origin in the consciousness of sin, and of depen-
dence for help and salvation upon the gracious love of God ;
it springs, the rather, from the experience of manifold physical
and social evils, and from the desire to influence the spiritual
powers which are showing their ill-will by inflicting these evils.
Yet even in not a few of the earlier prayers, hymns, and
other expressions of religious belief, as well as in certain forms
of ceremony and worship, there are discoverable the germs of
a confidence in the goodness and love of the divine powers.
Some, at least, of the gods are good fellows, and are well-
disposed toward mankind. The development of belief in the
Divine goodness reaches its next higher stage in the confidence
that the domestic and tribal divinities are kindly disposed
toward the families and tribes whose special divinities they
are chosen to be. At this stage, one of the most marked evi-
dences of the goodness of the god is his defence of his followers
against their enemies, or his willingness to inflict evil upon
these enemies.
Thus the virtue of goodness, in the dawning conception of
God as ethical spirit, is little more than good-nature or good-
fellowship. But few of even the evil gods are so malignant
that they cannot be made good-natured by treating them prop-
erly. In Genesis xviii, Yahweh comes down and sits with
Abraham at a meal. But when the deity is thought of as hav-
ing his seat in heaven, the burning of the sacrifice sends up a
" sweet savor ; " and he is thus made well-disposed. Out of
this stage the belief of Judaism in the goodness of Yahweh
scarcely succeeded in rising during the entire history of the
Old- Testament religion. The belief that lie was merciful
and loving toward liis people, — i. e., good as well as just in the
stricter meaning of tlie latter term as a faithful keeper of his
covenanted word — did, however, come to make a more or less
integral part of tlie faith of Judaism in the perfect rigliteous-
ness of God. And Judaism liad the rare merit, in its later
and liigher developments, of proclaiming, with certain irregular
THE MORAL ATTRIBUrp:S 187
flashes of moral insight, that faith in the perfect Divine good-
ness as perpetually shown toward all mankind, which, however
difficult of reconciliation with the facts of experience and with
the conception of a complete retributive justice, was the set-
tled and divinely inspired conviction of the Founder of
Christianity.
If by Christianity we understand the " religion of Christ,"
in the meaning which Lessing attached to this phrase, we find
that an unquestioning faith in the perfect justice and goodness
of God springs as an unquestioned conviction from the full
consciousness of perfect moral union with God. This con-
sciousness is the essence of religion, namely, the attitude of
filial piety toward the Divine Being ; and in Jesus it reaches
its highest expression through the perfection of the spirit of
sonship in him. As has already been said, this view of God,
under the Christian figure of speech which regards Him as
the Heavenly Father, had been coming into the better and
higher religious beliefs of Judaism. " When Israel was a child,
then I loved him and called my son out of Egypt (Hos. xi, 1)
does, indeed, only succeed in glorifying God as the tribal di-
vinity. " Have we not all one Father ? Hath not God created
us ? " (Mai. ii, 10) are questions, and the answer, " Doubtless
thou art our Father, O Lord; thou art our Father, our Re-
deemer" (Isa. Ixiii, 16) is an answer, which prepares the way
for the Christian position. Some of the later rabbis extended
the belief in the fatherhood of God beyond the tribal and na-
tional limits. Rabbi Zadok, for example, addresses the Divine
Being as " Lord of the world ; Thou Father in Heaven."
The " religion of Christ " does not, however, furnish ready-
made arguments for the perfect justice and goodness of God ;
nor does it embark upon the effort to minimize, or even to
understand, the meaning of all that evil of the world which
seems to contradict its own sublimely audacious faith. Accord-
ing to Jesus, the sunshine and the rain are bestowed upon the
good and the bad alike ; but this is not a proof of the injustice,
1.S8 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
but of the supreme goodness, of God. The tower of Siloam
falls upon certain seemingly selected victims, and others es-
cape ; this, however, does not go toward showing that these
victims were sinners above other men. The most faithful fol-
lowers of a good and loving, as well as all-wise and powerful,
Heavenly Lord, often enough have scanty food and raiment;
but they may always be sure that He who notes the fall of the
sparrow and clothes the lily with beauty never forgets them.
While the foxes are provided with holes, and the birds with
nests, the Son of Man has not where to lay his head. Beati-
tudes are showered upon those who, in the spirit of unwaver-
ing confidence in the justice and goodness of God suffer with
meekness and poverty of spirit, all manner of physical and
social ills.
The Christian conception of God as the perfectly just and
good One is embodied in two terms which appeal to universal
human experiences. God is the Father of mankind ; and God
is their Redeemer. The evidence that these conceptions cor-
rectly represent to man the inmost real nature of the Divine
moral Being, and explain the fundamental relations in which
man, as himself a spiritual existence and a potential but wan-
dering and sinful son, stands to this Divine Being, Christ pro-
fessed to liave in his own experience of sonship. As the son,
he knew the Father ; and as a true sou, God the Father knew
him. There was such a perfect union between them that the
revelation of the essential truth as to the Father became an
immediate experience of the vSon. What God is, the Son of
God knows by virtue of his conscious likeness to God. But
what is true preeminently of the only begotten Son of the
Heavenly Father, is also true of all the sons of God. God is
the Father of humanity ; and man, being himself an ethical
spirit, is kindred to the Divine Ethical Spirit, and may be
unitcid with Him and so become God's accepted child. It is
this truth of CiirisLianity, as says Harnack,' — the belief which
i History of Dogma, I, p. ISO, note 4.
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 189
has been called " too good to be true " — that the Almighty God
of creation is " the merciful God of Redemption," which is
the tacit presupposition of the ChriAian declaration about the
Divine Being.
It cannot be claimed that the attempts of the Pauline the-
ology, or of any subsequent type of Christian theology, to argue
the perfect justice and goodness of God in consistency with the
religious consciousness of Christ himself, are altogether suc-
cessful. On the contrary, many of these attempts do violence
to the rising moral ideals of the race and are a plain descent
from the lofty attitude of the Great Teacher. When, for ex-
ample, the Apostle to the Gentiles, after having announced
(Rom. ix) the tenet that God, in order to declare his name
" throughout all the earth " hath " mercy on whom he will, and
whom he will he hardeneth," adds the question : " Nay but, O
man, who art thou that repliest against God?" he may be un-
derstood as fitly suggesting the limitations of human knowledge
and insight as to the conditions under which the Divine justice
and goodness are operating. But when he avails himself of the
truly Oriental but quite un-Christian illustration of the clay
and the potter, in the place of Jesus' doctrine of the erring son
and yet loving Father, he distinctly departs, in his zeal for the
argument, from the ethical doctrine of his Master.
Indeed, it is doubtful if much has ever been done by Chris-
tian theology, as such, to make rational or acceptable, by its
arguments, the faith of Christ in the perfect justice and good-
ness of God. The direct contributions to the support of this
faith, whether in the form of facts or of a rational adjustment
of the involved difficulties, have come chiefly from Christian
experience, in so far as it has been moulded after the pattern
of Christ. In a secondary way, the broadening and deepening
by the positive sciences of man's knowledge of the beneficent
cosmic processes and of their tendencies in ideal directions, has
thrown light upon the problem. But it is especially that calm,
self-effacing, and reflective attitude toward nature and human
190 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
life, which practical philosophy encourages, that has added most
to support the testimony of religious faith. Hence, as far as
the improvements from science and philosophy have penetrated
Christian theology, they have chiefly arisen outside of the
Christian Church itself. In brief, the experience of increasing
numbers of the race, who have accepted and made their very
own the faith of religion in the perfect justice and goodness
of God, and who have found proof of His Fatherly and Re-
deeming Love by living in the attitude of filial piety toward
God has furnished to the world the principal empirical data
upon which the faith itself can rely. But the effective rational-
izing of this faith, and the placing of it upon the broader
basis of a cosmic theory that shall satisfy the requirements of
reflective thinking, had its origin chiefly in Greek sources.
The pre-Christian Greek philosophical developments were by
no means wanting in a rational confidence in the perfect Divine
Justice and Goodness. According to Aristotle Hhe love of
men for the gods is like the love of dutiful children for their
parents ; it is based upon acknowledgment of their superiority,
and grateful recognition of the benefits the}-^ have bestowed
upon humanity. The confidence of Plutarch- in the goodness
of God is such that he introduces into his theodicy a fantastic
doctrine of Daemons to whom this goodness commits the souls
of men ; and each one of whom " loves to help the soul com-
mitted to its care, and to save it by its inspirations." There
are, indeed, some men for whom it is best to fear God ; and a
greater number combine fear of Him with their honor and wor-
ship. But this feeling is totally eclipsed by the hope and joy
that attend communion with God. Tlie l)est of the Stoics, also,
represented CJod as a stern but wise and loving Father, wlio ed-
ucates men as good parents do their children. God — it is the
teaching of Seneca ^ — does not keep a good man in pleasures,
»Nicom. Eth., VIII, 7.
'f'ornpure ( )iikc.stiiith, The Relicinn of Phitiirch, chap. VIII.
a Dc Vita lieata, XV; comp. De Providentia, I. ")/.; II, 0, 9.
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 191
but tries him, hardens him and prepares him for Himself. All
this is necessary in order that man may '•'■folloiv God " and be-
come like Him. The burden of the teaching of Epictetus ^ is
that we should continue in thankful and entire obedience to
God, being sure that God neither hates us, nor cares for us
above others : " He does not neglect any even of the smallest
things." And Marcus Aurelius,' than whom no more noble
and truly pious soul ever lived in the ancient Roman world,
would have all men love and follow the good God and Father
of all, and live in love with all mankind.
Thus on a Jewish basis, but by union with Greek philosophy,
there developed a conception of the Divine Being in his moral
attributes which was destined most profoundly to influence
the thought of all time. The view that the world of natural
objects and of human history came into being because God
ivilled it for good is that of the Old and New Testaments. It
is the goodness of God, our Father, as manifested in Nature
and, more marvelously and unmistakably in human historj^,
which impresses the minds of the Biblical writers, in spite of
many pessimistic utterances about the world as evil, and as
lying in the " wicked one," etc. But it was Philo's concep-
tion of which Bousset^ declares : In his mind the best of the
Old-Testament conception had found a union with the best of
the Greek philosophical thinking. Thus for Philo " God only
is the truest and actual Peace .... and although He is ' One
and All,' He is also the Good God."
Subsequent Christian doctrine based upon the experience of
redemption certain factors of the conception of the Divine
justice and goodness which Stoicism and Neo-Platonism could
not in the same way take into their account ; and which Ju-
daism had left in a state of aiTested development. These were :
(1) Faith in the pity and redeeming love of God ; (2) Hope
1 Discourses, Translation by Higginson, I, 3, 6, and III, 22, 24.
2 Thoughts (Long's Translation), VII, 31.
3 Die Religion des Judentums, p. 420.
192 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
in the future and final triumph of the Good ; and (3) an ac-
tive Love for mankind, whicli became a mighty world-force
for the uplifting of the race of men by the self-sacrificing and
Christ-like exertions of men themselves. It continued, never-
theless, to be the Platonizing conception of God, although as
modified by union with elements from the Old-Testament doc-
trine of Messiah and of the suffering Servant of God, which the
Christian Apologists used in their efforts at showing the con-
sistency of the world's evil with the justice and goodness of the
world's Creator and Lord. Thus Greek philosophy attempted
to make rational the moral faith of religion. The attempt in-
volved the following principal assumptions : (1) God cannot
be conceived of as without reason (<iXo7os) ; He is the full-
ness of reason ; He has the Logos in Himself. (2) For the
sake of creation, which is motived by an expressive and rational
love, God sends forth the Logos from himself, the Logos be-
comes hypostasized. (3) This Logos whose essence is indenti-
cal with God becomes in this way distinct from God, — /. c, has
an origin, as God has not. (4) This Logos becomes incarnate
in Jesus ; thus (5) through his redemptive work as the sou of
God, preeminent, and through his followers, the other sons of
God, the race is to be won back to God, and the perfect Di-
vine justice and goodness is to be vindicated.
We have called the faith of religion in the moral attributes
of God a " sublime and sublimely audacious '' belief. We
now turn to certain considerations, lying more or less com-
pletely outside, by which this faith may be supported. These
considerations are largely indentical with those which are an-
tithetic to the ethics of Hedonism. For it is difficult, Nay ! it
is impossible, to believe in the justice and goodness of God on
grounds of a consistent hedonistic theory of morals. On the
one liand, if God has no regard at all for human happiness, lie
cannot be conceived of as displaying moral attributes in his
dealings with the race. Every attempt at a theodicy seems to
compel the admission : " Susceptibility to privation of good
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 193
and to suffering and sorrow is essential to the existence of a
moral system consisting of finite persons under a government
of God." ^ The very conceptions of justice and goodness im-
ply that the goods and evils of life are distributed according to
some plan that, if completely known, commends itself in the
interest of moral ideals. But if this Divine ideal is the hedo-
nistic ideal, and if the supreme good for man is happiness and
the supreme evil is suffering, then a hopeless and irreconcilable
breach is made between the ideals of morals and the ideals of
religious faith.
The prior question, in the light of the rational answer to
which the Divine Morality must be vindicated, if vindicated
at all, is, bluntly expressed, just this : " What is God after f^
What is the end which the Divine Being wishes to secure in
the application of the actual cosmic processes to the race of
mankind ? But every answer to this question implies a refer-
ence back to human conceptions of worth. What kind of
worth is that, kinship with which God's kindness aims to se-
cure ? To this question religion, can give only one answer : It
is kinship with Him, as the pure and Holy One who is blessed
in being this and in suffering that others may become like him-
self. To regard the divine goodness as caring only, or chiefly,
for the divine happiness, or for the happiness of those who are
upon his side, so to say, is to degrade this moral qualification.
For the most genuine and perfect goodness prizes and seeks
that which is most good ; and this no longer appears to be hap-
piness, if once we have agreed to take the point of view of-
fered by subjective religion. In this respect, the ethics of Chris-
tianity is in agreement with the ethics of Stoicism.
Moreover, when we come fairly to survey, and consistently
to reflect upon, the actual condition of the world's affairs, —
whether in the past, the present, or the prospective future,
however distant — their planful character, so far as they exhibit
any planful character at all, does not seem to agree with the
1 So Professor Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, I, p. 223.
13
194 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
assumption which makes happiness the supreme end of it all.
The aversion of religion to a pessimistic estimate of the final re-
sult of the cosmic and social processes cannot be based upon
a hedonistic view of the working of these processes. On the
contrary, the chief effective cause of disbelief in the perfect
justice and goodness of God is wont to be an aversion to the
suffering which is inevitable under the laws of his discipline —
physical, ethnic, but especially ethical, in the larger mean-
ing of this word. It is the immorality of insubordination to
these laws which religion would cure by substituting the spirit
of filial piety, of trust, hope, and love. It is by no means a
mere, although a biting sarcasm, when a Greek writer repre-
sents the advocatus diaholi as " gathering together, from var-
ious sources, an undigested mass of confused observations,
and then scattering tliem upon Providence in one contemp-
tuous stream of spleen and anger." And a modern writer
strikes the true note when he says^ : " Pessimism can only
establish itself in the minds of those who think that pleasure
is the goal of life, or — which comes to the same — that life has
no goal at all."
When, then, we take the higher point of view and assume it
to be true that God is in the world, redeeming the world and
securing thus for mankind the supreme and all-inclusive ideal
good, the vindication of His perfect justice and goodness fol-
lows in this way ; thus, and thus only, is a religious theodicy
placed upon its more unassailable grounds. From this same
point of view, in the absence of other considerations, it would
even be possible to turn the evidence so squarely around as to
make it attack God's justice and goodness, on the other side, so
to say. For, then, it is not those who, although being more
righteous than otliers, suffer more than others in this life, that
seem to be most unjustly treated. For they have the larger
share in the b(3nelits of the discipline of suffering. But the
Divine injustice seems greatest toward those few, if any such
> D'Alviella, Ibid, p. 292.
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 195
there be, ■whom He permits to be most happy and prosperous,
although they continue unrighteous and even prosper by means
of their unrighteousness. Verily, tliey have their reward !
" Let molten coin be thy damnation," says Providence to the
miser : " Be thou for ever drowning in a butt of sack," to the
drunkard.'
There are, however, not a few considerations to which mod-
ern science and philosophy are most firmly and intelligently
committed, that assist the mind in its desire to look favorably
upon the moral optimism of religious faith. These considera-
tions are chiefly of the following three classes : (1) Those
derived from the solidarity of the race ; (2) the enormous
complexity and flexibility, combined with tenacity, which char-
acterize the connections of humanity with Nature at large ;
and (3) the fact of an enormously complicated and indefinitely
long development. Each one of these three considerations
will be seen in its higher value, when we come to treat critic-
ally the religious doctrine of God's relations to the World.
But a remark upon each is quite unavoidable at this point.
If it is attempted to take the individual out of his connections
with the race, it immediately becomes quite impossible to con-
ceive of what would be just or unjust, kind or unkind, treat-
ment of the individual. How would Providence manage to
treat men justly and benevolently as parents, husbands, friends,
members of a tribe, citizens of the nation, or of the world,
without reference to the essential character of these very rela-
tions ? The parents do, indeed, eat sour grapes, and the
children's teeth are set on edge. Modem science — physico-
chemical, physiological, psychological, and social — is con-
stantly emphasizing the fundamental import and supreme
value of all these relations, in the solidarity of the one race.
TJds fact of solidarity is the basic fact of all moral development.
1 OiiSk •yqpa.cavri'i iKoXdffdrjffav. dW iyrjpdaap KoXa^d/Mvoi ; " Not when they
had growTi old were they punished, but they grew old in punishment," —
was the startling Greek way of stating this mystery.
196 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
And if the essential justice and beneficence of this fact are
impugned or disproved, then Divine government becomes in-
conceivable under any circumstances similar to those of the
real world ; and all question of the moral nature of such gov-
ernment becomes absurd. But if this solidarity of the race is
essentially just and good, then to treat individuals in accor-
dance with it cannot be essentially unjust and bad.
Again, the modern conception of Nature, and of man's place
in Xature, is such as to warn us from tampering in the sup-
posed interest of our desires for a speedy realization of the
divine plan, with those cosmic processes which are themselves
to be considered as somehow the expressions of the same divine
moral attributes. He who begins finding fault with God be-
cause He has not made a quite different world, begins digging
a grave in which to bury, if he can only make it wide and
deep enough, not only all the choicest and most comforting re-
ligious beliefs, but the whole structure of a rational and beau-
tiful, though mysterious Universe. Science and philosophy
have their sane endeavor and their safe limits, not in trying to
build a better world than God himself has built, but in trying
to understand this God's world just as it has been, and con-
stantly is being, built. And religion, leaning on the arm of
science and looking through the eyes of philosophy, sees the
God she believes in and worships, immanent in the cosmic pro-
cesses and in human history. A science, or a philosophy,
which cannot see this same God when religion points Him out,
is blind to the inmost truth as to the Being of Nature itself.
From the scientific point of view, belief in the goodness of
Nature's indwelling spiritual Life is not, indeed, a matter of
exchanging a few smiles and greetings, in a garden of roses on
a June morning. Nor is it wholly true of the Universe that
" He that has light within his own clear hicast
May sit in the centre and enjoy bright day."
Nor can all those who go through life as tlirough a valley of
death-shadow, be alleged to belong among men who "hide a
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 197
dark soul and foul thoughts." But the vastness and intricacy
of the cosmic system, and the hidden nature of man's place in
that system, arouse thoughts which may always give pause to
emotions of repining and fault-finding against the perfect justice
and goodness of its indwelling spiritual Life.
And, finally, in order to tolerate even a provisional and prob-
able answer to the inquiry into the essential justice and good-
ness of God, it is necessary to view the history of humanity as
a divinely ordered course of development. Men have always
been asking themselves impatiently : " What is the good of
the mills of the gods that grind so exceedingly slowly ? " But
their perfection consists in just this, that they do grind so slowly
and yet so as truly to fulfill at the last their appointed work.
This cosmic process of evolution, considered as an ethico-
rational affair is itself God's work in justice and goodness with
the human race. At any rate, such is the faith of religion.
The whole discussion of God's moral attributes implies, then,
the realization in human history of certain Divine ideas ; or
else, it implies nothing of any sort that can be estimated as
either good or bad by human ideals and judgments of worth.
And here it is that the controlling conceptions of Christianity
come into force. For with this religion, God's justice and good-
ness are not abstract qualities, of interest merely to an ideal
construction of an absentee Divinity. They are, the rather,
evolutionary forces realizing themselves in the historical growth
of what they mentally represent. The Divine moral attributes
are seen in the actual reconciliation — slow and progressive — of
man to God ; in the abolition by a redemptive process, of the
suffering and sinful condition into which man has somehow
fallen. It is at this point that the religious doctrine 'of the
future, the doctrine of destiny, for the individual and for the
race, becomes so important a part of a theodicy. Faith in the
future triumph of the principles of justice and goodness, and
faith in the eternal justice and goodness of God, thus mutually
support each other.
198 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
After all, however, it is in this faith itself — its existence, its
persistence, and its growth — that its own most convincing
proofs are to be found. Somehow or other, in spite of much
evidence to the contrary, there has established itself in human
experience the comforting and helpful assurance that the
World-Ground, the Personal Absolute, is a Being of perfect
justice and perfect benevolence. " In moments of philosophi-
cal depression," says a writer on this subject, " what I have
asked myself is not whether there is a God in whom we live
and move and have our being ; it has been whether that mys-
terious power has any purpose, and specifically any benevolent
purpose." On the one hand, it would seem :
" The evil that men do lives after them ;
The good is oft interred with their bones."
But, on the other hand, we are confident that the memory of
the man of righteousness and good-will survives and widens,
while that of the wicked decays. And poetical insight joins
with religious faith to say : —
" My own hope is, a sun will pierce
The thickest cloud earth ever stretched;
That, after last, returns the first,
Though a wide compass round be fetched;
That what began best, can't end worst;
Nor what God blessed once prove accursed."
This individual hope, however, religious experience sets into
reality, only just so far as it becomes the experience of more
and more of the race. It is only in the extension of this ex-
perience that the better evidence for the Divine justice and
love accumulates. The quite convincing and perfectly irresis-
tible proof of the perfection of the moral attributes of God
will come only when the process of historic redemption is
actually accomplished.
Thus the argument in further support of a theodicy termin-
ates in a conclusion similar to that with which the problem of
THE MORAL ATTRIBUTES 199
evil was partially solved ; only now the conclusion is lifted to
a higher and more extensive point of view. The evolution of
the Kingdom of Redemption is the postulate of religious ex--
perience ; it carries with it the evidence of the vanishing of
evil and the vindication of the perfect justice and goodness
of God.
CHAPTER XXXIV
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD
The attribute of "holiness" as applied to Deity was origi-
nally, and indeed has been down to its later developments,
rather a ceremonial and priestly or theological, than a dis-
tinctively ethical, conception. On the human side, this con-
ception emphasizes the need of some special purification in
order acceptably to approach the invisible superhuman Power
in which the worshipper believes ; on the side of the Object
of his faith, the conception implies certain qualities which make
fitting, or even demand, such purification. Outside of Judaism
and Christianity, however, there are no other religions which
insist in the same way upon holiness as an essential ethical
attribute of God, or as a characteristic essential to the wor-
shipper's acceptance with God.
Even in the lower stages of religious development there are
abundant expressions of the feeling that some sort of purify-
ing ceremony or process is necessary in order most acceptably
to worsliip the gods. And the natural complement of this
feeling is the belief that the nature of the gods is such as to
lead them to appreciate tlie purification. Thus, for example,
in Shinto, the indigenous religion of Japan previous to the in-
troduction of Buddhism into that couutry, the need of puri-
fication in order to please the gods was an important tenet.
" If Shinto has a dogma," says one writer (Kaburagi), " it is
purity." Its emblem, the mirror, is commonly interpreted as
em])lematic of tlie Ix-licf tliat the Kami no Michi (or " Way of
the Gods") requires "purity," in the one who wishes to tread
200
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 201
it successfully. Its dogmatic exponent, or bible, (" Kojiki ")
lays emphasis on cleanliness. In its view "pollution was
calamity, defilement was sin, and physical purity at least, was
holiness." ^ " Disease, wounds, and death, were defiling ; " and
the physical distaste or disgust for these things led to a treat-
ment of women in childbirth, of the sick and the dying, such
as prevails in India to-day, but is from the modern point of
view immoral and cruel. The priests of this religion purified
themselves by putting on clean garments before making offer-
ings or chanting liturgies. But the purity of early Shinto, as
of religions generally in the same stage of development, was
almost exclusively a physical and ceremonial affair. What the
improved ethico-religious sentiment considers as essential to
purity was so wanting that as Professor Chamberlain says^^ of
the Kojiki, " The shocking obscenity of word and act to which
the ' Records ' bear witness is another ugly feature which must
not quite be passed over in silence."
In the religions of India, too, the ceremonial and propitiatory
value of at least the appearance of purity is early emphasized.
To appear somewhat " cleaned-up " gives one a better chance
of obtaining favor with the gods. The priest who is acceptable
with his sacrifice is either antecedently and officially purified
as being a Brahman, or else, in addition, he has in some manner
especially purified himseK for the occasion. In the laws and
customs of Hinduism there is found the same crude mixture
of things really important from the moral point of view, with
things that are ethically trivial, but are considered important be-
cause they meet the requirements of the gods, in order that men
may be " holy " in their sight. For example, Yama's law in
regard to the horse-sacrifice, as expounded to Gautama, declares :
— ^ The acts by which one gains bliss hereafter are austerities,
purity, truth, worship of parents, and the horse-sacrifice." The
popular religion of India to-day is an elaborate system of regu-
1 Compare Griffis, The Religions of Japan, p. 84/.
2 Kojiki, p. xlii.
202 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
lations as to bathings and anointings and repeating of formulas,
\vhich are supposed to render the worshipper " holy " ; but both
gods and worshippers alike may be lamentably deficient in even
the elements of a true ethical purity. And, in general, the
purification of the religions of India has this mark of inferiority
to that of the ancient Shinto ; it does not even secure physical
cleanliness, but often the very reverse. But in Japan tlie mod-
ern revival of Shinto, and in India the higher reflections of
Brahmanism, agree with Christianity in teaching that purity
of lieart, or moral " holiness," is necessar}' in order to be accep-
table to God.
Buddhism, however, both in the doctrine and in the life of
its founder, advocated the essential nature of purity of heart
and conduct for the attainment of any measure of real blessed-
ness,— of actual salvation. The traditional parting-injunctions
of Gautama, at the beginning of the " Book of the Great De-
cease," are richly laden with this thought : " As long as the
brethren shall exercise themselves in the seven-fold higher wis-
dom, that is to say in mental activity, search after truth, energy,
joy, peace, earnest contemplation, and equanimity of mind, so
long may the brethren be expected not to decline but to pros-
per." These injunctions were given to those who were sup-
posed to have long passed beyond the need of exhortation to
put away the vulgai; sins of the flesh, such as indulgence of
the appetites, covetousness, or greed. But these excellent
practical rules can have little or no bearing upon the concep-
tion we are now examining, without such modifications as al-
most completely reverse some of the tenets of earlier Buddhism.
To apply the term " holiness " to the Being of the World, con-
ceived of in an impersonal or pantheistic way, involves an ob-
vious contradiction. Only personal, self-conscious Will can be
either holy or unholy, in any meaning of the words appropriate
to ethical ideas. " / am holy," may be claimed by the anthro-
pomorj)hic gods of any religion. " Tt is holy," can only mean
" consecrated to some sacred use." For, as Kuenen truly says :
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 203
" Holy signifies a relationship " that can only exist between
persons. Therefore, man's strivings after purity, even in the
lowest forms of their religious expression, imply the belief that
there is some personal and spiritual power over man which de-
mands and appreciates purity. They testify to man's faith in
the existence of an over-Life, not his own, in whose estimate
the holiness has worth.
This truth is not destroyed, or even abated by the undoubted
fact that immoralities and unspeakable orgies of cruelty and
lust have not only accompanied, but have sometimes been
deemed an essential part of, many of the ceremonials and forms
of worship in religions of a low ethical grade. Examples are
the cruelties of the Mexican and Aztec religions, and the
sexual impurities of the religions of India, Syria, and of
ancient Greece. " It is not until a late period," says Tiele,*
" that the religiously disposed man strives to express the su-
perhuman character of his gods by ascribing to them ethical
attributes."^ The ideal of the undeveloped belief of all
religions tends constantly to the opinion that the independent
power of the gods renders them under no obligations them-
selves to keep the moral laws, with the enactment and enforce-
ment of which over men they are so much concerned. But
this is the same ethical fallacy which, in monarchical countries,
condones or excuses moral excesses in the rulers, and which
in republics, allows the influential and law-making classes
to commit with impunity breaches of the very laws they have
themselves enacted. But religious development involves
forces to counteract this tendency. And as the moral con-
sciousness comes to demand higher satisfactions, concep-
tions of divine beings that behave immorally become intoler-
1 Elements of the Science of Religion, Second Series, p. 89.
2 The ideas of "holiness" which primitive man attaches to divine things
are amply and vividly illustrated by Frazer (The Golden Bough, I, p. 241/.;
comp. p. 343) in the case of the restrictions and prohibitions which the
Flamen Dialis must observe at Rome in order to keep himself "holy," and
so fit for his sacred functions.
204 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
able. For the law which rules over all the genuine religious
progress of humanity is tliis : The ideal of Ethics and the
ideal of Eelijion /mist he completely united in the Idea of God.
God therefore must be perfect Ethical Spirit in order to be
God at all. The process of effecting this complete union of the
two ideals is the most essential tiling about the growth of a
rational conception of Deity. Thus " holiness," in a new and
higher meaning, becomes the essential moral attribute of Deity,
and the essential thing required hij Deity, in order that man
may be acceptable in His sight.
The greater religions, even in very ancient times, have not
been without the dawnings of conviction with regard to the
importance of the attribute of ethical purity, or holiness, in
the relations between man and God. In the Turin copy of
the Egyptian " Book of the Dead," the deceased is made to
appear before the gods, saying : — " I have brought you Law,
and for you I have subdued iniquity." The earthly monarch
must be able to enter into the hall of the Two-fold Madt (la
double justice^ or " Right and Wrong," or " heaven and
earth " [?] with these words : " I am not a doer of fraud and
iniquity against men." Otherwise he cannot be acceptable to
the holiness enthroned there. We have already seen what a
high degree of moral purity some of the prayers of believers
in the ancient religion of Babylonia and Assyria attribute to
their gods. So, in spite of the inconsistency with its agnostic
or atheistic teachings, the Buddhistic writing, " The Way of
Purity " (Vinuddhi-3Ia(/ija^y virtually motives tlie call to holi-
ness among men by the conception of a perfectly pure and
noble spiritual Existence, to be united with which is the ra-
tional goal of all human endeavor and the highest blessedness.
It was, how<;ver, in .ludaism that the more just and efliciont
conception of tlie Divine Holiness had its source; and it is in
Christianity that this same conceptioti reaches its supreme de-
velopment. On the legal side f)f Judaism the conception
•Sec liuddhistii in '[V.-uislnfion, jjp. '2.S5/7.
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 205
found expression in such raptures as these : " Thy law is ray
delight ; thy commandment is exceeding broad." " Thy law
do I love : great peace have they who love it." The con-
clusion which the higher Judaism reached, in its fullest inter-
pretation, from its loftiest point of view, enforced the injunc-
tion : " Be ye holy, for I, Yahweh, am holy." It thus prepared
the way for the companionable and reassuring example and
law of " the religion of Christ " as expressed in the striving
to aspire toward keeping the command : " Be ye therefore per-
fect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect."
But in Judaism the conception of the Divine Holiness was
no sudden appearance ; nor was its development at any point
independent of the developing moral ideals of the race.
Robertson Smith's statement ^ that, primarily, " holiness has
nothing to do with morality and purity of life " is probably
extreme, even when applied to the earlier developments of any
of the greater religions. It is certainly inapplicable to the
lower stages of the Old-Testament religion.^ " Israel as Yah-
weh's people," says Montefiore,^ " must keep itself free from
uncleanness of every kind, that the land may not be defiled and
Yahweh's name profaned. Sin is impurity." In the Deuteron-
omic code, to which Professor Klostermann has given the
commonly accepted surname of the " Law of Holiness," the
1 The Religion of the Semites, p. 140/.
2 The adjective customarily employed in Hebrew is the genitive of the
noun, l^'lp. In the Septuagint and New Testament it is &7ios(holy) and the
noun is ayiojo-uvi] (holiness). Throughout the Old Testament and the Old-Tes-
tament Apocrypha the title uniformly means, either (1) as applied to God,
"reverend, worthy of veneration," on account of his majesty; or (2) as ap-
plied to things and men, "set apart for God," — ceremonially clean, or purified
in heart and life. In the New Testament the adjective comes to mean
"purified" or "upright," in a more distinctively moral sense (as, e. g., the
the "holy" kiss of charity). In a very few cases (only two?) the noun "holi-
ness" signifies moral purity (1 Thes. iii, 13; 2 Cor. vii, 1). In Romans i, 4,
Christ is said to have been declared "the son of God with power, according
to the spirit of holiness."
3 Origin and Growth of Religion (Hibbert Lectures, 1892) p. 236.
206 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
conception is more communi^stic and social ; the sin of the
members of the religious community defiles the kind. But in
Ezekiel, who emphasizes the priestly conception, the matter is
considered in a more individualistic way. Of this conception,
" Be holy, for I, Yahweh, am holy," Kuenen truly remarks : ^
" In these words the priestly thorah itself sums up its concep-
tion of religion. It is with this demand that it comes to the
whole people and to every several Israelite. . . . Holy signifies
a relationship. It is applied to the person or thing which is
consecrated to the deity, which belongs to Him and is set aside
for His service. What does it mean, then, to be consecrated
to Yahweh ? . . . . The answer reveals the character of the
priestly conception of Yahweh's demands. . . . Holiness is
purity. . . . The centre of gravity for him (the priest) lies in
man's attitude toward God, not in his social but in his personal
life." In spite of the limitations which always cling to this
priestly conception of the Divine Holiness, and notwithstand-
ing the corruptions which it is so difficult to exclude from it
and which maintain themselves in Judaism and in Christianity
down to the present day, the emphasis which it places upon
personal and particular relations, of an essentially etliical char-
acter, which exist between the individual man and the Infinite
Spirit, has proved of inestimable value to the religious develop-
ment of the race.
It is in Christianity, however, that faith in the perfect eth-
ical purity of God, and the belief that man must somehow at-
tiiii, in liis measure, the same sort of purity, has reached the
liighest development. Thus the conception of " holiness " as-
sumes tlie steadfast and complete commitment of the Divine
Will to whiit is monilly good. God's Will is the perfectly pure
:ind unsoilc'd Fr)untain, the flawless Ideal of Morality. This
same Will revolts against moral iinpurity in human beings,
and it desires and plans that they too, shall be shaped after its
' Niitional Keli^^ioria and UniverHul ReliKioris (Iliblwrt Lectures, 1SS2),
p. IGU/.
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 207
own ethical likeness. At this stage God's holiness is no
longer conceived of as an aversion to physical uncleanness, or
to a lack of ceremonial preparation for paying due respect to
his majesty ; and human morality is required to aspire to a
standard tliat represents the perfect Divine ideal of morality.
Since such ethical purity cannot be attained by bathings, in-
cantations, and ceremonials, but must be gained by complet-
ing the inner conquest over moral defilement, it is the Holiness
of God which provides the means of man's purification.
It has already been shown^ how the mental reactions which
characterize the development of morality, on the one hand, and
of religion, on the other, necessarily bring about some union
of the two in a higher ideal common to both. This higher
ideal, in its perfection, is the attainment by man of an ethical
and spiritual likeness to, and union with, God, conceived of as
perfect Ethical Spirit. But, for the religious consciousness,
holiness is the essential element, the very core, of the perfec-
tion of Divine, moral and spiritual Being. Hence the con-
sciousness of wrongdoing becomes the consciousness of sin ;
and the wrongdoer regards himself as offensive to the divine
holiness and alienated from the divine favors.
When, however, the divine holiness is conceived of as a cold,
passionless, and austere, but perfect moral purity, the concep-
tion of God lacks those elements which win the heart, encour-
age the hopes, and inspire the moral life, of humanity. In-
deed, the moral consciousness infallibly judges that such so-
called " holiness " is not the perfection of moral and spiritual
Personality. Therefore " the religion of Christ," in the high-
est degree, and certain other religions (especially some of the
later developments of Buddhism) in inferior degree, soften and
modify the characteristic of holiness as applied to God, by an
infusion or saturation, as it were, of the feelings of kindness
and pity. Thus the one supreme and comprehensive moral
attribute of the Divine Being becomes his righteous, but piti-
iVol. I, chap. XIX.
208 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ful and forgiving, ethical love. Later Judaism, as its concep-
tions find expression in the Old-Testament Apocrypha, had
begun to emphasize this forgiving aspect of the Law, of the
divine nature, and of the way of salvation for sinful man. " If
ye turn yourselves to Him, then will he forgive all your trans-
gressions and pardon all your sins." " To whom wilt thou be
merciful, O God, if not to those who call upon the Lord."
The summons of Jesus was to penitence and to the forsaking
of sin ; but it was to a penitence which is the reaction of sor-
row in view of the newly discovered self-sacrificing Divine
Love ; and to a forsaking of sin as the result of a joyful en-
trance upon the life of communion with the purifying Divine
Spirit. That this view of the purity which was required by
the perfect holiness of God actually pervaded tlie early Chris-
tian community to a commendable extent, their history does
not leave us in doubt. " The Christians," says the Apology
of Aristides (c. 15) " know and believe in God, the creator of
heaven and earth, the God by whom all things consist ; i. e., in
Him from whom they have received the commandments written
in their hearts, commandments which they observe in faith and
in expectation of the world to come. For this reason they do
not commit adultery, nor practice unchastity, nor bear false
witness, nor covet that with which they are intrusted, or what
does not belong to them."
Historical Christianity, considered as a system of dogmas, or
as an ecclesiastical organization, or as a moral code, has often-
times really departed from the true conception of the Divine
holiness. Its entire doctrine of sin, and its dependent doc-
trine of salvation, have too often been such as quite to sacri-
fice the essential justice and goodness of God by espousing
some morally repulsive, mechanical view of the measure of the
individual's wrongdoing, and of the primitive reactions of the
Divine Will against this wrongdoing. Or, on the other hand,
it has provoked others so to S()ft(Mi and weaken the element
of justice, and so to degrade tiio element of goodness, as to
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 209
bring about a return to that lower stage in the development of
the conception of the gods, when they are highly regarded for
their " companionable " qualities — virtually after the type of
the Vedic era. Then it was that the gods were so good to men,
that both practiced immoralities together ! Or, yet again, the
attempt has prevailed to satisfy the conception of God's holi-
ness by the purely priestly method of conformity to an elabo-
rate ritual ; or by strict obedience to ecclesiastical decrees and
ordinances ; or by the practice of the minute details of a life of
asceticism.
It is, therefore, the faith of religion in God's holiness that
alone secures the kind of Optimism which is the peculiar
possession of him who has this faith ; and all other optimism
seems insecure, and not founded in reason, when examined
from the religious point of view. For religion holds that the
chief good of human beings is the attainment of a perfect
moral union with the Divine Being. As says Kaftan^:
" There is no chief good in the World. If there is to be such a
^ood it must be conceived and sought as one which is above
the world, i. e. in the sense of religion — as participation in a
life which is not of the world, as participation in the life of
God." If, however, this insufficiency of the world to provide
the " chief good " is pressed to such an extreme as to create a
complete antagonism between the demands of the Divine
holiness and the conditions of this present life, the effect is to
render the conception of holiness itself too abstract and prac-
tically invalid. Even in the current Christian conception
of God a perfect union has by no means been effected between
the religious ideal of a Being who must be adored and served
in order to attain salvation for the individual, and the nobler
and more inclusive Ideal of a Will eternally and wholly com-
mitted to what is morally good.^
iThe Truth of the Christian Religion (English Translation), II, p. 335.
2 Thus Sir Wm. Hamilton could make the astonishing statement that "a
God is, indeed, to us only of practical interest, inasmuch as he is the condi-
14
210 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
As to proofs of the perfect Divine Holiness, they do not, of
course, exist, in any strict meaning of the word. Certain
empirical evidences may, indeed, be appealed to in support of
the belief that, on the whole, the cosmic and social forces
which represent to the particular sciences what the philosophy
of religion regards as the immanent Divine Will, are on the
whole contending against moral impurity, and are making for
the gradual moral uplift of the race. Such evidences will be
brought forward in connection with a critical examination of
the views of religion respecting God's relations to the World.
Certain suggestions, however, may fitly be presented in the
present connection.
And, first, many of the objections to this faith of religion —
by which we understand, the perfect commitment of the Divine
Will to moral purity — are partially, if not wholly removed, by
the thought that God, as the Moral Ruler, is dealing with the
race in the entire course of its moral evolution. Among these
objections some are being either lessened or removed by the
discoveries of modern science. These discoveries are con-
stantly showing how the influences from that part of man's
physical and social environment over which he has no direct
control, tend somewhat steadily, when given time enough, to
effect the improvement, by their discipline and punitive
action, of his moral purity.
When, in the second place, the history of man's ethical and
religious development is carefully examined, it is discovered
that, in fact, the highest forms of this development have ac-
tually attained the most assured and effective faith in the
tion of our immortality" (Metaphysics, Lecture II, p. 23). And in his La
Vie itemeUe M. Ernest Naville, according to Brinton, "takes pains to dis-
tinguish that Christianity is not a means of Hvinp; a holy life so much as one
of gaining a blcs-scd hereafter." .And lirintoii himself declares that "most
of the recommendations of action and sulTerin^ in this world are based on the
doctrine of compensation in the world to come," (The Religious Sentiment,
p. 25(i/.).
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 211
perfection of God's holiness. Moreover, this faith has itself
exercised a supremely valuable influence over the efforts of
individual men, and of considerable communities, to purify and
make " holy," both themselves and the society of which they
have been members.
But, thirdly, this sublime faith itself is, in some sort, its own
best defense, and its own most convincing proof. How signifi-
cant the fact that, after countless centuries of groping their
way upward, the race has, in the persons of some at least of its
most trustworthy portion, attained to faith in the perfect holi-
ness of God ! In practical, as well as theoretical, dependence
upon this faith, the religious life of humanity tends more and
more towards an Ideal which unites within itself all the satis-
factions of the moral, sesthetical, and religious demands of the
mind and heart of man. God — the all-holy, the all-sublime,
the all-commanding Ideal — is One with the Reality which
science postulates as the " Nature," out of whose womb come
all things and all souls, and at whose breasts they are all nour-
ished. Thus this Nature appears as not only in its essential
content, identical with the Personal Absolute of philosophy,
but also with the perfect Ethical Spirit of religion.
That the conception of such an Ideal-Real should be actually
reached in a course of intellectual, ethical, sesthetical, and re-
ligious development, and yet no semblance of a Reality corres-
ponding to this Ideal exist as its Ground, — this is a difficult
thing for reflection to credit. It is this difficulty which, as we
have seen, gives its cogency to the negative way of stating the
so-called ontological argument. The Ideal has formed itself ;
it has emerged, in fact, in the course of the world's develop-
ment. This, its existence, could not be — cannot be made
rational at least — unless the nature of Reality has called it
forth. There may be no demonstration more mathematico, con-
cealed in this inference. It is the leap from real experience
to faith in the Realitij of the experienced Ideal. But no reality
is known to man by processes of mathematical demonstration.
212 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Let us then call this process the postulate of faith in the Reality
of its own Ideal.
There is one composite virtue which good men display in vary-
ing degrees and which religious faith attributes in its perfec-
tion to God. This attribute is Wisdom : and in order to vin-
dicate his moral completeness and ideal perfection, God must
be conceived of as infinitely wise. That the gods, or at least
some of them, know more than human beings and are shrewder
in the use of what they know, is a persuasion common to all
the lower religions. For example, even Glooskap, the gross
divinity of the Micmacs, is represented as so powerful over the
forces of nature that he could call " Earthquake " to his ser-
vice and have him transform men into cedars or pines by plan-
ting their feet in the ground. But in another version of this
tale Glooskap himself, when he had converted an old man into
a gnarled and twisted cedar said : " I cannot say how long you
will live ; only the Great Spirit above can tell that." ^ Wisdom
implies, whether in God or in man, both power and knowledge ;
but it implies something more ; for wisdom is a moral attribute.
This attribute, therefore, embodies the conceptions of knowl-
edge and power employed in the interests of what is morally
good. Good-will is necessary to wisdom. And if the wisdom
is to be perfect, not only must the power and the knowledge
be perfect, but the good which is chosen and pursued by all
the means that the perfect knowledge and wisdom provide,
must be the highest and supremely valuable Good. This good,
the human mind is obliged to conceive of as uniting the three
recognized forms of good — the good of happiness, the good of
beauty, and the good of morality — in one Ideal of all that has
worth.
The Divine Wisdom is, then, both a choice of an ideal end,
and a use of the Ijest means for attaining this end. And if, as
the faith of religion affirms, God has chosen and is employing
his power and his knowledge in the realization of an Ideal
1 See Algonquin LcRends of New England, by C. G. Leland (2d cd. 1885).
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 213
which includes every form of good, then He is himself, so to
say, entitled to the attribute of perfect wisdom. If he is omnip-
otent and omniscient ; God can be wise if he wants to be. If
he is also holy, then he is also, as a matter of course, perfectly
wise.
The ethical and artistic efforts of man to improve his con-
ception of Deity constitute the most important and interesting
feature of the history of his religious evolution. The archi-
tectonic of the gods, however, has been a matter of slow de-
velopment. Even now it is far enough from perfection ; —
whether one take, for one's point of observation, the ethical,
the sesthetical, or the more purely practical position. The
gods of ancient Egypt, for example, were conceived of with a
most excessive naturalism, and as subject to all manner of de-
grading limitations and lack of perfection. They suffer from
hunger, thirst, old age, disease, fear, and sorrow. They
perspire, have headaches, and bleeding at the nose. Their
limbs shake ; their teeth chatter ; they shriek and howl
with pain ; they are not immune as against either snakes or
fire. Even the great gods of the Egyptian pantheon cannot
perfect themselves by tlirowing off these depressing natural
burdens. But as man's ideal of personality and of personal re-
lations, as viewed from ethical and sesthetical points of view,
has improved, he has more and more idealized the objects of his
religious belief and worship. In the other greater world-
religions, but preeminently in the best efforts of reflective
thought to interpret the experience which Christianity has
brought into the world, the result has been the framing of the
conception of an Absolute Self, who shall stand in the Unity
of his Being for the realization of all humanity's ideals.
There must, however, be a complete union of the " metaphysi-
cal predicates " and the " moral attributes," in order to fill out
the conception of the Perfection of the Divine Being. This
union can be effected — whether in thought or in actuality —
only as it exists in the Unity of a Personal Life. In answer
214 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
to this demand for such a unity, religious faith attempts to
blend all the ideal predicates and attributes in the one idea
of eternal, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient, Goodness
personified. In a word, its Object is conceived of as perfect
Etliical Spirit. But in the mixed scientific, philosophical, and
religious development of man there has been a constant ten-
dency for two lines of reasoning upon the data of experience to
fall apart ; and so to prevent or to impair the perfection of this
idea. To state the case in a somewhat extreme way : The God
of science and philosophy, and the popular God, have been at
war with each other. Philosophy, in fidelity to the data fur-
nished by the positive sciences, has evolved the conception of
an Absolute, or World-Ground. In this conception the attri-
butes of eternity, power, absoluteness as respects limitations of
time and space, have been the factors which have claimed the
preeminence. Thus the philosopher's God, even if he ceases
to be a barren abstraction and gains the title of " Supreme Be-
ing," or the " Power which the Universe manifests," is not so
personified as to come near to man, to touch his heart, and to
influence his life profoundly on its ethical and spiritual side.
But, on the other hand, the more popular conceptions so an-
thropomorphize God as to dissatisfy, if not to shock and revolt,
the higher and more permanent demands of the scientific and
rational interpretation of human experience in its highest, most
dignified, and noblest developments.
Now neither of these lines of human development, or of the
conceptions for which they stand, can be safely discredited or
left out of our total account. The " philosopher's God " can-
not be dismissed from consideration with an outcry against its
metaphysical origin and abstract characteristics. It is a con-
stantly recurrent and permanent force in the evolution of the
religious life of humanity. It represents the highest flights of
human reason in the attempt to reach the lofty altitude where
tlie atmosphere is so free from the mists of ignorance, and the
dust of superstition and passion, that the purged eye may look
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 215
into the very face of the Infinite One. Nor is this true of the
mystical speculations of India or of later Greece alone. It is
also true of the Fourth Gospel, of some of the Epistles ascribed
to Paul, and of other passages in the New Testament. And
the history of the first four centuries of Christianity shows how,
on a basis laid by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, the Christian
view rose to a conception of God, not only as the Father and
Redeemer of men and the author of the form and qualities of
things, but as the very Being, Substance, and Reason, of the
world of things and souls. " The cosmogony of Origen,"
says Hatch,^ " was a theodicy." And Augustine's " City of
God " is a treatise on cosmology. The Christian conception
of the Object of faith can no more be made henceforth to re-
turn to the alleged simplicity and freedom from metaphysics of
early Christianity than can the existing cosmos be forced back
into the mythical egg from which it was brought forth.
On the other hand, the God who dwells ever near the popu-
lar heart, even in the lower forms of religious development ;
he who sits by the fireside and guards the hearth, who pre-
sides over the boundaries of the fields, and is the guardian
angel of each newborn child ; he who makes the clouds his
messengers and rides upon the wings of the wind ; he who
springs to life before us in every fountain and whirls by the
frightened mariner in every storm ; — He, even He, represents
a conception that cannot be denied its correlate in Reality.
The homely, domestic Divinity, the God of the child and of
the lowly in intellect and life, He is no less a reality than is
the philosopher's God. But ever must we reiterate the su-
preme triumph of man's religious development : There is only
One God ; He is the Alone God.
As the development of man has gone forward, the greater
religions, and especially the more thoughtful forms of Christian
doctrine, have presented in a more harmonious union the dif-
ferent factors of the conception which appeal to the various
1 Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, p. 204.
216 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
interests of humanity. Thus God is more perfectly known ;
because known as a perfect Ethical Spirit, as well as the In-
finite and Absolute One. But this union is disturbed, rather
than assisted, when there arise within the same religion two
conceptions of God, — one esoteric and one popular ; and when
two sets of doctrines as to the divine relations to the world of
things and of selves are evolved. In its efforts to perfect the
conception of Divine Being, Christian dogma has centered its
attention chiefly upon the Fatherhood of God and the sonship
of Christ ; — that is, upon the relations of God to man in those
conditions of weakness, suffering, and temptation, which are
inseparable from man's existence in the world. This fact has
made this religion of inestimable value for the comfort and up-
lift of mankind. But when the doctrine of God's Fatherhood,
and of the sonship and mediatorial office of Christ, is taught
so as to disregard, or to contradict, the ideals of Divine Being
which have been evolved by the reflective use of human rea-
son, in its highest forms of functioning ; then even this doc-
trine ceases to represent the Perfection of God in the worthiest
and most effective way. Then science and philosophy become
arrayed against Christian dogma ; and the latter is sternly
called upon to improve and to elevate its conceptions. For
the Reality of all man's supremest Ideals, as well as the pledge
of their progressive realization, must be found by religion in
the perfection of the Object of its faith. With this convic-
tion agrees the central philosophic principle of the confidence
of the poetical insight : —
" All we have willed, or hoped, or dreamed of good shall exist;
Not its semblaDce but itself."
From the highest point of view reached by religious experience
when reflectively treated, all the ideals of humanity appear, for
their origin, ground, and guaranty, to converge in One Ideal-
Real. This Being of the World science calls by various
titles, — sucli as " Nature " (n<xtura naturanx^, or the one
" Force," of which all the varied forms of energy are species
HOLINESS AND PERFECTION OF GOD 217
or examples, — and places it under the " reign of law," in a course
of evolution. By further reflective thought, philosophy arrives
at the conclusion that the essential characteristics of this same
Being of the World, or " Ultimate Reality," can only be expressed,
or even conceived of, in terms of self-conscious and rational
Personal Life. But religion has needs that science and phi-
losophy, apart from the further reflective treatment which the
latter can give to religious experience, taken in the large, are
quite unable to satisfy. Through thousands of years of grop-
ing, and yet at times led rapidly forward by great individual
teachers or by more popular movements, humanity has attained
the conception of an Object for religious faith. In this, its
Object, religion finds some thing much more than science and
philosophy can furnish, as respects its power to meet the moral,
sesthetical, and religious needs of human nature. For to the
experience of religion, the Object of its faith appears as One,
like man, an ethical spirit, — but immeasurably, and as yet in-
comprehensibly superior to man, a perfect Ethical Spirit.
The objections to this conception of the Object of religious
belief and adoration, which arise on various empirical grounds,
still remain. Neither man's physical environment, nor his
moral and spiritual constitution, nor his social relations thus
far evolved, nor his demands for a speculative harmony and
unity in his great postulate, completely correspond to his faith
in the Divine Perfection. Faith is troubled, baffled, forced
into conflict, on this account. But faith persists ; and, on the
whole, as it seems to us, it can scarcely be denied that both
science and philosophy are in the way of explaining it as surely
grounded in reality ; and also of commending it as practically
worth}^ and effective, more and yet more. The limitations of
the perfection of the Divine Being are, indeed, no less apparent,
because the world-order is becoming somewhat better known,
and much more implicitly trusted than ever before. In fact, as
will appear when we come to consider critically the relations
of God to the world, as conceived of by religious faith, there
218 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
are many important respects in which modern science and
philosophy have, so to say, been constantly making these limita-
tions more obvious and difficult to remove. But the philosophy
of religion welcomes this discovery ; for it considers them as
s<7/"-limitations ; and it is ready with a nobler, more rational,
and morally more effective, conception of that Absolute Self,
who in wisdom, love, and holiness, thus limits himself. For
Absolute Will could not he Good-Will^ were it not limited hy
a self-imposed deference and devotion to ethical and spiritual
ideals.
And, finally, our study of the faith of religion, as it mani-
fests itself both in history and in the most illustrious individual
examples, enforces the conviction that, after all, this experience
of faith itself is its own most convincing argument. Its con-
clusions are obtainable only through a realization of the re-
deeming and gracious love, and the perfect holiness of God.
They come to the individual who has embraced the faith, and
who is living according to the influences of this love and this
holiness. They are coming to the race as the actual redemp-
tive process more and more embraces, in the extent and in the
perfection of its operation, the social constitution and social
relations of mankind.
PART Y
GOD AND THE WORLD
" The High and Lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy, "
Isaiah.
"Who laid the foundations of the earth that it should not be removed forever."
Psalmist.
"The ONE, maker of all that is; the one, the only one, the Maker of all exis-
tences." Hymn to Amon.
" These are the works of the second and co-operative causes which God uses as
his ministers when executing the idea of the best, as far as possible." Plato.
"// our view of the world is defective, our notions of Deity will not advance
beyond the mythological stage." Schleiermacher.
PAKT V
GOD AND THE WORLD
CHAPTER XXXV
THE THEISTIC POSITION
That God is, and what God is, could of course become
known to man only in and through the " world ; " if within
this latter term it be meant to include the sum-total of human
experience with things and with selves. Were it not for cer-
tain relations existing between the Infinite Being and these
finite objects, as known to man, then no account of the forma-
tion in human thought of the conception of this Being could
have any claim to represent, however imperfectly, the truth
about the reality. It is, therefore, these relations to which our
thought is compelled to appeal, in the effort to vindicate in
the light of modern science and philosophy the conception
which religious faith holds of its Object. But the more de-
tailed criticism of the content of this faith, with respect to the
several main classes of these relations, will, of necessity, al-
ways have the effect of either confirming or modifying our
conceptions of God. For God is not at all for man, except as
G-od is related to man in and through that physical, social, and
spiritual environment, that system of media, of which man
has experience.
In discussing the religious doctrine of God and the World,
however, we cannot rightfully be expected to keep slipping
back into points of view that have already been transcended.
And besides it is desirable, as far as possible, to avoid even the
appearance of repetition of the same conclusions from some-
what different points of view. It will then facilitate progress
222 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
if two or three of the most important of these conclusions are
recalled in the form in which they have appeared to be, if not
quite demonstrated, at least made most reasonable. And,
first : For the religious experience God does not appear as
the " Absolute " or the " Infinite," in the sense of being the
Unknowable or the Unrelated. For religion God is known as
a spirit, — by the lower religions in a variety of crude and im-
perfect, or even irrational, immoral, and grotesque forms of
representation, but by the most highly developed religious con-
sciousness, as perfect Ethical Spirit. It no longer, then, be-
comes unmeaning or self-contradictory to inquire into the rela-
tions existing between this Spirit and that sum-total of known
or legitimately inferred finite existences which we call the
world. God and the World may be thought of as brought into
some sort of actual connection.
And, second : In speaking of the relations of God to the
World, or of God and the World, it is implied that the two
terms of the relation are not strictly identical. The problem,
therefore, cannot be approached with the virtual assumption
that it makes no difference with the truth of any proposition
concerning their relation, which of the two terms is subject,
and which predicate of the proposition. Even the strictest
form of pantheistical or materialistic theory could scarcely
hold that it is a matter of no real significance whether one
says : God is the World, or the World is God ; God made the
World, or the Worhl made God. It is most surely, as the en-
tire discussion sliows, no such use of the copula which leads
Professor Royce to declare, " The Absolute /» (tiie italics are
mine) the whole system of which the finite experience is a
fragment."
But, third, there are certain ways of conceiving more pre-
cisely of the relations of God to the cosmic existences, forces,
and processes, which have already been transcended. These
ways have indeed been traveled l)y systems of religious phi-
losophy in the past. They are of historical interest to the
THE THEISTIC POSITION 223
student of man's religious evolution. They are constantly
revived, in whole or in part, by the popular theology and phi-
losophy. But they are so foreign to principles now somewhat
firmly established, and to thoughts fitted for getting a signifi-
cant grasp upon the mind of the age, that our present specu-
lations need do no more than merely mention them. Among
these "worn-out" theories of the divine relation to the
world of things and selves is the view which regards God as
the maker of the world out of some preexistent and quasi-
independent " stuff " or material. There is scanty need to
thresh again the straw of a religious cosmogony which can
fitly be ridiculed after the fashion of the late Professor Huxley ;
or which resembles the conception of the " idiotes,''^ whom Ori-
gen considered to be the only person capable of believing that
Elohim planted trees in the garden of Eden after the fashion of
the human gardener. Neither the "carpenter theory," nor
" the gardener theoiy," of creation need be revived for serious
discussion.
Scarcely more tenable from the modern scientific and philo-
sophical points of view is the conception which would virtually
limit God's relations to the world to an act of creation ex nihilo
which launched the present system of things and selves, as a
vast chaos of self-existent and self-sufficient "stuff," endowed
with multitudinous so-called qualities and forces, out of which
" It " proceeded, without further divine aid, to develop itself.
And, indeed, the need which was once felt in the interests of
this view — namely, to save the purity and sublimity of the
Absolute by keeping it as much as possible away from immedi-
ate contact with finite creations — is no longer a dominant mo-
tive in the speculations of religious philosophy.
Not much superior, or more worthy of prolonged discussion
for present-day purposes, are the older forms of the theory
which related God to the World through some process of
"emanation." In its oldest and crudest form, this theory
regarded the gods as making the earth and men out of certain
224 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
portions of their own bodies. These divine fragments, or
pieces broken off from the divine beings, have life in them-
selves and can grow and produce their like. Thus the older
emanation theories united a certain crude theory of evolution
with the view which considers the gods to be the makers of the
world. But a still more vital and subtly anthropomorphic view
regards the gods as the procreators, or progenitors by sexual
processes, of the world of things and men. In the coarse lan-
guage of the Kamchatkans, their chief god has married all
creatures and become the common father of all. With the Red-
skins of the North the Divine Being is the " Great Father."
But the various productive and protecting divinities of India
are addressed also as " Mother." And all over the earth, from
the crude belief of the Zulus, or the Navajos, to the teachings
of some of the Church Fathers, God's nature is represented as
" father-mother," or " mother-father ;" and so, as partaking of
both sexes at one and the same time. A more scientific view
of evolution, on the one hand, and a more spiritual view of the
Divine Fatherhood, on the other hand, have saved us from
the necessity of giving further attention to these grosser forms
of the emanation theory.
The attempt at summarizing all the endless variety of con-
nections which individual and finite things and selves have
with the totality of the Being of the World, so as to express
them as they truly and essentially are, in a few confessedly
figurative terms, is agreed by all thinkers to suggest the pro-
foundest and most unanswerable problems of speculative philo-
sophy. But these problems are, of necessity, involved in the
question : How can we more definitively conceive of the most
eternal and fundamental relations which exist between the
World and God? In their answers to these problems, few
philosopiiers have the audacity to propose formulas that claim
to be accepted as perfectly clear, satisfactory, and final defini-
tions. Lotze, for example, in one place,' holds that the relation
1 Outlines of Metaphysics (English Translation), p. 155.
THE THEISTIC POSITION 225
of finite selves to the Absolute is best expressed by saying that
they, as "spiritual elements " of Him, have '"'' Being-for-self •,'
while the meaning of things and of their general laws of exis-
tence and relation among themselves, is wholly " to be found in
their being consequences of that Idea of the Good " which is the
very own nature of the Infinite Spirit. But of those relations
on which religion fixes its attention, the same author else-
where affirms: ^ " It is not required that there be found a spec-
ulatively unobjectionable expression for that which is essen-
tially Transcendent, but that we have figurative expressions to
which the mind may attach the same feelings that are appro-
priate to the content of religion." And yet again, he concludes
the discussion of the world's immanence in God by affirm-
ing : " It will lead directly to our view that every single thing
and event can only be thought as an activity, constant or
transitory, of the one Existence, its reality and substance as
the mode of being and substance of this one Existence, its
nature and form as a consistent phase in the unfolding of the
same."
Of the conclusions which would seem to follow in logical con-
sistency from such theses as the foregoing it is not our purpose
to speak at length in the present connection. But the two
principal conceptions under which may be summed up the real
meaning and value of all the symbolical ways in which religion
regards the relations of God and the World are the following :
Dependence and Manifestation. The former is chiefly empha-
sized in the religious doctrines of God as the Creator, Preserver,
and Moral Ruler of the World. The latter conception is chiefly
emphasized in the doctrines of God as Moral Ruler, as Provi-
dence, and as the Redeemer of the World ; but also, in the doc-
trines of Revelation and Inspu'ation as means of the Divine
rule and of redemption. The World depends upon God ; and
the World manifests, or reveals, God. The word " depen-
dence " expresses relations mainly of finite existence to Infinite
1 Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion, p. 147.
15
226 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Being, of human feeling and will to Absolute Will ; but the
words " manifestation " and "revelation" express chiefly the
relations essential to religious faith or knowledge. But just
as feeling and will enter into faith, so does knowledge give
reasonableness to feeling, and light and guidance to the will.
Thus the filial attitude which is subjective religion, or true
piety, understands and accepts as the guide and source of
blessedness for man's life, the belief that all which exists, or
can happen, in the world is ceaselessly dependent upon God ;
and that all which is, or happens, if its deepest and truest sig-
nificance can be understood, is manifestation of God.
The theistic conception, which affirms that all cosmic exis-
tences and events are dependent upon God and are manifesta-
tion of God, becomes a doctrine whose ontological significance
and practical value are incorporated into the very essence of re-
ligion itself. In obscure but germinal form, this conception
is found in all those lower forms of religion, the nature of which
was defined as " man's belief in the existence of superhuman
spiritual powers, on his relations to which his welfare is depen-
dent, and to which he is in some respects at least responsible, —
together with the feelings and practices which are naturally and
necessarily connected with such belief" (Vol. I. p. 89). But
especially does a reflective and developed monotheism involve
the elaboration of this conception, so as to include all the re-
lations in which the Absolute Being stands toward all depen-
dent and relative beings, the Infinite toward the system of finite
existences. Indeed, the theistic doctrine of God is essentially
an exposition of the "• experienced world " as a dependent mani-
festation of Divine Being. This doctrine rests upon the funda-
mental assumption that this experienced world is God's WorlJ.
Take away the possibility, and the right, of speaking of the
relations vviiich human experience explains in terms of the two
conceptions, (Impendence: and man/fe station, and religion be-
comes dumb, and wholly unable to explain or to defend itself.
More precisely, the entire content of a rational faith in the
THE THEISTIC POSITION 227
outological value of the divine predicates and attributes is
little else than an interpretation of what man finds to be true
respecting his environment of things and of other selves, re-
garded as a dependent manifestation of God. Thus the dec-
laration that God is " omnipotent " amounts to the assump-
tion that all the forms of cosmic energy, known or conceivable,
must be regarded as dependent manifestations of the divine
power. To say that God is "omnipresent" signifies that,
everywhere in the world's space and time, as respects phenom-
ena observable by the senses or causes inferred to explain
these phenomena, God is manifested, then and there, by the
dependence of the world on Him. And he who intelligently
holds to the full value of the " omniscience " of God, must do
so by interpreting the orderly behavior, the rationality and
unity of this known complex of things and selves, as a depen-
dent manifestation of the self-conscious and planful mind of God.
The revelation of the ethical attributes of the Divine Being
requires indeed, a much more intricate and subtly profound
but genuine insight. But this revelation, also, is not made in
the form of a process of pure logic, or of an intuition unmixed
with the contents of an experience with actual things. The
revelation is an interpretation of experience.
This, then, is, essentially considered, what Theism means
when it represents the relations of God to natural objects and
to the race of men, under such figures of speech as are em-
bodied in the words Creator, Preserver, Moral Ruler, or Father
and Redeemer ; or in the terms Providence, Revelation, In-
spiration, etc. But these terms we have chosen — " Depen-
dence" and "Manifestation" — are themselves, of course, signifi-
cant only as they express classes of relations with which
man's universal experience makes him familiar. They are,
like all words, essentially anthropomorphic ; and like all words
which are employed to suggest the more profound, invisible
and spiritual experiences, their use has been transferred from
physical things to self-conscious and personal life. In this
228 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
transference they, therefore, carry along with them certain
sensuous limitations which are derived from their physical
uses. The escape from these limitations is a progressive affair,
a subject of development. Thus it means something different,
and much more, for a reflective monotheism than for an unre-
flective spiritism, to represent the relations of finite beings to
the invisible spiritual Power, in terms of a dependent mani-
festation.
Moreover, it must be confessed that neither of these two
words is exactly fitted to express in the best conceivable man-
ner what the philosophy of Theism means to teach respec-
ting the true and ontologically valid relations of the World to
God. For things and selves are not in precisely the same way
dependent upon the Divine Being ; much less are things and
selves in precisely the same way, or to the same degree, mani-
festations of this Being. And besides, the word " manifesta-
tion " is apt to be tainted with the notion of display. Too
often the term savors of the theatrical and the spasmodic.
For tliis reason, in part, religion prefers the term " revelation."
But this term also has been perverted by theology and
made to serve as the embodiment, either of distinctions be-
tween the natural and the supernatural which are not fortunate
and tenable in view of the facts, or else of obscurities arising
from the failure properly to distinguish things that are, in
fact, quite distinctly unlike.
The word '* manifestation," as applied to the entire relation
between the divine immanent activity in the world and the de-
velopment of man's religious belief and practice, also encounters
certain other difficulties peculiar to itself. These arise at the
different points at which the various agnostic, materialistic, or
pantheistic conceptions regarding this relation, part company
with the theistic argument. Such difficulties are illustrated
in a somewhat startling manner by all such tenets as that which
Mr. Herbert Sponcer proposed as the basis of reconciliation l)e-
tween religion and science : "The Power vvliich the Universe
THE THEISTIC POSITION 229
manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." For here " the Power "
is first regarded as something invisible and superhuman ; it is
superior and prior to, or else immanent in, the Universe, — i. e. in
the experienced system of interdependent beings and connected
changes, in the sum-total of the phenomena. But the Power
is then declared to be " manifested " in this Universe, in
this system as given to man in his actual experience. Now all
this is, indeed, precisely what the reflective religious conscious-
ness maintains. It is such a Power in which religion believes ;
and religion regards the Universe as a manifestation of this
Power. How, then, can the Power that is manife.^ted also be
utterly inscrutable ? But just here is where Theism refuses to
stop. It interprets the experienced world as a significant and
trustworthy manifestation of a Being of whom we may predi-
cate more than mere power. And if the word " manifestation "
is applicable at all to the interpretation of the relations between
the One active Power and the complex of phenomena called
the Universe, then we cannot stop in the application, at the
point of arrest assumed by the agnosticism of Mr. Spencer.
We must go either forward or backward ; we must be more
logical and thoroughgoing either in our denial or in our affirma-
tion. Either the Universe does not manifest the Absolute at
all, or else it manifests the Absolute as something more than
mere Power.
It becomes necessary, then, for religion, in order to com-
mend its faith to science and to philosophy, that it should ex-
plain more precisely in what manner it employs the concep-
tions of dependence and of manifestation in its various symbol-
ical ways of representing the relations of God and the World.
And here we are at once reminded of the differences which ex-
ist between the two interconnected but not identical fields of ex-
perience in which these relations display themselves. They are
Nature and human nature ; or the world of physical phenomena
and the Soul of man. In both these fields the primary interest
of religion is to support its own beliefs, to purify and minister
230 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
to its emotions, and to nourisli and improve its practical activ-
ities. Religion aims to interpret the world so that God may
thereby be the more truthfully apprehended and faithfully
loved, adored, and obeyed. This aim characterizes its adop-
tion and use of various figures of speech in its effort to ex-
press its doctrine of the relations between God and the World.
But the same aim requires various important distinctions to be
made between the way in which physical things and self-
conscious spirits depend upon, or manifest, the will and mind
of God. Thus, while the theistic position regards both things
and finite spirits as " dependent manifestations " of the Divine
Being, it does not regard both as manifesting this Being, or as
existing in dependence upon this Being, in the same way. On
the contrary, it makes an important distinction between the
two. With religion as a subjective affair, however, tlie reason
for the distinction is chiefly its regard for the feelings of value,
and for the practical interests essential to its very life and
growth. But the philosophy of religion must critically esti-
mate the distinction, and must determine, if possible, its val-
idity and its limitations in the light of modern science and re-
flective thinking.
It is at this point that Theism is most apt to come into con-
flict with some of the tenets wliich the positive sciences — es-
pecially those of the physical order — are maintaining as of uni-
versal applicability and absolute authority. Religion believes
that the World is one, and that this one world is all a de-
pendent manifestation of the One God. It designs, without
identifying the two, to establish some rational scheme of the
essential and permanent relations between them ; and this
scheme must 1x3 such as to secure, as far as possible, all the in-
tellectual and moral interests involved. But the feelings of
religion are hurt, its beliefs shaken, and its motives for practi-
cal activity weakened, when the unity of the world is stated in
terms only of a mochanism that embraces in its all-including
and nnrelaxing grasp, not only all physical existences, but
THE THEISTIC POSITION 231
the history and destin}'- of the souls of all men. Such a form
of materialism, or of materialistic pantheism, seems quite as
much a fell destroyer of all tlie confidences, hopes, and aspi-
rations, of the religious experience, as does the most complete
asrnosticism or dogfrnatic atheism. And should the Median-
ism itself be called divine, this would not serve to appease the
fears, or encourage the hopes, or fortify the faith, of the believer
in the verities of religion. A Power that manifests itself in
terms of pure mechanism only does not satisfy the convictions
on which the religious life of humanity is based.
One of the most interesting and suggestive evidences of the
present attitude toward each other, of theology and of the nat-
ural and physical sciences, is the way in which both have come
to regard that branch of religious apologetics which was de-
signed to harmonize their interests, and which was formerly
called " natural theology." The natural sciences have them-
selves been verging of late toward the conclusion, that their
former conceptions of the world as a closed mechanical system
were quite too crude and inadequate ; in order to fit all the
phenomena, they must be largely modified or wholly abandoned.
To this conclusion the biological discoveries, and the enor-
mously finer analyses, — chemical, microscopic, and theoretico-
physical — of the elements of both organic and inorganic exis-
tences, have forced open the way. Into this opening way there
would seem to be a demand made upon the philosophy of reli-
gion that it should boldly and hopefully enter. This wonderful
new world — so vastly richer, so infinitely more complex and
mysterious in its operations, so much more alive, and even
throbbing with life, in every germ, and cell, and atom, and cor-
puscle, than was the world as known to science only a brief
century ago — is still none the less, but all the more, God's
world. God has not been driven out of Nature ; neither has
a merely mechanical Nature been substituted for a living God.
But meantime theology, frightened and beaten away from the
older forms of its dogmas with respect to the natural and the
232 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
supernatural, revelation and miracle, etc., has been weakening
its claims to find in cosmic existences and cosmic processes any
evidence of an immanent Spiritual Life. With this has come
a period of comparative silence about religion's right to regard
the world, throughout, as a dependent manifestation of God.
But having failed — as was reasonable — to effect a complete
reconciliation on the agnostic basis of a confession that the
Power which both acknowledge to be manifested in the Uni-
verse is " utterly inscrutable," science and theology have be-
come more disposed, for the time, to leave each other unmo-
lested in their respective spheres of labor. Hence the decay of
so-called " natural theology," — and the conclusion of writers
like Macaulay : " Natural theology is not a progressive sci-
ence. . . . But neither is revealed religion of the nature of a
progressive science."
No reconciliation of science and theology by way of indif-
ference to each other's interests, no truce which follows a tacit
agreement not to use each other's ideas or to talk in each
other's terms, can be of long endurance. Such an arrange-
ment is in its very nature destined to fall asunder through the
pressure of forces inherent in the very being, and persistent
throughout the entire history of this long-standing controversy.
Both science and religion inevitably lead the mind toward
the problems of " natural theology." Td shirk them is to
cease to think ; — and this, just at the point where thinking
becomes most imperative and most fascinating. The problems
are ever new and always changing ; the problem is always the
same old and unchanging problem. For to correlate God and the
World is phllosophi/ 8 fundamentalinquirij and supreme interest.
Man gets the data for both his science and his religion out of
one and the same Cosmos, or " Nature," in the most inclusive
meaning of this word. And the scientific and religious de-
velopments are both the outflow of one and the same nature
of man. These are, to be sure, two not precisely identical
lines of actual experience ; for Universal Nature has two
THE THEISTIC POSITION 233
sides ; the one which appeals to the scientific instincts and
interests, and the other wliich appeals to the religious instincts
and interests. It is, then, in accordance with the constitution,
both of the nature of man and of that larger nature in which
man " lives, and moves, and has his being," that the terms,
whether of peace or of strife, between science and theology,
must be settled by his own reflective thinking upon his own
total experience. In fact, the natural sciences, whenever free
rein is given to reflection upon their principles and their con-
clusions, inevitably lead up to theology ; and theology inevi-
tably results from the attempt to give scientific form to the con-
tent of religious faith as touching that Reality which is revealed
in the relations and interactions of finite things and finite selves.
From both points of starting, then, the experience of humanity
leads straight on to the problems of " natural theology."
And whenever the proper stage of intellectual advance has
been reached by any portion of the human race, an absorbing
interest of reflective thinking in the problems of natural the-
ology is sure to appear. This is true of the conception of the
ancient Chinese religious philosophy answering to T'ien or
Shang-Ti ; although this conception does not indicate, any
more than do the similar conceptions of the older Greek philos-
ophy, a distinct separation between the sensuous and the
spiritual. T'ien, or Heaven, is Shang-Ti or " Great Ruler,"
over both physical and spiritual things and relations. It is
thus the object of both scientific and religious interest and in-
quiry. Its nature is also a matter of practical importance ; for
" It " is represented as punishing the bad and rewarding the
good, — a Power that makes for righteousness, a physical
Reality, which is at the same time an Ethical Spirit. The
attempts of the Vedantic philosophy, also, to represent the
Divine Being in right relations with its several manifestations
in the one world ran, in some sort, parallel with tlie early cos-
mogonies of the Greeks. Thus in the Bhagavadgita ^ Aruna
1 See Sacred Books of the East, VIII. p. 96/.
234 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
addresses the " high-souled One " as " first cause," " infinite
lord of gods," "pervading the universe ;" and also as "wind,
Yama, fire, the moon, Pragapati, and the great grandsire."
It is, then, of essential interest to religious faith that philos-
ophy should vindicate the truthfulness and ontological value
of its rational conviction that the World is indeed a dependent
manifestation of God. On the one hand, this postulate affirms :
" God latent in nature is the tacit fundamental postulate of the
faith which is the foundation of natural science." ^ On the
other hand, the postulate of religion affirms : God manifest
in nature is the perfect Ethical Spirit to whom humanity looks
up, and upon whom the human heart reposes in confidence
and love. And what is true of the Whole is true of every
part of this Whole. The " scientific trust " in the evolution
of the " universal cosmic order " is, for the purpose of reli-
gious belief, elevated into, and absorbed in, the " religious trust"
in a " providential activity forever at work throughout the
evolving universe." To represent tlie two forms of trust as
antithetic and the two conceptions of the relations of God and
the World as irreconcilably antagonistic, is to make impossible
a rational view of our total experience. For the thinker it is
to expose himself to the sarcasm which Spinoza directs against
all those who deny the Divine Immanence in the World: "They
suppose that God is doing nothing, so long as nature is moving
on in the accustomed order ; and, on the other hand, that the
powers of nature and natural causes are idle whenever God is
acting by interference with nature. They imagine, therefore,
two powers, distinct from each other — to wit, the power of
God and the power of natural things. . . . But what they
mean by nature^ and what by God^ they know not."
This theistic position, which regards the cosmic existences
and processes — The World, or Nature taken in a larger sense
— as a dependent manifestation of God, is eitlier wholly nega-
tived or largely invalidated by various scientific and philosoph-
> So Fraser, Philosophy of Theism, p. 137.
THE THEISTIC POSITION 235
ical theories. So different are the points of view held by
these theories, and so almost imperceptible the various diver-
gencies upon minor considerations under the one great prob-
lem, that any rigid classification could not be made to fit the
facts. Different degrees of agnosticism, for example, with its
accompaniment of different forms of positivism, reach upward
through one sort of materialism to a kind of Deism ; and
through another sort of materialism, they terminate in a more
or less spiritual Pantheism. Thus it comes about that the ap-
plication of the general theistic tenet to the satisfaction of
those religious beliefs and practical activities which respond
to the doctrines of creation, preservation, moral government,
providence, and redemption through revelation and inspiration,
finds itself at times traveling along the borders of deistical
and pantheistic tenets, and coming so near to them that it is
easy to clasp hands and journey together for a certain distance
in a common direction. But names should count for little
here. And he who accepts the view of Theism in its integrity,
and carries it out with consistency, must be prepared to be
called a variety of names, however inconsistent, or even anti-
thetic, those names may really be. The main positions which
he is obliged either tacitly to reject or openly to antagonize
are of two kinds. One of these is Atheism as a vjrtual denial
that the World is any sort of a manifestation of God. The
other is Pantheism as a virtual denial of the theistic position,
by an identification of the World with God. But both the
theistic and the pantheistic view of the relations of the World
and God may involve a conception which is essentially materi-
alistic, because it regards the sum-total of cosmic existences
and cosmic processes as self-explanatory in terms of the physi-
cal and natural sciences ; — and so " without God." Here
again, however, the necessity for further examination and defi-
nition begins. For before one can explain experience either
"without nature " or " without God," one must know what
one "means by nature^ and what by God."
236 PHILOSOPHY OF RP:LIGI0N
The positions which it is necessary to review in a preliminary
and somewhat polemical way, before undertaking the detailed
examination of the theistic view, may, therefore, be classified
under two heads : They are, as to the relations of God and the
World, (1) atheistic denial, and (2) pantheistic identification.
With one of these two positions a philosophical Theism is
compelled to enter upon a life-and-death struggle. With the
other, its first effort is to come to an understanding ; and in
this effort further definition of terms and mutual exchange of
explanations serves, not infrequently, to mitigate, and even
largely to abolish, the spirit of strife. For the theistic position
with reference to the relations of God and finite beings is taken
in tJie interests of securing a rational faith in the Object of
religion as perfect Ethical Spirit ; and of supporting and en-
couraging that life of filial piety on man's part in which sub-
jective religion essentially consists. For the accomplishment
of this end, our reflective thinking finds it quite as necessary
to maintain the Divine immanence in the World, as the Divine
transcendency of the World ; — quite as important to realize in
practical ways the union of man with God, as to emphasize his
separation and his need of redemption in order to effect this
union. In the effort to accomplish this reconcilement, the
student of the philosophy of religion cannot afford to be
frightened by words.
CHAPTER XXXVI
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM
Of logically consistent and dogmatic denial of the reality of
some Being corresponding, in part at least, to the theistic con-
ception of God, there is little or none to be found in evidence
at the present time. In view of this fact it is even customary
to say that, strictly speaking, Atheism has no advocates left
among the classes given to scientific culture or philosophical
reflection. But of A-theistic views respecting the relations be-
tween the Ultimate Reality and the world of things and selves
as known in human experience, there is now an unusual abun-
dance of intelligent, sincere, and skillful advocates. A philoso-
phy of religion which thinks to show how Theism is tenable in
the light of modern science and reflective thinking cannot,
therefore, afford to pass by in silence the virtual denials of its
point of view and of its conclusions. And while these antithetic
positions may perhaps best be quietly displaced or transcended,
as the different doctrines of religion regarding God's relations
to the World are critically examined, a brief survey of them
is in place here.
Atheistic denial of the truth that the World is, in reality, a
dependent manifestation of God, may take either the form of
a certain kind of Agnosticism or of a certain kind of Material-
ism. In speaking of the agnostic denial of the theistic position
in this connection, the term " agnosticism " must be employed
in a qualified way. Of absolute and logically consistent agnos-
ticism the philosophy of religion can, of course, take no account
whatever. Its conflict with this form of negation must begin,
238 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and end, before philosophy can establish its right to deal with
the theistic problem. And in the possession and exercise of
its right, this branch of philosophy has no particular advantage
or disadvantage. For the denial of thorough-going agnosticism
goes to the extent of holding that neither science, nor philoso-
phy, nor religious faith, can achieve any knowledge of reality,
— ^least of all, any defensible and systematic knowledge of so-
called " Ultimate Reality." The agnosticism of which we are
now speaking, however, admits that the world, as somewhat
more than can properly be meant by " appearance " or " phe-
nomena,"' really is, and even that we may know something
true about what it really is. Indeed, many of the agnostics of
this stamp proclaim with confidence elaborate systems of a
high-and-dry metaphysical sort, touching what science most as-
suredly knows as to the constitution and the history of a " really
real " world, both of things and of selves. On the other hand,
it is claimed that neither through science, nor in any other
way, can man reach the knowledge of how God, if there be any
God, stands related to the world.
Curiously enough, this agnostic denial of the position of
Theism, has frequently been advocated in the supposed inter-
ests of religious faith, as well as of scientific certitude. This
fact is stated in somewhat startling language by Professor
Flint : ' " The two forms of agnosticism which directly refer
to God and religion are the theistic and antitheistic, the re-
ligious and anti-religious." Both deny that through the knowl-
edge of the world's existences, forces, and laws, regarded as a
dependent manifestation of God, man can reach any science or
rational justification of the contents of religious faith. But
the one affirms, and the other denies, the trustworthiness and
ontological value of this faitli itself. The one would substitute
faith for all attempts at science, — accepting the content of faith
on authority, or by way of influence from unreasoned feeling
or from valual)le practical interest. The otlier form of agnos-
i Agnosticism, p. 423.
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 239
ticisra would reject religious faith, because it finds no scientifi-
cally defensible content in this faith ; it would refuse, in the
name of science, to be influenced by religious feeling or by the
practical interests of religion, in the pursuit of scientific truth.
Both forms of agnosticism exist to-day, largely as the historical
results of that natural and inevitable reaction against the
excessive dogmatism of the metaphysical theology current in
the Mediaeval and post-Reformation eras, which came to its
masterpiece of constructive thinking in the Kantian criticism ;
and which has been disintegrating this theology ever since the
time of Kant.
The arguments against agnosticism, whether " religious " or
"anti-religious," are no other than all those considerations,
both of an historical and of a psychological and philosophical
sort, upon which the philosophy of religion relies in rendering
its account of the ways in which God has actually been mani-
fested to the religious consciousness of man. In a word, the
complete argument is the total religious experience of the race.
This experience is an actual making of God known, in and
through the world of things and selves ; this is what the ex-
perience definitively and essentially is. And the larger and the
richer this ever expanding and growing experience becomes,
the greater and surer is that knowledge of God which is mani-
fested in and through the world. To treat this race-experience
in agnostic fashion is to do it an indignity ; it is also to do an
injustice and a mischief to the reason of the agnostic himself.
There is no higher knowledge for man than that which comes
in just this way. The knowledge of the divine relations to
the world of things and of souls, like all other knowledge, is
nb outgrowth of abstract reasoning alone ; it depends upon
the careful observation and skillful interpretation of actual
life in its environment of reality. Neither the faiths of religion
nor the faiths of science spring up and grow in the soul of man,
cut off from its physical and social environment. iNIoreover,
the fact that the influence of ethical and aesthetical feelings and
240 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ideals is so powerful, not only in urging, but also in the justi-
fication and defence of the faith of religion, is no reason for
assuming the agnostic position toward this faith. This fact,
indeed, constitutes a valid reason for the opposite attitude of
mind.
It is well at this point to refer again ^ to the conception of
religious faith which is implied in the theistic position as anti-
thetic to the agnostic and atheistic denial. " Faith,''^ in order
to be anything more than vague feeling or untrustworthy cre-
dulity,— in order, that is, to be faith for beings that reason and
that find themselves in a world which may be known, in part
at least, as a rational affair, must have some content of truth
in charge. " Having a content of truth " implies a source of
the particular faith, which must be sought somewhere in the
experience of a rational being, and which must be established
by some sort of rational judgments. Only reason can issue,
and only reason can receive, a " content of truth." Now with
the greater world-religions, and especially with Christianity,
the very claim to be worthy of universal acceptance is an ap-
peal to the court of human reason as a judge of the content
of trutli held by their faith. With all such religions a " rea-
soned faith " is the only kind of faith which can abide.
Religions which make a claim to universality are, therefore,
constantly called upon to adjust their beliefs to the truths which
have become established in the name of science and philosophy.
But the postulate of every science, which is not flippantly ag-
nostic, is that it furnishes an essentially true, though very par-
tial and limited, knowledge of the real existences, and actual re-
lations and changes, of the World ; and the postulate of religious
faith is that this World is God's World, is a dependent manifes-
tation— though as yet a very partial and limited manifestation —
of the real Being of God. However, the world of science, and
the world of religion, is one and the same World. For science
to deny the truth of religion, as given in tlie content of its faith,
»Comp. Vol. I, p. 493/.
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 241
is to rule out one most important aspect of human experience
that is contributory to a knowledge of the essential nature of
things and of selves. And for religion to deny the truth of sci-
ence is, so far forth, to be unfaithful to the fundamental postu-
late of religion, which is that this essential nature of things
and of selves is a dependent manifestation of God. The one
form of denial mutilates man's experience ; the other narrows
and debases the conception of God. In both science and reli-
gion, faith and reason, reasoned faith and fidelity to the in-
sights and ideas of value which are an essential part of reason,
go hand in hand.
The religious experience of humanity demands an attempt
to form a rational system of the relations existing between the
Divine Being and the World as a dependent manifestation of
this Being. The complete theoretical refutation of the essen-
tially negative position toward this attempt — whether " reli-
gious " or " anti-religious " agnosticism — requires from its advo-
cates a thorough readjustment of their opinions on the most
fundamental problems of philosophy, both epistemological and
metaphysical. The theory of knowledge held by agnostic
atheism is uniformly one-sided and partial. In its current
form, its roots lie in the soil of the negative results of the Kant-
ian criticism. But the most important outcome of this criti-
cism, in the view of its author, was the conclusion that, while
the knowledge of the World as an independent reality is no less
impossible than is the knowledge of God as the Absolute, man
does attain, through the immediately given and indubitable
datum of the moral law, a rational faith in the realities of morals
and religion which transcends the irremovable limits fixed for
the physical and natural sciences. In a word, by the aid of
ethico-religious reason the mind escapes the bounds set to its
knowledge of the world by use of intellect and speculative
reason. Faith thus reaches knowledge of the Ultimate Reality;
while science can only arrange in logical but " objective " con-
nections the otherwise disparate elements of phenomenal reality.
16
242 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
But a truer than the Kantian theory of knowledge shows us
that the fundamental postulates, permanent convictions, and
supreme conclusions, of both science and religion are essentially-
equal, so far as their claim to represent truthfully the real
Being of the World is concerned. All human knowledge is,
indeed, "anthropomorphic," partial, subject to admixture of
error, and an affair of development ; but the completer systema-
tizing of its various elements in the cognitive evolution of the
race cannot safely neglect any of the permanent aspects of hu-
man experience, whether these aspects seem at first most prop-
erly to be arranged under the title of " science " or under the
title of " religion " ; or whether — which is most often the case
— they admit of being regarded from both the scientific and the
religious points of view.'
It follows, in logical consistency, that before this kind of
atheistic denial of the possibility that the world should reveal
the true Being of God, religious faith does not stand or fall
alone. If its assault upon the position of Theism is success-
ful, all claim to what men universally understand by knowl-
edge falls into ruin. Knowledge so-called — whether scientific
or religious, and whether or not its character inclines us to
speak of its constituents as properly called only a " reason-
able belief " — becomes a merely logical co-ordination of phe-
nomena. It tells, neither to the scientific observer nor to the
religious believer, anything whatever about the real Being of
the World.
The other form of atheistic denial which Theism encounters
at the present time is still, in spite of all protests, most prop-
erly to be denominated " materialistic ; " and this, even if it
falls short of a systematic and self-consistent Materialism.
This position has so far transcended that of a positive agnosti-
cism as to affirm a certain knowledge of wluit the world, as a
vast coinplf^x of interrelated things and selves, essentially is.
' For the elaboration of these positions, see the author's Philosophy of
Knowledge (pasitim).
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 243
It is ; but It needs no God to explain what It is. This com-
plex of cosmic existences and events, as it is given to man in
experience, is self -explicable ; it requires no postulate of a
Being on whose Will it is dependent, or whose self-conscious
Life it reveals through the evidences of a teleology immanent
in it. And if one asks for some term under which one may
most conveniently summarize the essential characteristics of
such a world, one is invited to discard all words that sound
like echoes from the conception of Selfhood; and to substitute
for them such words as "Nature," or "Mechanism," or the
like. For atheism in this form the "World is simply a self-
contained, closed, and in itself complete Mechanism.
It is easy to show, however, that the conception of " Mechan-
ism " is quite as anthropomorphic as the crudest conception of
Deity ; it is also much more meagre in content, and much
less effective as a summary of our total experience than is the
most refined and philosophical, as well as deeply religious, con-
ception of God. The monstrous character of the proposal to
regard the whole system (?j of things and selves as mere mechan-
ism, can only be estimated when the mind has forced itself to
think the proposal through, without swerving a hair's breadth
from the strictest logical fidelity to its theory. Then one comes
to sympathize warmly with the declaration of Voltaire : " One
must have lost all sound human understanding to believe that
the mere movement of matter is sufficient to call into existence
feeling and thinking beings." The more modern form of this
theory, however, cannot be dismissed in any such off-hand
manner as that employed by the French thinker. For its con-
ception of " matter," and of " the movement of matter," is by
no means the same as that which prevailed in Voltaire's time.
What needs to be shown, therefore, is precisely this : Jmt as
far as the conception of Mechanism is modified and extended so
as to serve the l>etter as a principle under which to arrange our
total experience^ just so far is it made to iticlude more of the very
elements ivhich legitimately constitute the conception of God. In
244 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
a word consistent 3IateriaUsm turns out to he incipient Spiritual-
ism. Atheism inevitably uses veiled terms, and misinterpre-
ted figures of speech, to precisely the same extent to which it
succeeds at all in presenting a tenable conception of the Being
of the World. The truth of this statement is made perfectly
clear by a critical examination of the assumptions wliich are
absolutely essential to the conception of Mechanism as an ex-
planatory Principle.
Any complete and consistent conception of mechanism must
begin with the assumption of an infinitely great number of
elements, distributed in no planful way in a self-existent space,
and having an enormously complex endowment of capacities,
or inherent selective forces, which fit them for the inconceiv-
ably intricate actions and reactions that are necessary to enable
them to play their several parts in the building of the struc-
ture of the one World. Until very recently these elements,
have been called "atoms;" and the business of the phj^sico-
chemical sciences has been to discover their irreducible kinds,
the conditions under which each kind enters into definite rela-
tions with the other kinds, and the resulting properties of the
masses which are composed of aggregations of these atoms. But
who that reflects does not see at once what sort of a mental
picture is this, to which the reality of the so-called atom is
supposed to correspond ? Each atom is somehow able to thread
its way amidst the world of change ; it is always entering into
more or less new relations, with an accuracy and promptness
which cannot be born of usage or of experience ; and it invari-
ably returns to its old and tried relations, whenever the proper
opportunity is offered for it to show in this way what its essen-
tial nature, as an atom, really is. Now science is em^jirieal.
The terms, tlierefore, in which all this facile ability and varied
but legally constituted life of the atom is expressed, must be
derived from experience. But ''experience" itself must be
understood in the broadest and most genial way ; and the only
experience which can clear up tlie behavior of these atoms is
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 245
that of a self-active being, or will, behaving itself teleologically,
or according to immanent ideas, in varying relations to other
beings of various so-called " classes " or " kinds. '^ That is to
say, the atom must be conceived of, if at all, as behaving like a
will in society.
Modern science, however, is of late discovering that the
chemical conception of a material atom, even with all its enor-
mous complexity, is quite insufficient to explain our experience
with things. Accordingly it seems necessary to supplement the
atomic theory of ordinary matter with the assumption that this
matter, which has mass, is everywhere interpenetrated with a
yet more mysterious and incomprehensible entity ; and to this
entity, on account of its extremely tenuous and subtile charac-
ter, the name of " ether " seems most appropriate. This branch,
or arm, of the universal mechanism, so to say, must now take
upon itself the more spirit-like (.s/c) actions and reactions for
which its older-born and more grossly constituted companion
seems inadequate. But just now the conception of both atom
and ether is being raised, it would almost seem, to the nth
power of both teleological constitution and efficiency, and also
of incomprehensibility. For what appears to sense-experience
as ordinary enough matter turns out to have, hitherto con-
cealed, the most ea:traordinary and even astounding properties.
The number of so-called "radio-active" substances is on the
increase ; and he would be a bold prophet who should venture
confidently to predict where the increase will stop. At the
same time, and in consequence largely of the same discoveries,
the scientific view of the nature and constitution of the now
old-fashioned atom is undergoing a rapid change. What the
plain man's perceptive consciousness assures him is only just
common kind of " stuff," incapable of self-movement or of the
realization of immanent purposes, and only made — whether by
nature or by God, it matters not — for man's convenient use,
now appears to be all alive with profoundly ra3^sterious and
quite inexplicable self-active qualities. To its core, ever}^ Thing
246 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
is more than mere thing ; through and through it is penetrated
with the semblances of a planful life.
All this experience undoubtedly gives warrant to renewed at-
tempts to bridge the gaps, and to break down or over the bar-
riers that have been acknowledged to exist hitherto within the
world's mechanism itself. Very naturally and properly, too,
this attempt takes in modern times the same form which it
took in antiquity ; — that is to say, science tries to account for
the Unity in terms of greater simplicity. Hence the infinitely
varied real elements which, by their combination and recom-
bination, form the mechanism of the world, are reduced to
the smallest number possible ; the kinds of energy which
operate in and through these elements are considered as species
of One Force ; the existing relations between them are stated
in general formulas of a mathematical order ; and they them-
selves are figuratively represented as possibly all belonging to
one essentially identical type. Thus the appearance of simplic-
ity is produced ; thus the real, but infinitely varied Unity,
of the World is explained in terms of a purely mechanical
system.
Far be it from us to scoff at science for its failure to ex-
plain experience in terms of mere mechanism. Its attempts
are perfectly justifiable in deference to its own rights, its aims
and its estimate of values. But when the resulting theoretical
construction of Reality is assigned the place of an ultimate ex-
planatory Principle, its failure to explain is conspicuous
throughout. Tlie appearance of simplicity is only specious ;
the forms of energy remain as truly varied and characteristic
as before. The actual relations are found to be much too com-
plicated and constantly shifting to admit of a satisfactory ex-
pression in any mathematical formulas ; ami the elements of
reality themselves are only the symbols of beings that are
packed full of a yet more profoundly mysterious and indefi-
nitely varied outfit of original qualities and capacities.
All this entrancing picture which modern science furnishes
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 247
of a cosmic mechanism, that is self-explanatory and able to
represent the final truth which man may know concerning the
real Being of the World, comes far short of meeting the ra-
tional demands made by the larger and more vitally interest-
ing part of human experience. For this part is an experience
of life, and growth ; — of life in every form of that comprehen-
sive word, and of growth which pervades the entire mechan-
ism and compels us to consider it all under the conception of
deveiojyment. The Being of the World is confessedly not a
fixed and unchanging piece of mechanism — however compli-
cated and mysterious. Its explanatory principle cannot be
unfolded in any adequate way by considering the condition,
relations, and interactions, of the mechanism at any one brief
momei»,t of time. The mechanism, which is the world, has a
life-hisxory ; it has grown from a condition conceived of as
more primitive, toward a condition which must be thought of
as in sone sense furnishing a goal. But this growth of the
mechanistn, which is the evolution of the World as known in
the totality of human experience, is only the aggregate of an
infinite nimber of interrelated individual growths. Out of
itself must this mechanical whole produce all manner of liv-
ing individual existences, each one of which in some obvious
or mysteriois way partakes of the disposition and the power
to aid in the development of the whole.
And now the mind is thrown violently back upon the original
proposal of tie materialistic denial of that tenet of religious
philosophy wlich regards the World as a dependent manifes-
tation of God This proposal was to furnish such a concep-
tion of the elements which combine to form the mechanism,
that they shall somehow contain in themselves, as elements^ the
satisfactory actount of all the cosmic existences and cosmic
processes. It is, indeed, a very common opinion, that the mod-
ern theory of evolution greatly assists both the negative and
the positive conclusions of materialism. But the very oppo-
site is true, as vill be shown more in detail further on. For,
248 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
in one word, a self-evolving Mechanism, composed of elements
which contain within themselves the potentiality of will and
reason in a form necessary to accomplish such a life-history
for themselves, is a conception vastly more difficult than any
which the philosophy of religion has ever invited the mind of
man to entertain. A Demiurge, an Atman or World-Soul, a
Personal Absolute, — to conceive of either of these is a trifling
task as compared with that demanded by a purely mechaiiical
theory of evolution. From the demands of this theory tlie re-
bound toward the midnight of a complete agnosticism, g total
distrust of both science and religious faith, seems inevitable.
Further examination of the view which would substitute
the conception of mechanism for the theistic position intro-
duces in exaggerated form the difficulty of filling in the so-
called " gaps." In spite of the increased refinement and po-
tency which has been given to this conception by the most
recent discoveries of chemistry, molecular physics, and biology,
it seems little better able than before to handle any of the
higher forms of living beings, their reactions, and their ex-
periences. The actual world contains innumerable existences
which not only move in ways to correspond with tie complex
natural endowments of atoms and of the ether, but which live,
in the sense of feeling, thinking and planning. Of these liv-
ing beings some are human ; and they are profcundly influ-
enced by ethical and a)sthetical sentiments. Of these human
beings, multitudes l>elieve in God and regard themselves as
somehow under the influence of invisible spiritual agencies.
When life begins amidst the physical mechanise ; when sensa-
tion and feeling first emerge from the concoirse of atoms ;
when man commences to think logically and to nake ontolog-
ical assumptions and postulates ; when moral jvid artistic sen-
timents and ideals sliow their alluring and ins;)iring forms to
the upturned face of humanity ; when invisl)le but super-
human powers are almost f(;lt as the environmeit of the visible
and the human ; or wlion One Infinite, Absolite, and perfect
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 249
Ethical Spirit appears as the all-encompassing and all- vivifying
Power ; then the elements of phj'sical reality, as conceived of
in terms of a consistent and pure mechanism, are indeed hard
pressed by the inquirer for an explanation of the phenomena.
And here, as everywhere, it is not the principle of continuity,
or the conceptions of unity and order that are at stake in the
controversy. The problem is, the rather, whether the actually
existing continuity, unity, and order, can be at all satisfactorily
explained in terms of a mechanical theory. It is not at the
" gaps " alone that the conception of mechanism breaks utterly
down. But it is at the gaps that its utter break-down and
inability throughout becomes most obvious and conspicu-
ous.^
The philosophy of religion is in search of some theory of the
relations between the World, as known by ordinary or scientifi-
cally construed experience, and the Object of religious faith.
The hypothesis of materialism not only fails to account for
man's religious life and development, but it distinctly shocks
and discredits the religious convictions, sentiments, and ideals.
Certainly, on the one hand, these convictions, sentiments, and
ideals, must adapt themselves to the truth about the cosmic
existences and events as this truth is made known more com-
pletely by the advances of science and philosophy. On the
other hand, religion is a fact, and it is a very stubborn and
persistent fact. It therefore is perpetually asking science to ex-
plain it to itself ; to admit somehow into the circle of important
scientific considerations the evidences for the beliefs, sentiments,
1 It seems to us that all this may be felt very keenly, on reflecting upon
the phenomena of the formation of the living ceU, or the behavior of the im-
pregnated ovum. Each such cell is, somehow, a center of definitely selec-
tive and planful processes, although composed of a vast number of atomic
elements. Each such ovum starts a process of evolution, which is so intri-
cately and yet definitely a movement toward a goal under the control of an
immanent idea, that the part which science can assign to the known phys-
ical and chemical properties of the atoms as compared with the part con-
spicuously played by the control of this idea, is relatively insignificant.
250 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and cult of religion. The question, then, keeps recurring,
whether both science and religion may not be true and faithful
to reality, in holding their respective views of the world. To
answer this question satisfactorily to both, it would appear
necessary that science, on the one hand, should greatly modify
its conception of the world as mere mechanism ; and that reli-
gion, on the other hand, should adapt its conceptions of God
to the demands of scientific truth, so far as such truth is
statable in terms of mechoiism. Now this is precisely the
problem which is essayed by the theistic doctrine of the rela-
tions actually existing between God and the World. Science
must suffer no other restrictions to its theory of mechanism
than such as are put upon it, in fact, by the cosmic existences
and processes themselves ; and religion must suffer no other
shock or damage to its convictions, sentiments, and ideals
than that wliich comes to ignorance or to bigotry, when the call
is sounded for a reexamination of the evidence for such con-
victions, sentiments, and ideals.
The extremity of materialistic atheism is reached in the dec-
lamtion that all natural phenomena, including plant-life and
all human consciousness, are reducible solely to terms of
atomic mechanism. But this extreme, although sometimes
reached by a sudden leap from certain premises in fact to a
general conclusion, is seldom or never held and applied with
strict logical consistency. In fact, as everyone acquainted
with the most patent limitations of science knows, very few
natural phenomena are wholly " reducible to atomic mechan-
ism." Many, even of the chemical phenomena themselves,
have as yet persistently refused to submit to such reduction ;
and it is in chemistry, with its wonderful advances, that sucli
terms are most strictly applicable. In plant-life, not only as
the life of an organism, but even as the life of the single cell,
atomic mechanism has as yet succeeded in affording almost no
explanation of the phenomena. And the very proposal to
reduce human consciousness to an atf)mic mechanism involves
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 251
the imagination in illusory figures of speech, that are not only
unscientific, but for the most part prejudicial to the true inter-
ests of scientific explanation. Only he who has quite failed
to possess the simplest elements of an accurate conception of
the nature of man's conscious life, can think of speaking of it
in terms of a merely molecular or atomic mechanism. And in
all these cases criticism quite invariably shows that, after all,
not so much is really meant as is actually said.
Pantheism has its origin in a much more profound and even
deeply religious view of the world, and of the relations which
its varied finite existences and transactions sustain to the great
Whole. The feelings which contribute to excite and to sup-
port the pantheistic view are vague, but legitimate and power-
ful ; they are chiefly these two : The feeling of the unity of
the world, both of things and of selves, and the feeling of the
mystery of the world. It is for this reason that the more re-
flective forms of Pantheism arise in reaction against an extreme
form of dualism (like that, for example of John Stuart Mill),
which posits a good but not omnipotent and absolute Deity in
only a limited control of the world ;^ or, the rather, in reactions
against the conceptions of a Deism that aims to banish the
feeling of mystery by presenting to the intellect precise and
apparently final definitions of God. The same reasons account
for the fact that a certain form of Theism — that, for example,
advocated by Schleiermacher who reduced religion itself so
completely to a vague and mystical feeling of dependence upon
the Unity of the World — so easily becomes almost or quite in-
distinguishable from certain pantheistic views.
The fundamental difference between the pantheistic and the
theistic positions concerns the work of reason in representing
to itself the nature of the relations which exist, in fact, between
the system of finite things and selves and the Object of religious
faith. — that is, between the World and God. As applied to
1 Compare the remarks in A. Domer's Gnmdriss der Religionsphilosophie,
p. 124/.
252 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the religious experience of man, the question becomes : Does
the World, conceived of as a totality, account for the origin
and development of self-conscious ethical spirits, who pureue
an Ideal of a spiritual order and attribute to it a supreme
worth ; or must this world itself be conceived of as having its
Ground, and the Law and Goal of its evolution, in an Abso-
lute Ethical Spirit? To this question, Pantheism replies by a
theory of identification ; Theism answers with the conception
of dependent manifestation, or revelation.
As soon, however, as the pantheistic theory begins to explain
in detail what it means by identifying the World and God,
it is apt to introduce distinctions which profoundly modify, or
perhaps completely destroy, its own doctrine of identification.
As soon, on the other hand, as the theistic conception begins so
to enlarge itself, and to abandon the enormous limitations and
errors of a quite untenable dualism, it, too, seems compelled
to modify, by extending, the conception of " dependent mani-
festation." Thus certain very significant approaches of the two
views — the pantheistic and the theistic — are certain to show
themselves in all the contending answers to the difficult prob-
lem : How shall the relations of the World to God be so con-
ceived of as, on the one hand, to satisfy the postulates and con-
clusions of science and philosophy, and, on the other hand, to
do Justice to the convictions, sentiments, ideals, and practical
life of religion ?
Certain forms of the identification of the World and God
might quite as well be called atheism, or atheistic agnosticism,
as pantheism. This is true of much of the doctrine of philo-
sophic Hinduism, — especially as taught in parts, at least, of the
Upanishads, wliere it is affirmed that the true nature of Deity
can be known onl}' by negations. " There is a visible and in-
visible Brahma ; " but the real Brahma is incomprehensible and
is described only by a series of universal denials. So, also,
to identify the world, considered as a lump-sum of finite ex-
istences and after all reality of the human soul has been de-
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 253
nied, with God — as certain forms of Buddhistic theory have
done — is not to be distinguished in any important respect from
an atheistic materialism.'
In the strictest sense of the words, all identification of the
World and God is atheistic. The world, as we are now using
the term, is the sum-total of the finite existences, physical and
psychical, of which man has experience. To say that this is
God, and then to refuse to explain either subject, predicate, or
copula, — that is, to make the judgment one of identification in
the simplest and most absolute form possible — is equivalent to
denying the Being of God, in any meaning of the word God
which the religious experience can tolerate, or of which the
doctrines of religion can make use. Even the most ignorant
fetish- worshipper, or worshipper of some relatively insignificant
and transitory natural phenomenon, knows better than this.
The fetish or the phenomenon is not identified with what he
worships. For he himself is a spirit ; and he at least dimly
knows that his god is a spirit, too.
But even after the exclusion of pantheistic atheism and ma-
terialism, philosophical criticism has the greatest difficulty in
fixing definitely the content of the conception to be included
under the word " Pantheism." For, as says Professor Flint : ^
" It has been so understood as to include the lowest atheism
and the highest theism — the materialism of Holbach and
Biichner, and the spiritualism of St. Paul and St. John."
" There is probably no pure pantheism." In tracing the way
in which the change from nai've polytheism to a more and more
reflective pantheism came about in India our attention is called
1 For example, we are told by the Mahajana of Japan that Buddha- tathata,
or Nature Absolute, is the essence of all things. Essence and Form were
originally combined and identical. Fire and water, from which so many
concrete existences apparently originate, were themselves originally not
differentiated. Indeed, Matter and Thought are one — are Buddha-tathata.
See Griffis, The Religions of Japan, p. 243.
2 Antitheistic Theories, p. 334.
254 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
to these historical facts : ' " The older divinities show one by-
one the transformation that they suffered at the hands of
theosophic thinkers. Before the establishment of a general
Father-god, and long before that of the pantheistic All-god,
the philosophical leaven was actively at work. . . . One reads
of the god's ' secret names,' of secrets in theology which are
not to be revealed, till at last the disguise is withdrawn, and
it is discovered that all the mystery of former generations has
been leading up to the declaration now made public : ' All the
gods are but names of the One.' " This declaration " Brahma
alone is " now becomes coupled with the declaration : " Every
thing else is illusion." " All these gods are but names of the
One ! " In itself considered, this way of representing the true
relation of the One to the many which had formerly been wor-
shipped as the true gods, is quite capable of being made to run
parallel with the teaching of the Apostle : " Whom ye ig-
norantly worship, him I make known to you."
All the greater religions, as they develop toward monothe-
istic views, under the influence of reflective thinking and of
the various forces that are constantly at work to produce a
more complete unification of human experience, feel themselves
impelled to admit certain important truths which the va-
rious forms of pantheism try to incorporate into their theory
of the identification of the World and God. The very predi-
cates and attributes of God, as a philosophical monotheism
conceives of Him, are dependent upon the recognition of these
trutljs. As we have already seen, for example, God is " om-
nipotent," can mean nothing less than that there is no form of
energy, physical or psycliical, that has not its source and
ground in the Divine Power. God is "omnipresent," can
mean nothing else than that there is nowhere in tlie world,
where God is not in the fullness of his Divhie Being ; all
" wheres " are equally his " wliereabouts ; " there is for Him
no " here," nor " tlur-re," which is exclusive of any other here or
1 See Hopkins, The Keliinions of India, p. 40/.
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 255
there. God is " omniscient," can mean nothing else than that
there is no existence or hapjjening outside of his cognitive
consciousness ; no movement or change in anything, no phase
of any animal or human consciousness, that escapes his univer-
sal co-conscious Mind. All these relations of dependence, and
all the manifestations of the Divine Being which these rela-
tions are, apply to the wliole World. Collectively and individ-
ually— with an " all " which is what the logicians are accus-
tomed to style the " universal " and, as well, the " distributive "
all — is it true that finite beings " live and move and have their
being " in God.
Those scriptures in which the Christian religion finds its
standard of doctrine regarding the relations of God and the
World, abound in declarations that arise from pantheistical
feelings and points of view. The pious soul, conscious of the
divine indwelling and favor, affirms : " If I ascend up into
heaven, thou art there ; if I make my bed in hell, behold thou
art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in
the uttermost parts of the earth, even there shall thy hand
lead me." Yahweh asks of himself, in confidence as to what
the answer must be : " Am I God at hand, saith the Lord,
and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places
that I shall not see him ? saith the Lord. Do not I fill heaven
and earth? saith the Lord." And when the consciousness of
the ethical perfection of this Divine One has reached the su-
preme heights, it is ready to declare : " Of Him, and through
Him, and to Him, are all things ; " and " He that dwelleth in
love, dwelleth in God, and God dwelleth in him." " Infinite
is the Buddha, infinite the doctrine, infinite the Order ; " but
" finite are creeping things, snakes, scorpions, centipedes, spi-
ders, lizards, mice ! ; " and yet " the good priest is in a sublime
state of friendliness to them all." In its underlying motif this
Buddhistic sentiment is not essentially unlike that of St.
Francis of Assisi's love of our " dear brethren " the birds ; or
the faith of Jesus in the divine care for the sparrow.
256 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The philosophical criticism of every form of Pantheism
must begin its work with an examination into what is really
meant by applying the concept of identification to the relations
of the World and God. Such an examination takes the mind
back to a problem in the theory of knowledge ; or in the appli-
cation of abstract logical categories to real beings and to
actual events. Logic was formerly accustomed to symbolize
the so-called principle of identity, as it was supposed to under-
lie and to limit, in a perfectly absolute way, all thinking and
knowing, by the abstract formula A is A ; ov A=A. But this
formula, even when taken as a mere abstraction, turns out not
to be true. A in the place of subject to any sentence cannot be
identical with, or precisely equal to, A in the place of pred-
icate. Nor can any conceivable meaning be given to the cop-
ula— whether this copula be the verb " is " or the sign " = "
unless some difference be recognized between the two terms
which it unites. The much profounder logic of the modern
mathematics has therefore come to afifirm that no relations can
be stated, as relations merely, and without specifying or defin-
ing what objects are thus related ; and that, between any two
real objects, there is always postulated at least one relation
which obtains between no other two knowable or conceivable
objects. We cannot even say, " I am I," without implying
an important difference between the " I " that is subject, and
the " I " that it predicates of itself ; and of which it somehow
affirms an essential and living unity with itself. For, really
to be «e//-identical is actually to live the life of a self-differen-
tiating and self-identifying being. And one moment of this life
is given to the finite Self whenever it knows itself as self-con-
scious and cognitive.
The attempt, therefore, to apply the category of Identity to
the relations existing between the Absolute and the sum-total
of cosmic existences and happenings is above all other attempts
of this sort, illogical and even absurd. And, indeed, tliis is
never what Pantheism, when it tries to take its terms out from
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISiM 257
behind the misty veil of feeling which envelops them, really
does. The World which it affirms to he God is never con-
ceived of as, in all its terms, precisely the same as God. The
affirmation, when strictly interpreted, turns out to be one of
relations and not of strict identification. And the relations es-
pecially apt to be selected for expounding the real meaning of
the copula — " is " or " equals to " — are those of dependence
and manifestation ! Otherwise, it would be quite as effective to
say, " The World is the World ; " or " God is God ; " as to say,
"The World is God." To identify the sum-total of existences
and events, as known or knowable by man, with the Absolute
or World-Ground, is to destroy the absoluteness of the Abso-
lute, by making it dependent wholly upon the exercise of man's
faculties of knowing. Whereas, to regard this World, and all
that man can discover about, or know of it, as only a veiy
partial and temporary but real, dependent manifestation of God,
is to make rational and consistent the beliefs and feelings which
befit the Divine Absoluteness and Infinity.
There is one class of relations, however, to which the category
of identity, in its more strictly pantheistic signification, has ab-
solutely no applicability whatever. Such are the relations
which arise and maintain themselves between persons. But
religion, whether as belief, sentiment, or cult, — on the side of
man at least, — is a personal affair. Only a being which has de-
veloped some capacity for knowing itself as a person, and for
entering voluntarily into personal and social relations with
other beings, can be religious. Only as this same being im-
parts to cosmic existences, the quasi-i^ersonal and spiritual
qualities which he recognizes in himself, does he regard these
existences as objects of religious belief and worship. But
personal beings cannot be unified by a process of logical identi-
fication, as it were. As long as I remain I, or am self-identical
at all, I cannot identify myself, or be identified by others, with
any other thing or person. This power of self-identification,
with its reverse or complementary power of distinguishing the
17
258^ PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Self from others, may indeed be lost ; but when it is lost, the
Self ceases, either temporarily or permanently, to exist at all.
In a word, the conception of two persons, " identical " as per-
sons, is a purely negative conception ; it cannot be stated in
terms that are not self-contradictory. Selves cannot be identified
otherwise than by self-identijication and self -differentiation.
Both Pantheism and Theism, therefore, are forced to use
such terms as "communion," or "union," in order to express
the most intimate relations which can possibly exist between
finite persons and the Divine Being. Or if such terms as " ab-
sorption," or " reentrance " into the Divine Being, be made the
goal of pious desire and endeavor ; unless these terms continue
to bear a wholly inappropriate and purely physical signification,
they cannot be interpreted as any species of identification. To
say that the human Self is so absorbed in God at death as to
return to the condition of an unconscious, or non-selfconscious
part of Divine Being, is simply to deny tlie Self's continued
existence.
When, therefore, the conceptions of Pantheism and Theism
are examined, in order to discover in what important respects
they differ concerning the relations of the World and God, it
is discovered that the differences all center about the idea of
personality. To say that the World is God, or may be idenfi-
fiedwithGod, in the pantheistic meaning of the words, is equiv-
alent to affirming that the sum-total of cosmic existences and
processes implies only an impersonal World-Ground. In brief,
the only Pantheism, which is not virtually a-theism, differs from
Theism, in failing to rise to the full-orbed conception of the
personality of God. In its sight, the Being of the World is,
indeed, somehow worthy of the mystical and worshipful feel-
ings, and even of the loving service, wliicli is due to the Di-
vine. In the view of pantheism, however, this Being is not
properly conceived of when given the predicates and attributes
of an Absolute Self.
Yet here again it is true liiat Ho-iiullcd Piiuthi^ism has many
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 259
shades of meaning and degrees of approach to the highest and
best thoughts of Theism. For it has tlie figurative and flow-
ery way of dealing with its conception of the World, which
makes it correspond to the theory of Mechanism as God. Thus
the Divine Being of the World is identified with the sum-total
of cosmic existences and processes, when conceived of after
the analogy of an impersonal World-Soul, or of an Idea which
the cosmic processes are realizing, or of a Universal Life which
is immanent in the phenomena. The God, which the World
is, now becomes thought of as somehow transcending — poten-
tially at least — all the phenomena of the universe, whether
considered in their temporal, their spatial, or their more espe-
cially dynamic, relations. But this view brings the thought
hopefully near to the theistic position. And from this position
we need not be disturbed, and cannot be dislodged, by being
told that God, when " qualified by his relation to an Other "
is " distracted finitude."^ We may even admit that the Abso-
lute is not " merely personal ; " until, at least, the term personal
has itself been interpreted in a higher than the ordinary sense.
How possible it is to mingle the higher theistic with a-theis-
tic conceptions, in the attempt to reach a more satisfying form
of Pantheism, may be illustrated by such declarations as the
following :^ " Personality is a self-comprehending Selfhood in
opposition to Another ; on the contrary, Absoluteness is the
All-comprehending, the Unlimited, which excludes from itself
nothing but just that exclusiveness which belongs to the very
conception of personality ; absolute personality is, therefore,
sheer nonsense, an absurd idea (<? non ens^. God is not a per-
son by the side of and above other persons ; but the eternal
movement of universal existence, which is only realized and
becomes objective in the subject. The personality of God,
therefore, must not be conceived of as individual but as a uni-
1 See Mr. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 445, and 531.
2 Compare Strauss, Christliche Glaubenslehre, I, § 33, Von der Persbn-
lichkeit Gottes.
260 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
versal pei-sonality {AUpersdnlichkeit ); and instead of personi-
fying the Absolute, we must learn to conceive of it as personi-
fying itself."
The mixture of truths, half-truths, and self-contradictory
errors, which characterizes this classical example of the argu-
ments advanced by tlie pantheistic conception of the World
and God, has been essentially the same all the way from the
Vedanta philosophy down to the writers quoted above. When
we are told that " God is not a person by the side of and above
other persons ; " and that " the personality of God must not be
conceived of as individual," but as "a universal personality,"
we may recognize a certain essential truth to the statements,
in spite of the awkwardness of their form. To say that, " in
place of personifying the Absolute, we must learn to conceive
of it as personifying itself ad infinitum,'' is to remind Theism
of considerations which it, indeed, needs to take into its
account. These ver}'- considerations are, indeed, most effective
means to controvert the conclusions of Pantheism. For an Ab-
solute that^8 " universal personality," or is capable of " personi-
fying itself ad infinitum" can be conceived of only in terms of
personality. But what becomes of the warning that, to try to
unite the conceptions "absolute" and "personality" is to per-
petuate "sheer nonsense," to construct an "absurd idea?"
And if we could succeed in conceiving of this Absolute as per-
sonifying itself, and as continuing to do this very thing ad in-
finitum, how should we escape the charge of making the Abso-
lute itself responsible of realizing "sheer nonsense," and an
" absurd idea " ? Theism, on the contrary, may hold that to
personify one's self expresses admirably the very essence of per-
sonality. No finite person can become a person without per-
sonifying itself. But every finite person, who progressively
better and better accomplishes this tsisk, who makes his own
Self a more :ind higher Self, does this only in dependence
upon the Alwoluto Self. Beligion crowns the task of solf-
personifying, with its gift of that spirit of filial confidence and
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 261
ethical love which, by an habitual attitude of the self-determin-
ing will, unites the finite person in a moral and spiritual union
with God.
While, then, Theism needs constantly to incorporate into
itself those profound considerations which are emphasized by
the higher and more spiritual forms of the pantheistic theory,
and to wliich certain religious sentiments of the highest value
naturally and promptly respond, it cannot loosen its grasp upon
the conception of a personal God ; it cannot take to itself the
impersonal, or imperfectly personal. Deity which Pantheism
offers in his stead. To do this is to dream rather than to
think ; the dreamer, if he continues sane and logical, is sure
to awaken from his dream to find that he has embraced no
more reality than that of a vanishing cloud. On this cardinal
point the real and final issue between Pantheism and Theism
is joined ; the ultimatum is stated, upon the basis of which
alone, if at all, a lasting peace can be secured. A final choice
must be made between the Ideal of self-conscious, rational,
and Ethical Spirit, as the Ground of all Reality, and all the
many vague conceptions which the pantheistic theory has to
oppose to this ideal.
Further in favor of maintaining a firm tenure of the com-
plete theistic position is that inevitable vacillation between
atheism and the extreme of mysticism to wliich the more
fervidly religious forms of the pantheistic hypothesis are con-
stantly liable. Spinoza, for example, in his doctrine of God as
Universal Substance, or of natura naturans devoid of truly per-
sonal qualities, was correctly judged atheistic by the ortho-
doxy of the seventeenth century. In the last chapter of his
JEthica, however, he states the theory of the Divine Love as
the true moral bond and real union of all souls, in a manner
which might well seem acceptable to the Christian mystics of
all ages of Christianity.
The imperfect or erroneous conception of personality, which
differences the pantheistic from the theistic notion of the Divine
262 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Being, becomes particularly obvious in the doctrine of mail's
nature and relations to God. By Pantheism the personality
of which the human individual is capable is not conceived of
in its true, full, and highest significance. This defective con-
ception is expressed in various figures of speech which are not
only taken from physical relations but which are appropriate
only to things and to the relations of things. Thus, for ex-
ample, the Hindu doctrine, in its more purely pantheistic form,
although it regards man's atman, or soul, as some sort of an
indestructible entity, represents its relation to the Atman of
the World, as that of a " portion " or " fragment " to the whole.
Union of the two is, therefore, made complete by an " absorp-
tion " of one in the Other, to the loss of its own personal exist-
ence. All is Atman ; and my atman is part of the impersonal
absolute All-being ; which may, indeed, as properly be called
Brahma as Atman. The Buddhistic doctrine of the non-reality
of soul, on the contrary, destroys the personality of man in an-
other way ; — namely, by resolving it into a mere series of states,
having moral significance indeed, but not implying or revealing
that self-active, self-personifying power which is the essence
of even finite personality. In similar way the modern pantheism
of Schopenhauer and his followers and successors, where it
does not vacillate — as, indeed, it is constantly doing — between
the theistic and the strictly pantheistic conception of the re-
lations which man sustains, for his origin, continued existence,
moral welfare, and destiny, toward the Absolute, is equally
defective and confused.
Much, if not all, therefore, of the contested difference be-
tween Pantheism and Theism, as to the Divine Being and as
to the relations sustained to this Being by finite things and
finite selves, depends upon a fundamental difference in the
conception of self-hood or personality. And since religious
experience seems always impelled, if not compelled, to express
itself with reference to these matters in symbolic and figurative
terms, the settlement of the controverted difference between
ATHEISM AND PANTHEISM 263
the two forms of religious philosophy is largely dependent
upon the way in which each interprets these symbols and fig-
ures of speech. In the one case, the interpretation is wont to
regard all cosmic existences, processes, and events, as only the
phenomenal and illusory aspects, the apparent modifications or
parts, of an impersonal and eternal Substance. In the other
case, the existences, processes, and events are regarded as a
real, though partial and dependent, manifestation of One self-
conscious, rational, and ethical Will.
But while Theism regards man, like all other finite beings,
as a dependent manifestation of the Divine Being, — a child of
the World, so to say — it also places him in other and quite
distinctly different relations, than those which things and ani-
mals have, to God. Man is " God's child," in a peculiar sense ;
his nature is the inchoate and undeveloped image of God, as a
self-determining ethical spirit ; and, therefore, God and man may
come into more definitely reciprocal personal relations. These
relations it is the end of religion to establish and to perfect.
Thus man's personality, instead of being lost in the impersonal
World-Ground, may be saved and raised to a higher potency
by a voluntary and ethical union with God.
A philosophy of religion which helps to secure this supreme
good for humanity, in accordance with the approved truths of
science and history, has done all that reflective thinking can
do for religious experience. And in this attempt the impor-
tant considerations for which the pantheistic conception has
stood, in all the greater religions and not least of all in Chris-
tianity, must be accorded the high estimate of their worth
which is their due.
CHAPTER XXXVII
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL
The possibility and the reality of " the Supernatural " so-
called, as well as the character of the relations, if any, to be
established between it and the existences and forces which are
called " natural," cannot be discussed without some preliminary
examination of the value of the terms employed. Both these
terms — Nature and Supernatural — are very complex and ab-
stract. They cover conceptions whose content needs analysis
and reflection, before any theory of the two can be stated, —
much less justified by an appeal to experience. The word
nature, when used in contrast with the supernatural, should
always be understood in the meaning properly given to it by
a pure empiricism. It is just that complex of existences and
changing relations which is actually given in human experience.
Its evidence consists of the observations, and reasonable and
defensible inferences, of the positive sciences. In Kantian ter-
minology, nature is the sum-total of known, or knowable, " phe-
nomenal realities." The moment, liowever, metaphysics is em-
ployed, whether in the alleged interests of a more profound
science or of a more rational exposition of the religious experi-
ence, so to break up the conception of nature as to find within
it some inner Principle, wliether of Being or of Unity of Force,
which, as a self-consistent Totality, shall account for the order
and orderly evolution of natural phenomena, tl ion there lias vir-
tually been introduced, not only the problem, but the explana-
toiy conception, of the «///;c/--natural. Tiiat is, over and be-
yond tliat which appears in experience, there is now implied a
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 265
Something-More^ a Super-Being of the World. Reflective think-
ing finds itself compelled to recognize that which is beyond the
natural — in the restricted meaning of the word ; and to which
it attributes the chief ontological value. It is for this reason
that the metaphysics of physics likes so well to spell with im-
posing capitals such words as Order, Law, Nature, and Unity
of Force.
For Theism the Supernatural is God — nothing more ; but
then also, nothing less.
The distinction set up between nature and the supernatural,
or rather between the naturalistic and the supernaturalistic
way of regarding and explaining finite beings and finite events,
is as old as either science or religion. It appears primarily to
rest upon the difference between what is known to be done by
man's agency and what is, on account of some peculiar mys-
tery about its causation, conjectured to be done by some other
spirit than man. In this form, it is merely the distinction be-
tween the human and the superhuman. For according to the
belief of primitive religion, all things are done by spiritual
agencies, and what is not done by my spirit or your spirit is,
of course, done by some invisible spirit. Should this deed
seem the more remarkable, because it is something which nei-
ther you nor I can do, — unless, indeed, the invisible spirits ac-
complish it through one of us, — then it is essentially super-
human ; and because it excites wonder and worshipful feeling,
it is divine. Thus among the Peruvians the word Suacas, or
" the extraordinary," is the term for the godlike ; and the word
Kami, or " the admirable," among the Japanese. On the other
hand, savage or primitive man is by no means wholly without
knowledge of that regular, dependable, and understandable,
nature and interconnection of things which contains the germ
of the conception of " Nature " and the " natural. "^ Whatever
may be conjectured as to the mental capacities and attitudes
1 So Waitz and compare D'Alviella, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of
the Conception of God, p. 63/.
266 PHILOSOPHY OF RP^LIGION
of so-called primitive man, the arts of making a fire, of con-
structing and using stone implements, and of preparing food,
imply the naturalistic, as well as the supernatural, point of
view. For savage logic, as Jevons maintains,^ is in no im-
portant respect different from the logic of the trained man of
science. The same necessity tends powerfully in the direction
of compelling the most scientific minds to resort to some hy-
pothesis of unifying invisible principles ; — that is, of the essen-
tially super-natural (above the natural^ as it is empirically
known in terms of the positive sciences) in some one of its
several possible forms. By the multitude the distinction is
made, although more reluctantly, scarcely less naively to-day
than it was decades of centuries ago.
The conceptions of the natural and the supernatural, al-
though persistent and universal, are in their application ex-
ceedingly vague, shifty, and unintelligent. For example, the
erysipelas due to bathing when overheated is thought by the
Australian black-man to be caused by an evil water-spirit.
The illness of the Peruvian mountaineer, when he descends to
live in the valley, is ascribed to the supernatural power of the
sea. The Kafir, however skillful he may be in the multiplica-
tion and care of his cattle by resources under his control, never-
theless prays : ^ " This kraal of yours is good ; you have made
it great .... you have given me many cattle ; you have
blessed me greatly. Every year I wish to be thus blessed, etc."
It is customary to sa}-- that, with the advances of natural science,
the sphere of activities allowed to the supernatural has been
constantly contracting ; until now he who trusts the empirical
evidences for his conception of nature can no longer tolerate
the conception of the supernatural in any of its hitherto current
meanings. This conclusion is then taken to mean that God
has been driven out of the World ; at least, as this world is
known to man in terms of the positive sciences. To tliis con-
» Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 18/.
2 Shooter, Kafirs of Nutal, p. IGG.
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 267
elusion, theological orthodoxy has opposed in vain a view sim-
ilar to that of Cleorabrotus ; and which regards those who
exclude the Divine Being altogether from secondary causes
and those who see Him everywhere, as equally in error. The
remedy for such an error is to draw the line between the nat-
ural and the supernatural just behind the footsteps of Provi-
dence, after it directly " intervenes," " interposes," or " inter-
feres," in the world's affairs. Thus God is either altogether
banished from, or is made a meddler in, the World of which
he is the Ground !
The distinction between Nature and the Supernatural must
be made satisfactory both to science, if not to all the " scien-
tists," and to the religious experience, if not to all the theo-
logians. Both the scientific and the religious points of view
are truly taken ; both conceptions are sure to be somehow
held, and employed, in the effort to express and to explain the
total experience of the human race. The reconciliation of the
two, so that they shall no longer be antithetic and mutually
exclusive, must be found in some higher conception which in-
cludes them both.
In this laudable effort at reconciliation, certain mistaken
ideas as to the distinction between the natural and the super-
natural, and as to the character of the theistic position, so far
as it commends itself to thoughtful minds, must be recognized
and abandoned from the very start. The truths of experience
are indeed embodied in both these two conceptions ; both
views call loudly for recognition at the hands of the philosophy
of religion. These truths are either whoU}'' abrogated or much
impaired, by (a) the materialistic rejection of the supernatural
altogether ; by (h) the idealistic denial of the reality of nature
(in the form of solipsism) ; or by (c) the agnostic denial
of all possibility of relations between the two. Neither can
these truths be secured if the natural and supernatural are re-
garded as mutually exclusive spheres of existence and of ac-
tivity.
268 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The word super-nntur&l does, indeed, suggest a spatial rela-
tion ; but to take the suggestion seriously would, in the light
of the modern scientific view of the world, be absurd. God
no longer appears to enlightened thought as spatially superior
to nature, — over the haturaP— , as thougli managing it from
above. Nor can our thought truthfully represent the natural
and the supernatural as regularly (i. e.^ except upon occasions,
as it were), taking no account of each other. Sucli a form of
representation is not only antithetic to the conclusions of the
positive sciences, but it also leads logically to the position that
revelation and inspiration are wnnatural and wnreasonable, —
or foreign to the rational nature of either man or God. In-
deed, if we understand nature and reason in this limited way,
we seem obliged to say that all revelation, and all religion,
must be both super-n&t\n:aX and swjoer-rational.
The reconciliation of the two contrasted, bnt not antithetic,
aspects of human experience with the world of things and
selves, can be accomplished in only one way. The immanency
of God in nature and in human society, and his transcendency
as Personal Absolute and perfect Ethical Spirit, must both
be maintained and harmonized. But the considerations which
not only make this view possible, but which require it, are
amply provided by both the scientific and the religious expe-
rience of the race. For even from the lower points of view, as
required by the positive sciences, every existence and every
event in the world — i. e., in nature as presented empirically
to man's perception and intellect — may be, and indeed must
be, regarded from several points of view. Reality is rich
enough to justify and to liarmonize the conclusions from all
these points of view. No individual Thing, or meanest Self
among men, is so poor as not to display more or less of all this
wealth actually existent in its peculiar content. This tree,
this watch, for example, is indeed just a mere tree, a vure
watcli. It has its own species, or own manufacture ; it can
grow a form and fruitage of a definite kind ; or it can tell
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 2G9
time to serve the practical conveniences of its owner. But
even when taken thus, the tree, or the watch, is a concrete
embodiment, an accomplished realization, of all the natural
and psychical forces. Its individual being actualizes all the
so-called categories.
But how vastly different a thing to science is this tree, this
watch ; and liow different its being and qualities, when viewed
from the different scientific standpoints ! To chemistry, the
watch is no longer a material continuum, that is movable
only from without, and analyzable by ordinary mechanical
processes — such as breaking, pounding, pulling apart, etc., —
into bits of the same kind of stuff, appreciable by the unaided
senses. It is, the rather, when regarded from the chemist's
chosen point of view, what no eye can see, or hand touch, or
other sense-perception immediately apprehend and appreciate.
It is a vast collection of invisible and intangible elements, with
mysterious natures of their own, and uniform modes of self-
activity in ever changing relations to other elements. More-
over, these elements " obey laws ; " and the laws are, partially
at least, expressible in terms of mathematical formulas. But
what can be meant by " obeying laws," is to be explained only
when a return in thought is made to this same mysterious
" nature " of that which is invisible and intangible. The real
watch is no longer a mere Thing, as things appear to the plain
man's everyday experience. From the point of view of the
senses, in their appreciation of the natural, science has raised
this Thing to the realm of the si^per-natural. For this watch
is, in all its essential qualities as known to chemistry and as
described in chemical terms, so much " over " and " above "
the everyday nature of that same watch, as to make it quite
another kind of existence. Yet it is the same Thing, only re-
garded from different points of view, and with a profounder
insight, and as subjected to more comprehensive observations
and trains of reasoning. The watch of " common sense," and
the watch of chemistry, are not two watches ; they are not anti-
270 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
thetic or opposed to each other ; they do not negate each other,
as though they belonged to wholly distinct and mutually exclu-
sive spheres of reality. It is one watch, seen from two differ-
ent points of view. And if the one watch were shown to the
fetish-woi-shipper, he would doubtless be easily persuaded to
recognize its diNinity, and to propitiate its mysterious, invisible,
but indwelling divine power.
When the tree — just this plain thing of a tree, with which
ever}- beholder is sufficiently familiar in many aspects of its
being — reveals its inner nature, not only to physiological chem-
istry but also to biology, it transcends its own apparent nature,
even much more than does the watch. For the tree not only
" moves," and •' has its being," in the Being of the World ;
it •• lives " in this Being. And being alive, every element of
this common and familiar thing, would have to be declared
most 5i/^fr-natural, as contrasted with that which is ordinary
and natural from the common-sense point of view.
To appreciate this " miracle of life " ^ let the thinker take
his stand at one end of the microscope, while beneath the other
end there is going on those cosmic processes which result in
the evolution of the living cell. Here is Nature transcending
her other works, producing something quite beyond and above
what she has done before. Here is the natural rising to su-
pernatural heights ; but on this new level, it is a higher order
of nature still. In recognizing this nature of the living tree,
as known to the chemical and biological sciences, there is
involved no contradiction of the nature of the same tree, as
known by the common gardener. This new scientific knowl-
edge gives, indeed, an acquaintance with hitherto unknown and
unsuspected invisible and intangible beings and forces. These
beings and forces, by their obedience to law and by their dis-
play of an immanent teleology, show their superior spiritual
and self-like cliaracter. From the scientific point of view, tlie
1 It is not .«tranpe that Haeckel haa called his latest treatise on this sub-
ject, Das Lebensumnder.
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 271
tree now appears as something that has already far transcended
its old nature as mere tree. Its particular being is now seen
to be only one among an infinite number of manifestations of
the larger and all-inclusive Being of the World.
Thus does the nature of every Thing, when more perfectly
and interiorly understood, rise above its own inferior nature ;
but in thus rising, its more inclusive conception becomes, not
antithetic to, but comprehensive of, its own less inclusive
conception.
Let us now return to the conclusion which we have been il-
lustrating. Every being in the whole world, as this world is
empirically known, must have its nature considered from an
indefinite number of points of view. As known from the su-
perior point of view, its whole nature appears changed : but
the change is not one which puts its new nature over against
its old ; its superior nature does not oppose, or negate, its in-
ferior. The one Thing really has these various natures^ as as-
pects of its one nature ; and no thing is so poor as not to share
in this infinite, and infinitely complex, wealth of natures rising
above natures, but all having their ground in the one all-
comprehending Nature. And the positive sciences, instead of
discovering and exposing this all-comprehending Xature in its
naked simplicity, are compelled to clothe It, and vail It, with
garment piled upon garment, each more elaborately wrought
and richly ornamented.
It is not likely that any advocate of the view which modern
science takes of so-called Nature, "writ large," would dispute
what has been said hitherto. The scientific conception of what
should be included under the term " natural " is, indeed, now
far more comprehensive and rich than it has ever been before.
And just on this very account it is claimed that the natural
no longer needs to be supplemented by the supernatural ; that,
indeed, the former positively excludes the latter. This claim
could be justifiable only on two conditions. Of these conditions,
one is that the conception of Nature shall be so illogically ex-
272 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
panded as to include those points of view which belong more
properly to the conception of the Supernatural ; and the other
is, that the natural and the supernatural shall be regarded as
mutually exclusive spheres. But it has been agreed to limit
the conception of the natural to that system of existences and
transactions which is described, and descriptively explained, by
the positive sciences. We cannot, therefore, be satisfied with
such a metaphysics of the chemico-physical, biological, and
psychological sciences, as either unconsciously, or by a species
of illegitimate smuggling, provides for the Supernatural under
cover of the natural. Our reconciliation of the factitious
antithesis of the two conceptions must, the rather, be open, in-
telligent, and deliberate.
Religion cannot dispense with the conception of the Super-
natural. But religion cannot afford to hold this conception
in antagonism to modern science and philosophy. We seek a
reconciliation, therefore, in some larger Idea which shall include
both the natural and the supernatural, in harmony. According
to this larger Idea, every existence and every event is capable
of being regarded from two different but not antithetic points
of view as both natural and supernatural. This is only to say,
indeed, every existence and every event must be so i-egarded ;
because all cosmic beings, processes, forces, and happenings,
however they may be explained by the positive sciences, must
also be regarded as, essentially considered, dependent mani-
festations of the Supernatural, — of God.
The account which naturalism gives, therefore, affords no
perfect substitute for the account which supernaturalism offers ;
the account which supernaturalism offei-s, is not intended to
displace, or to annul, and does not in fact contradict, tiie ac-
count which naturalism gives. The totality of human experi-
ence, in the realm of scientific endeavor, and in the realm of
ethical, jesthetical, and religious beliefs, sentiments, and ideals,
demands the satisfaction afforded by lM)th j)oints of view. The
Reality which this experience increasingly apprehends, and
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 273
dimly comprehends, is an infinite sphere of Being, — vast,
mysterious, and rich enough to satisfy all demands. Science
may, then, say to religion : " If He is not here, manifested in
these things and these souls, whose ways of behavior and his-
tory of development I am studying, and striving to reduce to
order ; Where, then, is your God ? " and, " How shall man
know either that He is, or what He is ? " And religion can only
answer : " He is here ; and He is known as immanent in these
things and in these souls." And then, in its turn, religion may
say to science : " Can you explain the unity and order of these
things, and especially the experiences of these souls, without
discovering or postulating some Principle such as that I may
reasonably make it the Object of my admiration, trust, and
love ? " Or better : " Show me your natural forces and the
laws of their working, and I will expound to you the power
and wisdom of my God ; tell me how, out of the Being of the
World, came Christ and the religion of Christ, and I will show
you why I take toward this Being the attitude of a loving and
forgiven son."
And, indeed, the more thoughtful it has become, the more
has science recognized the necessity of resorting to some theory
of the Supernatural, as immanent in Nature, and demanded for
the completer explanation of natural phenomena. In history,
the larger conceptions of the world have always tried to provide
for a " something more " than could be caught and described
in terms familiar to the positive sciences, so long as these sci-
ences felt compelled to remain within the limits of an experi-
ence that assigns no ontological value to the beliefs and senti-
ments of religion. " Nature " is therefore conceived of as
somehow capable of separation into two parts ; one of these
must be put " over " the other, must play the missing part of
the «Mj9er-natural. This one nature is after all, both a natura
naturans and a natura naturata. It includes some active uni-
fjdng Principle as well as an obvious complex of interrelated
phenomena. This truth is virtually admitted, but not well ex-
18
274 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
pressed by such statements as that of Professor Le Conte : '
" To the deep thinker, now and always, there is and always has
been the alternative ; — materialism or theism. God operates
Nature or Nature operates itself ; but evolution puts no new
phase on this old question." It is indeed true that evolution
does not change any of the essential factors of the problem
proposed by such terras as Nature and the Supernatural. But
the problem is not well expressed as an alternative of this sort.
The World, and all that is in it, is always, and necessarily, and
by virtue of its very conception, both natural and supernatural.
It is capable, on the one hand, of being looked at as naturalism
demands ; but its more complete understanding demands that
it should be looked at in another way. Looked at in this other
way, Nature becomes the name that masks the immanency of
the Divine Will and Mind in all the cosmic phenomena.
It is, however, when we come to consider human nature in
its historical development that the merely naturalistic view
reveals its special and most marked deficiencies. For the his-
tory of humanity is replete with signs of a presence and power
that is above nature, in the narrower meaning of this term.
The student of history feels himself compelled to admit that
there are " hidden influences " at work " shaping the religious
fortunes of mankind," which " cannot be wholly accounted for
by historical investigation." ^ To the same conclusion, writers
like Wellhausen, Strauss, and others, are found assenting,
when, on making a cross-section in the historical evolution of
humanity, they have recognized two somewhat exclusive
spheres of reality, — the so-called n'atural and the so-called su-
pernatural. But of the history of humanity, as well as of so-
called physical nature, a clear-sighted philosophy affirms that
it is all capable of being looked upon from both these points of
1 See the chapter on "Xature and Spirit" in his Theory of Relipion; imd
compare the chapters on "Matter," "Nature and Spirit," and the "World
and the Alwohite," in the aiithor's A Theory of Reality.
' So Jabtrow, The Study of Religion, p. 178/.
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 275
view. In this field of research the distinction exists ; but it
must be held in a relative and shifting way. And it is not to be ap-
plied by picking out bits of history here and there ; and by as-
signing some to one conception exclusively, and some to the other.
The distinction is indeed permanent and important ; but its ulti-
mate intention is to pay respect to the different aspects, as re-
garded from different points of view, of the one life of humanity.
In this evolving life of human nature, God, the Supernatural is
always and everywhere immanent. As the Abbe de Broglie,^
argues : It seems a strange inconsistency when the naturalistic
school, which proposes to bring everything to the test of his-
torical facts, rejects a jyriori and often with scorn all those
ideas of the supernatural, miracle, divine revelation, etc., which
history shows to be universally spread among, and tenaciously
adhered to by all religious peoples. Further examination
usually shows, however, some provision for recognizing these
ideas under another form or name. And Matthew Arnold's
"Power that makes for righteousness," some unifying Force,
or resultant of g'wasz-spiritual forces, is called upon to perform
the same gigantic task which Baron Bunsen assigned to " God
in History."
Thus by the naturalistic party, the demand to enlarge the
scope and increase the efficiency of its explanatory principle has
been met by expanding and intensifying the conception of
"Nature," "the Cosmos," "the World," or the "Unknown
Force " which, however, the Universe manifests to us. In its
best condition of development, this conception is made to
cover, not only all the existences, forces, and processes, that
are " natural " in the narrower meaning of the word, but also
the origin and history of the human race regarded as the ex-
pression or product of forces that are also " natural " in the
widest meaning of the word. Thus Mother Nature is con-
ceived of as made big, strong, and mse enough to bring forth
from her womb all that has become or can become, objects of
1 Problemes et Conclusions de L'Histoire des Religions, p. ix/.
276 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
human experience. And now our question returns upon us in
other forms, but in essence the same. All experience is now
enfolded in " the natural." Outside of Nature, or over or
above it, nothing real or even imaginary can be ; and whatever
is regarded as immanent in Nature is confessed to be a part of
It. But if Nature is the all-surrounding, all-upholding, all-
producing One, where now is the place for the iSupernatuviil ?
To this question the reply must be that we are here dealing
with a species of logical jugglery. But the trick is not hard to
discover. For the extension of the conception of the natural
to such dimensions reveals its own inherent inconsistencies by
the perpetual tendency to break up again into two parts ; and
each of these parts has for its important business, the reestab-
lishing and safeguarding of the same distinction with which,
by their hasty union, the conception was itself constituted.
This distinction between the natural and the supernatural was
originally introduced in order to contrast " the manifested," or
wliat has priority and superior immediacy and certainty from
the empirical point of view, with what has the logical priority
and the ontological primacy from the reflective point of view.
But now the distinction has been abolished by making the
whole sphere of the natural equivalent to the Absolute ; in
other words, the conception of Nature has absorbed the concep-
tion of God. In this way the mind has returned to the stand-
point of atheism, so far as the Divine manifestation in the cos-
mic existences, forces, and processes is concerned. But this
conclusion is intolerable to the religious experience.
For religion, I repeat, the Supernatural is God ; and all the
so-called natural is the manifestation of his immanent Self.
How, then, is God, the Supernatural, " over," or " more than,"
the natural ; wlien these figurative expressions are translated
in terms for which some rational meaning and ontological value
may properly be claimed ? The prefix '■'■Supei\'' when wrongly
interpreted, does indeed set the World and (Jod into relations
of antagonism or mutual exclusiveness. Yet religion certainly
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 277
demands for its satisfaction " something more " to the content
of the Object of faith and worship than the positive sciences
can impart, so long as their investigations and conclusions with
regard to the Being of the World remain within their proper
spheres. Even the vaguest pantheistic conception of the natu-
ral, like that attached to the Chinese word Tdo^ is brought to
a rest before the confession : " There was something undefined
and complete, coming into existence before Heaven and Earth.
How still it was and formless, standing alone and undergoing
no change, reaching everj^where and in no danger (of being
exhausted). It may be regarded as tlie Mother of all things.
I do not know its name, and I give it the designation of the
Tao (The Way). Making another effort to give it a name, I
call it The Great." '
The doctrine of God as supernatural assigns to Him both
logical priority and ontological primacy in contrast with^ hut not
in opposition to, the natural. Three subordinate conclusions —
one negative and two positive — follow from this doctrine.
First : Nature, as known or knowable by man, is not, and never
can be, exhaustive of the Supernatural. In order to satisfy
the religious consciousness, in its highest and its profoundest
reflections upon the Object of its faith, there is always to be
assumed and imagined, something '• over," or " yet-more-tlian,"
the sum-total of all its manifestations, as inherent in the es-
sential reality of the Personal Absolute. Doubtless this de-
mand has the same origin as that which refuses to regard the
essential reality of man's spirit as nothing more than the total
" stream of consciousness," so-called. Nature as known, or
conceivable, is finite ; God is infinite. Nature, as known or
conceivable now, is dependent and limited ; God is absolute.
All the world's beings and events, in all their historical devel-
opment, do not exhaust the Divine power, wisdom and good-
ness. Man's world is not, and never can become, a manifesta-
tion of all that God really is.
1 Sacred Books of the East, XXXIX, p. 67/.
278 PHILOSOrtlY OF RELIGION
But there is a second and positive conclusion which is of
greater theoretical and practical consequence. God is the
Supernatural One, since Absolute Personality and perfect
Ethical Spirit is, ever and essentially, " over," and " above,"
and " more than," the sum-total of its own particular manifes-
tations. The personality of the individual man even is more
than the simple aggregate of its manifestations. I am not able
to take myself as nothing but the summing-up of the events
that have happened, or are happening, in the stream of con-
sciousness I call mine. In some good meaning of the words,
I, the person, am " over " them all ; I am " more than " are
they all. But this superiority of the human Self to the doings
and happenings which manifest it to itself and to others, is a
dependent being. With God the case is not the same. The
human Self is dependent upon nature : this is the scientific
point of view, which does not however contradict the convic-
tions to which religion appeals, and which convince us that
somehow this human nature partakes of the essentially super-
natural. But God's Personality is not dependent upon Nature,
in even the most inclusive meaning of that term. The Abso-
lute Self is not only for man's thinking the logical jiriiis of
the natural ; He is the real Ground of all the natural ; Nature
is the dependent manifestation of Him.
For, third, in God, as Absolute Will and Reason, as the Su-
pernatural One, the ultimate source and explanation of all
natural existences and events must be found. In the lan-
guage of religion, He is the Creator, Preserver, and Moral
Ruler of all things and of all souls. To use figures of speech
which originally expressed spatial relations, the super-niituTnl
is now conceived of as " under," and " in," all the natural.
He is the Tnjer, the Immanent Power, omnipresent and teleo-
logical, which must be recognized as forming an important part
of the accounting for eveiy being and every event. For every
iK'ing and every event — no matter liow firmly set it may seem
to be in that complex and ever shifting framework which we
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 279
call Nature, nevertheless bears also the stamp of being at the
same time a significant manifestation of the Supernatural One.
To be a part of the natural, as seen from one point of view, is
to exist " in God " — that is, by the purposeful Divine Will — as
beheld with the insight of religion and philosophy, when looked
upon from another point of view.
Such a view of the relations of the natural and the super-
natural raises the problem of the Immanency and, at the same
time, the Transcendency of God. " No one," says a modern
writer on this subject,^ " can form a clear conception of how
the immanence of Deity is consistent with personality, and yet
we must accept both, because we are irresistibly led to each of
these by different lines of thought." On the contrary, only
the full conception of a Personal Absolute who is immanent in
all that system of beings and changes which, in its historical
evolution, corresponds to the full conception of " Nature," can
afford the best available explanation of the total experience of
the race. As the same author goes on to say, " the gradual
individuation of the universal Divine energy reaches complete-
ness in man ; " — but not of energy alone, but, the rather, of
energy as guided by ideas in the realization of ends. In other
words, the " individuation " of the Absolute Self reaches its
highest grade of realization as manifested to human experi-
ence, in the developed selfhood of man. This is the conclu-
sion with which philosophy meets and satisfies the beliefs, sen-
timents, and practical needs, of the religious life of humanity.
Can God be conceived of as both immanent and transcen-
dent ? The answer to this question depends, as a matter of
course, upon the meaning attached to these terms. No : if by
the very terms employed we mean to affirm conceptions or
judgments respecting the Divine Being and its relation to the
world which are inherently self-contradictory. Any original
inconsistency and confusion of thought cannot be annulled,
but is rather made obvious, by the subsequent attempt to unite
1 Prof. Le Conte, Evolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, p. 314.
280 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the two terms in a common judgment of a wider extent and
richer content. Yes : in case we are ready to take to our con-
fidence the profound truths embodied in both these terms ; and,
after interpreting them in the light of these truths, combine
them in a higher and harmonious conception.' This confidence
must be gained in the face of tlie consideration that the terms,
" immanency " and " transcendency," are in their very consti-
tution figurative. Nor is the confidence disturbed by the ad-
mission that we have no immediate experience which can be
transferred uncritically to the Absolute, in order to illustrate
just how such relations to the world are realized, as united
in Him.
The history of man's religious development, especially when
viewed in the light of his reflective thought upon his own re-
ligious experience, shows how he has more and more satisfac-
torily dealt with the problem of uniting in a harmonious con-
ception the immanency and the transcendency of God. In this
advance toward harmony he has followed suggestions and an-
alogies derived from a growing knowledge of himself as a per-
son ; and of his own changing relations to other persons and
things. In its most intimate form, the experience of a Self
is just this : — a will and mind somehow dwelling within and yet
riding over — with a consciousness of superiority to — an ani-
mated body. From this experience arises the pantheistic con-
ception which represents the Divine Being as Atman, or Parat-
nian ; that is, iis the Supreme Soul, manifested in and through
the material universe and the world of finite spirits. Such a
conception does indeed strike the keynote to an eternal and in-
finitely valuable truth. But the tune played upon it is not
harmonious and true to all the most profound and lasting sen-
timents and thouglits of man. Its failure is duo to the fact
1 Comparo the view of Dr. Buase (Philosophic und Erkcnntniss-thcorie)
who, while holdinp to the view that God is l)oth immanent and transcendent,
derlares we whall never \>c ahle to ex|>Iain how this can l)C so. But here all
depends MjKtn what i.s meant by "explain."
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 281
that the conception of the Self, or Supreme Soul, is so incom-
plete and inadequate. By providing a more perfect Ideal,
Theism attempts to furnish, and thus to validate, if it does not
comprehensively explain, both the immanency and the tran-
scendency of God. So often as the conception of God as Per-
sonal Absolute and perfect Ethical Spirit gets driven from any
portion of the space or time which science needs for the opera-
tion of its cosmic forces and cosmic processes, religion brings
the conception back and plants it yet more firmly within more
extended areas of the world's space and time. And when re-
ligious experience comes to a recognition of its own truest
meaning and most invulnerable postulates, it affirms that in all
natural existences, forces, and changes, God is immanent.
The world, which truly and yet from a partial and lower point
of view appears to science as a complex of such forces, is in-
deed his immanent, manifested Will. Its uniform sequences,
its laws so-called, and its order, as all these are observed and
inferred by science, are the immanent, manifested Reason of
God.
This dependent manifestation of an immanent Will and Rea-
son, as known to man, is a process in time ; it is an evolution
which, so far as the positive sciences can discover its origin,
destiny, and significance, comes, we know not Whence, and
goes we know not Whither — with, we know not what final
Purpose, or Wherefore, to secure its goal. Religion, with its
beliefs, hopes, and experience of facts, joins ethics and sesthet-
ics, to discover and establish a confidence in the realization of
the ideals common to them all. It affirms, therefore, that the
Will and Reason immanent in and through this cosmic process
must be conceived of as a presiding and over-ruling Personal
Spirit. Thus God is conceived of as both immanent and tran-
scendent. Because He is immanent, we know that He is, and
what He is, as manifested in Nature. Because He is tran-
scendent, we believe that His final purposes of Good, which
are more and more clearly revealed in the evolution of the eth-
282 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ical, sesthetical, and religious sentiments and ideals of the race,
will finally be realized. " All is well," says religion, " because
God is both in and over the World." " God in all," and " God
over all," are both true ; neither is antithetic to the other. In
a word : It is the conception of an Absolute Self icho is perfect
Etiiical Spirit, ichich unites and harmonizes the two otherwise
conflicting conceptions of the immanency and the transcendency
of ^God.
Approaches to the true doctrine of the relations of the nat-
ural and the supernatural have been made by all the greater
religions of the world. Indeed, the germs of the doctrine exist
in the very nature of religion itself, even in the form which its
beliefs and feelings take at the stage of unreflecting spiritism.
Judaism was especially productive of this thought, deemed by
so many modern thinkers " too good to be true." The Old
Testament, in its choicest utterances about the relations of
natural existences and events to tlie presence, power, and
moral concerns of Deity, although it uses only figurative
terms, freely expresses the belief in both His immanency and
His transcendency.
Nothing can exceed the dignity, beaut}'-, and sublimity of
Jesus' teaching and practical attitude with reference to natural
objects and natural events. He always expresses the unwaver-
ing conviction that the world is God's world, and the clear and
constant consciousness that the "son of man" is also God's
son. Indeed, so true is this that the conception of God which
Jesus reveals becomes — though only in a secondary, and yet
legitimate way — a revelation of the real nature of the physical
universe. It is to his doctrine of Providence, as producing
and justifying the filial spirit in its perfection toward all the
dealings of God through natural means, that an appeal must
be made, if the question is raised as to what Jesus thought of
the relations between nature and tlie Supernatund One. The
true son of the Heavenly Father may always be so confident of
his Fiither's presence in, and power over, all earthly existences
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 283
and events, as not to be disturbed by anxious and corroding
cares about his food, clothing, and other similar interests. Let
him seek first the Kingdom of God and Jm righteousness, and
all these things shall be provided for him. For all nature is
but his Father's garment, too thin even to vail the indwelling
Divine presence ; and nothing can happen, which is not the
manifestation of the Father's wise and loving Will ; or which
is prejudicial to the real good of those who lovingly will as He
wills. The world of men — human nature, too — is God's child ;
it is wandering, indeed, in ignorance and forgetfulness of the
Father's love and of the natural relations which bind it to
God ; but it needs only the knowledge and the effectual work-
mg of the immanent Divine Spirit to realize that universal
ethical unity of man with God which it is the mission of Jesus
to bring about.
The task of adjusting this conception of the Founder of
Christianity, respecting the relations of the natural and the
supernatural, to the facts of science and of human history has,
indeed, been most difficult ; and it has onl}'- very imperfectly
been performed or even undertaken. The early Apologists
tried to unite the thoughts of Jesus with those of Greek phi-
losophy. They held in general that God created the world a
fair and orderly whole for the sake of man. Some of them
went so far as to express the opinion that beautiful natural ob-
jects are maintained only for the sake of Christians. " I have
no doubt," says Aristides,^ " that the earth continues to exist
only on account of the prayers of Christians." It was the
Logos doctrine which undertook a theoretical reconciliation
between Jesus' faith in God, the Father, as both in and over
the world, and the ideal of Greek sages and philosophers who
thought of Absolute Reason as manifested in control of the
cosmic processes and cosmic events. In later Christian thought
the controlling conception has been, as it was in the pre-
Christian Jewish view, that God ivilled the world for ideally
1 Apol. [Syriac Version] 16.
284 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
good ends. Meantime science and philosophy have been con-
stantly employed upon a basis of enlarging and more certain
experience, in the effort to develop the conception of the ex-
tent, complexity, and mystery of these cosmic processes and
cosmic events, both as respects their ultimate origin and their
ultimate significance. But still, and with no relaxing of tenac-
ity, as Sabatier has well said ^ : " For piety, the laws of Nature
which have since tlien been revealed to us in their sovereign con-
stancy, become the immediate expression of the will of God."
Or, to employ the more comprehensive statement of Tiele : '^
" It is Christianity which unites the two opposite doctrines of
transcendency and immanency by its ethical conception of the
Fatherhood of God, which embraces both the exaltation of God
above man and man's relationship with God." Both these
statements, however, apply more directly to the union of the
Divine immanency and transcendency in human history. How
this union may be most fitly conceived as applicable to the to-
tality of the cosmic existences, processes, and events has now
been sufficiently explained.
In the interests of religious feeling, two questions regarding
the more precise relations of Nature and the Supernatural re-
quire further consideration. To regard all human experience
in this " wholesale " fashion, so to say, seems at first sight to
offend the religious consciousness. For this consciousness re-
cognizes the Divine presence and superintending providence as
being greatest and most valuable wlien manifested in certain
select kinds of existences or certain preferred classes of events.
These are such existences and events as seem most essential to
the truthfulness and efficiency of religion itself. Indeed, there is
a constant tendency, in even the greater, more liberal, and genial
forms of religious belief, to restrict the recognition of the Divine
activity to special cases ; and thus to exclude God, as it were,
from an}' immediate participation in those beings and happen-
1 Esquisse d'une Philosophic dc la Kelipion, p. 88.
' Elements of the Science of ileligion, First Series, p. 209.
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 285
ings which appear to have little relation to the interests of faith
and of practical piety. In this way, the one world, which
should be for faith and piety, all of it God's world, is di-
vided into two worlds, whose existences and processes run on
in some sort of independence of each other. God is recognized
as present and interested in one of these two worlds, — namely,
that in which faith and piety find grounds for their existence
and growth ; but the other world is, at best, since its creation,
a piece of self-dependent and self-adjusting mechanism ; if in-
deed it is not the devil's own world. From this point of view
the problem of evil reappears, with all its gloom and weight of
diflSculties ; and with it, returns the thought of limiting the im-
manency and transcendency of God in order to save the perfec-
tion of his moral and spiritual Being. His manifestation
belongs only to that part of the sum-total of the cosmic exis-
tences, processes, and history, which seems fair and good to
those creatures of His, whom he invites to have their faith and
hope in Him.
The attempt to treat rationally the problem of God's relations
to the world can meet with no more disastrous repulse than
the recurrence, in the form just stated, of the distinction be-
tween Nature and the Supernatural. For it must never be
forgotten that if we expect to base our evidence for the being
and attributes of God on our experience of the world at all,
we must take the world as it actually is, and not as we vainly
imagine it ought to have been. And if we aim consistently to
establish the doctrine of One Alone God, having the attributes
which relate him essentially and eternally to man's total ex-
perience, we cannot proceed with this aim after having re-
jected from consideration the larger part of this experience.
If faith and piety exclude God from such portion of his
world as finite understanding does not readily recognize to be
agreeable to their ideals ; then faith and piety cut themselves
off from their own very roots. The attitude of true religion
toward the world is essentially just the reverse of all this. It
286 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
believes in God as the Ideal-Real ; and it trusts God, in his
own good way and time, to realize those ideals which He has
himself placed and nourished in the history of the race.
Without retreating one hair's breadth, then, from the posi-
tion which recognizes the abiding presence and power of what
religion regards as supernatural in what science calls the
natural, and in all the world's history, it is possible to advance
certain considerations which tend to alleviate the distress, and
quiet the doubts, of a too weak unreflective faith. And, first :
When it is said that God is equally immanent and transcendent
in all his relations to all the world's existences and events, or
that all the natural is also equally super-natural, the terms are
not used in a quantitative or mathematical way. Neither is
their use designed to deny all qualitative distinctions in the
beings and events that affect the religious experience of the
race. Strictly speaking, the word " equality," in its mathe-
matical meaning, in connection with the discussion of this
problem, is scarcely applicable at all. With respect to the
omnipotence, or limitless power of God, had we the data, we
might assume to measure amounts of the Divine immanency,
in the cosmic beings and processes. To say that there is more
of the energy of the Being of the World present in the move-
ment of the sun than emanates from so many pounds of some
radio-active substance, might be of interest to physics ; but it
would not enlighten, or change the standpoint of, an intelligent
piety. God's power is in the radium, the dewdrop, the grain
of wheat, the beating human heart or pulsating human brain,
as truly as in the moving solar system or in the distant star.
Por all of the energy which the physico-chemical sciences, first
differentiate and then endeavor to integrate under a theory
of conservation and correlation, the reflections of faith and piety
regard, and rightly, as the manifestation of tlie everywhere
present Divine Will.
Doubtless, t<:)o, it is possible to speak of God's wisdom being
displayed more abundantly in some things and some events
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 287
than in other things and events. But this attempt to measure
the amount of the Divine wisdom is likely itself to turn out
folly. To intelligent piety the profoundly mysterious archi-
tectonic skill of the Divine World-builder is no less impressive,
— and it is more available, near at hand, and verifiably certain,
— in the evolution of the impregnated ovum than in that of the
solar system. Any one can see the former under the micro-
scope to-day ; astronomy knows little that is certain about the
latter. But especially in considering the history of human
events, as bearing on the question of less and more of the pres-
ence and power of God, it is well to avoid an unseemly arro-
gance in one's attempts at measurement. For it is in this history
that small beginnings are pregnant with great issues ; and that
seemingly little deeds on the part of man work out the most
significant and tremendous of the Divine plans. It is this fact
which gives force to the pantheistic representation of the Being
of the World as dealing with men after the fashion of the chess-
player with his pawns : —
" Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays.
And one by one back in the closet lays."
But it is the same fact which the religion of Christ uses to
illustrate the confidence of the pious soul that he who wills
the fall of the sparrow is also immanent in, and transcendent
over, every event in the life of man. Moreover, the human
mind is never so placed as to see what is really great or really
small, in this vast, intricate, and ever-growing network of
human history. If a dream had not warned Joseph to escape
with the young child into Egypt from Herod's murderous
wrath, what would have become of the Founder of Christianity ?
If some chance bird, driven by unconscious impulse or wafted
by a momentary breeze, had flown to left rather than to right,
would Caesar have crossed the Rubicon and the Roman World
have been prepared for the spread of the Christian faith ?
Undoubtedly, certain problems which arrange themselves
under the different main theories as to the relations between
288 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the natural and the supernatural, and whose partial solution
depends upon the method adopted for reconciling the concep-
tions of immanency and transcendency, are exceedingly diffi-
cult even to state in a way satisfactory to religious experience.
How can God be said to be immanent in, and transcendent
over, all the processes and events in a world where so much of
ugliness and sin abound ? As has already been said, this
question raises again the dark problem of evil ; it can, there-
fore, only be answered in the same partial and tentative way
which is becoming for finite knowledge in the face of this
problem. But the doctrine which regards all cosmic existences
and events as a dependent manifestation of the Personal Ab-
solute, does not in any way impair those facts of experience
which testify to the myriad forms in which this manifestation
takes place. The Supernatural, in and over the natural, is no
dull monotone which prevents the listening ear from recogniz-
ing the other tones that must all blend together to make the
harmony. God is immanent " in " different things, in differ-
ent ways ; and God is transcendent " over " different events,
in different forms of control.
The faith of both science and religion — a faith that is in-
creasingly confirmed by accumulating experience — recognizes
the presence of a certain wonderful and mysterious beauty in
what seems ugly from other points of view and to eyes which
have less of penetration and of insight. The broader studies
in ethics are more and more emphasizing the place which
tragedy holds in the moral and sesthetical evolution of the
race. In this way the ugly and the painful appear, the rather,
as the necessary elements and factors — however mysterious in
their origin and incomprehensible in respect of their complete
significance — of a system, such as the world is, on its way to
the realization of a far distant but divinely beautiful and
blessed end. This does not, indeed, enable us to call pain
pleasure, or to do away with the distinction l:»otween the ugly
and the beautiful. But it does lend support to the faith which
NATURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL 289
regards the means in the light of the final accomplishment.
Thus even pain becomes welcomed as instrumental for a higher
good ; and the ugly appears, as either the imperfectly developed
on its way to perfection, or as the humbler servant of some
more obviously grand and beautiful object in the vast economy.
The lowly forms of life have the place — most interesting, both
to the moral and to the artistic sentiment — of scavengers, or
scrubs, in the royal palace, or court, or " mews ; " they may
seem really good and beautiful themselves, when separated
from the fictitious associations with which they have been acci-
dentally bound up, as seen by the nearsighted eyes of the
superficial looker-on.
How God can be " immanent in " sinful human nature, and
also " transcendent over " the world in which sin abounds, is,
indeed, the most difficult problem for reflective thinking in its
effort so to adjust the Divine relations to this world as at the
same time to satisfy the speculative reason and the ethico-
religious consciousness. Christianity especially (but all the
other greater religions also in some degree) gives the answer
of faith to this problem in its doctrine of God as the Moral
Ruler and Redeemer of the world. In these other connections,
therefore, we shall have abundant occasion to consider the
subject again.
19
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THEISM AND EVOLUTION
The discussion of the positions taken by the various theistic
theories, and by the equally various tlieories of evolution with
reference to Nature and the Supernatural, if pursued with the
intent to adjust the claims of both, requires that we should
recall what has already been said regarding the relations of
science and religious experience.^ It was then found that in
their aims, methods, satisfactions, and benefits to humanity,
the scientific and the religious points of view are, indeed,
notably different. In all these regards science and religion
are often so antithetic as not to seem reconcilable by any con-
siderations which shall command the fields of experience
legitimately assigned to both. In their historical development,
too, they have almost constantly been engaged in conflict. At
no age of the world has this conflict between science and re-
ligion been more fiercely and intelligently waged than between
modern Theism and Modern Evolution.
In spite of these facts, however, it was also found that the
fundamental psychological relations of science and religion are
such as to make it impossible that either should displace the
other from the confidence or the culture of mankind. Nor can
they themselves be satisfied to remain in the attitude of antag-
onism and hostility toward each other. For man is one ; liuman
nature is at the same time both scientific and religious in the
most serious activities and most permanent needs of its com-
plex constitution. Therefore the ideal, and the morally and
1 Vol. I, chap. XVII.
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 291
aesthetically correct, relations of science and religion, flow from
that unity of the spirit which seeks the one truth, by whatever
paths of experience it may be reached. The history of every
fierce conflict between the two contains, in fact and as an impor-
tant part, a narrative of the attempt to terminate the conflict by
the discovery and adoption of some common principle which
is discoverable from a higher point of view.
The characteristic scientific tenet of the last half-century
is Evolution. The genetic point of view has, indeed, been
taken, from which to regard the series of cosmic phenomena,
ever since man began to reflect upon nature or upon his own
life. That man and things groiv is by no means a foreign or
uninteresting observation for the savage mind. Indeed, for
the species to secure good, and to escape evil, it is quite im-
perative that he should possess the knowledge that both tilings
and men develop, and how they develop. The religious con-
sciousness notes this with a peculiar stress of interest ; for
whatever grows is most certainly alive, and life is preemi-
nently a manifestation of the Divine to man. Moreover, con-
jectures as to derivation from the gods, and as to change and
increase by reason of the indwelling or down-coming divine
presence, characterize the cruder religious theories devised to
account for the most ordinary experiences. Thus the history
of religious mythology and speculation is strewn with wrecks
of childish narratives, or more elaborate attempts to show how,
through successive generative acts, or by emanation or unfol-
ding, an impartation of divine qualities to the present world of
things and men can be traced backward to a Divine Source.
Theories of development, from both the religious and the non-
religious points of view, are sure to follow upon any consid-
erable reflection over the most patent facts of experience.
And development is even a more important conception for
religion than for science.
The peculiar excellencies of the modern theories of evolu-
tion are due to their greater success in building upon facts of
292 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
observation and experiment ; and to the thoroughness and
subtlety of the processes of reasoning which have carried them
far beyond the limits of possible observation and experiment.
These very elements of success, however, have not infrequently
served as pitfalls into whicli their advocates have fallen. This
is true even within the fields where empirical methods are most
readily and surely applicable. But it is more extensively and
disastrously true within fields where such methods are more
strictly limited or nearly impossible ; and where figures of
speech, which have at least a verifiable and definable meaning
in biology, are employed to enforce theories of origins and of
relations to which they have really little or no valid applica-
tion. Thus it has come about that scientific (s/c) guesses as
to the method, order, and laws of evolution are not much less
numerous or conjectural than are religious cosmogonies or
theological theories of creation.
Really admirable results are, however, emerging from this
last half-century of conflict between Theism and Evolution.
The application of the genetic and historical method to the
study of man's religious life and progress has been peremptorily
demanded in the name of all the modern sciences. While look-
ing on its alleged facts in the statical and unhistorical way,
and considering its beliefs and dogmas as a long ago finished
and unchanging but priceless possession, religion found itself
totally unable to compete with science in the unequal strife for
enlightened credence and sincere devotion. It was thus forced
to define itself in the light of the same conception of develop-
ment. And now, after agonies of fear, urging it on to agonies
of industry and sweat, religion is beginning to reap an increase
of reward in its ability to defend the view, that whatever the
positive sciences may discover about the details of the world's
history, the contention of Theism still holds good ; for the
mind which takes the attitude of a reasonable piet}-, the world's
liistory- is the history of the progressive Divine Self-manifes-
tation.
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 293
Meantime, science itself, especially as its utterances come
through the pens and the speech of its more mature and cautious
students, is growing more genial toward the reasonable beliefs,
the purer sentiments, and the more valuable practices of re-
ligion ; as well as also, perhaps, less sure of its own ability to
furnish explanations that shall not call for yet more funda-
mental explanatory principles, or that shall not themselves seem
to include, in the form of concealed postulates, the very things
which most need to be explained. By the time, then, that the
new science has agreed upon its most approved theory of evolu-
tion, the prospect is good that theistic religion will be ready to
accord this theory a cordial reception, and to regard it as a
grateful tribute to the incomprehensible majesty, power, wis-
dom, and goodness of God.
At the present time, two forms of evolution appear which,
when carefully examined and consistently thought through to
a conclusion, stand in distinctly different relations to the
theistic conception of the world as a dependent manifestation
of God. One of these is an ontological theory, a system of
metaphysics, which virtually claims to make evolution self-
explanatory, in a form to exclude the unifying Principle of an
absolute, self-conscious, and rational Will. This is Evolution
as antithetic to Theism. It is a theory of the development of
realities, stated in terms that contradict the rehgious theory of
the nature of Ultimate Reality. The other form of the evolu-
tionary hypothesis aims, the rather, at being a descriptive his-
tory ; — or, if the term is employed with a properly restricted
significance, a science — of how the different existences of the
world have come into being, and of how the different events of
the world have come to happen, in their actual relations of se-
quence and mutual dependence. This latter hj^Dothesis, or sci-
ence of the world's development, accordingly makes use only of
the more strictly scientific forms of judgment and reasoning.
Its formula is : " If A is B, then Cis i>," provided some relation
of dependence can be established between the two judgments.
294: PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
But whether A really is B, and C really is D ; and whether
the relation of dependence is one of actuality ; — these are not
matters for easy and off-hand settlement, when the object of
our inquiry is no less than the whole history of the universe
from its conjectural beginnmg, through its conjectural changes,
down to the present time. Our reserve of judgment is further
encouraged, when it is remembered that the law and the goal
of man's higher and more comprehensive scientific endeavors
are not determined merel}' by the desire for a consistent logical
system, but for a better understanding of actuality, — that is, of
the world as the race really finds it given in its experience.
And this real world does not appear to be much less difficult
completely to describe in terms of modern evolutionar}' science
than in terms of religious mythology or theological specula-
tion.
Both these classes of theories, and indeed all theories of
world-building, whether scientific or theological, may therefore
well enough learn modesty and caution from the vastness of the
problem. It is not at all likely that man will ever know, how-
ever much gain may be made by the race in scientific knowl-
edge or in rational faith, " just how " the world began to be ;
and even less precisely what has been the history of its devel-
opment in the more distant times and spaces. Let us, then, be
more reasonably agnostic about all this. And let us also re-
member that the cosmic existences, cosmic forces, and cosmic
processes are never to be conceived of as antithetic to, or inde-
pendent of, the Being of the World ; nor are the Supernatural
One and the natural many to be considered as belonging to
mutually exclusive spheres.
The first of the two forms taken by the modern theory of
evolution is, of course, awf i-theistic ; in its most extreme state-
ment, it becomes a-theistic. Indeed, in this form the evolu-
tionary hypothesis is simply modern materialism, dressed in the
only clothing in which materialism can now hope to claim the
attention of minds possessed of even a rudimentary scientific
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 295
culture. That the world, as known to human experience, is
a development, — this is a conclusion upon which all our posi-
tive sciences so converge their evidence as to render it substan-
tially unassailable from any point of standing. Wherever any
one of them turns its search-light, there it reveals some portion
of Nature — physical nature, including plants and animals, or
human nature — placarded, as it were, with the sign " Evolu-
tion." No theory of world-building which is not evolutionary
can at present hope to gain credence. Both Theism and Ma-
terialism, or the denial of the theistic postulate and theistic
beliefs, must be evolutionary.
While, however, this is true, it does not by any means follow
that no choice remains of a higher order than that which sim-
ply permits the combination, at will, of any of the elements
that may be selected from the two-score biological theories
already proposed, and the other two-score or more theories of
the psychological and historical sciences, which too often avail
themselves of biological terms to set forth doubtful conclusions
in misleading figures of speech. Nor can reflective thinking
over the problem offered by the attempt to reconcile the scien-
tific and the religious conceptions allow itself to be mystified
by such declarations as the following ^ : " The self-generation of
natural law is a necessary corollary from the persistence of mat-
ter and force. . . . For aught that speculative reason can ever
from henceforth show to the contrary, the evolution of all the
diverse phenomena of inorganic nature, of life, and of mind,
appears to be as necessary and as self-determined as is the be-
ing of that mysterious Something which is Everything — the
Entity we must all believe in, and which without condition and
beyond relation holds its existence in itself." That all such
conceptions as " the self-generation of natural law," " a self-
determined (but non-self-like) evolution," " a mysterious Some-
thing which is Everj'thing," and an " unconditioned and un-
related Entity," are alike untenable and worthless as explanatory
1 Physicus — A Candid Examinatiop of Theism (3d ed. 1892), p. 57.
296 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
principles, whether put forth in the name of science or in the
name of religion, it is quite unnecessary to show again in this
connection. As long as the quarrel is over the relative values
of such utterly abstract and quite worthless conceptions as are
confusedly gathered under these terms, neither the man who
takes his science seriously nor the seriously pious soul need
much care as to how the quarrel ends.
Materialistic evolution encounters, in even more effective
form, all the objections which can be urged against materialism
in general. As we have already seen, these objections concern
especially the assumptions with regard to the material elements
out of which the unity of the world must be built ; the gaps
that have to be filled in, even after the original endowment of
these elements has been made as mysteriously gifted as pos-
sible ; the revolt of man's moral, sesthetical, and religious be-
liefs and sentiments against the picture of the Being of the
World which is constructed in this way ; and the acknowledged
increasingly difficult nature of all such crude attempts at the
metaphysics of physics and of chemistry. " The self-genera-
tion of natural law " is not only an inadequate substitute for
personal Will, teleologically immanent in the world ; but it is
also, in itself considered, an inert and self-contradictory con-
ception. For natural law has no generative power, even
within the relatively narrow domain to which the idea of
biological generation properly applies. It is living beings that
somehow carry within certain of their elements the mysterious
power to produce, by fission, proliferation, and other processes,
other living beings more or less similar to themselves. The
" laws " of this procedure are only the more or less uniform
and consistent ways in which the procedure takes place. This
procedure is in some sort a case of self-generation for every
living cell ; because each such cell lias within itself the atomic or
molecular outfit (or what not) which jnakes the process of gen-
eration possible. But it has already been said, that tlie theory
which endeavors to explain even the single cell as a mere col-
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 297
lection of atoms or corpuscles, in respect to its unitary and
purposeful activities, — of wliich generation is only one, — loads
down the atoms or the corpuscles with an enormous weight
of occult, original, and unchanging, metaphysical assumptions.
Just here the theory of evolution comes forward and increases
the necessity for further assumptions of the same sort, by
showing that atoms and corpuscles themselves must be sub-
jects of development. The very elements of things, organic
and inorganic, must therefore be not only self-generating but
also capable of generating other elements with a different kind
of selves ; — otherwise the World of things, as we know it,
could not be developed. And so sure of all this is the author
whom we have just quoted, that he calls Clerk Maxwell's
statement—" none of the processes of nature, since the time
u'hen nature hegan^ have produced the slightest difference in
the properties of any molecule " — " an atrocious piece of arro-
gance." ^
However all this may be, and it is as yet the very imper-
fectly finished task of science to tell how it actually is, there
can be no doubt that the acceptance of the modern theory of
evolution enormously increases the task proposed to any mate-
realistic theory of the world's history. On this point the exact
opposite of the customary assumption is true. Evolution does,
indeed, succeed in basing itself upon facts of experience. It
can at least present to our minds an attempt to unify those
facts in terms of a general conception or hypothesis. In this
way it greatly extends man's knowledge of, and it deepens and
strengthens his confidence in, the essential unity of the world.
For it exhibits this world as everywhere moving forward,
through countless ages of time, in some planful way toward
some distant but perhaps incomprehensible goal. Thus its en-
tire history seems to be penetrated throughout and guided un-
ceasingly by one indwelling Principle, one immanent Life. But
such a unitary Being of the World is not " ^'eZ/-explanatory " ;
1 Physicus, Ibid., p, 156.
298 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
nor can either the scientific or the religious interest in appre-
ciating more fully what It really is, be evaded (much less can it
be satisfied) by such vague conceptions as the " self-generation
of natural law," etc. This wonderful new world, with its
vastly greater subtilty of physical elements and mystery of new
and hitherto unrecognized forces, is all the more in need, so to
say, of the help of Theism for its explanation. Only, as a matter
of course. Theism must so modify and enlarge the conception
of the explanatory principle which it has to offer, as will enable
this principle the better to meet the increased demands of the'
hour. For the world, as we now know it, is much vaster, richer,
and more profoundly mysterious than the world our fathers
knew. This fact, on the one hand, enormously increases the
objections to materialism; on the other, it also puts increased
obligations upon the reflective thinking which takes the theistic
point of view. In the days of Lucretius, materialism was a
comparatively credible hypothesis. But a world that is, as it
were, all alive inward to the minutest corpuscle, and outward
beyond the remotest visible star, would seem to make a revival
of the materialistic hypothesis in any form, forever impossible.
Evolution, as a descriptive history or strictly scientific theory
of the world, is not, however, incompatible with Theism. On
the contrary, when rightly expounded and docilely received, it.
informs religious faith on matters which lie quite beyond faith's
province and outside the limits of its powers of insight. It is
not by faith that knowledge is acquired of the modus operandi
of the Being of the World. Nowhere, whether in the form of
deductions from its conception of the Divine Being, or of in-
spired revelation in its records of history or of doctrine, does
religion furnish any trustworthy picture of the order, or proc-
esses in time, of God's creation of the world. This is as
true of the early chapters of Genesis as it is of the correspon-
ding records of the beliefs and stories prevailing in early Baby-
lonian or other religions. In all such accounts there may be,
and there are, profound religious truths given in the form of
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 299
myth, or tradition, or shrewd guesses which anticipate facts
and laws not yet established ; but of scientific and assured
knowledge there is none. It is this conviction which has led
the defenders of a theistic view of God's relations to the world,
so largely to cease from trying to reconcile Genesis and ge-
ology ; and, indeed, to accept, if not to welcome, whatever the
positive sciences can show of truth as to the history of the
Divine creation of the cosmic system of finite existences, forces,
and laws.
As a descriptive history merely. Evolution does not move
along the same levels as Theism ; and therefore the two cannot
come into deadly conflict, or even into hostile contact. In this
form the evolutionary hypothesis, whatever its subordinate
and detailed opinions may be, claims the value only of a nar-
rative of how, in time, the world became what we now know it
actually to be. Part of this narrative is based upon verifiable
facts of experience ; far the larger part, however, has for its
basis the conjectures of gifted and brilliant imaginations as to
what might have been, in places and times forever inaccessible
to human experience. Further efforts, reaching through long
periods of future time, may enable science greatly to enlarge
the field covered by fact, and better to secure the basis of con-
jecture. But conjecture must always remain far the larger por-
tion of every theory of evolution that ventures to include the
whole world of things and selves within the grasp of its en-
deavor. For religion, no theory of evolution can ever be any
thing more than a very partial and incomplete descriptive history
of the way in which God has been creating the World. The grander
and more inclusive this picture becomes, the more profound
and reasonable are the religious feelings of awe and mystery
with which true piety will hold it in view ; but the more neces-
sary and valuable, in the interest of rational satisfactions, will
be the theistic view of God's relations to the World.
While, however, many authorities in modern science are ready
to admit that no evolutionary theory can claim to be more than
300 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
a largely conjectural, descriptive history of the world as known
by man in time, there are others who are by no means satisfied
with so limited a claim. The former hold a conception of sci-
ence which limits it to description ; for them science is the
discovery and statement under appropriate formulas of the uni-
form sequences of phenomena in time. But the latter insist
on adding to this conception a very important clause which,
indeed, largely transforms the very nature of the evolutionary
theory. In their view, scientific evolution must also explain
" the gradual passage of the simple into the complex, the rise
of tlie differentiated out of the undifferentiated, bi/ the action
of purely natural causes.'''' To this view also the beliefs, senti-
ments, and practical life, of religion cannot reasonably object,
if only it be understood that so-called " purely natural causes "
— whatever may be meant by this profoundly mysterious term
— do not, anywhere or at any time or under any conceivable cir-
cumstances, exclude the Supernatural in the sense already de-
fined.
In the interest of its completeness and efficiency as a scien-
tific theory, we therefore find evolution itself explained in
terms of postulated entities, forces, and invisible agencies and
processes, of a highly metaphysical character. About the na-
ture, number, and relative or absolute value, of these ontological
postulates there is scarcely any measure of agreement on the
part of the various authorities and schools at the present time.
For this reason, and for other reasons inherent in the very char-
acter of the experience to which all evolutionary theory must
appeal, its metaphysics is a most complicated and confusing
affair. Among such postulated but sensuously undiscoverable
entities we have Darwin's "primordial germs," or "gem-
mules ; " Huxley's abandoned Urnchleim, and " bioplasts,"
or other form of the as yet undifferentiated " matter-of-life ";
Haeckel's Monera, or "primeviil purentofall other organisms,"
which is " nothing but a semilluid idWuiiiinon.s lump ; " Weis-
mann's " ontogeny," and especially that most mysterious 2)art
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 301
of it which is " reserved unchanged for the formation of the
germ-cells of the following generation." In order so to work
these entities that they shall efficiently perforin the processes
of development, a goodly number of occult forces, some of
which are of a decidedly psycho-physical character, need also
to be assumed. Such are Darwin's " innate tendency to new
variations," Huxley's variability, " determined by conditions
inherent in that which varies "; or " natural selection," — a
term which, when analyzed, seems to cover a large number of
forces, external and internal to the organism, which somehow
serve the common psychical purpose of a preference for cer-
tain forms over others. Thus do metaphysical entities and
occult forces somehow mind-fully co-operate to evolve the uni-
tary being of the world, as it reveals itself to the observer from
the scientific point of view.
Now religion has no objection to offer to any of these meta-
physical assumptions, which the theory of evolution may find
it necessary or desirable to make in the interests of a better
explanation of the facts of experience, so long as the assump-
tions are kept within the limits of legitimate scientific theory.
If their value is only logical, they seem the better to unify for
thought and imagination a pleasing and admirable picture of
the World, which must still, no less than before be regarded
as having for religious faith the significance of a dependent
manifestation of God. If science succeeds in giving a place of
undisputed ontological value in the real world to these postu-
lated entities, forces, and processes ; even then, neither the be-
liefs and feelings of piety, nor the views and doctrines of a
theistic philosophy, need be greatly disturbed. And surely
such a " scientific view " of the way that the world of things
and selves has evolved and is still evolving, can scarcely re-
ject the religious view, on the sole ground that the latter is
only the result of a deplorable anthropomorphic, metaphysical
tendency !
Strictly speaking, no theory of evolution can be made to
302 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
serve as a sufficient explanatory cause, or " ground," of any
individual existence. Evolution may give, for every such
existence, a more or less complete, but always largely conjec-
tural, narrative of the order in which its different stages have
appeared. In similar manner also, it may connect the origin
and orderly evolution of this particular existence with other
more or less similar existences that are known, or are conjec-
tured, to have existed in past time. But the causes of all this
process, whether they lie in the individual existence itself, or
in antecedent existences of the same or allied species, are con-
cealed in the theory under such inexplicable assumptions as
"heredity," "variability," etc.; or as the chemico-physical
" properties " of atoms, corpuscles, gemmules, etc. It is to
these assumed beings and laws, or general facts, that we must
look for the proximate, explanatory causes. Yet after all,
every individual existence — thing or self, corpuscle or star —
always has to be taken in the last analysis as a fact, a datum
of experience, which can never be wholly resolved into grounds,
or causes, that consist in the mere order of the occurrences
connected with its coming into existence. The history of this
order, therefore, never tells the whole rich content of what
the particular Thing, or particular Self, really is ; much less
does it afford a summary of all the causes that explain just
why that particular Thing, or that particular Self, came to be
what indeed it really is.
The barriers which are met by the theor}'- of evolution in
the attempt to explain any individual existence, are yet higher
and more insuperable, when the proposal is made to explain in
terms of evolution the sum-total of the system of all existen-
ces, through infinite time and boundless space. It then ap-
pears even more evident that the very factors which the theory
claims as its own riglitful and necessary postulates, themselves
imply, for tlieir real existence and effective application to the
task of world-building, the co-ordinating influence of an intel-
ligent Will. Or, the rather, these factors are themselves only
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 303
so many different aspects of the manifested Power, the Will
and Mind, which is the Ground of the World as it is known
in human experience. Thus the same line of scientific research
which leads to the theory of evolution, when reflected upon
and understood in its deeper significance, leads to the conclu-
sion of the philosophy of religion : Evolution itself cannot even
he conceived of, except in connection with some unitary Being, im-
manent in the evolutionary process, which reveals its own Nature
hy the iiature of the Idea which, in fact, is progressively set into
reality hy the process.
The whole problem now returns upon us in a more impres-
sive and insistent way. For it is now the problem of an in-
finitely complex, and indefinitely prolonged, "self-evolving"
World. This obliges the mind to raise anew the question :
What sort of a world — meaning by this, the sum-total of
cosmic existences, forces, and processes, as known, or reason-
ably imagined or conjectured, can be capable of se{/-evolution ?
It is this very " Being of the World " which we desire to ap-
prehend ; but it must now be apprehended in the completeness
of the outfit necessary, not only to continue its existence, but
also to realize by a series of intricate and inter-related changes,
through millions and millions of years, some all-inclusive Idea.
A self-evolving World requires an immanent Will and Mind;
— " Something far more deeply interfused " . . . .
" A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought."
The philosophy of religion should, therefore, have little dif-
ficulty in reconciling permanently the conflict between Theism
and evolutionary science over the relations existing between
God and the World. On the one hand, religious faith has
only the interest of preserving the rational grounds for that
attitude toward its Object which requires that all the ex-
istences, events, and processes of the things and selves
which compose our total experience, should be regarded as de-
pendent parts of the one planful manifestation of God. This
304 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
faith is not only favorable to the conception of development,
but some of its most essential beliefs and doctrines require the
application of tliis conception to the experience of the individ-
ual and of the race. Without help from the tenet of evolution,
the doctrine of God as perfect Ethical Spirit cannot be vindi-
cated against the charges offered by the prevalence of evil;
and the most precious dogmas of Christianity concerning the
Divine work of redemption, the growth of the Divine Kingdom
by revelation and inspiration, and tlie final triumph of that
Kingdom as the realized Ideal of an all-inclusive good, cannot
even be stated in intelligible terms. Thus the beliefs, hopes,
and practical motives of a religion that is compatible with the
advance of race-culture, require the unquestioning acceptance
of tlie truth, that wherever " the earth bringeth forth fruit
of herself," there it is always, " first the blade, then the ear,
after that the full corn in the ear."
On the other hand, it is only history and science that can
tell religion wliat, more precisely, this evolutionary process lias
been in the past, is now, or will probably continue to be. For the
question of the precise order, and the exact how, of the world's
development is not a problem to be solved by faith. The un-
folding of the life of religion itself, whether in tlie individual
or in the race, demands an investigation, conducted after his-
torical methods, into scientifically established facts. And,
finally, the picture which studies in evolution enable the pres-
ent age to draw of the way in which the world has been made
in the past, and is still in process of making, stirs to their pro-
foundest depths the religious feelings of awe, mystery, de-
pendence, and worshipfulness. Evolution makes more reason-
able those beliefs which attribute to the Being of the World
such majesty and sublimity of Will, and such rationality and
benevolence of purpose as are satisfied only by the conception
of this Being as Absolute Pei'sonality, and perfect Ethical
S[)irit. It is, however, when the history of humanity is re-
garded as manifesting the Divine holiness, and the redemp-
THKISM AND EVOLUTION 305
tive processes which derive from it their potency, that religious
experience finds its demands for satisfaction most fully met by
the doctrine of development.
Let us, then, for a brief moment indulge the imagination in
prophetic insight and foresight, with a spirit that is at the same
time docile toward the conclusions of evolutionary science and
genial toward the ideas of value, and the valuable faiths, of
man's religious experience. According to science, countless
decades of centuries lie behind us in the past, during which the
life that is, so to say, latent in the Being of the World, has been
coming to a higher and more complete manifestation in the
history of human selves. All the lower forms of this manifes-
tation, both inorganic and organic, have their value and signifi-
cance in the process of evolution. They stand, each species,
and even every individual in each species, not only for some
good-in-itself, but also for some higher good in respect of the
contribution which they have made toward the onward move-
ment of this process. The evolution is, indeed, necessarily ac-
companied by, and dependent upon, a vast, an incalculable
amount of struggle, suffering, and death. But, from a reli-
gious point of view, this " necessity " is not that which compels
a mechanical system, like a mill to grind on, regardless of the
results produced in the condition of the material that is being
fed into it. Neither is it fitly described as a " Will-to-live, "
that cannot, however, justify itself by an appeal to those highest
products of its own volition, which it has mysteriously made
capable of passing judgment upon its moral character, and of
consenting or refusing to conform themselves to its Will. This
necessity is, the rather, somehow — although man can only
dimly apprehend, and never fully comprehend, this " how " —
inherent in the Good-Will of the Being of the World itself.
For faith, now not blind and credulous, but made more hopeful
and reasonable by evolutionary science itself, holds that all this
necessary struggle, suffering, and death, is the expression of an
absolute and perfect Ethical Spirit, whose absoluteness guar-
20
306 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
antees the certainty of the end, and whose ethical perfection
will secure the realization, by the totality of the process, of
what is supremely worthy of the cost, because it is the supreme
and all-inclusive good.
From this height of religious faith the beholder may look
upon all of the process of evolution, so far as observation or
imagination can bring it under review, with feelings of pity
and sympathy, for the cost, but with feelings of trust, calmness,
and resignation, as respects the justness of the process and the
value of the end. And inasmuch as religious experience leads
to the belief that, —
" The loving worm within its clod,
Were diviner than a loveless God
Amid his worlds," —
it also induces the particijDation, in thought and in action,
in that work of Divine redemptive struggle, suffering, and
death, which the very perfection of God makes ethically nec-
essary for Him.
From the same height of faith, too, the theory of evolution
is seen to afford a new significance to all the upward striving
of the Life that is immanent in the history of the biological
series, as modern science so forcefully describes this history.
" Death and birth," said Fichte, " is simply the struggle of life
with itself, in order to display itself more clearly and more like
itself." All the lower forms of life, as regarded from this point
of view, have a specific reality and value of their own; but they
are the more real and the more valuable, because they are the
necessary pioneers, and forerunners, of the life of man's moral
and spiritual Self. But man, too — not only as an individual
Self, but also as that member of tlie biological series who has
the superlatively great share in the benefits to procure which
all the members of this series have struggled, suffered, and
died — must purchase for himself, under the plan still necessi-
tated by God's Good-Will, the higher and yet higher develop-
ment of self-hood in the society of redeemed selves. This
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 307
personal and social redemption, too, must pay the price. The
higher life costs heavily ; but faith credits it with a value that
is greater than its cost. And thus, from the religious point of
view, the entire process of biological evolution may be regarded
as a demonstration of how the lower soul —
" Grows Into, and again is grown into
By the last soul, that uses both the first,
Subsisting, whether they assist or no,
And, constituting man's self, is what Is
and, tending up,
Holds, is upheld by God, and ends the man
Upward in that dread point of intercourse,
Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him."
For God, in his relation to the evolutionary process, cannot
be conceived of, with any approach to satisfaction of either in-
tellect, heart, or will, unless the enormous amount of loss and
death with which this process seems, of necessity, to be accom-
panied, may be regarded as only preparatory to a higher, and,
finally, to the highest and most permanently valuable, form of
life. Such a life is the spiritual life ; the sharing by the human
race in the fullness of the life of God. Thus all the " travail "
of creation, to which the Apostle Paul refers, is introduction,
as it were, to the work of religion regarded as the spiritual up-
lift of humanity. The preface is tragic. The scene of the
great drama is itself full of tragedy ; but the conclusion of it
all is the triumph of that social Ideal which biblical religion
denominates the Kingdom of God.
Against this faith evolutionary science can have no reason
for complaint; since every barrier is removed to its freest
ranging in the fields where either logical consistency, or onto-
logical values, give the law to the hunter and the reward of
his success. The World is no less God's World because
evolved by God, whose immanent Will and Reason are the
fundamental and the final principle of the evolutionary process.
308 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
He who is the Ground of its being at all, is no less the Ground
of its ceaseless becoming. For it is not with an alpha and
an omega alone, — and leaving out all letters between the two, —
that we should spell the title which God possesses to be recog-
nized by any theory of the evolution of the world. From re-
ligion's point of view evolution itself is just this, — the way of
the World in becoming^ in time, a more and more full, hut always
dependent manifestation of God.
The problem which is offered by the conflict between The-
ism and Evolution, and which is answered by the theistic po-
sition so as to include in harmony the claims of both, is not
infrequently proposed in a yet more difficult form by the phi-
losophy of religion itself. In its desire to do full credit to the
important conception of development, especially when this
conception is made to cover the whole world as known in the
totality of human experience, an attempt is made to apply it
to God Himself. The world is known in its essential nature
only as it is known to be in a process of evolution. The
essential Being of God is known only as manifested in and
through the world. What, then, should prevent us from
holding that this essential Being is itself, in its real essence,
evolutionary ?
The attempt to conceive of God, or the Divine Being, as
undergoing a process of development, profoundly changes the
whole philosophy of religion. This change appears in its con-
ception of the predicates and attributes appropriate to this Be-
ing, and in its theory of Nature and the Supernatural. God, if
we continue to apply this term to the World-Ground, is no
longer, as it were, inherently possessed of infinite and absolute
power and knowledge ; He is, the rather, coming unceasingly to
the more perfect possession of these predicates. He is not es-
sentially and eternally wise, holy, and good, — a perfect Ethical
Spirit ; He is Himself constantly becoming more and more
conscious, as it were, and observant of the moral principles,
which have from tlie beginning somehow lain dormant in his
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 309
nature. A Deity that develops, may be, indeed, essentially
Spirit ; but the completeness of this spiritual essence must be
discovered, not in what He has eternally been, but the rather
in what He will in the future become. And if the inquiry be
pressed as to the particular form, under cover of which this
evolution of the Divine Being is going on, the answer must of
course point to the development of the human race. As the
race becomes, in the person of its highest representatives, or
as represented by the general average of humanity, more truly
cultured, and especially more spiritual ethically ; this hitherto
hidden and unconscious spirituality of God the more fully
realizes itself. For it is preeminently in man, and in man's
historical development that God is always immanent. On the
other hand, the character of this immanence being judged by
its highest manifestation, we are compelled to say that it con-
sists in the way it perfects itself by a process of becoming. In
a word, the Divine omniscience must be conceived of as the
sum-total of the evolution of more and higher knowledge in
the science of the race. The Divine spirituality must be
thought of as the increasing, collective growth of human
society, organized and guided in accordance with ethical prin-
ciples, in the realization of spiritual ideals. Indeed, God's so-
called Absolute Personalit}' merits this title, only because it is
not conceived of after the analogy of the individual man,
whose personality is always relative to, and dependent upon,
that of others in the race. The Divine Self is the sum-total of
the finite selves which compose the race, and which are ever
on the way to becoming more and more truly personal.
Such a view as the foregoing of the relations which maintain
themselves between the Divine Being and a world which is
known to be in a process of evolution, has a fascination for
minds enamored of logical consistency. Besides this, it un-
doubtedly presents certain features that appear favorable to
some of the more important beliefs and feelings of religion.
The latter excellence is due chiefly, if not wholly, to the graphic
310 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and seemingly intimate way in which it presents the doctrine
of tlie immanence of God in all human experience. That the
power, cunning, and purpose toward men, of the divine invisible
beings, are present in all the life and growth of other concrete
beings, is a tenet essential and dear to all the lower forms of
religious belief. That God's Infinite Spirit is sympathetically
and helpfully present in all the struggles, sufferings, and even
failures, of human finite spirits, is a conviction with the truth
of which no religion that offers to man " a way of salvation "
can possibly dispense. " He knoweth our frame ; he remera-
bereth that we are dust." And of him whom Christianity re-
gards as manifesting more than any other the real nature of the
Divine Spirit, it is said : " Though he were a Son, yet learned
he obedience by the things which he suffered ; and being made
perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them
that obey him." Moreover, in attempting to elaborate the
theistic theory of the Divine relations to the World, it was
found necessary to regard God as " co-conscious," and thus
consciously immanent, in every act, and phase of the unfold-
ing spiritual life of the individual and of the race. And, finally,
any even tentative and partial solution of the problem of evil
seemed to require that God, as perfect Ethical Spirit, should
be conceived of, not as abiding in a blessed aloofness from the
sufferings and sins of humanity, but as the Suffering though
Blessed One, and as the immanent Redeemer of man, by
an historical process, from his condition of suffering and of
sin.
All attempt to apply the conception of evolution to the Di-
vine Being, however, when more closely examined and thor-
oughly thought out, is seen to defeat itself. It represents the
immanency of God in a way largely to render it ineffective ;
and the doctrine of the Divine transcendency is quite over-
looked or made impossible from its point of view. Collective
humanity is not a satisfactory substitute for the Absolute Per-
sonality, the UniUiry Being of an onmipotent will and an cm-
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 311
niscient mind ; much less is it an adequate representative of
man's Ideal of ethical perfection. If the conception of God
is to serve human reason as an explanatory principle, as a real
" World-Ground," God must be conceived of as the adequate
Ground of this world as we actually find it. But the world,
as we actually find it, is in a process of evolution. God as the
Ground of the World must, therefore, be so conceived of as to
account, not only for what, according to the evolutionary hy-
pothesis, the world has been and is now, but also for all that
which, according to the expectations and predictions based
upon this hypothesis, the world is destined in the future to
become. And in this connection, the development of human
society toward the better realization of its cherished ideals
must, in a very special way, be taken into the account.
The conception of a self-evolution of God, therefore, turns
out to be a resort to the lower form of an unconscious and im-
personal Mechanism, or a semi-personal and undeveloped World-
Soul, as a substitute for the theistic conception of God as Ab-
solute Person and perfect Ethical Spirit. It has some of the
excellences, and also most of the defects, which always accom-
pany the views entertained by the different forms of pantheism.
It is, however, in its application to the various religious doc-
trines which symbolize those relations of God to the world
that are most vital and valuable in the religious experience of
the race, that this conception fails most conspicuously of af-
fording satisfaction either to philosophy or to faith. Only if
the evolution of things and selves, as it appears in history and
to modern science, may be regarded as a process of Divine self-
revelation, can philosophy and religious faith be harmonized
upon a basis of historical and scientific facts. Evolution is
manifestation of the Absolute ; evolution can never be its
producing cause.
In conceiving of the relations between God as Personal Ab-
solute and the process of the world's evolution, the inescapable
limitations which belong to all human knowledge — whether
312 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
scientific, philosophical, or implicate in the content of religious
faith — must constantly be kept in mind. In its doctrine of
God as Creator, Preserver, and Moral Ruler and Redeemer,
theology has too often striven for conceptions that should be
spaceless, timeless, unconditional ; and so should represent
these relations between the World and its Ground, sub specie
oeternitatis^ as it were. On the otlier hand, in order to escape
the necessity of introducing Deity as Jin explanatory principle,
even at the beginning of the world, evolutionary science has
tried to help itself out by postulating an infinite amount of
undifferentiated material ; and this material is thought of as
self-existent, or as " left over " from the wreck to which some
prcvixistent world had already been brought by an evolu-
tionary process. If we inquire after the ground of this pre-
existent world, with its " self-generating natural law," we are
referred to another still preexistent world ; and so on, ad in-
finitum. Now this abstract conception of a Divine Being, that
may be conceived of in terms not drawn from experience, but
as existing sub specie oeternitatiSy and the equally abstract con-
ception of an eternally self-existent and self-generating World,
are alike useless both to religion and to philosophy. The only
Divine Being man knows, or can know, is God as manifested in
the totality of an experienced u'orld, — a world that is essentially
conditioned upon relations which are realized in space and time,
and as an historical development.' Tiie only world that science
can know is just this same experienced world. To experience
God by faith, as manifested in this world, is the essence of
religion. To know God as revealed in this religious experience
is the aim uf the philosophy of religion. Both religious expe-
rience and philosophical knowledge are subject to development.
But so is evolutionary science itself. Religion, science, and
philosophy, all have their roots in tho unitary being of man ;
' Kor a discussion of the way in which the catojiorics of Time and Space
are related to the conception of an Absohitc Self, see the author's A Theory
of Reality, chapters VIII an<l IX.
THEISM AND EVOLUTION 313
and by his progress toward the realization of his ideals, all
these aspects and experiences of his own nature are more
and more to be harmonized and united as permanent and
fundamentally important factors in the total evolution of the
race.
CHAPTER XXXIX
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER
That the invisible divine beings, or gods, have much to do
with the shaping and even with the production of things, has
been the conviction of the religious consciousness from the be-
ginning until now. Indeed, it is this conviction that gives to
the popular divinities much of the influence which they pos-
sess, to excite the fears, hopes, and other affections, of their
worshippers. Yet the impulse, or motif, which leads the mind
to believe in creator gods, or in the one God as the Creator, is
not precisely the same as that which leads to the belief in the
popular divinities. Neither is the development of religious
cosmogonies by any means wholly parallel to the development
of the doctrine of God as perfect Ethical Spirit and Moral
Ruler of the world. The more primary and practically oper-
ative impulses to religion have been seen to be the fears of evil,
and the desires for good, which lead the sensitive spirit of
man toward the invisible and <?^/t£'r-spiritual Being which en-
virons him. But the belief in divine creation is a matter
chiefly of theoretical and speculative interest.
In the very beginning, however, so far as definite informa-
tion enables us to describe this beginning, man employs his re-
ligious belief in the construction of a theory of reality. He
asks most imperatively, it is true, the pressing practical ques-
tions : How may I so " square myself " with the gods as to
save my crops, my cattle, my wife and my children ; But he
also asks : How did things come to be as they are ? Who
made the world ? and How shall I account for the ceaseless
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 315
process of the coming and going of individual existences ? It
is, then, a most natural phenomenon to find the races which,
from certain points of view, are rated lowest, believing in
creator gods ; and in the generation of men, animals, and
things, by the divine beings.
As to the manner of the divine making of the world, a num-
ber of views prevail among savage or primitive peoples. Of
these the most naively anthropomorphic may be called the
Potters' or Moulders' view. Thus Tzacol, or the " builder,"
and Patol, the " moulder," are terms used for some of their
gods by the Mayan tribe of Indians.' Certain Australians call
a similar divinity by the name Baiame, or the " cutter-out " —
as of a sandal from a skin. Physical generation, the primitive
form of the belief in the divine fatherhood, by associating the
creator with a wife who is the genatrix of all things, or a uni-
versal mother, furnishes another analogy under which to con-
ceive of the divine act of creation. Under this form appear
most of the East Indian myths. But the Bushmen, too, whose
material poverty and physical degradation are undoubted, be-
lieve in a male and a female divinity, who are, themselves, the
invisible parents of visible objects. The Hottentots, whom
certain of the earlier anthropologists rated as only slightly
above the Orang-Utang, boast, as did the early Greeks, that
their ancestors are descended from a god, called Jouma (the
" Great Captain "), to whom they ascribe the work of creation,
and whom they regard as the giver of all life.
The Hebrews, however, were by no means the only people
who early arrived in a largely independent way at some more
spiritual conception of the divine method in creation. Among
the Zunis of New Mexico the god Awonawilona was said to
have conceived the world " within liimself and thought it out-
ward in space." Or, since the word expresses the wish of the
mind, he speaks in kinglike fashion and it is done ; he com-
mands and it stands fast. But the following view of the same
1 See Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 179 and chap. VII.
316 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
people would seem to require that it should be placed some-
where between the second and the third of those views de-
scribed above : " With the substance of himself did the all-
father impregnate the great waters, the world-holding sea." In
like fashion the Mixtecs asserted that before there ever were
years or days, the world lay in darkness ; all things were or-
derless, and " a water covered the slime and ooze that the
earth then was." But by the efforts of the two winds, one
personified as a bird and the other as a winged serpent, the
watere subsided and the dry land appeared.'
In similar lofty manner, certain of the native Australians be-
lieve that, besides the demons and bad spirits, there is a good god
" Tian " who dwells in heaven and made all things, even includ-
ing the heavens themselves. All another creator god needed
to do was to say : " Let earth appear ; let water appear ; " and
it was so.^ Like beliefs are held by those natives of Queens-
land whom Sir John Lubbock classified, on the authority of
Dr. Lang, as without any religion. And a strange old chant
of the Dinkas runs :
" At the beginning, when Dendid made all things,
He created the Sun.
And the Sun is born, and dies, and comes again 1
lie created the Stars,
And the Stars are born, and die, and come again!
He created Man,
And Man is born, and dies, and returns no more! "
Similar views are held by the Polynesians regarding the so-
called " high gods," and are expressed in their creation myths.^
Tangaloa is worshipped by them, under different names, as the
special "head-god" of them all, by whom all the other gods,
and men, and all things, were made ; though some of the
myths attribute the creation of the heavens, clouds, stars, wind,
1 So Garcia, as quoted by Brinton, The Myths of the New World, p. 230/.
2 See RoskofT, Das UeliRionswcsen der rohe.sten Naturvolker, pp. 36/7-
3 See Waitz and Gerland, .\nthropologie der NaturvOlker, VI, pp. 231/.,
336/.
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 317
plants, and animals to his son Raitubu. In the Samoan crea-
tion-myths Tangaloa is spoken of as dwelling " in the pure
air," where he "hovered as a bird" and had power over the
rest of the gods, who were for the most part his children.
Among the Polynesians, as elsewhere, the "high gods," or
" creator gods," are not wont to concern themselves particu-
larly about the details of present affairs going on among men.
They do not need, therefore, to be propitiated ; and there is
little occasion for offering sacrifices or prayers to them. It is
this relation of the god and man which leads Waitz ^ to say of
the Redskins that the " Great Spirit " " stands at the head of
their religion," but "not at its center." Of the fetish-wor-
shippers on the West Coast of Africa, Nassau declares " I have
yet to be asked, ' Who is God ? ' " Njambi, or the ' One-who-
made-us,' is " the name of that Great Being which was every-
where and in every tribe, before any of them had become en-
lightened ; varied in form in each tribe by the dialectic differ-
ence belonging to their own, and not imported from others." ^
While, then, we are not able to affirm that all tribes, even
the lowest in race-culture, have always believed in creator
gods, we are able to point to this attempt to account for the
coming and going of the world's visible existences by reference
to the creative agency of the divine invisible powers, as a nat-
ural and inevitable factor in the origin and development of
religion.
This view is further confirmed by the fact that all the most
ancient cosmogonies are religious in their character and their
origin. They ascribe the beginnings of things to the gods;
although they nowhere rise to the speculative conception of
creation in the stricter significance of that word (a creatio ex
nihilo'). In this respect, however, the more ancient religious
cosmogonies — with the possible exception of the Hebrew cos-
mogony as detailed in Genesis i, 1-ii, 3 — do not differ from
1 Ibid., Ill, p. 178.
2 Fetichism in West Africa, p. 37.
318 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the philosophical theories of world-building which began among
the Greeks. Both assume certain preexistent and unexplained
material, — a kind of " stuff " " found on hand," as it were ;
they then undertake to tell how the successive differentiations
and elaborations of this material took place. In the one case,
however, the world proceeds to make itself ; in the other case,
a divine invisible spirit shapes this material into a more or less
orderly system of things. This same difference in point of
view, and in the character of the principles postulated in the
interests of explanation, forms the principal distinction between
the doctrine of theism and the theory of scientific materialism
at the present time.
The cosmogonic ideas of the Semitic, the Indo-Aryan, and
the other ancient religions, although they differ in details, and
although certain characteristics of superiority must be conceded
to the Hebrew cosmogony, are in most important points essen-
tially alike. There are two versions of the Babylonian, as there
are of the Hebrew cosmogony. In the Creation Epic or " Epic
of Marduk " we are informed : —
" There was a time when above the heaven was not named;
Below, the earth bore no name.
Apsu (or Ocean) was there from the first, the source of both,
And raging Tidraat (T'hom), the mother of both."
Then follows a conception of the making of the world which
is foreign to the Hebrew thought. For, according to Professor
Jastrow,^ " Apsu represents the male, and Tiamat the female
principle of the primaeval universe." Out of the chaotic mix-
ture, where all was darkness and water, strange monstei-s arose.
" Tlien were the gods created in their totality." It was the god
Marduk wlio subdued the "raging Tirunat" and reduced the
seething and ungovernable chaos to order and to cosmic form.
•• He established the stations for tlio preat gods.
The stars, tlicir likont'ss he sot up as constellations.
lie fixed the year and marked tlu^ divisions."
* Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 411.
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 319
For all this he is called the " creator of abundance and full-
ness " and "' the lord of lands ; " for " he created the heavens
and formed the earth."
In the earlier Vedic religion " there is also a vague nascent
belief in a creator apart from any natural phenomenon, but
the creed for the most part is poetically, indefinitely stated."^
Dh^tar (" maker ") is, however, called " most wonder-working
of the wonder-working gods, who made heaven and earth." In
the Rig-Veda (vi, 48, 22) it is expressly said : " Only once
was heaven created, only once was earth created "; but this
creation is attributed to different gods. The speculative mind
of the Hindus, however, could not rest satisfied with so naively
anthropomorphic a conception of the way in which the present
system of things and souls came into being; and therefore
at the end of the Vedic period theosophy invented the " god
of the golden germ " — a pantheistic conception. This panthe-
istic and evolutionary view expressed itself in such myth-
making as follows : " The world was at first water ; thereon
floated a cosmic golden egg (the principle of fire). Out of
this came Spirit that desired ; and by desire he begat the
world and all things." But all through its history the religion
of Hinduism, in spite of its speculative tendencies, furnishes
no clear picture of the process of creation. The same thing is
even more true of the Shinto cosmogony, as taken from the
Preface of Yasumaro to the Kojiki. In some respects this de-
scription of the history of creation is not inferior to Genesis.
But its differences, and its relatively defective character, be-
come apparent when we are told how, after Heaven and Earth
had parted and the three Deities had performed the commence-
ment of creation, the Passive and Active Essences developed,
and the two became the generators and ancestors of all things.
The principal points of superiority in the Hebrew cosmogony,
regarded as a doctrine of creation, are these three : (1) Elohim
is in the beginning ; (2) Elohim speaks into being all other
1 See Hopkins, Religions of India, pp. 173/., 207^.
320 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
things and finally creates man in his own image — i. e., does not
generate him ; and (3) Elohim is not represented as developing^
or as himself developed out of the preexistent. It is noteworthy,
however, that all the ancient religious cosmogonies, even the
Hebrew, begin with some lofty guesses at a truth which forms
an important part of the content of religious faith — namely,
that all things have their origin in the Divine productive Life ;
but they then, on trying to imagine details as to the nature of
the process, drop down into the region of tradition, childish
myth, or unverifiable folk-lore. This is due to the fact that,
as has already been shown, religion has no means of knowing
how God created the world ; and philosophical thinking had
not at the time of these cosmogonies developed so abstract a
conception as that of a creation out of no preexistent material
by mere fiat of will. Even in Plutarch's view ^ the original, or
prime Creator of the World, only bestowed upon the stuff of
the phenomenal universe the principle of change by which,
without his intervention and under the operation of natural
causes, this stuff is constantly reshaping itself.
The absence of scientific knowledge, and the limitations of
man's earliest philosophic endeavors, make all the more won-
derful the sublime conceptions to which the impulses of reli-
gious faith, joined to those of intellectual curiosity, have raised
the mind of certain favored individuals. Renouf, in proof of
the assertion that John Henry Newman's " true notion of God
could more easil}' be matclied from Egyptian than from Greek
or Roman religious literature," instances the following: "The
great God, Lord of heaven and earth, who made all things that
are "; " O my God and Lord, who hast made me, and formed
me, give me an eye to see, and an ear to hear, thy glories."
According to Menaiit,'^ the doctrine of creation taught by
Zoroastrianism was that of Judaism rather than of Hinduism :
" The universe is a true creation in the full force of the word,
1 Sop Dc Defcctu Orac, 30 luul 37.
2 Zoroastre, p. 191.
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 321
and not at all an emanation. As soon as the creature appears,
it is to remain forever distinct from the creator." Perhaps the
most spiritual and ideally lofty of all the ancient religious
cosmogonies is that of the Avesta. Ahura-Mazda surrounds
himself with seven spirits who are his creatures, — good
thoughts, holiness, majesty, humility, sanity, obedience, purity.
He created man for good thoughts, words, and works ; and
then the elements of fire, water, and earth, which should there-
fore be kept pure; and lastl}^, wholesome trees and good
animals. All noxious and bad things and animals were created
by an evil spirit ; but religion is trust, love, and obedience to
Ahura-Mazda alone ; and over all the evils the good God will
conquer at the last.
It was from an intellectual rather than a more purely ethical
point of view that the doctrine of the Chinese philosopher
Shushi, much later, maintained the creative activity of eternal
reason to be the origin of the universe of things and minds.
" Before the existence of the heaven and the earth, there was
— Reason." " In the beginning there was no being except
Reason." This eternal reason is at once the Great Limit and
the Limitless. Every particular object shares in the Great
Limit, or in Eternal and Universal Reason ; but the particularity
of each is due to the quality of the force which it manifests.
Equally lofty is the Buddhistic view of creation, which ex-
plains that in the beginning there was no thing ; all was emp-
tiness and the five elements had no existence. Then Adi-
Buddha revealed himself under the form of a fiame of light.
He is indeed the great Buddha, who exists of himself. All
things that exist in the three worlds have their cause in him ;
he it is who sustains their being. From him, and out of his
profound meditation, the universe has sprung into life.
A special relation of man to God as creator is quite uniformly
recognized by the religious cosmogonies, — even by those of the
lower order from the intellectual and scientific points of view.
This relation is more usually conceived of in terms of physical
21
822 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
generation, or fatherhood, in the early stages of man's religious
development. The most direct form of this relation is also cus-
tomarily regarded as limited to the divine ancestor, or to the
more highly privileged, of the then existing race. The Pharaoh
in Egypt was regularly looked upon as the son of the gods ; ^
and when the queen was the progeny of a deceased monarch and
the sister of her spouse, the reigning king, she was called " the
daughter of god." Under the new monarch, however, she
bore a title derived from her relation to the king, who is god
or son of god ; she was therefore called the '' spouse of god,"
or the " mother of god." According to Preiss,"^ in the Chinese
theology Heaven and Earth are father and mother of all things ;
and man stands somehow midway between this Supreme Pro-
ductive Principle and the host of lower powers, heavenly and
chthonic. When this lofty doctrine of his origin is coupled
with the ancient and immemorial doctrine of the Chinese sages,
that man is by nature good and inclined to virtue because he
received his nature from Heaven, the influence which religious
belief has always had upon civil affairs in China is seen to have
been, with good reason, enormous. It is environment, especially
bad government, which, according to Chinese views, leads the
people astray. In biblical religion, however, the doctrine of
man's moral fall is incorporated into one of the earliest versions
of the Hebrew cosmogony ; and thus, although man is indeed
a special creation of the Divine Being, and is made in the
Divine image, he is at present a wandering and sinful child.
Christianity, witli its doctrine of redemption, emphasizes, on
the one hand, man's low moral condition and need of God's
help, in order to realize worthily the end of his creation ; and,
on the otlier hand, it exalts man's spiritual potentiality and in-
comparable value, since all his religious histor}' is to be looked
upon as a manifestation, in the jtrogressive establishment of
the Kingdom of Redemption, of the Divine redeeming Love.
1 Sec Ennau, yl^Kypten und ^gyptisches Lcbcii iin Altertuni, p. 112/.
2 llcligioiisgeschichte, p. 38. »
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 323
The religious experience has from the earliest times re-
garded God as the Preserver, or " Upholder," as well as the
Creator, of the world. Little definiteness and insistency, it
is true, has been given to this conception of the relations be-
tween the cosmic existences and processes and the One World-
Ground. The reason for the fact is obvious. Once made,
things and selves seem, both to naive and to scientific realism,
to be capable of continuing and upholding themselves. Their
^^ properties^' are conceived of as preserving them. But the
phenomena of death and destruction make a very vivid appeal
to man's religious beliefs and sentiments ; and therefore de-
stroying gods, or some one divinity known as the Destroyer,
are readily projected into the field of experience by the imagi-
nation and thought of the worshipper.
The attempt to unite in some systematic way the various
divine works of creation, preservation, and destruction, was
most elaborately made by the Hindu religious philosophy of
the fifth and following centuries after Christ. By the earlier
date there had developed a sort of pantheistic triad composed
of Brahma, the All-god, the Creator in the sense of being the
Atman or World-soul, and two of the great sectarian gods,
Vishnu and Shiva.^ Of these two Vishnu was originally the
sun, and Shiva the lightning. But Vishnu had also been
worshipped as the All-god, who may, however, be incarnated
in temporary forms. As the " Divine Song " affirms : " He is
not born, he does not die at any time ; nor will He, having
been born, cease to be. Unborn, everlasting, eternal, He, the
ancient One, is not slain when the body is slain. As one puts
away an old garment and puts on another that is new, so He
the embodied Spirit puts away the old body and assumes one
that is new."
But Shiva, too, must be celebrated by his sectarian devotees
as equally an All-god. He is indeed a " bes tower of gifts"
1 On the history of this development, see Hopkins, Religions of India, es-
pecially pp. 410^.
324 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and a creator ; but he is also and especially, " the terrible,
great, fearful god." He represents, as saj'^s Professor Hopkins,
"the ascetic, dark, awful, bloody side of religion." Neither of
these sectarian divinities, however, could dethrone, or prove a
substitute for, the indestructible Brahma. He could still say
of himself : " I am the inexhaustible seed." " I am being and
not-being." " I am immortality and death." " I am the be-
ginning, the middle, and the end of all created things. I am
Vishnu among sun-gods. . . . Among the Rudras I am Shiva.
.... I am the letter A among the letters, and the compound
of union among the compounds. I am indestructible time and
I am the Creator. I am the death that seizes all, and I am
the origin of things to be."
But how shall this puzzle of three " All-gods " be answered,
this conflict of rival claims be adjusted? The later trinita-
rian Hindu pantheism is the answer. Of the Supreme God
the Bhagavadgita declares (iii, 272) : " Having the form of
Brahma he creates, having a human body (as Krishna) he pro-
tects, in the nature of Shiva he would destroy ; — these are the
three manifestations, or conditions, of the Father-god." Thus,
not so much " by unfolding the riches of the one great god "
as by " compounding the claims of three gods who were riv-
als," ^ the later philosophic Hinduism arrived at the concep-
tion of Deity as Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer. Brahma,
or the neuter and impersonal All, thus analyzes himself, as it
were, into the three personified phases of the World's Life,
represented by Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.
Crude in ideas, inconsistent in logic, and mythological in
form, as the later doctrine of Hinduism certainly is, it is an
attempt to recognize and express a truth of essential moment,
eternal persistence, and profoundest import. The world of
hnm;in experience is a process of becoming, in which all indi-
vidual things and selves appear as arising and continuing
only for a time, and then ceasing to be. Somehow, therefore,
1 So Menziee, History of Religion, p. 350.
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 325
the Ground of their origin, of their persistence, and of their
disappearance, must be found in the one Being of the World.
It is this truth which the religious consciousness postulates in
its doctrine of God as the Creator, the Upholder, and the De-
stroyer, of all finite existences. This truth religious experi-
ence finds necessary, in order to establish to its satisfaction
the content of its beliefs ; and in order to meet the needs of
its most profound and valuable feelings. In making this pos-
tulate of faith, the religious consciousness sees further into the
truth of the World than is possible for descriptive and explan-
atory science. For it finds the origin, the upholding, and the
passing away, of all finite existences to be in the One planful
Will which also manifests itself to piety as fatherly and
redeeming Love.
The doctrine which refers the whole process of world-
building, and especially the evolution of spirituality in hu-
manity, to the active Divine Love in creating, upholding, and
controlling all beings and all events, is preeminently that
adopted by the reflective thought of Christianity.
In the Old Testament, apart from the attempt at a cosmog-
ony in the earlier chapters of Genesis, no descriptive history
or quasi-scientifiG theory of the order and manner in which
God creates and preserves the world is anywhere to be found.
It is enough that the presence of Yahweh in all the phenomena
of nature should be recognized in poetical language, and in a
form to stir the heart of man to wonder, gratitude, and praise.
But as in other religions, so particularly in Judaism, God is
regarded as the Lord of life and death ; He it is who giveth
and also taketh away. He is also the Lord of Hosts and by
no means indifferent to human history, — especially when the
interests of his covenanted people are concerned. He comes
down and scatters the kings which have assembled against
Israel ; and when he has conquered, he ascends on high again
leading captivity captive. He makes and keeps alive every
man ; for man is indeed but clay, until the breath of Yahweh
326 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION .
has breathed a soul into him. When this breath is removed by
divine act, the body returns to dust. Whether it can live
again, God knows ; but if it does live, it will be by renewal
of life through the same inspiring breath. This idea of God
as the creative and renewing source of all life is continued in
the New Testament ; but it is made more ethical and spiritual,
until the apocalyptic vision where, on the testimony of the
angels, it is said : " O Lord God Almighty, which art, and
wast, and art to come," to Thee belong " salvation, and glory,
and honor, and power ; " for Thou art " Alpha and Omega,
the beginning and the end."
Christianity expresses its maturer views as to the doctrine
of God, Creator, Upholder, and Destroyer of the generations
of men, under two markedly different and yet not irreconcila-
ble forms of symbolism. One of these, although it is not
wanting in elements which convey the profoundest specula-
tive truths, is mainly emotional in origin and of practical
value. The other, although it also appeals to certain senti-
ments and is of influence in the religious life as an affair of
conduct, is mainly speculative and designed to answer to ra-
tional demands. The one corresponds to a conception which
is found germinal and growing in all the various forms of reli-
gion. As it appears in Christianity, it is of Jewish origin, but
springs more especially out of Jesus' consciousness of sonship
and moral union with God. The other is not, indeed, wholly
foreign to Old-Testament ideas and figures of speech ; but it
is chiefly Greek, both in origin and in its form of expression.
The one tenet represents God as the Lord of Life and Father
of man, — as creating, preserving, and dealing with liunianity
after the likeness of the father's treatment of his sons. The
other doctrine accounts for what the Divine Being is, and does,
for the race, as due to tlie quickening and uplifting activity of
the Logos which proceeds forth from Him. The creative, up-
holding, and destroying energy of God is essentially both
paternal and rational.
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 327
Attention has already been called to the fortunate fact that
the religion of the Old Testament, even in its earliest and
crudest form, does not regard the Divine Being as originating
human physical or psychical life by an act of generation.
Man's entire being, indeed, comes from God, but not in a
way analogous to that in which it comes from his human pro-
genitors. The imparting of the Divine Life to humanit}' is
conceived of as essentially a spiritual affair ; although the con-
ception of spirit itself remains all through the Old Testament
relatively crude and undeveloped. That God is the Father
of men, the Source of their life, and especially, and in a
unique degree of the Son of Man, is a tenet of faith which
springs resistlessly forth from the profoundest depths of the
consciousness of Jesus. It is this steadfast consciousness of
living the life that is in God, of being fully and unceasingly
one, as son, with the Father, in which Jesus finds the unques-
tioned proof for the reference of all his experiences to the wise
and loving Divine Will. Such a life — constantly re-created as
it is from the exhaustless Well of all vitality — cannot perish ;
it is in the Father's hand, and no man can pluck it out of his
hand. Moreover, it is by union with him, in the same vital
way, that those who live the life which follows the secret of
Jesus, become partakers of eternal life. They are branches of
him, the vine ; and the branches that remain in living union
with the vine, cannot fail to live and grow, for they are planted
in God. But this same God is the Destroyer as well as the
Creator and Preserver of human life ; for the branches which
do not abide in the vine are surely doomed to wither and to
be burned. This, too, is the law of the Divine evolutionary
procedure. This conception of spiritual existence and devel-
opment for man as attainable only under the conditions of vital
union with God, the Source of all Life, is expanded in the
New Testament especially in the writings which bear the name
of John.
The more speculative doctrine which endeavored to express
328 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
both the transcendency and the immanence of God, and to
justify the unique relation of Immanity to Christ as the Son of
God, was derived largely from Greek sources. The Old Tes-
tament had imparted majesty, and all the qualities of kingship
and rule to the conception of God, by representing him as act-
ing through mediators, — not merely physical beings and nat-
ural forces, but also angels, prophets, seers, etc. In the earlier
Christian doctrine the invisible and m^-sterious but really spirit-
ual naturcof God, was expressed in similar ways. The first con-
ception of the sonship of Jesus was rather practical and spirit-
ual than metaphysical. The views of the earlier apologetic
and Greek development, concerning the relations of God to
the cosmic existences and processes, are summarized by one
writer^ in the following way: Christians believe in " a God
who is unbegotten, eternal, unseen, impassible, incomprehen-
sible, and uncontained ; comprehended by mind and reason
only, invested with ineffable light and beauty and spirit and
power by whom the Universe is brought into being and set in
order and held firm, through the agency of his own LOGOS."
The philosophy of Christianity had, of course to attempt
the problem which is the crux of the philosophy and theology
of all time, — namely, how to represent to thought and imag-
ination the method of procedure b}' which the Absolute and
Transcendent Being becomes immanent in the cosmic processes
and existences as the creative, upholding, and destroying
agency of them all. It was therefore necessary, on the one
liand, that its speculative solution of this problem should sa-
credly guard the unity of God ; and on the othej- hand, that it
should exalt and make more effective the mediating and re-
deeming work of Christ. That form of the Logos-doctrine
which may be called " catholic " (leaving out of account the
dogmatic inquiry whether this doctrine is defensible, or even
essentially and permanently "Christian "), was the answer wliich
was given to this difficult, and perliaps forever unanswerable,
1 Athenagoras, Legatio, 10.
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 329
problem. In its development three stages, or factors, to the
inquiry may be recognized :(1) As to the Genesis of the Logos;
(2) as to the Nature of the Logos ; and (3) as to the relation
of the Logos to the man Jesus. ^ A theory of cosmology was
to be incorporated into a doctrine of the way of salvation.
The tracing of the development of the Logos doctrine in
the history of Christian theology or dogmatics, and the criticism
or defence of this doctrine, do not constitute a part of our ap-
pointed task. It is enough in this connection that two features
of the entire history, with its hot debate and even blood}'- con-
flicts, should be borne in mind. One of these concerns the in-
estimable religious truth that God is really present in the
world, and, especially, in human souls and human history, as
the immanent and rational All-Spirit ; and that He has set into
reality this, his abiding spiritual presence, in a quite uniquely
impressive and effective way, through the pei-son and work of
Jesus Christ. But the other truth emphasizes the doubt, vacil-
lation, and inherent difficulty, if not impossibility, that belong
to all attempts to represent the method of this real immanence
in a completely satisfying way.^
Modern psychological science, and a philosophy of mind
which bases itself upon experience, distinctly favor a return to
the position which interprets the immanence of God in the
human soul in the more practical and spiritual way. For the
1 On all this inquiry, compare Harnack, History of Dogma (English
Translation), Vol. I, pp. 110, 328; III, 1-50; and Hatch, Influence of Greek
Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, pp. 256^.
2 For example, the nature of the Logos soon came to be regarded as God-
like, not simply by partaking but by essence {oi/a-la). But the value
and meaning of ousia becomes doubtful ; for it may be used as the equiva-
lent of material substance, or of abstract substance, or of the species or
genus. In time this term was made convertible with "hypostasis"
(vwdffTacris), — a word which was intended to emphasize real existence in
contrast with mere appearance, or potential existence. Then -personals.
character in a play, or a party in a juristic sense, became the equivalent
of " hj-postasis. " Later #i/(ris and TLpbiuwov ca,vaQ into use.
330 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
doctrine of "soul-essence," or " spiritual reality," or "personal
substance," which the later forms of the Logos-doctrine em-
body, is itself both unscientific and unphilosophical. But the
essential truth which Christianity postulates as based upon
a more profound and highly illumined experience than belongs
to the other great world-religions, remains essentially un-
touched. This experience is that of a spiritual presence and of
a moral and spiritual union. Its essence, or reality, consists in
just this.
What, then, is the essential truthfulness of the religious doc-
trine of God as Creator, Upholder, and Destroyer, when criti-
cally interpreted and examined in the light of modern scientific
and philosophical opinion ? This question is answered by com-
paring this doctrine with the conclusions of the positive
sciences as respects the origin, continuance, and cessation of
the cosmic existences and forces. In general it may be claimed
that the evolutionary conception of Matter is not unfavorable
to the essential truth of the theistic doctrine of God's relation
to the World. On the one hand, so-called " matter " can no
longer be regarded as originally a quite lawless and as yet un-
ordered " stuff," upon which mind must come from without, as it
were, in order to impress it with order and law. Its " proper-
ties," so-called, were not subsequently imposed as superficial
and unessential qualifications for its future work as a world-
building material. In a word, the doctrine of the ancient re-
ligious cosmogonies, which regarded Deity as an artificer, or
worker-over of ready-made material, is no longer tenable. But
equally untenable, on the other hand, is the conception which
thinks to account for the World's evolution by ascribing to its
material, under the guise of impersonal qualifications of most
intricate and inconceivable kinds, the necessary equipment for
building itself without the presence or aid of indwelling Will
and Mind.
By all of the positive sciences the World is now known as
a ceaseless Becoming. It is, in fact, a continuous ])roc('ss of
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 331
change in time ; and all individual existences, in their own
life-history as well as in their changing relations to other exis-
tences, are parts of this process. The process itself is brought
about by — is indeed the expression of, a vast and inconceiv-
ably intricate network of forces which co-operate by combina-
tion or collision, to bring about the result. But the World is
not a mere Becoming ; it is an Evolution, a more or less or-
derly and law-abiding series of changes, which have a certain
ideal Unity, and which are moving forward toward the accom-
plishment of certain ideal ends. In this Evolution the origin,
continued existence, and destruction of all individual beings,
things and selves, and even — if this were possible — of the ma-
terial elements themselves, are moments in the world's Time
and fragments, or factors, in the world's Energy.
With this evolutionary conception of the Being of the
World, we have already seen that the religious doctrine of God
as Creator, properly understood, does not conflict. The essen-
tial thing about the doctrine of creation is that the creature
shall be regarded as dependent for its origin upon the rational
and free Will of God. The only answer which religious faith
can give to the inquiry after the origin of any individual ex-
istence, or of the World as a whole, is a reference to the
Divine Will. But this Will must not be conceived of as blind
force, or as an unconscious and unintelligent World-Ground ;
it is immanent and purposeful Reason, as well as Power, that
is displayed in all creation. For God is not compelled to cre-
ate ; neither is He unaware of the causes which lead to, and
express themselves in, his creative acts. The causes are God's
" reasons ;" for the causes lie in the ethical and spiritual Being
of God himself. He brings all things and selves into being of
his own wise and good will. Therefore religion simply an-
swers the child-like question, " Who made the World, when
first it began to be ?" by proclaiming its faith in equally child-
like fashion : " God made the World ; and He who is its maker
did not begin to be, but was, and is, and eternally will be." The
332 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
further question, " Why was the World so made ?" the same
faith has the courage, born of rehgious experience, to answer :
" Because God so willed it, in liis wisdom and goodness, and
for the fulfillment of his own wise and good purposes."
The tiine at which the world began, and whether we con-
ceive of the world as beginning at any particular time or not,
does not concern religion. Its answer in no respect alters the
relation in which God as Creator stands to those cosmic exis-
tences and processes which science undertakes to investigate.
As to the time of creation — if by this be meant, How long is
it since the present elements of the known world came into ex-
istence ? or even. How many seons is it since they assumed
substantially their present cosmic form? — neither science nor
revelation now give, or ever can give, any trustworthy infor-
mation. Indeed, the whole problem of the absolute origin of
the world is essentially insolvable ; but fortunately, it is of no
theoretical or practical importance for either science or religion.
Both science and religion are obligated, if they desire to keep
within the limits of the known and the knowable, to take tlie
world as human experience finds it. The arguments of science,
both for and against the eternity of matter and force, in any
strict meaning of the word " eternity," are equally inconclu-
sive. And as to religious experience, it should be distinctly
understood, that if God is not needed now, to render a rational
account of the origin, existence, and passing away, of the finite
minds and finite things of the experienced world ; then He is
not needed at all. If religion can do without God to explain
what /.", it can equally well do without Him to explain what
was, or what tvill he. If the present recognized cosmic proc-
esses are in need of no spiritual Principle to render them ex-
plicable and effective in carrying forward the world to its
ideal goal ; then they may be left to take care of tliemselves,
as it were from an eternity ah ante to an eternity ad post. For
neither religion nor science can profit by following the links of a
logical chain with an infinite reyresma, under the illusory hope
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 333
of capturing an abstract Absolute or Prime Cause, at the end of
this chain. Both religion and science should, the rather, seek
by insight into the real world of present experience, to discern
the ways of an immanent and ever-living God. In this search
of reason, the essential reality and logical cogency of the dis-
covered truths are not in the least disturbed by the confession
of man's inability to render cognizable, or even imaginable, an.
absolute beginning of the world at some point in time.
Within the limits of experience, and of the reasonable con-
clusions from known facts to inferred cosmic processes and
cosmic laws, it is the task of the positive sciences to tell when,
and how, God creates the particular existences of the world.
But religion, acting in the spirit of piety, refers every particu-
lar new existence to the rational, wise and good Will of God.
By whatever combination of preexisting elements under the
action of whatever so-called cosmic forces, this or that individ-
ual thing or soul began to be, it must still be piously consid-
ered as a dependent manifestation of the creative energy of
the Divine Being. Each thing, each soul, is God's creature ;
each status, or period of the world's existence, each phase of the
cosmic process, is God's doing. The philosophy of religion
supports this tenet of religious faith.
In spite of the inability to solve the problem of an absolute
beginning of the world in time, both science and religion re-
gard the experienced world as somehow completing a cycle of
events. The world we know, or imagine, begins in time, con-
tinues through aeons of time, and will reach at last some goal
toward which the entire process of development has carried it
onward. In its cosmogony the Hebrew scriptures represent
Elohim, who was in the beginning, as beginning to create an
orderly world out of materials then existing in a state of chaos ;
as continuing the work of creation in a succession of periods
characterized by the origin of higher and higher orders of be-
ing ; and then, finally, as taking for himself a Sabbath of rest.
This idea of God's resting — in the sense of becoming an inac-
334 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
tive and absentee God — is not only rejected as unworthy by
the religious consciousness of Jesus, but is also rendered quite
untenable by the established views of science and philosophy.
The motif which existed in the mind of the writer of Genesis
— namely, to authenticate the divine command of the Sabbath
by the divine example — has no longer any bearing on the
problem. It remains true, however, that all the resources of
human knowledge, now obtained or presumably obtainable,
only enable us to paint a picture, whose frame is indeed obscure
and expansible, but which always represents only a very small
section from the eternal Life of the Personal Absolute. For
tlie physical sciences this picture shows a limited number of
successive periods in the self-evolving existence of the Cosmos.
For religion, the same picture gives the history of the foun-
ding, growth, and triumphant establishment of the Kingdom of
God.
From the point of view of the positive sciences, no physical
thing, or animal soul, or human spirit, is created all at once,
as it were. Its creation is its own peculiar evolution ; its being
is its process of becoming. It follows, then, that God the
Preserver, or Upholder, in the view of the philosophy of reli-
gion, cannot be an Other than God the Creator. In no case of
any individual existence, however insignificant and speedily
transient in time, does the creative act consist in the placing
of something already finished and " ready-made " within the
self-evolving system of previously existing tilings. Indeed,
the very essential being of every particular existence consists
in its ability to go through a certain series of changes which
are peculiar to itself. Even of the atoms, or of the corpuscles
which modern physics thinks itself entitled to make use of, in
order to give a satisfactory internal constitution to certain
species of atoms, we must say that they — each one — have their
own peculiar round of changes to go through ; their value in
the world of reality consists in their continued faithful per-
formance of this task. It is just this ability which designates
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 335
the " nature " of the thing. And its more common features
and characteristics are spoken of as the " laws " of things.
To piety, and to the philosophy of religion, this perseverance
of things along the courses of conduct which make them to
realize their own ideas, and to play their own part in the cosmic
complex, is a manifestation of God as the "Upholder" of all
things. According to this view, the impious man may be re-
minded that neither he, nor his possessions, can be continued
independently of the Divine Will ; and the pious man, by the
same view, obtains a perfect rest in God. That things keep on
existing, just because they have existed in the past, is as for-
eign to the conceptions of modern science as it is unwelcome
to the beliefs and sentiments of religion. For, as has already
been said, their very being does not consist in maintaining a
sort of death-like existence statu quo ; indeed, the word death-
like cannot be used in this connection ; death itself is change,
with just as much of immanent force and purposeful idea dis-
played by it as is displayed by the phenomena of life. This de-
nial of the possibility of any existence independent of God, is a
vital truth with the religious experience. Therefore, from this
point of view, the philosophy of religion proclaims again the
truth that, for the World as a totality of cosmic existences and
cosmic processes, its continuance is an uninterrupted manifesta-
tion of the Divine Will. And what is true for the continued
existence of the World as a totality, is true for every moment
and every change in the existence of all particular existences.
For the flow of the Divine energy into the several currents of
the world's life is a steady stream, and it is He who is the
Ground of the continued reality of all the system of finite things
and finite selves.
Since the conservation of things and of selves does not con-
sist in the holding of them in statical condition, the destruction
or passing of the old is as essential to their continued exis-
tence as is the becoming of the new. Indeed, the two are re-
verse sides, or rather complementary phases, of one and the
336 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
same evolutionary process. Conservation involves destruction.
If, therefore, God is to be the Creator and Upholder of a
World which under existing conditions is a system of beings
in a process of development, He must also be the destroyer as
well. While this is true even of the relatively most unchange-
able of material objects, it is more obviously true of all things
that live and grow. Metabolism — or the displacement and ejec-
tion of worn-out material by new material appropriated from the
world's supply — is the essential process by whicli the units of
the living organism continue in existence. By the same proc-
ess, multiplied millions of times over, the organisms of all liv-
ing creatures support themselves and continue to be.
The multiplication, conservation, and development of species,
is also a ceaseless process of destruction and reconstruction car-
ried on in accordance with immanent controlling ideas. In the
larger world of all plant and animal life, the succession and
improvement of species takes place in the same way. It is of
man, as tlie most complex and highly organized of all known
existences, both physically and psychically considered, that this
creation and preservation by a process involving destruction is
most impressively true. Thus the individual human being
comes to be, continues to exist, and passes away. The history
of the human species, in all the forms of its development, illus-
trates the same truth. Race after race ai'ises, propagates itself,
decays, and dies, in order to make way for, or to contribute
some needed element to, the evolution of the human race. And
in that spiritual kingdom, upon whose realities and ideals the
faith of religion fixes its eye, life is secured and conserved only
by losing it ; the members of this kingdom, and the institutions
they build, are ever somehow undergoing a wonderful and
mysterious process of destruction and reconstruction. For the
King of the kingdom is the Destroyer, as He is also the Creator
and Upholder. Its law of growth is to become as a grain of
mustard seed, or a field sown witli wheat, having tares to be
plucked up and needing constantly the purification of burning.
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 337
Among the speculative questions in which the philosophy of
religion has no small interest, as connected with its view of the
Divine Being in relation to the cosmic processes of creation,
conservation, destruction, and re-creation, are those in debate,
from time immemorial, between Realism and Idealism. It
would seem, however, that certain factors from both these
philosophical systems are needed in order to validate the reli-
gious view of the world in a semi-logical way. That solipsistic
idealism which denies that the world of things has any reality
independent of the finite subject, and which considers the essen-
tial being of things to be exhausted, as it were, by the repeated
and collective experiences of humanity, would seem to make
faith in God as the World-Ground irrational by making the
world itself unreal. On the other hand, the Kantian concep-
tion of reality as noumenal, or Thing-in-itself, and so forever
excluded from the realm of the knowable, considered as an ex-
perienced world, is destructive of the ontological value of
that procedure of intellect by which the philosophy of religion
thinks to establish the conception of God as the Creator, Up-
holder, and Destroyer of cosmic existences. Any of the several
forms of the doctrine of the World as Maya — illusory and like
the fleeting shapes of a dream — makes it illogical to regard the
cosmic existences and events as a trustworthy manifestation of
an immanent, rational Will and Mind. And, in fact, such
Idealism has been historically associated either with Pantheism,
or with the effort (as in Kant's case) to arrive at the transcen-
dental realities in which religion places its confidences, in some
other than a truly and completely rational manner. For a
rational and ontologically valid interpretation of religious ex-
perience it seems necessary that the existences, forces, and proc-
esses of the cosmic system should have a reality which is not
imparted to them, or constructed for them, by the cognitive
activity of the human subject. That God made the World —
or rather, that God., by a ceaseless process of creation, uphold-
ing, and destroying, is making the World — is the doctrine of
22
338 PHILOSOPHY OB' RELIGION
religion. That the human Ego makes the World, and that this
"Ego-made" World has only the ''appearance " of reality, or
is only " phenomenally real," is a tenet of speculative philoso-
phy which appears antithetic to the postulates and convictions
of religion.
On the other hand, the Realism which recognizes in the
World nothing but the cosmic existences, forces, and proc-
esses, as the positive sciences, in however justifiable manner
from their proper point of view, are wont to do, is even yet
more destructive of the rational grounds of religious beliefs,
sentiments, and practices. It is to an Ideal Unity, which is
not a mere idea, but is an immanent and unitary, real Being of
the World, that the highest religious experience of human-
ity responds. To this Being, this experience, when critically
examined and rationally interpreted, awards the guaranty of
an Ultimate and Supreme Reality. As the idea of It de-
velops in the experience of the race, the Reality is better com-
prehended as corresponding to the Ideal of the race. From the
highest religious point of view, it is made the Object of reli-
gion, as perfect Ethical Spirit. Thus humanity's Ideal is recog-
nized, with an appropriate filial attitude by all personal finite
spirits, as the Ultimate and Supreme Reality, the true Being of
the World.
As to the precise manner and degree of reality which should
be ascribed to the different finite existences, and as to the exact
way in which we ought to conceive of the viodus operandi of
God in his progressive Self-revelation, religious experience has
little to impart. It can the more safely leave these problems
to the various schools of science and philosophy. About their
most probable solution, the existing schools, and all schools to
follow, during the indefinite fcons of the remaining world's
time, will probably continue curiously to inquire. The object
of such inquiry cannot properly be said to be " transcendent,"
in the Kantian meaning of the word. Its answer is not, in-
deed, of such a nature as to put it essentially, and from the
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 339
beginning, beyond the limits of all possible experience. But
the complete answer is essentially too deep in its hiding places,
and too boundless in the stretches of space and time which it
covers, ever to fall wholly within the field covered by human
experience. Meantime and always, however, the faith of reli-
gion in God as the Creator, Upholder, and Destroyer of the
cosmic existences and forces can be held in the interests of a
rational explanation, as well as of a devout and efficient life.
The supremely important thing for the religious conscious-
ness is, of course, that Man himself shall be consciously and
voluntarily placed in right relations to God as his Creator,
Preserver, and the Ruler of his destiny. With piety it is es-
sential that human life and death should be in God's safe keep-
ing. In order to find the fullest satisfaction for his religious
needs and aspirations man must believe himself to be the crea-
ture of God, and yet capable of attaining the abiding life in
God by becoming his son in a moral and spiritual union with
Him. This new creation of man, to which piety aspires and
which it is the promise of the religions of salvation and espe-
cially of Christianity to impart, cannot be hoped for or ob-
tained as the resulting product of cosmic processes when these
processes are regarded as themselves devoid of all direction
by an indwelling rational and ethical life. In order, then, to
place upon good and defensible grounds the hopes of religion,
God must be conceived of as the Moral Ruler and Redeemer
of mankind. This special work of the " new creation " of hu-
manity, which involves the originating and development of a
capacity for spiritual life, is the chief concern of the religious
view of God's relations to the World of things and selves.
But the creation of the " over-man " is an intricate and in-
definitely prolonged evolutionary' process. The origin of
spirituality in finite things can no longer be thought of as an
endowment, once for all, with body and mind capable of re-
sponding to the highest moral, sesthetical, and religious aspira-
tions and ideals. Neither in the case of the individual, nor in
340 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
that of the species, is this kijul of Divine creative activity like
the hiunching from the well-greased ways into smooth water
of a ship that is already full-rigged, fully stored, and fully
manned. There is no "common clay" of personality from
which the individual human being may be constructed as a
piece broken off from the gross lump of humanity. God's ac-
tivity in creating and upholding the spirit in man is co-exten-
sive with the history of the development of the human race.
In studying the forces operative in the creation of finite
spirits, the part that physical nature has played must be every-
where duly recognized. What the natural sciences describe
as man's discipline from his environment, in endurance, cour-
age, industry, and in the intelligent use of his powers of body
and mind, is, from religion's point of view, God's work creative
and preservative of spirituality in man. From the evolution-
ary standpoint the credit for this is due to the Divine Being im-
manent in the World ; even when the so-called natural forces
seem themselves to be waging a fierce and unfeeling conflict
with the lower forms of a beginning spiritual life. God the
Destroyer is present even here as God the Creator and Upholder.
The same truth enlightens and steadies the mind, as it observes
the evolution of spirituality in man through the more interior
and trying conflict between his lower nature and the higher and
more rational powers, when these latter dawn and rise slowly to
the place of control. For the ideals which now begin to ap-
pear prove to be indomitable forces, that greaten and lift up
the whole life of humanity. And, finall}^ it is such religions
as Zoroastrianism, early Buddhism, ;iii(l, ubove all, the religion
of Christ, which accentuate the conflict between the " world,"
as comprising those enticements to prize and seek the lower
values of wliicli man has experience, and tliat Kingdom of God
in which all tlie supreme spiritual and ideiil values are, so to
say merged.
In all this process of the evolution of man as spirit, man
himself has ttiken no unimportiuit part. For selves cannot be
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 341
made from without, or by other selves, but must also always
be self-made. Such a view of the origin, continuance, and
possible destruction of a true Self, accords with all that we
know about the subject from the point of view of the psychol-
ogy and metaphysics of mind. The reality of the human per-
son is always a development, admitting of different degrees,
and having its many conditions and phases as a process taking
place in time ; but it is also always a 8e{/'-development. To
quote the summary of arguments given elsewhere in detail : ^
" The peculiar, the only intelligible, and indubitable reality
which belongs to Mind (i. e., the human mind) is its being for
itself, by actual functioning of self-consciousness, of recogni-
tive memory, and of thought." And in all these forms of
functioning, self-determining will is ever present, as the "heart
of the heart" of the human Self. But every man's making of
himself is none the less the work of God in creating and up-
holding the spirit that is in the man.
In some such way the science and philosoj^hy of the mind
corroborates the postulate of religious experience. And we
may say with a recent writer on this subject : ' " The reality of
the Ego belongs to the metaphj^sical presujDpositions of re-
ligion." The creation of a Self is, therefore, always a two-
sided affair. Every Ego becomes, and continues to be, a real
person, just so soon, and just as long, and just as completely,
as it is actually able by self-activity, as self-conscious will, to
construct in a living process its selfhood in this way. Actually
to become a self-conscious, knowing, and self-determining will,
is an achievement in which this very same developing Self
takes part. But this activity is also a gift of God, and it is
constantly sustained by God ; it is His immanent, rational Will
which ever constitutes and upholds this self -hood of ever}'' man.
All this being which I properly call 7mne is a being in Him ;
1 See the author's Philosophy of Mind, where this conclusion is established
in detail.
- A. Domer, Religionsphilosophie, p. 244.
342 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
whether I will it or not, and whether I know it or not, I am
absolutely dependent upon him for its existence and its exer-
cise. By virtue of these divinely imparted and divinely sus-
tained powers, I take part in the creation and conservation of
my Selfhood. This co-operation renders me a Self, — apart from
God and over against God ; but at the same time, it is in this
power to be myself that the highest potency of my being in
God consists ; because this is, of all my being, most like the
being of God. It is, therefore, the self-conscious choice of, and
the steady adherence to, this divine ideal of a real spiritual
Selfhood which makes it possible for man to realize his peculiar
kinship to God.
Religion maintains that the conflict with evil, and the triumph
over evil which is at the same time divinely induced and self-
determined, is tlie supreme good possible for man within the
sphere in which he has been divinely set. It, and not the
successful seizure and control of physical goods, is man's su-
preme good. But this good is only the beginning of a good
which will come to humanity in the form of that " far-off di-
vine event " which is to include all the ideals of value. A
life of conflict, and of triumph through conflict is, indeed, the
greatest possible good that can be realized here and now;
and yet the anticipations of religion agree in saying, in the
words of Luther : " It is not the End, but the Way." Thus we
are brought back to the thought tliat man's religious experience
is of a process that is necessary for the development of spirit-
uality ; and that this particular aspect of his total development
is dynamically related to all those other aspects to which the
positive sciences give their especial attention. This is but to
say, that man's evolution is the manifestation of the creative,
upholding, and disciplinary presence of that perfect Ethical
Spirit in whom the faith of religion is firmly fixed.
It is the feeling of the value of this doctrine of man's cease-
less dependence upon God, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, of his capacity to take a responsible part in his own
GOD AS CREATOR AND PRESERVER 343
spiritual development, which has made Christian theology so
sensitive to the opinions of science, and of the different schools
of philosophy, as to man's place in Nature, as to the nature of
the human Self, and as to the personal relations of this self to
the Infinite and Absolute Divine Being. What religion aims
chiefly to secure is a rational ground for the ethico-religious
virtues of humility, gratitude, and the spirit of obedience and
service. But it cannot sacrifice man's relatively independent
personality to demands for a spurious humility ; nor can it
foster genuine gratitude by denying the dependence of truly
virtuous character, and of true piety, upon the choice of the
human individual. Moreover, the obedience which religion
asks, and the service which it prizes, are not of the nature of a
psychical mechanism which runs true because it is bound blindly
and unsympathetically to do its maker's will. On the con-
trary, genuine piety, and the growth of all the ethico-religious
virtues, are quite impossible practically, and are even theoreti-
cally inconceivable, without that constant conviction of depen-
dence upon the Infinite Spirit in which the best humility, the
warmest gratitude, and the most cheerful and efficient obedience
have their roots. Such piety constantly reminds itself: "I
truly live, according to the fulness of the Divine Life in me."
And when this twofold aspect of the one life is recognized as
somehow forming one truth, and is greeted with those convic-
tions and made to serve those practical purposes in which the
interests of religion are concerned, the illustration and enforce-
ment of the details of the divine methods in the creation, pres-
ervation, and successive passing-away, of the generations of
men are left to science to discover. The reconciliation of the
points of view from which these two aspects of the origin, pres-
ervation, and destruction of human life — the scientific and the
religious — appear, becomes a problem for the philosophy of
religion to consider with ever renewing industry and zeal.
CHAPTER XL
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE
Those conceptions in which religious experience expresses —
although largely in symbolic or figurative speech — its most val-
uable beliefs and cherished sentiments regarding the relations
of the World to God, are dependent for their rational justifi-
cation, in a very special manner, upon the validity of our ideas
of personal being and personal relations. For the history of
humanity is understood by the greater religions as a totality
which has a profound ethical import, and which rests upon a
sure basis in tlie ontological value of ethical ideals. This his-
tory may, indeed, be considered from different points of view ;
but as it is viewed by these religions, it bears the marks of
some sort of a moral government. When regarded as having
an evolutionary character and as being a real advance of the
race toward moral ideals, it is at least conceivable in terras
of the history of a redemptive process. The very essence of
Christianity consists in the adoption of this point of view ; its
life-history is the progressive realization of tlie redemption of
the race. Stripped of tlie characteristics which make it an
ethical Uplift of Humanity, it loses all its claims to distinctive
excellence ; failing in this historical task, it loses all right to
success in its missionary enterprise. But what is preeminently
true of the Christian religion is true in a subordinate way of
sucli religions as Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and even
of the better side of Islam.
Now unless (iod is Pcrsun, in the fullest conceivable mean-
ing of the word, and unless men are true persons, in no su-
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 345
perficial or illusory meaning of tlie same word, there can be no
such reality as Divine Government. To be Moral Ruler, in
any conceivable meaning of the phrase, God must be some-
thing more than impersonal Force or Law, or even Personal
Absolute — with no more significance attached to this latter
phrase than philosophy has often assigned to it. The Being
of the World, conceived of as an all-inclusive mechanism, self-
evolving and self-explanatory, cann(jt stand in relations of
moral rule toward individual human beings ; or toward these
same beings when considered from the point of view of their
social development. Mechanism ca/inot govern its own parts,
" morally." An Absolute, regarded merely as personal, might
be a moral ruler over certain of its creatures, if it chose to be
so. But an absolute and perfect Ethical Spirit must be a
" moral ruler," in the fullest meaning of this phrase. For
this " must-be " is not of the nature of a compulsion arising
from without ; it is a holy and blessed choice which expresses
the essential nature of the perfection of such a Spirit.
Equally plain, though not of the same nature, is the neces-
sity that man shall have attained at least the beginnings of a
capacity for personal relations and personal development, in
order to be a subject of moral government. Things cannot be
"governed " in any proper ethical meaning of the word. Ani-
mals may be said to be governed, only so far as g-wasi-personal
characteristics and capacities are assigned to them. In the
lower forms of religious belief, indeed, little or no distinction
is made in this regard between man and the lower animals.
Some of the latter are readily imagined to be upon preferred
terms of a political and social order with the divine beings ;
certain animals are more nearly allied to the divine nature than
are some men. But in the more sober reflections of the ethi-
cally developed religions, it is man, as god-like in his personal
being and as having the capacity for a moral and spiritual de-
velopment, who is the favored, if not the sole, subject of the
moral rule of God.
346 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
It is just at this point, however, that the philosophy of reli-
gion encounters •''some of its most persistent and, in certain
respects, insurmountable difficulties. Therefore, a return to
impersonal, or to imperfectly personal, or to mystical and pan-
theistic conceptions of God, of humanity, and of the relations
between the two, so often occurs at this point. We have
already found frequent occasion to remark how the modus oper-
andi of the immanent agency of a personally transcendent
God is the problem which forms the crux for all the schools of
religious philosophy. It is in the case of man, however, that
this problem becomes at the same time most important, most
sensitive to any rude handling of its various faces, and most
expressive of religious experience. God is Absolute Person
and perfect Ethical Spirit ; only as such can he be the Moral
Ruler and Redeemer of man. Personal relations, therefore,
must be established and maintained between God and man ;
otherwise there can be no such thing as moral government.
But how can Absolute and Infinite Personality coexist with
a multiplicity of real finite personalities ; and, more particu-
larly, how can other than merely seeming and illusory personal
relations exist between the two ? The One Self must, we are
told, be absolute and infinite, in order to deserve the predi-
cates and attributes, which belong to God. The many selves
have their limited and conditioned existences as parts of the
world, only l)ecause they, too, are dependent manifestations of
God. Their life, which appears to themselves and to one an-
other, as at least partially that of an independent self-being and
self-development, is, after all, in reality only their being in
God, and their continuing to l)e by the ceaselessly creative and
unholding Will of God. How shall such relations be realized
in consistency with the demands of religious experience ? This
is the proljlem which underlies every theory of the divine
government of the world. Religion answers tlio problem
with its conception of God as perfect Etliical Spirit, immanent
in human history as man's moral Ruler and Redeemer, and op-
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 347
erating in the totality of human experience as Providence;
and in the form of revelation and inspiration.
At the stage of the discussion already reached, little more is
necessary than to refer to the conclusions of the previous chap-
ters, respecting the predicates and attributes of Divine Being,
concerning Nature and the Supernatural and concerning the
immanence and the transcendence of God. It has already been
shown that by the infinity of the Divine Being the philosophy
of religion does not understand the all-comprehending nature
of this Being in any merely quantitative or ^itas^-mathematical
fashion. It can scarcely be too often remembered that the re-
lations of the Infinite One to the finite many are not to be
worked out like sums in arithmetic or geometry ; neither are
they to be adequately symbolized by terms of calculus or
quaternions. And as for " the Absolute," in the meaning of
" the Unrelated," or Unknowable " Thing-in-Itself," we have
once for all relegated this lifeless abstraction to the " death-
kingdom " of barren and negative ideas. Nor is any one of
the predicates or moral attributes of God so to be conceived of
as to exclude the possession by man of the same predicates and
moral attributes in his own limited and imperfect way. God's
o???m'-potency does not prevent human beings from the posses-
sion, or the progressive realization, of just so much, and such
kind of potencies as are in fact their own. On the contrary,
the former is the real ground and guaranty of the latter. God's
omn/-presence in no way interferes with my being to myself
here-and-now present ; or with the presence of other things and
selves then-and- there .^ Nor, again, does the divine omni-
science make any man less wise or less foolish than he
really is.
With the sentiment which ascribes all human goodness to
a Divine Source, the pious soul has been familiar in all re-
1 Most of the diflBculties and antinomies which have characterized both
orthodox theology and pantheistic philosophy upon these points, come from
a thoroughly mistaken psychology and metaphysics of the Self.
348 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ligions, and among all peoples, that have reached a certain stage
of race-culture. " God be praised ;" and " To God be the glory;"
— these are exclamations of the most mature religious expe-
rience in view of all the triumphs of truth and righteousness
over conflicting forces ; or at the discovery of what is true and
good in unexpected places, and in extraordinary degree. But
these same individuals and peoples whose language abounds in
such phrases, are, above all others, those which are also most
ready to admit the reality of human responsibility, as well as
the justice of the divine discipline and retribution, even when
it bears most heavily upon themselves. With this sentiment
goes the more or less instinctive or highly intelligent shrink-
ing which piety feels, from regarding God as the author of evil
— especially of that evil which the ethico-religious conscious-
ness regards as sin. The spirit of piety is unwilling, even in
the interests of a logical consistency, to bring any taint of un-
wisdom or moral obliquity upon the perfection of that Ethical
Spirit which is the Reality of religion's most precious Ideal.
It appears, then, that the problem of man's moral freedom,
and the yet larger problem of moral evil, are both involved in
the effort to imagine how strictly moral relations can exist be-
tween an Absolute and Infinite Person and a multitude of finite
and dependent personalities. The discussion of the problem
which underlies the religious doctrine of the Divine Govern-
ment of the World, therefore, soon meets with difficulties of
a sort that cannot be wholly removed. This fact may be admit-
ted without argument. Such an admission, however, is far
from the conclusion that the intrinsic nature of these problems
furnishes a legitimate ground for charging human reason with
hopeless and inescapable internal contradictions.
Contradictions between human freedom and the ethically per-
fect government of an Absolute Person exist only when, either
on the one hand tlie self-determination of the human will is
understood in a too mechanical fashion ; or, on the other liand,
the action of the Divine Will upon the human will is conceived
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 349
of in too absolute fashion.^ But a relation of wills is intrinsi-
cally not of a mechanical character ; all figures of speech taken
from mechanical relations as subject to quantitative measure-
ments fly wide of the mark, when directed to this relation.
This is no more true, and is scarcely any less true, when the
wills of two finite selves are under consideration. Howl can,
by willing, influence another will, may be to me a mystery ; it
may remain a mystery for all human thinking, until the end of
time. But that it is so, and that its being so, does not destroy
the consciousness of moral freedom or impair the entire fabric
of human society which is built upon this consciousness, re-
mains no less a fact of experience. The fact of self-activitj^
culminating in the choice of ideal ends — which fact, however,
and also all realization of those ideal ends, are dependent upon
the influence and inter-action of wills — appears to be an expe-
rience beyond whick we cannot go. I choose, and I assert my
self-active and independent being by my choice ; but I choose
as a being, dependent upon and environed by, other beings in
the One Being of the World. I will to influence others, as
myself a will ; but in this willing, I acknowledge and I realize
my debt of influence received from others.
A yet more fundamental examination of this problem of
moral freedom, from the point of view of a philosophy of
knowledge, shows that the mysterious character of the ulti-
mate facts involved is not so essentially different from that
mystery which eludes all attempts at investigation, because it
marks the limits of the knowable. Physical science explains
all the transactions which occur in the world of its experience
by referring them to interdependent and mutually related self-
active beings. This related self-activitij is the ultimate and the
forever inexplicable fact. It is mysterious and inexplicable,
not because it contradicts other facts, which are, like it, based
upon experience ; nor yet because it is essentially antinomic
1 See the discussion in the Chapter on Moral Freedom in the author's Phi-
losophy of Conduct.
350 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and self-contradictory. Ou the contrary, it is the ultimate fact
on which, as fact, science builds itself up ; as does also all
ordinary and practical knowledge. It is mysterious, because it
is ultimate fact ; and as fact, it is the basis of all knowledge.
Things, that are " mere things," are supposed to be neither
conscious of tlieir self-activity, nor of their relations in fact
to other things ; nor of the reasons why they should act as
they do, or why they should act at all. Mere things cannot,
therefore, choose to act this way rather than some other ; they
cannot see why they should, or will that they should, act in
any way at all. But it is distinctive of selves that they do see,
to some extent at least, why they act ; they do, at least some-
times, very deliberately choose how they will act. More es-
pecially it is distinctive of selves, in the higher stages of per-
sonal hfe, that certain ethical, sesthetical, and religious ideals
arise in their field of consciousness ; and that they may choose
either to pursue, or to refuse to pursue, these ideals. It is in
tliis field of rational apprehension, of choice, and of practical
activities, that the highest attainments of moral freedom lie.
That men may choose, and may be influenced to choose, and
may influence others to choose, the life whose ideal is a moral
and spiritual union with God, is an undoubted fact of religious
experience. The modus operandi of this choice, and of the
relations between God's will and man's will which the choice
implies, may have the insolvable mystery of ultimate facts of
relation between self-active wills. But this is quite a different
thing from saying that the relation in fact is, from the rational
point of view, antinomic and self-contradictor}-.
The claim, therefore, that the absoluteness of the Divine
Will necessarily excludes all finite wills from any manner, or
measure, of moral freedom is based upon a complete misappre-
hension of the fundamental nature of the relation between
wills. Tliis is as true, when the misapprehension affects the
religious conception of God, as it is when the same misappre-
hension results in the dogmatic or agnostic denial of the Being
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 351
of God. The theology of Ishim and even of Christianity has
wrought as much mischief here as atheism has. A God
whose infinite and absolute sovereignty is so conceived of as
to reduce to nothingness the personal being of man, can no
more be made tolerable to reason as a moral Ruler than can a
self-explanatory, self-contained and self-developing mechan-
ism. To purchase the omnipotence and omniscience of Deity
at the expense of his wisdom, and of tlie moral attributes of
justice and love, is the worst sort of a bargain which religion
can possibly make.
Moreover, to deny the possibility of full personal rela-
tionship between God and man — in which God's holy Will is
absolute, and man's dependent but limited personal freedom is
actual and effective — is really to deny the divine omnipotence.
Speaking anthropomorphically, one may safely declare that the
Divine Wisdom can find a way, if the Divine Being wills it, to
have its own Will perfectly, and at the same time to let other
beings have so much of their wills as it seems wise and good
for them to have. Beyond this, the religious conception of
God as Moral Ruler requires no postulates with regard either
to the absoluteness of the Divine Will, or to the indepen-
dent and free wills of the subjects of his rule. But to im-
agine that this, conception impairs the foreknowledge of God,
or jeopards the fulfilment of his purposes, is to conceive of
omniscience as a species of uncertain calculation, and of the
development of God's Kingdom as a complex of incidental and
chance occurrences.
When human reason, under the compulsions of its inherent
demand the better to understand the Being of the World,
and through the enticements and needs of the higher sestheti-
cal, ethical, and religious sentiments, has once framed the con-
ception of God as perfect Ethical Spirit, then the inherent,
rational necessity for conceiving of the history of humanity as
under the divine moral rule becomes obvious. In no other
way than as the Creator, Upholder, and Distributor of the des-
352 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
tiny of j)ersonal beings in the furtherance of ethical ideals can
the perfection of ethical spirit exist, or maintain, or express
itself. An ethical spirit is essentially a social spirit. Were
there no other selves in his universe, then the Absolute Self
could not be perfect Ethical Spirit.
It is scarcely needful again in this connection, however, to
revive the answer to the antiquated and worn-out objection,
that such a view makes God dependent upon others for his being
what he really is. For the answer to the objection, whenever
made, must be always the same. The Absolute that God is,
is not the Unrelated, but the Ground of all relations. The com-
pulsion to be the Father of spirits has its source in the Father-
hood of God Himself; just as the necessity to redeem and to
develop spiritually his many sons, springs from the exhaustless
fountain of the Divine Love.
Man's personality, then, with all the so-called freedom of will
which it implies, is to be considered from tlie point of view of re-
ligion as the gift of God. This gift God can make, because he
is omnipotent ; this gift he has made, in the way in which his om-
niscience provides, and which is illustrated by all our experience
of personal relations. Its profounder "mode of operation"
lies hidden from human sight. But the rational motif hxkI final
purpose of all that Divine governance, under whose control the
evolution of humanity takes place, must be found in that per-
fection of Spirit which God is.
Such a view of God as Moral Ruler is certainly most con-
sonant with the beliefs and sentiments of the highest religious
experience. And if psychology and metaphysics would only
cease from trying to show that, much which really is, cannot
possibly be ; and how things are not, as they really are ; or
how they are, as they really are not; then this view would
seem to science and philosophy, if not without its mysteries,
at lejist as rational as any other view. And, indeed, the reli-
gious is the more rational of the several views proposed. The
guardianship of the ethical interests concerned in the answer
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 353
to the problem of the quasi-moral relations between man and
the Being of the World, both a scientific materialism and a
mystical pantheism seem incompetent to secure. To quote
what has been said in other connections : ^ " The attempt to con-
strue the World-Ground in a so-called scientific and totally im-
personal way tends always to minimize the authority and value
of personal life. A bubble rising, briefly remaining, and then
soon bursting upon the surface of Nature's boundless sea, seems
scarcely worth the attention which the study of the Moral
Self of man, and of his rising moral Ideals urges us to bestow.
But a single child of God may surely be held to have no small
potential value. And to believe that what is done for one
— whether that be one's self or some other one — is somehow
done for all, and that the Ethical Spirit in whom all have their
life and being is the Source and Guarantor of the moral inter-
ests of all, can scarcely fail to assist in both the theoretical
and the practical solution of the antithesis between the ego-
istic and altruistic virtues so called."
If, however, the search for philosophy's answer to this prob-
lem is turned in another direction, it appears that " the oneness
of man in God " has not infrequently been so taught by the
metaphysics of ethics as to do away with all intelligible ap-
prehension of the nature and grounds of morality itself. I am
one person, — in my moral Selfhood exclusive of all other per-
sonality and individually responsible in a very real and signifi-
cant way. My morality is my own ; there is no reality an-
swering to the term the " Social Self," but the morality of each
Moral Self is ever an individual and concrete affair. The moral
self of every human being is, indeed, peculiarly lonely. A
metaphysics of ethics, which either alienates the attribution of
good and bad conduct to the individual, or which merges it all
together in the Universal Person, is above all forms of the solu-
tion of this problem most to be avoided and dreaded. Such a
method of reconciling moral antitheses cuts morality up by the
1 See the author's Philosophy of Conduct, p. 633/.
23
354 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
very roots. It breaks the force of the practical maxim :
" Stand up, and take your full share of the blame for the
world's evil, like a man."
None the less, however, it is necessary to emphasize the so-
cial nature of morality, and the amelioration which all moral
conflicts receive from the religious doctrine of the Fatherliood
of God, and of the membership of all men in the one divine
famil}'. All finite spirits derive their being from One Ethical
Spirit ; the sons of men are also sons of God. From this point
of view, the hard and sharp antithesis between the so-called
egoistic and the so-called altruistic duties softens and seems to
melt away. If any one Self in its conduct, strives to conserve
and promote the moral interests of its better Self ; then this is
done by it, as one of the members of the divine family and with
their interests as truly as its own, at heart. In all such de-
votion to others — to consider the individual's conduct from the
other and reverse point of view — the Self is realizing its own
ideal of the morally most worthy Self. Thus the " suffusion
of vague personality " which everywhere appears in the study
of ethical phenomena is made to crystallize into a definite doc-
trine of a personal Ground for all these phenomena. The dis-
tinction between persons (whether human or divine) is not
abrogated ; the rather is it emphasized and elevated.
In the light of this anticipatory survey of objections, which
is borrowed from the metaphysics of ethics, reference to the
nature of the historical development of the belief of man in
the divine moral government becomes more suggestive and
even convincing. In defining the nature of religion it was
seen' that, even when taken at its lowest terms, it embraces
the belief in some sort of a rule of the invisible spiritual powers,
or the gods, over human affairs. The conception of sin, or of
wrongdoing as contrary to the will of the gods, is, of counse,
an adjunct to the development of the conception of their moral
rule. Thus " in Tahiti sickness was tlie occasion for making
> Compure Vol. I, pj). 155/7.
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 355
reparation for past sins, e. g.^ by restoring stolen property." ^
In Peru, in the time of the Incas, " when any general calam-
ity occurred, the members of the community were rigor-
ously examined, until the sinner was discovered and compelled
to make reparation." Hence among the "more advanced
races," in addition to various means of exorcism, "a method
of aiding in the cure of disease was found in the confession of
sins."^
It is true that we may direct attention, as Tiele has done,^
to a later difference arising between the " theanthropic " and
the " theocratic " religions so-called. But this author himself
explains : ^ " We therefore only mean that one of the two fami-
lies (Aryan and Semitic) develops more in the theocratic, the
other in the theanthropic direction." Even with this explana-
tion the difference is not so great as it at first sight appears ;
for with those peoples who dwell most upon the theocratic
side, the conception of fatherhood, and of allied domestic re-
lations, is bound up with the conception of God as sovereign,
king, or ruler under some other kindred term. The king is
also, in some sort, the father of his subjects. On the other
hand, even in the title of Father and Mother as applied to
Deity by the Rig Veda, or by the Avesta (where Ahura-
Mazda is frequently called "Father"), or by the Greeks and
Romans, the idea of control and rulership is always included.
Indeed, the conception of patria potestas as held by the entire
ancient world emphasized the authority of paternal government
in the family. In a word, in all these religions the theocratic
idea, or the assumption that the gods have to do with the con-
trol of human affairs, seems present, although in varying de-
grees. Even in those cases where the invisible powers are
thought of as existent, but not as meddling with mundane
1 See Waitz and Gerland, Anthropologie der Naturvolker, VI, p. 396.
2 Compare Dorman, Origin of Primitive Superstitions, p. 57/.
3 Elements of the Science of Religion, First Series, Lecture VI.
Ubid., p. 156.
356 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
matters, they still rule, as it were, by proxy, or through the
order which they have previously established.
This conception of a theocratic government of human af-
fairs, like ever}' other conception of ethics and of religion,
grows from crude beginnings to higher degrees of purity and
of influence over conduct. This is even true of tliose develop-
ments which are more likely — as, for exainple, the ethico-reli-
gious ideas and ideals of the Greeks — to be classed as distinctly
" theanthropic." Indeed, the Greek conceptions of Moira or
Fate, and Anangke or Necessity, vacillate in their meaning ; —
sometimes being equivalent to what the gods have themselves
decreed, sometimes being represented as a sort of impersonal
Power superior to the gods themselves. On the other hand,
again, the man-like divinities either preside over human beings,
in the person of some deified man who is for the time being
the appointed ruler of the people ; or else some one god, as is
fitting in matters of government, holds the supreme control ;
or, again, as in the Homeric period, the gods have a sort of
confederated government and rule by council with one another,
or by intriguing against one another, after the fashion of an
Oriental court, or of the gathering of the clans in some Occi-
dental country.
Indeed, among the Greeks, the very idea of moral order and
government, in its more rational and absolute form, developed
only in a pretty constant relation to religious ideas. All
things were, it is true, early conceived of as coming under the
ordering power of " number ; " in this way they were invested
with a sort of rational necessity.' All things happened as they
were allotted to men by destiny ; the gods themselves had their
positions assigned to them ; the dark impersonal shadow of
necessitated Fate hung over the throne of Zeus himself. But
even this impersonal rule contained the factors of an assured
and perfect world-order ; and essentially considered, it resembled
the ideal of a rationally ordained Law rather than a blind
» Compare Plutarch, De Plac. Phil., I, 25-28.
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 357
and irrational Fate. For the World was also conceived of as
a social whole ; and in it there were gods and men, both truly
personal, — the former as rulers and the latter as citizens and
subjects. According to Epictetus, for example, Zeus, who
was somehow bound so that he could not make the body or
the possessions of Epictetus to be as they would have been, had
Zeus been unhindered, nevertheless had given to the philoso-
pher a share in his Divine Self. This share consisted in " the
power of making or not making effort, the power of indulging
or not indulging desire ; in short, the power of dealing with
all the ideas of the mind." In a word : God must not be con-
ceived of as the source of disorder or as setting aside the ra-
tional system of things ; and yet he has given to man that best
gift of free and rational being, in order that man, being like
God, might prefer the same supreme good which God himself
prefers. Thus the Stoic philosopher nearly, but not quite,
caught the Christian idea of the divine moral rule over
mankind.
In the most theocratic of the monotheistic religions, and in
the religions which arise under monarchical conditions, even
before they become distinctly monotheistic. Deity is regarded
as a sovereign whose judgment cannot be questioned and whose
will must be unhesitatingly obeyed. Human conduct must, on
account of the essential relations existing between the Divine
Person and finite persons, be regulated according to divine
ideas of right and wrong. And it is well for man to have it
actually so. For Deity, like any earthly sovereign, does not
brook resistance to its rule. Thus, in the conception of the
most ancient Chinese religious doctrine, the sovereignty of
Heaven under the title of Shang-Ti, or Supreme Lord, however
impersonally conceived of in other respects, enforces a strict
moral government over human affairs. Indeed, so fundamental
and so thoroughly inwrought into the entire political and social
structure of China is this doctrine of the ethical rule of Heaven,
that nothing concerning the history of the people in the past or
358 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
their better thoughts in the present, can be understood without
taking it into the account. In the ancient Babylonian and
Syrian religions, too, the sovereign rule of God is made prom-
inent. In the hymns of Babylonia' Deity is addressed as
" Father Xannar " (or " Illuminator "), as " powerful One,"
" merciful One," " Ruler of the Land," etc. ; over and over
again is reference made to his " strong command ; " and it is
declared, " Lord, in heaven is thy sovereignty, on earth is thy
sovereignty." The extreme of this type of conception of the
divine government is reached in Islam, where, although the
thought of the essential good of a moral and spiritual likeness
to the perfection of God as Ethical Spirit is not wholly dis-
regarded, submission to the fateful and all-powerful will of
Allah is made the essence of all religion. " Thus Allah wills,"
becomes the sufficient reason for all occurrences, the sufficient
excuse for all failures and lapses. This irresistible Will of
Allah rules autocratically ; and Muhammadan literature
abounds with both serious and facetious illustrations of what
comes to those mortals who try to do things, whether Allah
will, or no.
We have already had frequent occasion to note the changes
in the moral and social ideas and practices of any people, which
logically and necessarily accompany the growing conviction
that the gods are good and righteous; and which culminate
in the belief that Deity is perfect Moral Reason, and is there-
fore worthy to set the ideal standard of morality for men. In
this Ideal of a rational and ethical Spirit, the longings of man-
kind to believe in Providence and the sinking of soul toward
despair before the conception of Destiny, are peacefully rec-
onciled. God now becomes the source, the pattern and the
guardian of righteousness. Ilis Will is now conceived of,
not wholly, or even chiefly, as omnipotent and omniscient, but
as good and gracious Will. Tlie so-called moral law loses its ira-
• See, for example, the Hymn to Sin, as given in Jastrow, Religion of Baby-
lonia and Assyria, p. 3U3/.
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 359
personal character. The awareness of having somehow gone
wrong, becomes the consciousness of sin ; and this begets a
feeling of separation in spirit and ideals from that One Self in
moral likeness to whom, and in vital spiritual union with whom,
all man's highest good must forever consist.
This conception of God as moral ruler it is whicli the reli-
gion of Christ sustains ; although the current Christianity has
only very imperfectly conserved it, and still largely and crimi-
nally neglects the endeavor to realize it for the regulation of
human affairs. By common consent it is to Judaism, among
all the ancient religions, that the great distinction must be ac-
corded of having most highly developed the conception of the
divine rule in righteousness. The few pious ones of this won-
derful people, in spite of all the temptations to distrust which
come from seeing the prosperity of wickedness and the distress
and temporary discomfiture of goodness, still clung to the per-
suasion that the rule of Yahweh followed an eternally un-
changeable and supremely worthy end. The reasons why the
divine purpose failed of a fuller and more nearly perfect reali-
zation were to be found in the unfaithfulness of man. In feel-
ing the responsibility for this failure it was then, as it ever has
been, not the careless but the most pious souls which took
upon themselves their more than full share. To the piercing
questions : " Art thou He who hast created all things ? " " Art
thou the Almighty who governest all things and rulest over
all things?" their faith could give only an affirmative reply.
And when the facts seem more than usually contradictory of
this reply, their confession is made with bowed heads : " Be-
hold I am vile, what shall I answer Thee ? I will lay my hand
upon my mouth."
The faith in the perfection of the Divine rule, and in the
final triumph of righteousness, which is necessarily so faint and
vacillating when based upon purely empirical considerations,
becomes a steadfast conviction when the highest notes of reli-
gious experience are sounded in the soul. For God as Provi-
360 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION *
dence is " the hope of courage, not the pretext of cowardice."
This view whicli the Emperor Augustus tried to revive, as
having been the inspiration and guide of the early Romans, is
embodied in Vergil's ^neid ; — how the race, " which from
burned Ilium came forth brave," formed Rome in reliance on
Jove, and by doing, in virtuous deeds, as the gods would have
them, made Rome great and strong. But it is the religion of
Christ, above all others, that incites, illumines, and confirms
the doctrine which Zoroastrianism made an essential part of
its beliefs, and which the best of ancient Israel struggled so
nobly to maintain.
How the central and essential truths of Christianity empha-
sized the conception of God as the Father and Ruler of man-
kind because He was perfect Ethical Spirit, in and over the
world of things and men ; and how the moral code of Chris-
tianity springs directly from the inspiring command to every
follower of Christ that he shall realize in his own life and de-
velopment this same Spirit which was so perfectly manifested
in " the Master ; " — tliis has already been explained with suffi-
cient detail. It is, therefore, only necessary in this connection
to remind ourselves tliat the picture tlius presented of the di-
vine ethical relations to the affairs of humanity is not tliat of an
autocratic sovereign, after the pattern of the Oriental absolute
monarchy, but the i-ather that of an immanent, inspiring, and
redeeming Spiritual Life. God is in the World, the indwell-
ing and controlling Power which is shaping human history
toward the progressive realization of ethical ideals.
If, then, the question is raised, as to the Divine Method, —
meaning now, not the occult and mysterious modus operandi of
Absolute Will, in ethical relations with finite wills, but the
means, experientially known, by which this process of govern-
ment is conducted ; certain answers at once suggest themselves
as obviously api)ropriate. How does God govern the world of
men? His government is in and through all the controlling
forces and influences, visible and invisible, so-called " natural "
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 361
and more manifestly spiritual, which constitute the changing
and evolving environment of man. The more detailed an-
swer belongs to experience, in the form of the positive sciences.
And, first, what is called " nature " (in the narrower mean-
ing of the word) is a most fundamental and important sphere
of the divine government over tlie human race. God is the
Moral Ruler of mankind, in and through the evolution of their
physical environment. It has been quite too common on the
part of apologists and theologians, to depreciate the moral in-
fluences that can be brought to bear upon man only through
this physical environment. Even the most serious and un-
prejudiced attempts at a philosoph}^ of religion frequently need
to be reminded that argument cannot play fast and loose with
the cosmic existences and processes. If God is surely revealed
at all to the human mind and the human heart by this system
of things in the midst of which man's life is set, then the rev-
elation must be received by the mind and laid upon the heart,
a% it in fact and actually is. Having once appealed to
Csesar, to Csesar we must go. If the goodness and wisdom of
God are shown in those so-called " benevolent " contrivances
which are more easily recognized and appreciated as the
primary conditions of sentient life and happy experiences;
then the same goodness and wisdom must be trusted as afford-
ing to faith the rational explanation of the abundant provision
made for pain, disappointment, and death. These latter con-
trivances too, in their deeper and more mysterious meaning,
must somehow be benevolent. If Nature evinces the goodness
and wisdom of God as the Creator, the same Nature evinces
the goodness and wisdom of the same God as the Destroyer.
That the system of things which constitutes man's close-fitting
inescapable environment has a moral purpose to serve is, in-
deed, a truth, or a postulate which cannot be derived from any
objective or purely scientific study of natural phenomena.
Natural science so-called, properly takes the point of view
which regards these phenomena as a-moral. From the point
362 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
of view suggested by the most advanced moral ideals, there is
undoubtedly much in nature, especially at first sight and on
the surface, which appears horribly immoral ; many of its
transactions do seem to be the expression of selfishness, cruelty,
and lust. Ethics cannot account for, nmch less justify, man's
developed ethical opinions and the sanctions which he attaches
to his ethical ideals, by appeals to the behavior of things or of
the lower animals. But, whether by processes of evolution
that lie far back in the obscure and hypothetical realm of the
prehistoric and the prehuman, or by some divinely imparted
impulse that has resulted in a " leap " from the merely natural
to a share in the supernatural, man is, in fact, raised above the
need of an appeal to nature by way of imitation and example.
He is also forbidden the right to make this appeal. To be hu-
man one must be more than " natural," in the lower meaning of
this word. The natural is the not-moral, if not the immoral ;
and human beings cannot indulge in the silly selfishness of
bovine creatures, or the cruelty of tigers and hyenas, or the
lust of dogs and monkeys, without a really unnatural dehuman-
izing of themselves. This reaction of the higher nature
from the " will to live " as the lower nature unwittingly be-
haves herself, leads to an irrational denunciation and abhorrence
of those as yet undeveloped and less than half self-like beings
which constitute so large a portion of the environment of hu-
manity. Thus, in fact, the outspeaking of religious experience,
and the reflections of theology, have quite too often looked
upon so-called Nature as essentially antithetic and even vio-
lently opposed to the true moral and religious life. The liter-
ature of religion abounds in hard words spoken against man's
physical constitution and physical environment, as though these
things were essentially the " devil's own," and not like ourselves,
a vast assemblage of God's creatures and children, of a lower
scale of reality than that which has graciously been bestowed
upon us.
There is, however, no more startling fact in human ethical
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 363
experience than the way in which even those who avowedly
assume the " purely " scientific attitude toward the cosmic
forces and processes, feel themselves impelled to confess their
deeper faith in the moral World-order. As long as this atti-
tude is kept strictly pure, neither praise nor blame, neither the
admiration which approaches reverence nor the denunciation
which, when extreme, savors of blasphemy, becomes man's
judgment as to the Being of the World. But when one's
" luck '' goes wrong, or " fate " seems not only unkind but
positively malignant, the tendency to an irrational feeling of
resentment, or to whispered, if not outbreaking, curses is as
strong in the scientific atheist, or agnostic, as in the devil-
worshipper. When he is good-natured and successful, how-
ever, nobody likes to hear the Being of the World abused. How
fair and admirable, and bent on securing in the long run some
higher good, does the Cosmos usually appear to the scientific
devotee ! The railing accusation, brought against It (^sic) in
the name of science by a recent writer,^ who speaks of the di-
vine dealings as " the hand which is red with millions of
years of murder ; " of Providence as " a scatter-brained, semi-
powerful, semi-impotent monster ; " and of the thunder and the
whirlwind as suggestive of some " blackguardly larrikin kick-
ing his heels in the clouds," — is almost as shocking and repul-
sive from the point of view of Haeckel and Huxley, as it would
have been from that of Paul or Augustine. But if this innate
spirit of piety does not express the scientific confirmation of the
instinctive attitude of religion toward the mystery of man's
physical environment ; What, pray ! in the name of rationality,
does it express ? Man may not, without condign punishment,
not only from his own religious and moral nature, but also
from those precious sesthetical and quaai-QthicAi sentiments and
ideals which are inseparable from science itself, abuse or oppro-
briously treat Nature, — however conceived of, or regarded from
whatever point of view. The cosmic forces and processes do,
1 See Mallock, Religion as a Credible Doctrine, p. 174/.
364 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
indeed, deserve the better treatment. If there is anything
which the modern doctrine of evolution tends to establish as
an essential truth, it is just this : The losses are somehow —
although mysteriously — compensated by the higher gains ; the
reign of death is the advancing kingdom of life ; the passing
of the generations of men is the uplift of the race. To return
to the language of religion : " The earnest expectation of the
creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God. For the
creation was subjected to vanity, not of its own will, but by
reason of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself
also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into
the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know
that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain to-
gether until now. And not only so, but ourselves also, who
have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan
within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemp-
tion of our body" (Rom. viii, 19-23).
It is true that the conception of the cosmic processes which
is properly gained by the physical sciences is not, primarily con-
sidered, that of the rule of a perfect Ethical Spirit. B ut as
our acquaintance with Nature becomes more profound, and our
insight the keener, and especially as we take to our confidence
the beneficent and hopeful side of evolution, our views un-
dergo important modifications. Undoubtedly, these modifica-
tions are largely due to the habit of reading into natural phe-
nomena man's better Self — ethically, just as truly as sestheti-
cally. And perhaps the system of things would have to be
pronounced largely a-moral, in itself, or conducive to immoral-
ity in the human species, if the investigation could he conducted
purtly from the scientific point of view. But it cannot be so
conducted ; for the fundamental fact remains that science itsolf
cannot escape admitting jesthetical and ethical considerations
and ideals into its conclusions from its own points of view.
And when these jestlietical and ethical points of view are once
assumed, and consistently occupied, the truth becomes clearer
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 365
that much of the most essential moral culture comes to the
race perpetually, in the way of God's rule in and through
man's physical environment.
In this connection a word of rebuke, and of the calling of
" shame," at the current hypocrisy in morals and religion
seems demanded. For an age that calls itself Christian, and
that shudders at tales of its savage ancestors celebrating their
victories by drinking strange intoxicants from human skulls,
or worshipping their gods by displaying the bones of their
victims in the temples, makes war with just as essential self-
ishness, and quaffs costly wines in honor of its victorious
generals, or buries them under epitaphs of immodest laudation
in the choice places of its cathedrals, and in the graveyards of
its churches.
In truth, the human race owes most of its discipline in the
more fundamental social virtues to the moral rule of God
through, and in, its physical environment. Such virtues are
courage, endurance, frugality, and respect for order and for
law. They are, indeed, basic virtues ; Nature unaided by higher
revelations of God as the perfection of Ethical Spirit, cannot
raise these virtues to their highest refinement and potency;
much less can it add to them the sweetness and light which
the inner experiences of revelation and inspiration impart.
But they are basic virtues. And unless the foundations of
individual and national character are laid in them, and are
preserved in their constant cultivation, the higher moral and
religious perfection can never follow. For this higher ethical
refinement, when helped out by all the sweet consolations and
comforting hopes of religion, will not suffice to dispense with
the stern discipline of God the Moral Ruler of the World by
his immanent presence in Nature.
It is the characteristic excellence of the religion of Christ
that it does for the human soul, and for human society, what
all the better religions do, only in a higher degree. It incul-
cates, and effects, the recognition of God's presence and spirit-
366 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ual control over man by his immanence in man's physical en-
vironment. For this reason, the truly pious soul endures
bravely the toils and misfortunes of life, submits resignedly to
the divine will, after living conscientiously, gives thanks for
all the good things which come to him, and sees in them signs
of the gracious and wise, though complexly mysterious, order-
ing of the interrelations of men with one another, and of men
with things.
That God is the Moral Ruler of the World through his im-
manence in human society is a belief which is in some respects
more easy to entertain and more comforting to hold than that
of the divine rule in nature ; in other respects, however, the
truth is quite the reverse. Without social relations no moral
government of any sort is possible, or even conceivable. Gov-
ernment implies society ; — in some crude and nascent state at
first, but with more complexity afterwards, if government
itself is to become more highly developed. Indeed, moral rule
and social relations cannot be dissociated. On the other hand,
for the mind which holds lofty and uncompromising concep-
tions of justice, truth, and benevolence, the ills that have their
origin in the region of purely physical causes are far easier to
bear with resignation, and to reconcile with the divine moral
perfection, than are those ills which come through the ill-
constituting or ill-managing of human social organizations.
From a certain not unhistorical point of view it may be said
that the principal curses of humanity at large have been laid
upon them by the leaders and rulers of these organizations.
Hence, on the one hand, springs the doctrine of tlie divine right
of kings, emperors, and other civil and military officers, of
written and unwritten laws, and of the customs and require-
ments of the different forms of social relations ; hence, on the
other hand, arises that call to reform, and even to revolution,
which must at times be answered, if the moral government of
liu inanity is to advance toward higher ideals and mon^ satis-
factory results. At one extreme, stands the demand, enforced
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 367
in God's name, for a complete and unquestioning submission.
At the other extreme stands theoretical and practical Nihilism.
Therefore, the representatives of religious interests, at one
time consign to hell, without hope of pardon, him who ven-
tures to lay hand upon, or even speak evil of, the " Lord's
anointed ; " at another time, they call upon all believers, and
all good and true men, to rise and by violence put down the
tyrant. Between these two demands many a pious soul has
been sadly perplexed to find the way which God would have
him take.
In spite of such perplexity, however, the teachings of the
philosophy of religion, both from the theoretical and the his-
torical points of view, cannot be called in question. God is the
Moral Ruler of mankind, immanent as the Creator, Upholder,
and the Destroyer of human society. For all these forms of
social organization, one profound and profoundly mysterious
but admirably noble law always reigns supreme. In the long
run and in the large, it is righteousness which " exalteth the
nation ;" but "sin is a reproach to any people." And that sol-
idarity of the race which involves the innocent with the wicked,
is so essential to even the conception of an historical process of
divine government, that to attempt to remove it, even theo-
retically, involves the complete reversal and utter confusion of
all our ideas of God's method of moral control. To see the
wicked flourish, while the righteous seem forsaken, has always
afforded a hard problem to religious faith. But good sense
and religion both require that the faithful soul should reflect
upon the fact, enter into the house of the Lord, and await the
end.
When the student of the philosophy of history considers the
grand sweep upward and downward, but on the whole upward,
of the lines that mark the course of human social evolution, he
may well feel less difficulty in believing that God as Moral
Ruler is indeed, and always has been, present there in power.
The synthesis of forces employed, the overcoming of obstacles
368 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
eifected, the ruthless clashing of interests that by their blind
and selfish strivings are, after all, only unwittingly serving
other unseen and altruistic ends, afford a drama of incompar-
able interest and magnitude. Piety, on contemplating this
drama, acknowledges that God's ways are not as man's ways, and
that His meaning for it all is not the meaning which most of the
actors have chiefly in mind. The actors are not, indeed, mere
puppets which are pulled from the divine hand by invisible
strings. But, although they are agents, they are for the most
part unconsciously working out the Will of the Moral Ruler
who is in and over it all.
The particular institutions of Family, State, and Church, are
yet more specific modes of the divine moral government of the
race. In the better significance of the word, with all the faults
belonging to their special forms of organization and of the indi-
viduals composing them, they are still distinctly theocratic in-
stitutions. Between the State and its government, and between
the Church and its particular form of constituting and ofiQcer-
ing itself, we are always warranted in making a distinction.
That human beings should live in families, develop statehood,
and organize themselves as brethren for a common religious
life, is so plainly the Divine Will, that to deny it would seem
to make all attribution of a moral purpose to the Being of the
World quite impossible. And in fact, it is in and through
these institutions chiefly that the ethical control and the ethi-
cal evolution of humanity has taken place. It is also within
the limits of the same institutions chiefly that those more im-
mediate modes of the moral rule, and of the redemption of the
world, which are known as revelation and inspiration, have
produced their greatest results.
Tlie results of the psychological and historical sciences are
not inconsistent with this conception of the moral evolution of
the race under the innnanent divine control ; even wlien they
liave not as yet come to announce essentially the same truths,
although in a different form of words. The conception of tlie
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 369
Being of the World as indwelling and dominant Ethical Spirit
is entirely consonant with all that these sciences can most
surely say of the past, or most confidently predict of the future.
The proofs that God is indeed the Moral Ruler of the World
are commensurate — no more, and yet no less — with the moral
nature and moral development of the human race. Certainly,
if man had not himself become an ethical spirit, he would not
conceive of the gods, the invisible and superhuman spirits, as
moral rulers. And only when he has developed a higher de-
gree of moral spirituality, and has also found expression for it
in certain forms of social organizations, does he arrive at the
conception of One perfect Ethical Spirit as the Moral Ruler of
the World. But man has developed an ideal of ethically
perfect government, and he has felt himself impelled to, and
justified in, attributing this ideal to the Supreme Reality.
While, then, an empirical method, which aims to treat of the
phenomena of man's moral life and development without resort
to metaphysics or to the faiths of religion, leaves unsolved the
more profound and ultimate problems of ethics ; the same phe-
nomena receive illumination and enforcement from the higher
ethico-religious point of view. To repeat here the conclusions
derived from a survey of the field of ethics :^ " The answer of
psychological analysis and of historical insight does not furnish
all that the philosophy of conduct demands. How can man
do for himself this significant work of idealizing, unless his
nature is born of an Absolute Ethical Spirit? How can he
develop such an Ideal, in whose life he shares, unless his his-
tory may be understood from the side of the ' Overman ' as
under the inspiration and guidance of this Spirit ? It is in the
answer to these inquiries that the metaphysics of ethics finds
itself obliged to adopt some position corresponding to that from
which religion regards all the development of humanit3\ Of
this tenet of the religious consciousness Pfleiderer forcefully
1 See the author's Philosophy of Conduct, p. 628; and for a fuller discus-
sion of the whole problem, chapters XXV and XXVI of the same work.
24
370 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
says : ' ' And here too Paul pointed out the riglit way, founding
his philosophy of religion on the thought which in modern
thinking must always be the principal point of view: the
thought, namely, of a development of the moral spirit under
the guiding education of God. Each stage of the develop-
ment has its corresponding moral ideal ; none of them is for-
tuitous or arbitrary ; each rests on a divine ordinance and is
good and necessary for its own time, and for its own time
only.' "
It is clear, then, from the very essential nature of man's
moral ideals and moral development that an impersonal and
non-moral view of the grounds on which these ideals and this
development repose, can never afford the least semblance of a
satisfactory solution for ethical problems. In a word, if the
ideals have in fact influenced human history, and if under this
influence actual progress of an ethical character has taken
place, then the ultimate explanation of such a racial experience
must be found in the religious doctrine of God as the moral
Ruler of the World. Undoubtedly the proximate explanation
of this form of man's progress must be found in his own nature,
with its reactions upon his changing environment, under the
laws of an ethical and spiritual evolution. But the more this
proximate explanation is expanded and perfected, with a view
to account for the facts of experience, tlie more imperatively
and comprehensively does it demand some more ultimate ex-
planation. The ultimate explanation can only be found in the
Being of the World ; and it can only be found there, if this
Being is conceived of as Ethical Spirit, manifesting itself pro-
gressively as the Moral Ruler of the World. As a modern
writer has said : ' " The moral World-order, regarded as an
active Principle, is God as Spirit. Only the Self, only Ego-
hood, is the home of all that is Ideal."
The faith that is founded on religious experience, when taken
»The Philosophy of I{(;lif,Mon, IV, p. 251.
2 Moriz Carriere, Die sittlichc Wcltordnung, p. 405.
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 371
at its highest expression, does give, and it alone gives, a satisfac-
tory answer to the ultimate problems of ethics. This answer is
the rational postulate that the Personal Absolute, conceived of
as perfect Ethical Spirit, is the Ground of the moral order of the
world. Or more naively and popularly expressed, and in a more
restricted way : God is the Moral Ruler of humanity. " In
man's moral nature the voice of the Personal Absolute is more
plainly to be heard. Faith in this voice is imperative here.
The account of the origin and the ongoing of the physical uni-
verse may seem complete without the recognition of a Spirit
whose self-conscious Life is the source and the inspiration of
an otherwise dead and even non-existent nature. . . .
But for the origin and the development of man's ethical and
spiritual life — with its laws that transcend all experience of
consequences, its sanctions that evoke a devotion which over-
steps all the bounds of a merely personal regard, its ideals that
are ever arising and fading, but only to appear more bright and
alluring and inspiring still — what account can possibly be
found in impersonal cosmic processes, or in a World-Ground
that is not itself an ethical and spiritual Life ? "
" Especially, however, does the heart of man crave the assis-
tance of some well-assured hope in its effort to bear dutifully
the grave contradictions which everywhere exist between the
actual and the ethically Ideal. That things are not as they
ought to be, is a much more trying discovery than that things
are not as they seem. The antithesis between Appearance and
Reality which has so often been exploited in a showily dialecti-
cal rather than in a profoundly philosophical manner is, for
the most part, a specious and not very alarming affair. But
the contradictions which exist between the moral and social
ideals of humanity and what is actual in human conduct, and
in the constitution of human affairs, so far as it is dependently
related to conduct, are very real and very disturbing. That
whatever appears, really is, — this is a proposition which may
well command the attention, and finally the consent, of every
872 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
thoughtful mind. But that whatever is in conduct and in
character among men is right — this is a proposition which,
however often it is made and with whatever brilliant dialectics
it may be supported, is opposed to all the most firmly seated
and valuable moral convictions of mankind."
" The conflict between the real of human experience and the
Ideal constructed by human thought and imagination, and fol-
lowed— however fitfully and imperfectly — by human endeavora,
is the eternal conflict. According to the myths of the ancients
and the theologies of modern times, it was waged in invisible,
supermundane regions, before it began to be waged upon earth.
The theoretical solution of the conflict, as respects its origin,
its fullest significance, and its ultimate issue, is, however, as
satisfactorily treated as is compatible with the limitations of
human knowledge, when it is shown how one may believe that
the ultimate Source both of the reality and of the ideals which
still await realization is one and the same World-Ground.
This World-Ground is a Personal Will, that is pledged and able
to effect the progressive realization of the ideals which, too, owe
their origin and historical development to Him. In a word,
the same Ethical Spirit who inspires the moral ideals of man,
and who reveals his own being in their historical evolution,
will secure, and is securing, the realization of the ideals in the
world's actual on-going. If one may have a reasonable faith
in this conclusion, then certainly, however severe the temporary
conflict may be, and whether tliis conflict be raging witliin the
soul of the individual or within the social organization, its final
issue and fuller significance are secure. Well-founded moral
Optimism makes large demands upon religious faith. Only
when one is confident that there is a Power in human history,
which is over and throughout it all, and whicli effectively
makes for righteousness, can one hopefully sui'vey the large and
long-existing disruption between the actual moral conditions of
humanity and humanity's own liighest moral ideals. The only
power which can be conceived of as at once interested and
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 373
suitable to effect this progressive realization of the actual with
the Ideal is God." '
Belief in God as the Moral Ruler of the World leads directly
and logically to the doctrine of a universal Providence. The
conception of Providence is based upon the conviction that all
single events, as well as the whole course of the individual's
life, are items in, or parts of, the Moral Order of the World.
If, however, this religious doctrine is to be defensible from the
points of view held by a philosophy of religion, it must be
freed from certain defects, which both the popular feeling and
the reflections of systematic theology have too often imparted
to it. These defects are chiefly the following three : (1) Such
a separation between the sphere of Providence and the sphere
of Nature, as constitutes a return to the antithesis between the
natural and the supernatural ; (2) a restriction of the doctrine
to special instances or particular experiences, or a classification,
based on essentially different marks, into so-called "special
providences " and " general Providence ;" and finally (3), a self-
ish form of conception, which, if carried to its legitimate con-
clusion, destroys the perfection of those very moral attributes
that make the doctrine of Providence a teacher and inspirer
of the spirit of true piety.
All Providence is a manifestation of the Supernatural ; but
the true conception of Providence does not place the em-
phasis upon God's foresight in a manner to suggest that the
world has, in part at least, or quite habitually — in its ordinary
operations and humdrum life — slipped from the divine con-
trol. Providence does not interrupt the order of nature ; it
does not prevent Deity from making His " sun to rise on the
evil and on the good ; " or from sending His " rain .on the just
and on the unjust." While, on the one hand, the conception
points the pious soul to the way that divine wisdom and good-
ness show themselves in the feeding of the birds, and in the
clothing with beauty of the flowers ; on the other hand, it
1 Quoted from the Philosophy of Conduct, p. 633/.
374 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
teaches that the same wisdom and goodness destroys the former
by starvation, cold, and other enemies, and breaks up the
lovely structure of the other by sunshine, drought, and frost.
In this divine activity Nature and the Supernatural are not
antagonistic or even temporarily separated ; they remain united
in the same Moral Order as regarded from different points of
view. The peculiar impressiveness of any incident, as regards
the directness and clearness with which it points to a Supernat-
ural presence, is a purely subjective affair. All providences are
alike natural and supernatural, according to the point of view
from which the observer chooses, or is temporarily interested
or impelled, to regard them.
So, too, does the distinction sometimes made between gen-
eral Providence and especial providences appear as a wholly
subjective affair. Certain happenings in the life of the indi-
vidual, or of the community, and certain events in the world's
history, have, indeed, a special impressiveness, on account of
their more obvious and important bearing upon those spiritual
interests in which religion finds its chief concern. This is
mere matter of fact ; and it is matter of fact which, although
consisting originally of human opinion and emotion, tends to
realize itself as an important force in objective events. He
who thinks that the divine presence has been manifested in
an unusual way in any event of his life, does something differ-
ent in view of tliis thought. In this way God specializes His
Will through the impression made upon the conduct of man ;
therefore, to maintain that all events are equally important for
the securing of the divine final purposes contradicts the ap-
parent truth, while not making the belief in the universality
of Providence any more reasonable or practically helpful. But
from the point of view of pragmatic history, as well as from
that of the philosophy of religion, a division of providences
into two classes is quite untenable. So closely interwoven are
seemingly trivial events with tiiose of the most stupendous
importance, that the web of this history cannot safely be broken
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 375
in any place, either to let God within or to let him escape
without. Providence is, then, always and everywhere, at the
same time special and universal.^ Its universality does not
contrast with, but the rather provides for and includes, all
special and minute providences. It is at once most intimate
and close-fitting, and also most comprehensive.
In order to have the complete trust in Providence which the
spirit of piety invokes and demands, it is not necessary to
think of one's self, or one's family, or one's country, as the
favorite of God. Indeed, all such thought is itself essentially
impious. But a rational faith sees no reasons for setting lim-
its to the divine wisdom and love in its regard for all the de-
tails of every individual's life. Indeed, since all — both things
and souls, and among souls, both the lower animals and men —
are parts of that one Moral Order, in and over which God
rules, the care of each individual being is ever present in the
mind of God. This, at least, is religion's supreme faith in
Providence. I and mine, but also you and yours, and he and
his, — all selves and all things, are duly and lovingly taken
account of in the divine moral government.
The belief in Providence is religion's way of expressing its
confidence in the moral order of the world, and in the final
triumph of moral ideals. That which the metaphysics of eth-
ics, so often and yet so inadequately, tries to express in imper-
sonal terms, the philosophy of religion refers to the moral and
providential rule of a personal God. Something approaching
the confidence that all which comes to the individual is the
ordering of a wise and holy Divine Will has belonged to the
more enlightened of the pious in all ages. " I call upon
thee, O my father Amon," exclaimed Rameses II at the battle
of Kadshu: ^ " My many soldiers have abandoned me ; none of
my horsemen hath looked toward me ; and when I called them,
none hath listened to my voice. But I believe that thou art
1 See what has already been said, Chap. XXXVII of this Volume.
2 Renouf, The Religion of Ancient Egypt, p. 237.
876 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
worth more to me than a million of soldiers, than a hundred
thousand horeemen." Though Yahweh slay me, yet will I
trust in him, was the persuasion of the Psalmist. And not in
times of emergency alone, but in the quiet life of every day,
God's manifestation of himself as Providence to the pious soul
is a constant experience. In a manuscript volume from which
Dr. Martin quotes,^ Ave may read the declaration of faith from
a Buddhist abbot : " If we sincerely remember how near to us
is Buddha, then we may dare to accept the nourishment that
heaven and earth affords." To pray, " Give us this day our
daily bread," is to utter vain and mocking words for the man
who has no faith in Providence.
It has been in the virtual possession of this faith that the
best of the race, the noblest thinkers and actors in human his-
tory, have with an increasing confidence, and often with a pas-
sionate and undying enthusiasm, proclaimed the ultimate tri-
umph of righteousness. Their optimism has not been economic
or anthropological ; it has been ethical and religious. They do
not now believe that commerce, or science, or art, without
righteousness, can regenerate humanity, or elevate the race
to its highest attainable, much less to an ideally perfect, social
condition. In all these respects, believers in Providence are,
perhaps, oftener pessimistic than optimistic. They die — gen-
eration after generation, for hundreds of years, they have been
dying — with faith unwavering, but with eyes unblessed by the
sight of what they have so greatly longed to see. They have
no weak complaints to offer, because they have themselves suf-
fered much in the interests of righteousness ; for the cause is
their ideal, and devotion to the ideal still appears to them worth
far more than all it can have cost. To these pious souls the
religious truth of a Divine Moral Order, which incloses and
protects tlie things that have worth, is a comfort of the su-
premest kind. This is the real doctrine of Providence. It is
the voice which breaks and scatters the darkness brought on
1 Lore of Cathay, p. 255.
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 377
by the temporary eclipse of righteousness, with the command :
" Let there be light." Say ye to the righteous : " It shall
be well with him ; " — and not in isolation, or as one of a
select few.
It is in connection with the religious doctrine of God as
Moral Ruler and Providence that the place of prayer in the
world-order deserves recognition anew. As to its subjective
value for the life of religion, its moral effect upon the man
who prays, enough has already been said.^ But that conception
of the system of cosmic existences, forces, and processes, with
their laws, as a dependent manifestation of God, which religion
teaches under the symbols of Creator, Upholder, and Moral
Ruler or Providence, opens up further possibilities, and pro-
poses yet more difficult problems to our reflective thinking.
Is man's prayer, when it is the expression of the filial attitude
toward the Divine Being, so related to the world-order as to
have an effect on its events ?
It would seem to need little reflection in order to reach the
conclusion that neither of two extreme opinions in answer to
this inquiry can justify itself at the bar of either science or
philosophy. Even the most strictly mechanical view of the
world-order must admit that prayer may, under certain circum-
stances, have an important effect in modifying the course of
physical events. Indeed, within certain limits not easy to be
fixed, the more strict and minute the tenure of the principle of
mechanism, the more sure and v/idespreading becomes the
physical influence of the subjective attitude of prayer. Taken
in its strictest form, the mechanical conception regards the
Cosmos as a totality, including all of man's life, which is so
sensitive throughout the whole to every slightest change in
every minutest part, that ceaseless and boundless vibrations
proceed from every finger-point, no matter how delicate its
touch may seem to be. Especially does this conception connect
together, in terms of some comprehensive theory of relations,
1 Vol. I, chap. XXI.
378 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
all the phenomena of human consciousness and certain corre-
lated changes in the bodily mechanism. No most interior,
unheard whisper, or even muttered thought, of a prayer could,
then, fail of its record in some corresponding physical event.
Some Hindu devotee, or Buddhist monk, or Christian saint, is
always praying in silence ; and in silence, too, a responsive
throb is issuing from this center of activity, and going out on
every side to the ends of the universe, and to the end of time.
Or, shall we not rather say, that the same Being of the World
which expresses its will in souls as the conscious attitude of
prayer, is expressing the same will in countless, unknown other
ways, throughout its own entire Being ?
If now this scientific picture of the relation of the subjec-
tive attitude of prayer to the World-order is translated into
terms familiar to the experiences of religion, the two seem
to be by no means wholly antithetic. Given the belief that all
this strict correlation of human desires and feelings with the
ongoing of things is the total expression of the wise and good
Will of Him who is in and over all ; then piety may well be
satisfied and encouraged thereby. The soul of the true believer
in Providence can have no higher ambition than to fulfil the
purposes of this Will, in just such place in this world-order,
and by just such measure and manner of activities, as accords
with these purposes. Thus the one prayer which underlies
and interpenetrates the spirit and meaning of all concrete pe-
titions becomes : " Thy Will be done " — universally, " as in
Heaven, so on Earth."
That this habitual spirit of prayer and all its particular ex-
pressions, whetlier inarticulate or spoken, sliould influence the
bodily mechanism, and through this mechanism the physical
environment, of him who prays, is a scientific inference based
upon all tliat we most surely know of the dynamic relations
existing in the order of nature between tlie human mind and
the human body. Modern psyclio-pliysics and physiological
psychology abound with forceful illustrations of this principle.
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 379
Upon this conclusion converges our experience with the most
ordinary transactions of the Self in its everyday life, and also
with the curious phenomena of nerve-anastomosis, mental
healing, hypnosis with hallucinations by suggestion, etc. The
proposal to test the efficacy of prayer by experiment with two
hospitals, otherwise equally favorable for the recovery of their
patients, but one of which encourages and practices petition to
the Divine Will for recovery of the sick, and the other not, is
in its very nature impossible of accomplishment. But could
it be carried out, there is no doubt as to what the result would
show. Of course other things being equal, those who pray
for themselves, or who know that others are praying for them,
are likeliest to overcome the attacks of certain kinds of disease.
This is simply to predict a result in accordance with what we
know experimentally of the powerful effect of psychological in-
fluences upon the most primary processes of digestion and nu-
trition.
On the contrary, to hold that the Divine Will, as manifested
in a Providence that is at once universal and minute, is subject
to alteration of its wise and good purposes at the instance of
human desire, however capricious, if only it be insistent and
credulous enough, is as abhorrent to piety as it is intolerable
toscience. Such a conception of God is indeed impious. Neither
can the philosophy of religion hesitate to affirm once for all,
and firmly to hold, the position that this Will has expressed
itself irrevocably — so to say — in certain uniform ways of the
behavior of things. Indeed, were this not so, there could be
no world-order for science to study from its point of view,
and for religious faith to accept as coming from the hand of
the Moral Ruler of mankind. A certain so-called " uniformity
of nature " is indispensable as a basis for all ethical and spirit-
ual control. At the same time, science needs perpetually to
remind itself, and religious faith may reasonably cherish the
conviction, that this so-called " uniformity " is itself no rigid,
machine-like affair. That "like produces like," or that "the
580 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
same causes are followed by the same effects," and all similar
formulas, are as useless practically as they are barren of real
truth.
For exact likeness and precise sameness of causes nowhere
occur in human experience, whether with things or with selves.
Each individual being, from star to atom, and each center of
psychical activity from amoeba to man, is unlike every other ;
each has somehow a special constitution, value, and mission of
its own. Nor are there any recurrences of like events, either
in conscious lives or unconscious things. The World-order is
itself a ceaseless process of new productions, both of existences
and of events. So far as man's history is a part of this order,
a single atom or amoeba may exert a more powerful immediate
influence than the bulkiest star.
It would seem, then, both scientific and pioas to recognize the
peculiar sphere of influence of prayer over physical events, as
comprising those happenings in the production of which hu-
man wills and natural forces co-operate. Within this sphere,
it is both a matter of scientific fact and a postulate of the faith
of piety, that the expression of human wills, whether in prayer
or otherwise, is, so to say, taken account of by the Being of
the World. From the point of view of science on the one
hand, prayer itself is a dynamic factor, the value and efficiency
of which must be recognized, and which may be — although
only obscurely and partially — experienced and estimated. In
particular cases, however, it must be left an open question for
the full solution of which tlie data are never likely to come to
hand. But this same thing is true of every such factor which
contributes its quota — liow large, how small, we know not — to
the evolution of the Cosmos as a whole. For science, beyond
a very limited sphere, agnosticism, uiul not dogmatic denial, is
the only rational attitude. From the point of view of religion,
however, prayer is an essential of its subjective life ; and it is
also a valuable and a valid expression of the rational faith,
which piety has in God as Moral Ruler, and as Providence, for
GOD AS MORAL RULER AND PROVIDENCE 381
every individual event in any individual's experience. Be-
tween these two views, philosophy sees no theoretical in-
compatibility ; while it recognizes the superior worth of the
religious view for the practical ends of moral and religious
development.
CHAPTER XLI
GOD AS REDEEMER
The relations in which religion places God toward the World,
in order that he may become its Redeemer, are above all others
distinctly personal and spiritual. In a word, the very culmi-
nation of that manifestation which God makes of Himself as
omnipotent and omnipresent Holy Spirit is reached in the his-
torical and progressive redemption of the race. Thus it is the
doctrine of Divine Redemption which includes the answer that
alone fully satisfies the most enlightened and profound religious
experience — its needs, its hopes, its aspirations, and its ideals.
In the form of this doctrine, religious faith bears its supreme
witness to the reality of God and to the actuality of his pres-
ence among men. Without this doctrine, and without the ac-
tual progressive realization of its truth by humanity, religion
itself fails of its highest mission.
It is, indeed, no superficial mark which suggests the division
of all religions into " religions of salvation " and those that are
not. The history of man's religious development expressly
shows that those forms of belief which do not promise redemp-
tion to their adherents and to the race, must, as the race ad-
vances in culture, be set aside as unworthy of serious attention.
And those religions which make the promise to the ear, but
break it to the heart and brain and busy hand of man, must
finally be convicted of having contributed to the superabundant
illusion and vanity of human life. What, then, will remain for
humanity? It may try to console itself, and to quench its in-
satiable thirst for the Ideal, with socialistic dreams, imperial-
GOD AS REDEEMER 383
istic plans, or selfish strivings for the place of the " Overman "
among the common herd of men. A few may comfort them-
selves with imaginary constructions of a universal but non-
religious altruism. But religion, as a rational faith in an
omnipotent, omniscient, and perfect Ethical Spirit, must be
renounced. The alternative for religion is either itself to per-
ish or else actually, but progressively, to effect the redemption
of mankind.
These seemingly abstract propositions may be somewhat
firmly placed upon an historical basis by considering how it has
come about that the great world-religions are in general pre-
eminently " religions of salvation." This fact is the essential
truth in man's religious evolution. The evolution itself in-
cludes the development of two correlated factors in the reli-
gious experience of mankind. One of these is the conscious-
ness of wrongdoing as sin against the Divine Being, and the
consequent feeling of need of Divine forgiveness and help ;
the other is the belief in the holiness of God, conceived of as
Himself perfect Ethical Spirit, and so, at the same time, anti-
thetic to moral imperfection in his creatures.
Man's need of redemption, and the growing consciousness of
that need, is the conclusion reached by a study of his ethico-
religious development. The "consciousness of sin," in the
stricter meaning of these words, — the meaning, that is, to which
the promise of redemption corresponds, — is a relatively late
experience. The more primitive expressions of the religious
consciousness contain it, if at all, only in germinal and unde-
veloped form. With savage man, if the things go wrong that
are supposed to be under the control of any particular god, the
supposition arises that this same god is offended at some neg-
lect or indignity on the part of the worshipper. But as man's
ethical conception of Deity becomes more exalted and compre-
hensive, he regards his own moral weaknesses and impurities
as offences against Deity. In general, when the gods are ideal-
ized as themselves more perfect, they require a higher ethical
384 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
standard in their followers. Some of the divine beings at least
become the especially strenuous promoters of righteousness,
the defenders of those who do wluit is right in the divine sight,
the punishers of those who do what is wrong. Finally, as man
identifies his highest Ideal of moral perfection with the om-
nipotent and omniscient Holy Will, all his own moral weak-
nesses and impurities are felt to be offences against God. The
consciousness of sin is, then, the theocratic form of conscience.
The order which is actually traceable in the history of man's
development accords with the psychological principle which
controls this form of ethico-religious exercise at the present
time. Devout souls feel their wrongdoing as sin, grieve over
their moral imperfections as a breach of perfect moral union
•with the Ethical Spirit who is the Object of their faith and
worship — their supreme Ideal of a worthy Life. The frequency
and the poignancy of this consciousness of sin do not depend
upon the multitude and magnitude of tlie individual's trans-
gressions, objectively considered. The rather are they de-
pendent upon the subjective condition of the religious life ;
upon that filial attitude toward God in which subjective reli-
gion essentially consists. Thus the startling experience is ex-
plained, that those most sensitively constituted, and most
highly developed from the ethico-religious point of view, are
most disturbed by the thought of their own wrongdoing. To
lack this form of consciousness is, indeed, no sign of ethical
perfection, but the reverse. To have it is to feel tlie spur
which drives the soul toward God as Redeemer of the World.
The consciousness of sin necessarily results in a conflict ;
and this conflict becomes a most important factor in the de-
velopment of spirituality, both in the individual and in the
race. Such a conflict, wherever the mce-culture has reached a
certain stage, is characterized by the three following marks :
(1) An appreciation of the supreme value of rational and
ethical will — or spirit — in the World order and in human life ;
(2) an increased insight into the nature of spiritual ideals and
GOD AS REDEEMER 385
of the means for their more effective realization ; and (3) a
firmer and more intelligent purpose to achieve these ideals —
both in one's Self and in Society, — or the determination to win
at whatever cost, the good of spiritual worth.
Now it is this struggle for spirituality, for the realization of
the dawning and rising ideal of union with God, conceived of
as perfect Ethical Spirit, in that environment which man's un-
developed nature and the seemingly hostile attitude of the
physical world necessitate, that develops the conscious need
of redemption. This conscious need is at first vague and in-
definite ; but in its higher potency, it becomes the fixed con-
viction, based upon indubitable experience, that m:in cannot
achieve the ideal life, or even make satisfactory progress to-
ward it, without divine assistance. The human soul, aspiring
and struggling to become spirit, is made aware of that highest
of all the forms of the feeling of dependence, in which so much
of subjective religion, in its emotional aspect, essentially con-
sists. As in all his so-called natural life — organic and psychic
— man momentarily depends upon the One Universal Life in
which he lives, and moves, and has his being, so does his
spiritual life recognize a yet more absolute dependence upon
its being and movement in God, the perfect Ethical Spirit.
This conscious need of God as Redeemer is an historical devel-
opment ; it is as forceful and insistent in demanding satisfac-
tion for itself as is any other human need. Just as the expe-
rience of need, and the conflict and suffering which accompany
this experience in every form, has resulted in the economic,
scientific, artistic, and social evolution of the race ; so has this
same impulse and imperative demand, in this its most pro-
found and supremely important form, developed the religious
conception of Divine Redemption in a way best to satisfy itself.
Were it not for this result, the history of the religious life of
humanity up to this present time would be an anomaly.
A certain pessimistic view of human nature and of human
life is, therefore, essential to the religious doctrine of God as
25
386 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Redeemer. All the religions of salvation cherish this truth as
something fundamental to their appeal for acceptance and for
the control of practice — especially, the greatest of them all,
Judaism, Buddhism, and Christianity. Scarcely less true is
this of the Hindu doctrine of Karma, as it had established
itself before the teaching of Gautama; and also as it con-
tinued, after his teaching had suffered a relapse in this respect. ^
As a recent writer ^ has said : " John and Paul, Augustine and
Pascal, Innocent III and Beeri, as well as Rousseau and Kant,
are in this sense pessimists.''' The same thing is true of the yet
more modern thinkers, John Stuart Mill, Comte, and Nietzsche.
Even the extremes of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, in
their low appreciation of man's "native ability" to improve
himself morally, or to attain his ideal of happiness by success
in the struggle foreartlily existence, are nearer to the standard
religious view than is much of the current, superficial, and un-
intelligent so-called " optimism." Nothing is more needed at
the present time, in order to counteract the dominant tenden-
cies, political, social, and religious, than a stronger emphasis
upon the powerlessness of all sensuous, and even sesthetical
satisfactions, to lift the individual and the race to the blessed
life. In this way a religion, that is somewhat more true to its
own inherent convictions and to its mission for humanity,
might more effectually cure the unrest of soul that torments
the individual, and might check the unholy and dangerous
ambitions of " that recurrent curse of the world, a dominant
race."
Side by side with this consciousness of need, and the struggle
for spirituality which it evokes, but also complementary to it,
there has gone on in the religious history of humanity a devel-
opment of the etliical and spiritual conception of tlie Divine Be-
ing. The doctrine of God as Moral Ruler and Divine Re-
deemer of iiiiiiikind nnist be preceded by, and founded upon,
'See Ilhys Davids, OriRiii and Growth of IlcliKion, p. SO/.
2 D. H. Schultz, Grundriss der Christlichen Apologetik, p. 70.
GOD AS REDEEMER 387
a confidence in the good-will and friendship of the gods toward
man. As we have already seen, this usually takes one of
two earliest forms. Either, as in communities where the more
primitive kind of social constitution prevails, the special divin-
ities of the tribe or clan are regarded as friendly to all of this,
their tribe or clan ; or else, as in communities where the ruling
and priestly classes are more separate from the people, these
classes are supposed to be in a special manner the friends and
beloved of the gods. In Egypt, for example, there are hun-
dreds of texts in which the Pharaoh is called by his title, the
" friend of the gods ; " or the gods are said to have set their
son, the Pharaoh, upon the throne.
Another allied conception plays a most important part in the
development of the doctrine of God as the Redeemer. This is
the conception of mediation, and of mediator, between the di-
vine beings and human beings. Under such a conception may
be ranged religious developments so different otherwise as the
Egyptian or Greek belief in good and kindly ministering
daemons and the Hebrew doctrine of the " angel of Yahweh,"
or the Suffering Messiah.
In Hesiod ' we are told how, —
"Thrice ten thousand holy Daemons rove
This breathing world, the delegates of Jove,
Guardians of man, etc."
In Plutarch,^ Cleombrotus, the traveller, asserts that the ex-
istence of beings with a nature intermediate between that of
God and man can be demonstrated by incontrovertible evidence.
Such beings naturally become classified into the good and
kindly and the bad and harmful. Thus they contribute in an
important but temporary manner to the development of the con-
ception of Deity as ethical spirit, by relieving him of the
weight of responsibility for evil ; and also by accentuating the
1 Works and Days, Elton's translation, Specimens of the Classic Poets, I,
p. 72.
2De Defect. Orac.,21.
388 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
multiform character of his goodness. The bad daemons are
made " scape-goat for everything obscene, cruel, selfish, tradi-
tionally imputed to the gods ; " and, on the other hand, the
good daemons afford great satisfaction to one in whose conscious-
ness God has been put far away, without removing, however,
the craving for some close, intimate, illumining and comfort-
ing means of personal intercourse.^ Thus later on the good
daemons may easily become identified with the gods ; and the
evil daemons sink to the rank of malicious spirits. Some of
the early Christian Fathers identified these intermediary spirits
with the heathen divinities. But a higher and holier truth
gleamed upon the world in the Egyptian myth of Isis, who is
described " as having given a sacred lesson of consolation to
men and women involved in similar sorrows." The same thing
is true of the conception of Ea among the Babylonian divin-
ities ; and of Prometheus who, among the Greeks, was pre-
eminently the suffering friend of man.
It is, however, the idea of a divine man, who acts as the me-
diator or representative of God among his fellows, which the
religious consciousness has seized upon, in its effort to make
its doctrine of redemption more comprehensive, intimate, and
popularly effective. Sometimes this Mediator is a king — God's
vicegerent upon earth, who rules in righteousness, but who
also loves, pities, strives and even suffers for his people. In
such cases the redemption effected is, of course, largely a rescue
from miseries of a physical or social kind. Sometimes it is, the
rather, a priestly mediator who has special favor with Deity,
because he is in some special meaning a " son of God ; " he, there-
fore, knows how, and is pitifully willing, to propitiate the divine
favor. Sometimes, again, the mediator is more purely a
prophetic leader, who has attained to the secrets of the Divine
Being with respect to tlie way of salvation in general, or to
some particular way of escape in an emergency. Yet, again,
the mediator may be regarded as the very incarnation of
1 On this whole subject see Oakesniith, The Religion of Plutarch, pp. 132^.
GOD AS REDEEMER 389
Deity in human form. God himself has come down to man, in
pity and in love, to lift man up to God. All these various
forms of the conception of God as man's Redeemer through
some kind of human mediation imply the belief in a spiritual
and divine nature that may be awakened within man. The
human being is potentially a son of the Divine Being. Every
man may become aware of, and possessed of, his spiritual like-
ness to the perfect Ethical Spirit, in whom the faith of religion
reposes for the redemption of the world.
Thus in various ways the different religions have expressed
their felt need of a Mediator who, when the ethical conception
of man's relations to God has reached its higher developments,
must also be conceived of as a Redeemer from misery and from
sin. And if, whether under tlie influence of lingering super-
stitions, or of immature philosophical theories, or of austere theo-
logical dogma, the Divine Being has lost touch with the human
heart and the practical interests of humanity, then the office
of this mediator is considered to be juridical, theatrical, or other-
wise expressive of the transcendent nature of God. As says
D'Alviella : ^ "It should be remarked that, almost every-
where, as the supreme God became more powerful and majestic,
the popular conscience had spontaneously fixed upon some
other divine personage nearer to its own sentiments, aspira-
tions, or even passions, to fulfil the function of interceder, or
rather mediator, between man and the Sovereign of the skies."
But in its highest manifestations religious belief attributes to
the Divine Being the realization of all the supremely worthy
ideals of man, in the Personal Life of an omnipotent, omnipres-
ent, and omniscient, perfect Ethical Spirit. Thus the attri-
butes, of redeeming pity and ethical love are restored to God ;
and God, as Himself the Redeemer, is made immanent in hu-
man life and in human history.
All the religions of salvation — and all the greater world-
religions are religions of salvation — share in the effort to satisfy
1 Origin and Growth of the Conception of God, p. 229.
390 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the needs of humanity in its struggle for an improved spiritu-
ality, and for a better standing and more perfect union with
God. Germs of the idea of a helpful and even a self-sacrific-
ing divine work in the behalf of humanity, therefore, exist in
all such religions. Their very mission is to hold out some
hope of escape through divine assistance from the weaknesses,
miseries, and sins of this earthly life. Heaven throws some
needed light upon earth's darkness — so the proclamation of reli-
gious faith is ever declaring to mankind. Salvation is indeed
the end which all those religions that have arisen above the
lower stages of egoism and superstition propose for their ad-
herents. But, from religion's point of view, salvation can come
only through redemption. As Eucken points out, religion al-
ways has its negative and its affirmative side. It is this two-
sidedness of Christianity — its admission of the reality of suffer-
ing and sin, as inherent in the existence of the individual and
of the race, and its hope of relief, individual and social, by the
expansion and elevation of personal life — which constitutes its
chief claim to superiority.^
In the remotest antiquity of which we have historical wit-
ness, cries are heard appealing to Deity for succor and help,
with confidence that the appeal will not be altogether in vain.
Such was the outbreathing of that humble soul whose prayer
is recorded in one of the papyri of the British Museum : " Oh I
Amon, lend thine ear to him who is alone before the tribunal ;
he is poor. The court oppresses him. . . . My Lord is my
Defender. . . . There is none mighty except him alone."
But a more universal doctrine of a spiritual redemption of the
world finds also a place in the religions of antiquity.
The Persian Apocalyptic proclaimed the belief in redemp-
I In this connection all that was formerly said (vol. I, chap. XXII) con-
cerning the "Way of Salvation" must be recalled and supplemented — and
perhaps, in certain instances, repeated — from another point of view. For
the doctrine of the path which man should follow in order to be redeemed,
and the article of faith embodied in the conception of God as the Redeemer,
are, of course, interdependent.
GOD AS REDEEMER 391
tion by the triumph of Ahura-Mazda, the highest God, over
the bad spirit, Ahriman, after a long period of struggle. At
the end of the first of the four world-periods, which had been
an unbroken rule of evil, arose the mediator, Zarathustra, the
first of the world's divinely sent rescuers. But his work only
gave a temporary check to the power of evil. At the last, the
final redemption of the world, the bringing to perfection of the
work of rescue, will be accomplished by one born of a virgin,
and begotten of divine seed hidden in the lake in which she
bathes ; and his name is Saoshyas.
The Hindu doctrine as to the way and end of salvation, al-
though it nowhere reaches the full and clear conception of God
as the Redeemer of mankind, in places approaches and even
coincides with the Christian doctrine. In the "Divine Song"
(Bhagavadgita) the Deity himself informs the devout knight
Arjuna, who is inquiring as to " the Way," that salvation is
by a twofold law. The Sankhya system had taught that
knowledge is salvation. But the fuller truth about the divine
way adds faith to knowledge. Knowledge of God, and faith
in God, are the appointed means of redemption from the weak-
nesses, miseries, and sins of man's mortal existence. Wisdom,
implying morality, is indeed necessary ; but even more neces-
sary is faith. Salvation is only for the believer that is wise,
and for the wise man that believes. This way of faith is Yoga,
or serene devotion, "action-devotion," — the "balanced mind,
that is free from all attachments, serene, emancipated from de-
sires, self-controlled, and perfectly tranquil." Renunciation
without Yoga is a thing hard to obtain ; but renunciation, when
united with Yoga, receives salvation from the Divine Being.
The soul is thus redeemed ; for its salvation is secured by ab-
sorption into Deity. Thus he who perfects himself in the dis-
cipline of Yoga obtains the highest bliss, — namely, Brahma.
The follower of the Yoga path of salvation " enters " Brahma'.
1 That the more precise views as to the conditions and nature of Redemp-
tion differ as widely in modern Hinduism as in modem Christianity, the
392 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
That reform of Brahmanism, which was chronologically earl-
ier than, but ethically much inferior to, Buddhism — the doc-
trine of the Jains — had also its way of salvation. According
to the Yogacastra, besides the practice of the five-fold conduct,
(1) non-injury, (2) kindness, (3) honorableness, (4) chastity,
(5) renunciation, — there were the other two " gems " which
must be possessed by him who would experience the divine
redemption. They were " right knowledge," or the possession
of the truth respecting the relations of spirit and non-spirit,
and "right intuition," or absolute faith in the word of the mas-
ter and the declarations of the sacred texts. The reality of
redemption is attained by escape from the body with its pas-
sions, desires, weaknesses, and sins.
It is Buddhism, however, which in some of its forms has
made the nearest approaches to that doctrine of salvation
which, upon a basis of Judaism, has brought to its highest ex-
cellence and practical potency the conception of the Divine
Being as the Redeemer of the World. But this Buddhistic
doctrine, in its latest example, is far enough removed from the
doctrine of Buddha, the one chief excellence of whose teaching
lay in its leveling or democratic character. To find his way
to Nirvana the plain man need not resort to the Brahman or
the sage. " He that is pure in heart is the true priest, not he
that knows the Vedas. . . . The Vedas are nothing ; the
priests are of no account, save as they be morally of repute."
Again : "What use to mortify the flesh? Be pure, be good ;
world over, I ran myself bear witness. For I have heard the (/aiikara-acarya
of one sect CSce Journal of Am. Oriental Society, xxii, pp. 227-236), in a dis-
course followinR a ceremonial designed only for the faithful, proclaim that
absolute and unquestioning acceptance of the Vedic scriptures, as interpreted
by the Brahman, is the only way of salvation; and within a few weeks been
told in private conversation with no less an authority than the "ascetic Rajah
of Benares," that most of these sfriptures are mere "rul)hi.sh," interspersed
with "nuggets of gold," that the lirahmans are in general blind leaders of
the blind, and that reflection, prayer, and self-renunciation constitute the only
way to attain the redemption which is Nirvana.
GOD AS REDEEMER 393
this is the foundation of wisdom. This is the foundation of
wisdom — to restrain desire, to be satisfied with little. He is a
holy man who doeth this." " Go into all lands," — such is the
tradition as to the parting words of this teacher to his disciples
— " and preach the gospel ; tell them that the poor and lowly,
the rich and high, all are one ; and that all castes unite in
this religion, as unite the rivers in the sea." As to the end of
salvation, this is Nirvana, the release from Karma or the end-
less round of rebirths, in each of which would be embodied, as
it were, the punishment for all the indulgences, weaknesses, and
sins, of the previous existence. Doubtless, as says Professor
Hopkins,^ " Nirvana meant to Buddha the extinction of lust, an-
ger, and ignorance;" — this primarily; but although he does
not seem to have preached it as an essential truth, he probably
in his own mind identified Nirvana with the extinction of all
consciousness — with annihilation.
The later developments of the Buddhistic doctrine of the
Divine Being as the Redeemer of the World, especially in
Japan, have gone much further than the simple and chiefly
negative teachings of the Founder. Indeed Hinduism, Jain-
ism, and early Buddhism, can scarcely be said to have recog-
nized in any clear and practically helpful way the doctrine of
God as concerned in the salvation of mankind. For them
the way of salvation was more obviously a practice of self-
redemption. Yet, on the other hand, the tenet of the necessity
of faith, however imperfectly developed, and even the insis-
tence upon the practice of Yoga as an " action-devotion," were
recognitions of the great truth that for the redemption of man
there is necessary on his part, the receptive and filial attitude ;
and that from the Divine Being, there comes an immanent spirit-
ual influence which actually accomplishes a moral union between
this Being and humanity. It was in opposition to the doctrine
of salvation by following the eight-fold path of primitive Bud-
dhism, or the ceremonialism and Phariseeism of India, that one
1 Religions of India, p. 321.
394 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
of the Chinese propagators of Jo-do proclaimed the doctrine of
salvation by a simple faith in the pitying and all-saving power
of Amida — "the personification of boundless light." Shinran
(1173-1262 A. D.), the founder of the Shin sect in Japan,
taught as his central religious idea, that man is to be saved by
faith in a compassionate Divine Being, who pities and loves
him ; and not by works or vain repetitions in prayer. That this
faith has so generally degenerated into credulity, and has thus
become powerless as an ethically purifying and inspiring force,
is no essentially different phenomenon in Japanese Buddhism
from that with which the history of numerous Christian sects
has made the student entirely familiar. In general, it is the
most lofty and inspiring of the tenets of religion, as of moral-
ity and of art, which are most readily misinterpreted and
practically most abused.
The doctrine of a redeeming God developed in ancient
Egypt with the cult of Osiris. The myth proclaimed that he
was indeed a son of the gods, but he came to earth and so-
journed among men in order to bring to them the blessings of
civilization. By the devices of the Wicked One he was slain ;
but in dying Osiris passed into the other world, where he reigns
over the dead as the " Good Being." Like the god, every man,
no matter how good and noble, must die ; but the good deeds
live forever, and immortal life under the protection of this
Divine One awaits the doer beyond the tomb. This doctrine
of redemption found its way into Greece ; and there, as well as
in Egypt and throughout the Roman Empire, it prepared the
way for Christianity.
From the sixth century B. c. onward to the coming of
Christ, the joyous Greek nature, which had been without abid-
ing consciousness of sin, had been toned down from its native
high pitch of sensuousness ; it had also been toned up ethically
by the suffering of j)olitical calamitios, and by the teachings of
its dramatists and philosophers. The gift-sacrifices of the tra-
ditional religion no longer satisfied those profounder ethico-
GOD AS REDEEiMER 395
religious ideas and feelings which had now become somewhat
popular. The tramp "purifiers " and dispensers of valuable
magic rites {agyrtce)^ as well as the more permanent religious
associations (thiasi ; and orgeones) had aroused a demand for
deeper spiritual satisfaction. What has been called that " wave
of revivalism which spread from the Northern Semites over
Hellas " had resulted in expanding and deepening the religious
experience of the age. This took the form of a more impera-
tive sense of need, and of the struggle for a higher spirituality
which inevitably follows the feeling of this need. Love
philtres, fanatical and even impure rites and ceremonies, were
offered to meet this sense of need. In the ancient world as in
the modern world, in so-called heathenism as in so-called Chris-
tianity, few probably pursued righteousness for its own sake, or
inquired the way of salvation with an unmixed desire for an
increased freedom from sin and a more perfect union with
God. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the words of
the candidate for the mystery of redemption from human suf-
fering, weakness, and sin, when he rose from his knees — " Bad
have I escaped, and better" have I found," — were sincerely
uttered, and in the future effectively realized, by thousands of
souls. For the Grseco-Roman world was awakening to the
conscious longing for redemption, and to the sense of the value
for the aspiring spiritual life of the conception of God as the
immanent, all-pitiful, and all-saving Redeemer.
It is not necessary to present again in detail the conception
of Divine Redemption which was developed by Old-Testament
Judaism. In the Semitic religions generally, the Divine Being
was regarded as interested in the trials and distresses of his
faithful followers in the present life. But as the grand ethical
ideals of Judaism emerged and became dominant — first in the
consciousness of the prophetic few, and then in the national
consciousness, as expressed and cultivated by its sacred writ-
ings— a more distinctly moral and widely universal conception
of God as the Redeemer arose and prevailed. To the last,
396 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
however, the conception of Judaism was national rather than
individual, political rather than distinctly spiritual. The
chosen people had sinned by being unfaithful to Yahweh ;
their weaknesses and miseries were the righteous punishment
for their sins. God would be their Redeemer by establishing
them anew, whenever they became convinced by the words of
his messengers and returned to their allegiance to Him. But the
need of a promise of redemption for the individual, and for the
departed saints, could not be met in this way.
The answer which sprang from the consciousness of Jesus
was a faith in God as the Redeemer of every individual soul
that would take toward God the attitude of piety ; and of the
race through the continued proclamation and growing efficacy
of the offer of redemption. Tims, as we have already said,
the whole significance of the religion of Christ is found in its
doctrine of redemption.
The Christian view of God as the Redeemer is characterized
especially by two classes of conceptions, or groups of factors.
One of these concerns the unique position which it gives to
Christ himself as, in some peculiar meaning of the word, the
Redeemer of mankind ; the other is the completeness of the
promised redemption, both as respects its moral and spiritual
intensiveness and its extension over liumanity. In it the eyes
are focused upon the historical person ; but from this center
they are directed abroad over the whole range of human his-
tory and even of the cosmic evolutionary process. Jesus is
God's appointed Redeemer ; but his redemption is thoroughly
democratic.
In his earlier conceptions of his mission and life-work,
Jesus definitively and unqualifiedly locates himself in the his-
torical Israel ; his work is related to the divine revelation of
redemption as made in the sacred writings of Israel. He has
come to the " lost sheep " of this house ; he brings bread from
God's hand to " the children." He is the fulfilment of the
Law and of Prophecy; he will claim nothing for himself that
GOD AS REDEEMER 397
has not already been claimed for Messiah by the prophets be-
fore him. It is, however, the prophets and the ethical, rather
than the legal and ceremonial, contents of these Scriptures,
with which he finds himself in accord. He is " the genial
Restorer of the true content of Old-Testament religion."
This claim, however, has its negative side. Jesus is almost
from the first in revolt against the pharisaical spirit and the
minute and petty discriminations and exactions of the scribes.
Their pride and hatred toward other peoples, and their con-
tempt for the great body of Israel who were not learned in the
law, he opposes with the doctrine of faith in God's fatherly
love and care. We soon begin to hear the voice of the divine
pity and desire to redeem, for all the " wandering sheep " and
" the sheep of other folds."
A more exalted and comprehensive conception of his office
and work belongs to the later and latest period of the ministry
of Jesus. He appears to regard himself as no longer merely
a prophet of Israel, but a King in the Kingdom of Redemption ;
" no longer merely subject of religion, but its Object." This
conviction was not with him a theological proposition, but an
expression of his inner consciousness of communion with
God. It is especially as " Son of Man," in the Messianic
sense, that Jesus claims preeminence for his personality.^ At
the end of his life, the religious instructions, exhortations,
and promises which constitute his doctrine of redemption may
be summed up in the word " Gospel." In the religion of
Christ this doctrine takes to itself the marks of a true and
complete universality. Upon the content of the word a mod-
1 In spite of the objections which have been made to Jesus' use of this
title, and to his acceptance of the prevailing Apocalyptical conception of Mes-
siah for himself, it is difficult to interpret the Gospels and the earlier Apos-
tolic writings fairly without admitting something of the kind. On the other
hand, the consciousness of sonship, and of his mission to lead many into this
relation of sonship with God, is much the most essential thing about Jesus'
claims to be a Divine Redeemer.
398 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ern student ^ of unquestioned authority makes these observa-
tions ; " The Gospel, which appears in these three elements,
the dominion of God, a better righteousness embodied in the
law of love, and the forgiveness of sin, is inseparably connected
with Jesus Christ ; for in preaching this gospel Jesus Christ
everywhere calls men to himself. In him the Gospel is word
and deed ; it has become his food, and therefore his personal
life ; and into this life he draws all others. He is the son
who knows the Father. In him men are to perceive the kind-
ness of the Lord ; in him they are to feel God's power and
government of the world, and to become certain of this consola-
tion ; they are to follow him, the meek and lowly, and while
he, the pure and holy one, calls sinners to himself, they are
to receive the assurance that God through him forgiveth sin."
It is an integral part of this Gospel of Redeeming Love that
the death of Jesus had significance in his own thought. It
was the death of the shepherd in behalf of the sheep. He
makes himself a voluntary offering for his own ; and this end
of his life is according to the will of his Father concerning
him. The rescuing love of God is thus expressed ; the revela-
tion of the divine grace is thus accomplished ; his life-work
and Messianic office are thus finished and given completion.
From the purely historical point of view the death of Jesus
was an event of little significance. He had scarcely become
the object of attention and interest to any considerable number
of people, when he perished, leaving behind a handful of in-
significant followers. Nor was there anything about the man-
ner of his death to excite the popular feeling ; it was not
through the fear or ill-will of the hated Roman government,
or the hostile persecution of the Jewish public ; it was due to
his having incurred the enmity of a small party of priests and
Pharisees. At first, this event seemed to his few disciples to
put an end to tlunr hopes for the redemption of Israel, and for
the establishment of tlie divine government in the world upon
^ See Uurnack, History of Dogma, I, p. 5<J/
GOD AS REDEEMER 399
a new and more favorable basis. This, in spite of the fact
that, at least in the latest days of his ministry, Jesus had him-
self become aware that his death was inevitable; and had
taught that it was a most important factor in the plan of God
his P''ather for the redemption of mankind. ^ In proof of this
teaching appeal may be made to the institution of the memorial
supper ; to the agony and prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane ;
and to his complaints that his disciples did not comprehend the
true nature of his kingdom, or the way in which his salvation
was to be established. "If," as says the authority already
several times quoted,^ "we also consider that Jesus himself
described his death as a service which he was rendering to
many, and that by a solemn act he instituted a lasting remem-
brance of it ... . we can understand how this death and the
shame of the cross were bound to take the central place."
The significance of this event respecting the truth of God as
the Redeemer of mankind comprises, therefore, these three
principal elements : (1) The death of Jesus is an example of
self-sacrificing service, which has the divine authority and ap-
proval to commend it, and which has reached the furtherest
possible limit ; (2) it is a victory which, when followed by the
belief in his resurrection, awakens in his followers the convic-
tion that God is with man, as Lord of life and Moral Ruler of
the living and the dead ; and (3) it is somehow, by this supreme
self-sacrifice that the deliverance of man from sin and death is
to be accomplished, — and this, for all mankind who will follow
in the " way of Jesus."
As to how the death of Jesus operates to complete the work
of redemption to which he gave himself, or becomes a central,
efficient factor in this work, the Apostles and other writers of
the New Testament do not make clear. Theories of the atone-
ment and of the person of Christ followed, as soon as reflection
began its work upon the facts of Christian experience, and as
a matter of course ; their history is an essential part of the
1 Harnack, What is Christianity? p. 172.
400 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
history of Christian dogma. Nor can it be denied that the ef-
forts to throw light upon this problem have been significant
and potent factors in the philosophy of religion as cultivated
by the modern Christian world. But almost from the first
there were different conceptions as to the ontological relations
of the man Jesus to the Divine Being ; and, also, as to the
value of the death of Jesus in securing the redemption of man-
kind. That he was in a unique sense " Son of God " and
divinely appointed Messiah, and that his death has somehow a
saving value, all the writings of the New Testament, including
those of Paul, the Johannine, First Peter, Hebrews, and the
Apocalypse, are agreed. But no theory, whether formed in a
germinal way in these writings or developed later by schools
of Christian philosophy and theology, can confidently appeal
to the authority of Jesus himself. They must all, so to say,
stand upon their own merits, and be subjected to the tests of
experience as undergoing an historical development. This
development, itself, when regarded from the Christian point
of view, — a point of view identical with that taken by Christ
himself, — is nothing else than the progressive realization of the
work of God as an immanent Divine Redeemer. In its totality,
the work is equivalent to the establishment of the Kingdom of
God among, and over, mankind. The tendency, which has
often prevailed and still prevails, to separate the death of
Jesus from his personality and work, and to make a theory of
its moduH operandi the essential tenet in Christian faith, incurs
the risk of a mischievous mistake. His death cannot be ap-
preciated properly except in indissoluble connection, both histoid
ical and doctrinal, with the totality of that work. And the
totality of that work can be appreciated properly — not to say,
wholly compreliended — only when the testimony of tlie experi-
ence of his individual followers and of the race, as affected by
that work, has been called to our aid. In this experience, if any-
where, must the proof of the Christian conception of God as
the Redeemer of the World be found.
GOD AS REDEEMER 401
When raising the question of evidence for the religious con-
ception of God as the Redeemer of mankind, it must be re-
membered in what sense only " proof " is possible in such a
case. In general, it may be said, then, that the only evidence
for this conception must be given in the actual experience of
redemption. There are, indeed, obscure intimations, vague
hints, and even impressive anticipations, of such a truth in that
behavior of the cosmic forces, and that course of the cosmic
processes, with which the physico-chemical sciences have to
deal. Certain remedial agencies, and even certain cjuasi-re-
deeming operations, of so-called Nature may be pointed out.
But these evidences are quite balanced, if not overwhelmed,
by considerations which would lead the candid observer of
nature's way of dealing with human weaknesses and human
sins, away from rather than toward a confidence in the divine
redemptive processes. The evidence of evolution is, indeed,
on the whole — though by no means so conclusively as is cus-
tomarily claimed — in favor of a reasonable belief in the con-
tinued betterment of the race. But betterment, especially of
the form sought by an age that is extraordinarily greedy of
gain in wealth, political power, and the prestige of empire, and
which is relatively indifferent to the highest ethical and reli-
gious ideals, is not " Redemption " in the meaning in which
Christ and the other great leaders and reformers of religion
have used this sacred term. For the Christian Church now to
renew the claim of Augustine that its borders are inclusive of
the Kingdom of Redemption is to excite the ridicule and scorn
of intelligent minds. And the moment that the evolutionary
process itself is converted into a purely mechanical or biologi-
cal affair, it is separated from the ideal beliefs and sentiments
which give it force ; and it then loses all resemblance to a truly
redemptive process.
If we could distinguish the redeeming forces in the history
of the race which are not "natural," in the more restricted
meaning of the term, from the definitively religious life and
26
402 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
development of humanity, we should find that they afford only
very doubtful evidence for the conception of God as the Re-
deemer. In a word, it is in religious experience itself that our
confidence in the divine redemptive wisdom and goodness has
its roots, its evidence, and its hope of attaining its end. The
very conception of Redemption is supremely a religious concep-
tion ; its proof is therefore necessarily to be found in religious
experience. In interpreting this experience, however, our
notions of religion must emphasize the intimate and compre-
hensive relations which its beliefs and sentiments sustain to
the whole life and progress of humanity. The self-sacrificing
services of all the good, in every grade of society and of every
people, may undoubtedly be regarded as contributions to this
one, great divine work of relieving man from his condition of
weakness, misery, and sin. But these services, too, in order
to be interpreted as " moments," or factors, in this work must
take their proper place in the history of humanity. It is, then,
in the total experience of humanity, when regarded from the
religious point of view, that our proof of the doctrine must
be sought for, and found, if found at all.
The conception of God as the Redeemer of mankind reaches
its highest form in Christianity ; and by " highest form " must
be understood the form that is most intimate, most effective,
most comprehensive, and most rational. To establish its inti-
macy an appeal to the experience of the Christian believer is
the only available or conceivable proof ; for this quality is ex-
pressed in the subjective attitude of the personal conscious-
ness toward its own weaknesses, miseries, and sins. To feel
relief from these is to be, so far forth, here and now redeemed.
From the individual's point of view, the redemption is the
relief. The efficiency of the redemption offered and furnished
by Christianity may also be in a measure shown historically ;
for an appeal may Iw made to the fact that the religion of
Christ evinces its own essential being in diminishing, as judged
by all the objective signs, the amount of human misery and
GOD AS REDEEMER 403
sin. In similar manner, the comprehensive character of the
redemptive process is shown both by the essential content of
Christian truth, with its democratic offer of salvation, and by
its actual entrance into the life of humanity, as a redeeming
force, irrespective of differences of race, of social condition,
of stages of culture, or even, in a marvelous way, of previous
moral condition. And, finally, it is the work of Christian
apologetics, in the broadest meaning of this study, to show
the rationality of the Christian doctrine of God as the Re-
deemer.
In order to maintain this last contention, however, it is nec-
essary for the apologist constantly to distinguish between the
essential content of truth as it was given to the world in the
person and work of Jesus, and all the theological or philosophi-
cal accretions which have been, or may be, mingled with this
content. The truth of this content is contained in the faith
of the Christian that the redeeming grace of God, meeting in
life with man's need of redemption, is realizable by every man;
and in the experience which is the concrete realization of this
faith. Thus, for the individual, when he has experienced the
consciousness of sin and of the need which is a part of this con-
sciousness, and has entered upon the struggle for spirituality
that naturally follows, the Christian resolution of this conscious-
ness is essentially subjective religion itself. It is the rational
attitude of a finite spirit, when recognizing its own weaknesses,
miseries, and sins, toward that perfect Ethical Spirit which con-
stitutes the Object of religious faith. This is not religion for
angels, or for perfected finite spirits, if such spirits exist. It
is religion for man, when man comes to know himself from the
higher spiritual point of view.
In order, however, to maintain that the Christian experience
of redemption fits the universal need of humanity for that de-
pendent manifestation of God's presence in the world which is
embodied in the conception of God as the Redeemer, allowance
must be made for all the differentiations which characterize the
404 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
individuality of religion,^ and for disregarding the admixtures
and idiosyncrasies that characterize these individual exfJeri-
ences and the various so-called " types " of religious subjec-
tivity. The redemptive work of the Divine Being is as mys-
teriously varied, and at the same time universal, as any other
form of his work.
Moreover, the divine work with the race is an historical proc-
ess. The history of religions shows how man's dissatisfaction
with his own relation to God, his dawning and deepening con-
sciousness of weakness and sinfulness, and his consequent
struggle to realize his own ideal of spiritual being, are essen-
tial factors in the religious development of the race. So, too,
is the rising faith of humanity in God as Ethical Spirit, pitiful
and gracious Father, and willing to redeem, an historical de-
velopment. The various mediators, or assistants, in the divine
manifestation — royal, priestly, prophetic, or political — have
been appointed, equipped, and located in humanity, as historical
characters. The preparation for him who was to be called,
above others, the Redeemer, was an historical process. Jesus
was essentially, not a speculative construction or a mythical
idea, but an historical personality. What has gone on since his
appearance, by way of realizing the ideals concretely presented
in his person and work, lies before the student of Christianity
chiefly in the form of historical facts.
The evidence for, or testimony to the ontological value of,
the conception of God as the Redeemer, has, therefore, two
sources of experience, which are really only two ways of ex-
pressing the one source. This one source is the totality of
human religious experience, as that of a race developing under
conditions wliich somehow make necessary the divine work of
redemption, and which show this needed divine work actually
in progress toward its own realization in the perfected spirit-
uality of the race. But this experience may be considered by
the philosophy of religion in two ways : — either as it is felt by
1 Comp. Vol. I, chap. XXIV.
GOD AS REDEEMER 405
the individual consciousness and observed by those who note
the conduct of the individual ; or else as it manifests itself and
its products in the larger, but more obscure and doubtful, fields
of the history of humanity. In both these ways, while the ac-
tivities and achievements of all the greater world-religions
should be gratefully acknowledged, there can be little doubt that
the religion of Christ exceeds them all in the character of its
doctrine of redemption and in the results of the redeemed life.
For the individual, therefore, the proof of the doctrine of re-
demption must always continue to be chiefly his own experi-
ence of religion as the power of a new life. The earliest form
of the Christian experience attached itself directly to the per-
sonal presence of Jesus. They who saw and heard him, and
who then believingly followed him, actually experienced a new
life. On this account, they regarded Jesus as the Savior and
Lord of the individual soul. But after death removed his per-
sonal presence from them, they still regarded him as the source
of a vivifying spiritual influence — the source of life, a life-
imparting Spirit, for his disciples. Thus, as says Harnack,^
" the characteristic feature of the primitive community is, that
every individual in it, even the very slaves, possesses a living
experience of God." This life, however, was never, from the
very first, an exclusive devotion to the traditional words of
Jesus, or a punctilious imitation of his life, or even a slavish
submission to his thoughts and his will, — much less to the
teachings and injunctions of his chosen Apostles. It was, the
rather, a free working of the perfect Ethical Spirit transform-
ing the weak and sinful finite spirit into likeness to itself.
" This mutual union of a full, obedient, subjection to the Lord
with freedom in the Spirit is the most important feature in the
distinctive character of this religion, and the seal of its great-
ness."
But like every powerful vital influence, and especially like
every powerful religious influence, the redeemed life of the
1 What is Christianity? p. 177/.
406 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Christian is a social affair. It is the power to live one's own
life with, and for, others in a new and higher form of the so-
cial relation. Thus this spirit was destined to effect a re-
demption in the life of the community of believers. It must
penetrate the entire body and weld them together, as it were,
in holy living — in purity and brotherly fellowship. We have
seen how the idea of purification, as somehow essential for the
proper religious life, is nearly as old and as universal as religion
itself. In the later period of the Greek religion, participation
in the mysteries required a laver of regeneration followed by a
sacrifice of salvation. So Christian baptism properly stood at
the entrance to an enjoyment of the purifying influence of this
life. But baptism, and all other ceremonial observances, were
of small importance compared with that experience of transfor-
mation in the whole temper and mind in which reposed the
faith in God as the Redeemer of the human soul.
Yet this new life, although it had all the fullness and ex-
uberance of the Spirit, was also a very sober practical sort.
There are traces, indeed, of excesses breaking out among the
early Christians ; and numerous excesses constantly show
themselves in connection with the Christian life during the
centuries of Church history. But to correct or repress such
exhibition accords with the real and essential spirit of the
Christian life. At present, however, the conception of God as
the Redeemer of the World by the work of the Spirit that was
immanent in Christ has issued in rather shallow notions of a
semi-socialistic order ; or in confidence in the so-called laws of
economics and sociology ; rather than in a just valuation of
those forces and ideals which are more independent of the ex-
ternals and superficies of social and economic conditions.
And, finally, the work of the Spirit of Christ in the human
soul, which begins by finding its entrance through faith, and
by effecting subjective reconciliation and the assurance of re-
lief from human weaknesses, miseries, and sins, as the indwell-
ing spiritual force of a new life, ends in the conferring of im-
GOD AS REDEEMER 407
mortality, or the eternal and blessed existence in union with
God and his redeemed ones. Completed salvation, or the goal
and end of redemption, is then for the individual, not so-called
"natural" immortality, happily circumstanced, as believed in
by the savage or by the modern Christian theologian ; nor is it
Hindu absorption into Deity, or Buddhistic Nirvana, or the
Paradise of Islam. It is, the rather, a complete ethical corre-
spondence, or habitual voluntary response, of the human will to
the Divine Will ; it is the reception into the human spirit of
the fullness of the Divine Spirit. In this meaning of the words,
U7iion with God is redemption, the ideal consummation of re-
ligion.
It is matter of historical fact that the experience of redemp-
tion, and the confident belief in God as the Redeemer through
his immanence in humanity as specialized, so to say, in Jesus
Christ, became a most potent factor in the regeneration of the
ancient world. The vitalizing power of Christianity, as the
experience of subjective redemption and as the confident hope
in the success of the divine process of redeeming society, wrought
everywhere important changes in the moral impulses and prac-
tices of men. In spite of the poverty, lowness of estate, and
frequent and bitter persecutions of its believers the vitality of
their experience as a force propagated in society, is the note-
worthy feature of early Christianity. It operated like the in-
troduction of new life-blood into the social and political body.
And this continued to be true for centuries, in spite of the al-
terations, and in some important respects, deteriorations, which
the later social and political prestige of this religion brought
about.
The best philosophical results of the doctrine of Redemption
were undoubtedly, in the earlier centuries of the Christian
Church, developed by the application of the prevailing Hellen-
izing spirits to the fact and truths of historical Christianity.
On the one hand, these results cannot be identified as a whole,
or by selecting any one of the prominent theories thus developed,
408 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
with the essential and unchanging features of the ontolcgically
valid conception of God as the Redeemer of mankind. On the
other liand, they cannot be rejected as unworthy of considera-
tion, or as wholly unessential accretions about the true content
of this conception. Like all developments of religious beliefs
and sentiments, — and, indeed, like all human opinions and con-
clusions based in a similar way upon special aspects, or classes,
of experiences, — they, too, must be judged by the evidence ap-
propriate to their case. Of this, however, there can be little
doubt : The construction of dogma, as it took place in the form
adopted by the early Church Catholic, and still later in the
form of the revived Paulinism of the Augustinian theology,
was the liveliest movement in philosophy belonging to those
centuries. And the religious organization which it produced,
in order that the Ciiristian Church might step into the place
then being vacated by the decline of the Roman Empire, was
the most powerful of all the political constructive movements
of the same centuries. These philosophical results were con-
tinued and developed yet further by the Media3val theologians ;
but even more fruitfully by the later Christian Mystics. At
the present time they are being quite properly subjected to the
reflections of the reigning philosophical Idealism, upon the
basis of Christian experience and of the history of the Christian
development. The real problem involved, when fundamentally
considered, is this: How shall we truly conceive of those
spiritual relations and activities which exist between the
Personal Absolute, who is perfect Ethical Spirit, and the linite
spirit of man, taken as he is, in all his weakness, misery, and
sinfuhiess, so as to explain, his experience of redemption, and
80 tis to realize progressively liis ideals of the redeemed life ?
The profound and far-reaching problem which the philosophy
of religion raises in the form just announced, the experience of
religion answei-s in a more concrete and practical way. The
sp<;cial answer oi (Muistian faith is its doctrine of redemption
through the divine immanence in humanity, as revealed in the
GOD AS REDEEMER 409
person, work, and abiding spiritual influence of Jesus Christ.
Proof of the truth of religion's answer, in the stricter meaning
of the words, can come only in, and through, the effective
working and final triumph of the experience itself. Is God,
indeed, the Redeemer, by a spiritual and yet historical process,
of the race of man ? The individual who has the experience,
may reply for himself. The observer, who notes the facts of
history and reasons profoundly in their explanation, may be
reasonably confident of an affirmative answer. But the final
and conclusive proof is the completion of the process. Thus the
conception of God as the Redeemer becomes connected with,
and merged in, the conception of the Kingdom of Redemption ;
and this implies the actual triumph in the history of the race,
of the most comprehensive and exalted of human ethico-religious
and social ideals.
CHAPTER XLII
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION
It has been the belief of man's religious experience, in all
stages and forms of its expression and development, that the
gods somehow make themselves known to man ; and also that
the invisible, superhuman spirits exercise some hidden influence
upon the spirits of visible, human beings. It may be said, then,
that the conceptions of revelation and inspiration are essential,
in order to account for the experience of religion, when looked
at either from the point of view offered by an analysis of the
content and nature of religion itself, or from that of an attempt
to interpret the religious development of humanity. The two
aspects of religion may, indeed, be viewed together in some
such declaration as the following: "God's revelation to man,
and man's discovery of God, are but two sides of the same di-
vine education of the race." Or better still : What is called,
when considered from one point of view, the history of the
self-revelation of God, may also with equal propriety, when re-
garded from another point of view, be called man's progress in
the knowledge, feeling, and service of God.
Essentially considered, all religion is a Divine Self-revelation,
— a revealing, or making of God known, b}-^ God, to man. As
says a recent writer on apologetics : ' " Religion is conscious-
ness of God, awakened by impressions of God upon the
rational personality. It is therefore either an illusion, or else
God himself must have called it forth in man." This is to say,
that either the central truth of religion, as it is involved in
• D. II. Schultz, Grundrisa der Christlichcn Apologetik, p. 20.
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 411
man's attitude toward God, has reality because it is produced
and validated by the Spirit of God ; or else religion itself is the
product of man's undeveloped fancy, is without cosmic correlate,
and is rather a dream, from which, when his brain is better
nourished, and his mind more illumined, he may awake to the
knowledge of having been self-deceived.
The Source of revelation is God. This statement follows as
a matter of course from the conception of the Being of God as
omniscient and holy Spirit, and of his ever living, active and
omnipresent relations to the world. However various the
modes emphasized in the different religions, and however nu-
merous the media employed by them, there is one, and only one
source of revelation ; from the point of view of theistic reli-
gious philosophy, this source is the perfect Ethical Spirit, the
Self-Revealer in all the religious experience of the individual
and of the race.
The Object of revelation is also God : — not, however, as an
abstract conception, or as a system of religious philosophy
given, as it were, ready-made ; but as a personal Life, working
in immanent and historically continuous communion with the
developing life of humanity. It is the making known, that He
is, and what He is, in all those relations which religion sym-
bolically recognizes in its doctrines of God, the Creator, Up-
holder, Destroyer, Moral Ruler, and Redeemer, of the world,
which constitutes the one object of the Divine work of revela-
tion.
The Subject of revelation is man : — primarily, the individual
to whom the revelation comes, and in whose experience God
makes himself to be felt and known ; but secondarily and su-
premely, in the religious experience of the race considered as
an historical series of human, individual consciousnesses, who
are related in space and time, by a variety of political, ethical,
and social bonds. It is humanity to which God is revealing
Himself. From this general truth, two most important corol-
laries follow. And, first, the very nature of religion, consid-
412 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ered as a Divine Self-revelation, is such that, from the psycho-
logical point of view, the process of revealing requires the co-
operating activity of the entire nature of man. Although the
term " revelation " lays emphasis on knowledge as the product
of man's intellectual and cognitive activities, it does not ex-
clude, but the rather of necessity includes, the accompanying
functions of affection and will. Only through the spirit of
piety in man is God made known to man. He that wills to do
God's will, as Jesus said, shall know of the doctrine. But,
secondly, revelation is in its very nature an act of divine con-
descension. The character of the individual, or of the com-
munity, always furnishes conditions to the character of the
revelation itself. To use the figurative language of the reli-
gious consciousness : In every act of revelation, and in its en-
tirety as an historical process, God " stoops " to man ; He adapts
himself to the capacities and necessities of those to whom he
would make himself known.
The " historical conditionateness " of revelation follows
from all this. Revelation is always some fact in history ; and
the series of " revealings," when discovered, treated pragmati-
cally, and interpreted according to their significance for the
religious development of the race, is nothing other than the
actual history of revelation. Like every other narrative, that
of revelation should be studied with reserve, with candor, with
a critical estimate of claims, but with a due evaluation of the
significance of the facts. For the history of man's religious
evolution is not antithetic to the rational doctrine of a Divine
Self-revealing. On the contrary, the historical view of reli-
gion, as an important and necessary phase of man's complex
development, demands a doctrine of revelation which shall be
so framed as to accord with the historical facts. If, on the one
hand, we try to weaken or to escape the force of the conclusion
by a wrong use of such terms as " special revelation," " spe-
cial divine dispensation," etc., we are at once convicted of a
retreat to that lower point of view, from which it is impossible
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 413
to estimate fairly the phenomena of man's religious life and re-
ligious development. On the other hand, it is indicative of a
lingering narrowness of conception, of a painful failure to
rise to the higher point of view, when such terms as " super-
natural," "revelation," "inspiration," etc., are discredited by
the advocates of the study of religious phenomena from a
purely historical point of view.
As in the case of all the other great religious conceptions
and doctrines, the conception of Revelation has undergone a
process of clarifying and uplift from the earliest dawn of re-
ligious consciousness, so far as history enables us to trace this
process, until the present time. We may not, indeed, be able
to accept with confidence the contention of M. de Bonald, that
a primitive supernatural revelation is " the absolute condition
of human life, such as it is unfolded in history." ''■ But this
inability, if conceded, would not controvert the truth of the
facts upon which Brinton relies in making the statement : ^
" I shall tell you of religions so crude as to have no temples
or altars, no rites or prayers ; but I can tell you of none that
does not teach the belief of the intercommunion of the spiritual
powers and man. Every religion is a Revelation — in the opin-
ion of its votaries." " Not only that ' God is above us,' but
also that ' God is in us,' " says Tiele,^ " is a belief common to
all religions." But it is the special character given to the idea
of revelation by the two great world-religions, Buddhism and
Christianity, which distinguishes them above others. All re-
ligions accept, and virtually originate in, revelation ; oracles,
prophets, signs and wonders, belong to them all. Most re-
ligions identify the organs or books of revelation with the revela-
tion itself. But these two regard the individual Fqunders as
special and supreme revealers of a new religious doctrine.
1 See R^ville, Prolegomena of the History of Religions, chap. Ill, on "The
Primitive Revelation."
2 Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 50.
3 Elements of the Science of Religion, Second Series, p. 103/.
414 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Otherwise, they differ in their doctrine of revelation. With
Buddhism, incarnations of the Divine Being come at different
epochs to make known, and illustrate, the way of salvation to
man. With Christianity, God is regarded as steadfastly im-
manent in humanity, revealing Himself as its Redeemer by an
historical, but spiritual process, that has for its goal the found-
ing of the perfect social community, the Kingdom of God
among men.
All these truths as to the source, object, subject, and process
of revelation, which are only dimly foreshadowed and pre-
sented in a fragmentary way by the lower religions, are abso-
lutely essential factors in that theistic conception which regards
the relations of God to the world as tliose of a perfect Ethical
Spirit to finite spirits existing under the conditions of an his-
torical redemptive process. " Atheism may consistently aver
that all religions, Judaism and Christianity included, are only
differing forms of superstition ; Deism may deny that any one
form of revelation can really possess those supernatural char-
acteristics which all these religions, in fact, claim for themselves ;
Pantheism may assert that there is no substantial and personal
distinction between the object and subject of revelation. But
according to the theistic conception of God and his relations
to the world, religion, which involves real relations of fear,
obedience, and love, between the Absolute Personality and the
personality of man, cannot exist without revelation. The Di-
vine must come forth from the unknown, from that which he
is ' in-himself,' in order to make himself known, in order to
reveal himself to man." '
On the other hand, the historical nature and " conditionate-
ness " of all religious revelation can least of all be denied
by the theist and believer in Biblical religion. The facts of
Biblical religion, as known by modern scholarship, show that,
however special its development, it had, back of and around
it, the same so-called " nutural," heatlienish, and even super-
i Quoted from the author's Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, II, p. 30G
EEVELATION AND INSPIRATION 415
stitious and mythical elements, which are found in all the other
greater religions. Moreover, the statements and attitudes of
the most illumining of the Biblical writers themselves, and of
the teachers of the Christian Church, ancient and modern, con-
firm the view that this revelation was a movement from the
imperfect to the more perfect, from that adapted to lower con-
ditions upward toward the higher and more universal. Though
divinely produced and fostered, it occurred under the condi-
tions of an actual, historical process. Indeed, the teachings
of Biblical religion can be summed up in no better way than
to declare : It is God making himself known as the Redeemer
by his immanence in the history of humanity. The specialty
of this religion is its possession, in a special degree, of those
characteristics by which we rightly judge the theoretical and
practical worth of all religious experience.
The psychology of revelation requires little special discus-
sion, in view of what has already been said with so much de-
tail regarding the religious nature of man, and the nature of
man's religion, from the psychological point of view. The ten-
dency to believe in revelation, and indeed the somewhat im-
perative need of this belief, comes from the inexhaustible spring
of religious experience. But this tendency is especially aroused
and fostered, it would appear, by the following three consider-
ations : (1) The mystery of speech and the other mysterious
signs of intelligence which man's environment shows to him ;
(2) the need of authority, and the longing for it, in order to
attain some, at least temporarily and partially satisfactory
theory of existence, that shall allow an ontological value to the
fundamental principles and higher ideals of human reason;
and (3) the pressure of life's practical interests, as contrasted
with man's ignorance of the causes which favor or hinder these
interests, and in particular, his ignorance of the future, both of
his bodily life and also of what comes to him after death. It
is in the demand which arises out of these needs, and in the
effort to meet the demand, that religions in general have their
416 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
orif^in. It is by the way in which they meet this demand, and
supply these needs, that the different religions are valued by
their disciples and devotees. Knowledge^ or at least the sem-
blance of knowledge, is craved by the aspiring soul of man.
Religion claims to furnish this knowledge ; Revelation is, there-
fore, of its essence, so to say.
In their work of revealing, the divine beings or superhuman
invisible powers have traditionally been supposed to make use
of a great variety of Means. And why should it not be so ; since
a great variety of means is at their disposal, and is plainly
serviceable for their purposes. Among such media of revela-
tion as are chiefly employed in the relatively non-moral and
irrational stages of religion, are a great diversity of omens, the
casting of lots, oracles, dreams, and strange and unintelligible
events.^ Among the Romans the college of augurs was the
appointed and legally regulated way of ascertaining the will
of the gods. Their cult was neither petitionary nor piacular,
but rather a kind of refined and elaborated magic. With this
people the " haruspices " or diviners, appear to have been of
Etruscan origin ; and the three classes of divination were view-
ing the entrails, the token of lightning, and the interpretation
of unnatural and significant occurrences, or portents (pstenta).^
In Old- Testament times, as in the Chinese Joss-house to-day,
the casting of lots was thought to afford a way of discovering
the secrets of the divine mind as to the future ; then, and al-
ways, because they are subject to the control of the unscrupu-
lous priest or seer, oracles are of all the alleged media of reve-
lation most uncertain and liable to misuse. In the development
of Biblical religion dreams and visions had no unimportant
place. In the experiences of the founder of the faith of Islam,
the first beginnings of his inspiration came in the form of " real
1 For a classified list of omens among the Assyrians and Babylonians,
see Jastrow, Ibid., pp. 352/7.
2 See Wissowa, Religion uiid Kultus dcr l{()incr, pii. Hil//.
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 417
visions." " Every vision that he saw was clear as the moming-
dawn," says one of the biographers of Muhammad.
He who holds to a rational faith in Providence, at once uni-
versal and also special, detailed, and minute, cannot fail to ad-
mit the possibility of the divine will making itself known
through any of these ethically inferior means of revelation.
The smoking entrails of animals just slain, the flight of birds,
the flash of lightning, the natural portent, or the sepulchral
utterance from the seer's cave, may give a new impression that
God is, and an expanded idea of what he is, to men in the lower
stages of their ethico-religious evolution. But, on the other
hand, no means of revelation are adequate to convey a finished
product of comprehensive knowledge ; and no inspiration guar-
antees such infallibility that the truth revealed needs no ex-
amination or further expansion by other divinely illumined
minds. Revelation, by whatever means accomplished, is an
act of divine condescension, which is conditioned upon the
psychological development, and physical and historical environ-
ment, of those to whom the revelation comes. Imperfection
and admixture of error, and even factors due to self-deceit or
to the selfish desire to deceive others, are present quite as a
rule. But even liars and fools may reveal God, if only their
word comes, as in the long run it is sure to do, to be taken at
its real worth. While always, and in all religions, it is largely
out of the mouths of babes and sucklings that he has ordained
bis strength to be made known.
As humanity rises in race-culture, however, it is not the
most marvelous and extraordinary natural occurrences, but
the rather the established cosmic order which becomes the pre-
ferred means of the Divine Self-revelation in nature. The
relation of this cosmic order to the work of making God known
is expressed by certain teachings in even the earlier stages of
the world's religious history. That the heavens reveal the
glory of God is the voice of Old-Testament piety. And Paul
declares (Rom. i, 19-25) that they are " without excuse," and
27
418 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
have " vain imaginations " and " darkened, foolish hearts,"
who do not understand " the invisible things of the eternal
power and Godhead," as they are clearly seen and " understood
by the things that are made." ' In the same spirit, the denial
of the divine revelation in and through nature has been de-
clared heretical by an ecumenical council of the Roman Cath-
olic Church. And if an appeal is taken to the sesthetical ap-
preciation of nature as it is expressed in the more exalted
strains of poetry, we find it confirming the religious conscious-
ness in its conviction : —
" Forever at tlie loom of time I ply,
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by."
On the other hand, modern science in its effort to substitute
for the God of religion the more abstract conception of a
" Mother-Nature " (so Haeckel) or a Nature-God (Goethe), and
modern religious dogma in its reactions against the former ex-
tremes of so-called " natural '' theology, have combined to de-
preciate the divine revelation in the cosmic forces and processes.
And, indeed, nature cannot reveal God to tlie man who is merely
a child of nature. What nature is to the individual and to the
race, depends upon what the individual is, and what the race
is — aesthetically, ethically, and religiously. The history of
man's moral and social elevation evinces the preparation which
the race has undergone in order to receive and interpret this
form of the Divine Self-revelation. Nature " in-itself," or con-
sidered from the lyixrely scientific point of view, does not make
God known.
The human mind never — not even (it might almost be said,
least of all) when it faces natural phenomena in the scientific
attitude — receives and interprets its impressions in a purely
unsentimental and unideal way. Through natural phenomena
God did, in fact, reveal himself to primitive man in the form of
tlie invisible s])i ritual environment, with which man must
reckon, and to which he must " s(piare himself," in order to at-
tain the good he desires and to avoid the evils he dreads. But
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 419
as man rises in the ethical scale and conceives of the Divine
Being as more distinctively ethical, nature itself appears to
him to be the minister of the divine, ethical purposes. God
then appears in the natural phenomena, ruling the world thus
in righteousness. Finally, to the more mature, reflective re-
ligious consciousness God becomes the active principle of that
rational order which both science and religion attribute to the
Cosmos ; in, and through, that order God is perpetually mak-
ing himself known.
The self -revelation of God in human history and in Providence
is yet more distinctly and forcefully evinced as a tenet of the
philosophy of religion. Among all the various forms of his-
tory this process is especially significant in the historical de-
velopment of religion itself. By accepting this statement a
return is once more made to the point of view from which the
process of the Divine Self-revealing and the history of man's
religious evolution seem to run parallel to the end ; if they do
not, the rather, perfectly coincide.
In the religious history of humanity it is human thought and
human speech which are the most distinctive and effective
media of the Self-revelation of God ; and yet more especially,
the thought and speech of the divinely selected and in-
spired men of revelation. Above all the other means, then,
which the Divine Being employs to make himself known are
the prophets, religious teachers and reformers, and the found-
ers of new and epoch-making religious movements. As in
every other form of the development of humanity, so in reli-
gion it is the few that lead the race. And such is the very
nature of religion, that only finite spirit can afford to Infinite
Spirit the fullest and the most effective medium of revelation.
Humanity reveals the Superhuman as entering its own con-
scious thoughts and utterances ; but this is God in man, mak-
ing God known to man. Only through finite selves can the
Absolute Self reveal his own Self.
As they have risen above the earlier and cruder stages of
420 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
their development, all religions have, therefore, been dependent
upon their prophets, priests, and religious teachers, for their
knowledge of religious truth. Nor is such dependence cere-
monial or external merely ; it is, the rather, of the same nature
essentially as that which the history of race-culture every-
where exhibits ; it is the dependence of the relatively obscure
and unreflective, upon the more enlightened and thoughtful
minds. This voice of God to man, through man, has been vari-
ously expressed. In the creeds of these different religions, the
avatars of Vishnu, the various incarnations of the Buddha, the
demi-gods that descended from the Scandinavian Heimdallr,
the prophets and seers of Old-Testament religion, and Jesus and
his Apostles in the New Dispensation, all have the office of re-
vealing God to man. Indeed, the doctrine of religious revela-
tion culminates in the belief, which the facts amply warrant ; —
namely, that some members of the race are constitutionall}^
and by habits of thought and feeling, and by purity of life, as
well as by what we are entitled to consider especial spiritual
impulses and insights, fitted to convey the truths of religion to
their fellow men. To these " men of revelation " the race
does, in fact, chiefly owe its growing and improved religious
conceptions and practices.
It is at this point that the religious doctrine of Inspiration
becomes intimately and necessarily connected with the doctrine
of revelation. Revelation, or God's making Himself known as
immanent Spirit in human history, is indeed the primary con-
ception ; inspiration is a secondary, dependent, and yet neces-
sarily correlated conception. Inspiration is the subjective or
inward influence upon the whole mental life, which makes pos-
sible the revelation. Religious inspiration differs from otlier
allied forms of inspiration, according as the character of the
mental activities necessary for the apprehension of new reli-
gious truth differs from that necessary for the apprehension of
other new truth. More definitively, these three distinctions
are important : (1) Revelation lays emphasis upon growth in
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 421
the knowledge of religious truth rather than upon the excite-
ment of the feelings, and the culture of the practical activities
of religion; (2) Revelation lays emphasis upon a product
rather than upon a process, considered as a kind of recipiency or
functioning of the mind, — upon truth gained rather than upon
the way of gaining it ; (3) Revelation lays emphasis upon the
more permanent and organic factora, but inspiration upon a
state that may temporarily be induced under divine influences.
As says a great German theologian ' : " Revelation, in process
of being imparted to the spirit of man, is, so far as its form is
concerned, inspiration." This is to say that, from the point
of view of religious experience, the formal process which occurs
in the mental life while the truth is being made known, is
itself an inspiration ; — or, as the figure of speech suggests, a
stirring-up of the finite human spirit by the Infinite Spirit.
Spiritual truth is made known by communion of human spirits
with the Spirit of God.
The relation between revelation and inspiration may be con-
sidered from the point of view of religious experience, as this
relation finds application both to the individual soul and also
to the religious development of the race. In the case of the
individual, the attitude of piety is one of receptivity toward
the truth, of reverence for its appearance, and of thankfulness
and praise for its possession. Thus the soul is open to the
Revealer of all truth, to Him in whose right hand the gift of
truth is held. But in its larger application, the immanence
of the revealing and inspiring presence of God is recognized
as necessary to interpret the religious development of the race.
As God is made known to humanity in an historical way ; so a
process of ethical illumining, elevating, and purifying, has made
humanity susceptible to the advancing degrees of revelation.
But this two-fold process itself has always been chiefly achieved
by the activity of the inspired men of revelation. Through
them has come about the mental seizure of religious truth, and
1 J. A. Domer, Ghristliche Glaubenslehre, I, p. 620.
422 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the convincing proclamation and living manifestation of this
truth.
Inspiration is, therefore, a term which applies, primarily,
only to personal beings. To be capable of being inspired is to
be a Self ; and the religious doctrine of inspiration assumes
the Selfhood of the Divine Being. From this important general
truth, the ps3'-chologically correct inference follows in a neces-
sary way. The kinds and degrees of inspiration vary with the
personal characteristics, development, and environment, of the
inspired personality. The subject always furnishes limiting
conditions to the character and extent of the inspiration.
" That the inspiration of different persons will differ in the de-
gree and mode of its manifestation, is a corollary from the
general truth which makes inspiration a truly personal affair."*
In different individuals, or in different inspirations of the same
individuals, the subjective conditions are always made promi-
nent, both in respect of the functions involved and also of the
product of truth evolved. Now the psychology of the inspired
mental state must take account of temperament, mood, con-
stitutional and acquired capacity; of the character of the
theme upon which feeling and thought are concentrated, and
of the conditions surrounding the expression of tliis feeling
and thought. The inspiration of the poet is not the inspira-
tion of the inventor, or the warrior. The inspiration of Sakya-
Muni differs from that of Zarathustra ; nor is either of these
like that of Muhammad. Within the sphere of Old-Testament
religion we find inspired poets, statesmen, artisans, and warriors,
all serving Yahweli, and all made ready for this service by the
iuflatus of his Spirit. While, in their mental apprehension and
unfolding of the truth of the religion of Christ, the inspiration
of Peter is markedly different from that of the writer of the Gos-
pel and Epistles of Jolin ; and neither of these furnishes the
pattern to be copied exactly by such revelations and inspira-
tions as were divinely accorded to Paul.
1 Quoted from the author's Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, II, p. 474.
KEVELATION AND INSPIRATION 423
Particularly characteristic, however, of the higher and more
efficient kinds of religious inspiration is its ethical dynamics, —
its moral insight, moral conviction, moral choice inflexibly
directed toward doing the Divine Will. In the lower stages
of man's religious life, on the contrary, the form, the product,
and the testing of the supposed divine influence are of corre-
spondingly low and unethical character. The earliest concep-
tion of inspiration is, indeed, chiefly confined to the theory and
practice of witchcraft and demoniacal possession. This con-
ception implies that the god being of an evil disposition, has
possessed the soul of the human being, or has sent some of his
subject spirits to take possession of it. But the witch or devil-
priest knows the formula necessary to dispossess this bad spirit,
and perhaps to substitute another more kindly spirit in its
stead. Again, the priest or priestess goes into a condition of
trance or ecstasy, under the influence of the god, and during
this condition some secret as to the future becomes divinely
revealed, or some special insight into present fact or truth
is obtained. In the Babylonian texts containing incantations,
for example, one series which covered no less than sixteen
tablets, bore the name of " the evil demon " — these incantations
being supposed to afford special protection against various
classes of demons.^ Another series which dealt with various
mental derangements, was known as the series of " head-sickness,
etc." But the priests, since they had even superior knowledge
revealed to them by the gods, and were inspired for this mediat-
ing and protecting office, could exorcise the male and female
witches " by command of Marduk, the lord of charms," or
could threaten them in the name of the Lord with the same
evils which they had inflicted.
In the Old-Testament religion, plain indications of the same
low views of inspiration belong to the earlier writings. In the
1 On this subject see the recently published book by R. C. Thompson,
"The Devils and Evil Spirits of Babylonia" (2 vols.), in Luzac's Semitic
Text and Translation Series.
424 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
development of Biblical religion, as in all religious develop-
ments,— and, indeed, as a general principle illustrated by every
form of evolution, — progress consists, not so much in totally
suppressing any of the ancient beliefs concerning the gods, as
in purifying, expanding, and elevating them to a higher degree
of moral value and of practical power. The command, " Thou
shalt not suffer a witch to live," and the penalty for those who
consulted spirits supposed to be raised from the dead, were, at
first, directed against oracles that were not under the patronage
of Yahweli. Prophetic ecstasy continues even in the New-
Testament era to be highly regarded as a kind of inspiration.
And some of the greater prophets, as well as the Apostles,
have important communications of truths made to them while
in a condition of trance, " having the eyes open."
Here also, however, the value of calm, rational insight, and
of the thoughts that are either " borne in upon the mind," or
are matured there more slowly, as reflection broods over ex-
perience, and experience itself is made richer, broader, and
more profound thereby, becomes increasingly greater. " What
think you of God ? " and " What of man, his life, his relations
to God, his duty, and his destiny ? " These problems, rather
than how to secure one's crops or boats from stress of weather,
or to guard one's sanitary or business interests by incantations
and sacrifices, become the great and pressing inquiries for the
human soul. He who can throw light upon these inquiries is
now esteemed as the " man of revelation ; " he who is raised in
spirit to tlie point of view where he catches and reflects the
pure glow of the perfect Ethical Spirit, is the " inspired man."
Such inspired men of revelation are found as historical char-
acters in all tlie Various progressive religions wliich have arisen
in the past; especially so, in ancient times, both in numbers
and in quality, among the Prophets and Psalmists of Israel.
More and more, as the centuiies of Israel's broken national life
went on, did tliose great trutlis of religion which address and
command the reason, stir the he:ut, and form the life of conduct,
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 425
clarify themselves in the utterances of this remarkable succes-
sion of inspired men. Both as revealing religious truth and
as shaping religious history, they prepared the way for the com-
ing, higher and even unique Divine Self-revelation.
In Christianity, the special self-revelation of Divine Being
as the Father and Redeemer of mankind is considered to have
been made through Jesus Christ. This relationship of Jesus
to God as revealer is summarized in the claims which are attrib-
uted to him, such as the following : " All things are delivered
unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth who the Son is
but the Father, and who the Father is, but the Son and he to
whom the Son will reveal it" (Luke x, 22 ; and Matt, xi, 27).
But especially is it the purpose of John's Gospel to set forth
the claims of Jesus to be the revealer of God. The one
thought on which the early Apologists — those Greek thinkers
who strove by reflection upon the content of Christian expe-
rience to make Christian doctrine acceptable to the reason and
common-sense of the Graeco-Roman world — was this : Chris-
tianity is revelation indeed, is real revelation. This truth
they undertook to prove by an appeal to what is universal in
man. But what is universal in man ? His reason, his capacity
for discovering and recognizing the truth. This apologetic
attempt, as a matter of historical development under the cir-
cumstances of the mental life and philosophical speculations
of the time, brought about a demand that the position of the
Church Catholic should difference itself from that of the
Gnostics, who were to be rejected as heretics by the" Church.^
What is Christianity, in its character as a Revelation ? was
the speculative question of the age. The Gnostics proposed
1 That a certain ground was afforded for Gnostic claims by the teachings
of the New-Testament writers, and even by those recorded of Christ him-
self, there can be little doubt. Even in the declarations cited above, the
distinguished commentator, H. A. W. Meyer Con Luke x, 22), says the
Marcionite reading tyvu is more probably original, and not a Gnostic
alteration; since the testimony for it is of a higher antiquity than that for
the reading yiviiffKei..
426 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
tests of the absolute character of this particular form of reli-
gious belief, which transcended the rights, and rightful limits,
of human reason and of so-called common-sense. Thus Chris-
tianit}^ became for them a revelation adapted only to the specu-
lative few — an esoterical religion, and absolute only so far as
esoterical.
The emphasis laid upon the ethical and practical aspects of
the Divine Self-revelation in Jesus Christ saved the great body
of Christian dogma and Christian life from being lifted out of
the atmosphere of history and of universal experience into the
thin air of speculations over the Unknown and the Unknowa-
ble. Thus the view which Christianity takes of itself as The
Revelation par excellence keeps the evidence for itself within
the limits of experienced fact. Like that of the Old Testa-
ment, the Christian revelation is preeminently prophetic ; it is
God making himself known to man by a human life and voice.
A life actually lived, and a voice which has been heard by real
and living witnesses, brings to mankind messages of truth
about God and about his relations to the world. In this way
all the prophetic content of the Old-Testament religion is ful-
filled,— not as a matter of correspondence to details of predic-
tion ; the rather does the life, work, and death of Jesus give
the " fiUed-full " answer to the prophetic anticipations and
ideals of salvation. But the Christian revelation is more than
prophetic ; it is eminently historical. In the case of the Re-
vealer himself this characteristic of all genuine and effective
revelation holds true. The revealing to him, of the truth he
came to teach, to manifest, to be, was progressive. On the
other hand, however, his insight appears more like the marvel-
ous and inexplicable outburst of genius — or, as Jesus himself
regarded it, an inner, spiritual making-known of God's truth
and God's will — than like the product of prolonged reflection
upon facts carefully observed. As regarded from tliis point of
view, therefore, tlie consciousness of Jesus witli respect to its
revelations of religions truth has tliose supreme marks of in-
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 427
spiration which characterize the mental movements of the men
of genius in every line.
The Christian revelation has always been, and it still is, a
progressive and historical affair. On this matter, the various
attempts of reflective thinking and philosophical speculation
to account for the religious experience which refers itself to
the life, work, and teachings of Jesus, compel us to agree
with Harnack ^ : " The question as to what new thing Christ
has brought, answered by Paul in the words, ' If any man be
in Christ he is a new creature, old things are passed away, be-
hold all things are become new,' has again and again been
pointedly put since the middle of the Second Century by Apolo-
gists, Theologians, and Religious Philosophers, within and
without the Church, and has received the most varied answers.
Few of the answers have reached the heighth of the Pauline
confession. But when one cannot attain to this confession,
one ought to make clear to one's self that every answer which
does not lie in the line of it is altogether unsatisfactory."
If, then, we ask. In what does the alleged perfection and
finality of the Christian Revelation consist ? we can, perhaps,
give no more satisfactory answer than something like the fol-
io wing^: A new ethical and religious form of humanity, called
the Kingdom of Redemption, or the Kingdom of God, was
brought to clear light in the person and work of Jesus Christ ;
and this in such a way as to afford a new, and more nearly per-
fect satisfaction to man's religious needs and religious longings.
This answer, however, connects the perfect, final, and so-called
absolute Divine Self-revelation with the progress, spread, and
complete triumph of a society which answers to man's ethical
and religious ideals. This Society is itself an historical devel-
opment,— a process of the Becoming of humanity more and
more into the right relations with nature, with fellow finite
spirits ; but especially, and as including all the rest, with that
1 History of Dogma, I, p. 72/.
2 Compare Schultz, Gnmdriss der Christlichen Apologetik, p. 166/.
428 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Being of the World which religion conceives of as perfect
Ethical Spirit, manifested in religious, and especially in Chris-
tian experience, as the Father and Redeemer of men.
Attention has already been called to the significance for
religion of Speech and of the Divine revealing Word. If
religious truth is to assume clear form, whether in the inspired
mind or in the form of a message to other minds, it must be
expressed, either by the revealer or by those to whom the rev-
elation is given, in articulate language. " Inspiration," said
Muhammad, " cometh to me in one of two ways. At times
Gabriel speaketh the word unto me, as one man speaketh to
another ; and this is easy to understand. At other times it is
like the ringing of a bell ; it penetrate th my heart and rendeth
me ; and this afflicteth me most." In Plutarch's time, the
silence of the oracles was " a common topic of speculation, of
anxious alarm to the pious, of ribald sarcasm to tlie profane." ^
Even the revelations which come through natural events, or
through the higher media of pure lives and noble deeds, how-
ever impressive and inspiring in themselves they may be, must
somehow be translated into written, spoken, or unuttered
language, if they are to be " revelations " in the fuller meaning
of the word.
In its lowest form this persuasion as to the value of words
is a superstitious belief that certain magical formulas — like the
incantations of the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians, or the
" Honovar " among the ancient Peraians — have a peculiar in-
fluence with the divine invisible spirits. Among the Persians,
however, the Jlonovar became a personification of the divine
revealing will — a sort of Logos. In a more highly organized
and pretentious form the same view originates the doctrine
that a certain fixed form of words, as recorded in the sacred
writings of the religion, expresses the precise truth about tlie
Divine Being and the Divine Will ; and that their unques-
tioning acceptance and use has some sort of magical, or quasi-
I So Oakesmith, The Religion of Plutarch, p. 139.
REVELATION AND INSPIKATION 429
magical influence with God. All the greater religions unite
in this claim for their own sacred books. For example, super-
natural origin is claimed for certain of the Confucian classics.
Among them is a table of mystical symbols, from which was
afterwards derived the diagrams of the " Book of Changes."
A monstrous myth was devised to account for the origin of
this sacred table. But even in China, when the more barbarous
ages were left behind, it was holy and inspired men {Sheng
Jen), providentially raised up, who become the organs of
divine revelation. Confucius, greatest of them all, made no
claim to infallible authority : " If it be the will of Heaven to
preserve my doctrine for the benefit of mankind, what power
can my enemies have over it?" or to supernatural means of its
derivation: " How does Heaven Speak? The seasons follow
their course, and all things spring into life, — this is the lan-
guage of Heaven." On the contrary, however, the Hindu or-
thodoxy of to-day regards the Vedas as wholly divine and infal-
lible ; and orthodox Islam affirms a belief in the " uncreate
origin " of the Koran ; while the post-Reformation dogma ^ of
the verbal inspiration and infallibility of the Hebrew and
Christian sacred writings is everywhere being either silently
or openly withdrawn.
Since, however, speech is always subject to misconstruction
and misunderstanding, — cannot, indeed, from its very nature
possess the qualities of an unchanging meaning and of the
bearer of infallible truth, — the Divine Word is quite uniformly
held by the different religions to stand in need of inspired in-
terpretation. Thus the Spirit, which is the Revealer through
the original message, must continue to exercise its function of
revelation and inspiration within the consciousness of every
one who would understand, appropriate, and apply this message.
In this way the democratic and universal nature of the divine
1 That the verbal infallibility of Scripture is a post-Reformation dognta
and not a Christian or even a Church-Catholic doctrine, has been abund-
antly shown. See Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, vol. II, part III.
430 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
activities of revelation and inspiration vindicates itself in the
experience of mankind. The priestess at Delphi needed the
help of an exegete ; the infallible Vedas demand the infallible
Brahman to make their obscurities clear ; the Sacred Scriptures
of the Christian religion require an endless series of commen-
taries, many of which use language that is much more difficult
to interpret into experience than is the language they set them-
selves to explain. Over and above this chance for the confu-
sion, and for the growth, of opinion which the freedom of the
Spirit requires, there is yet more abundant room provided in
the dissemination of the truth.
The demand for further revelations to other inspired minds,
in order that new trutlis may come to light, or that old truths
may be seen and experienced in new light, must, therefore, be
provided for, even in connection with the strictest adherence
to the most bigoted views of the verbal inspiration and the
infallible and final authority of the sacred religious writings.
In Hinduism, the Brahman may raise himself by contempla-
tion to a state of communion with the Divine Being which
gives to him an insight superior to the Vedas themselves.
In all the ages of Christian experience, too, believers have
found some way — either by resort to allegorizing and mystical
hermeneutics, or by distinguishing between different classes of
contents (ceremonial and ethical, temporary teachings and fun-
damental truths, etc.), or by tricks of interpretation and accusa-
tion of corruptions and glosses of text, or by the more intelli-
gent and courageous assertion of the rights of tlie Spirit — for
perpetuating in a measure the spiritual freedom of the Founder
of the religion and of his earlier followers. In all religions,
moreover, as in all art, and even to no small extent in much of
scientific discovery, some theory of mystical intuition has been
a most important and fruitful method for the acquisition of
knowledge and for the improved grasp of faith upon its content
of trutli. What is needed, liowever, in religion as well as in
science, is a prolonged and severe critical testing of what the
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 431
intuition sees and foresees, by the accumulations of experienced
facts. On these terms, all men of revelation, and all inspired
seers, whether in the realm of science, art, philosophy, or re-
ligion, may believe the truth of the claim : —
"While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things ; ■" —
or
"But God has a few of us whom he whispers in the ear:
The rest may reason and welcome : 'tis we musicians know."
For in religion, as in science, art, and philosophy, every claim
gets itself either accepted, modified, or rejected, by its endur-
ance in history ; and by the place which it finds itself able to
maintain in the changing and growing system of human beliefs,
sentiments, ascertained truths, and institutions built upon
these attitudes of man's developing life.
The superiority of the Old and New Testaments over all
other religious scriptures consists chiefly in just this combina-
tion of the historical qualities of continuity, progressiveness,
and adaptability to changes of social conditions and to intellec-
tual growth, with the insights and foresights of that " mystical
intuition " which is always, and properly, attributed to the
Spirit of God. The content of truth which these Scriptures
convey is, as we have seen, the faith that God is in humanity,
progressively redeeming it, by bringing it to a spiritual like-
ness and union with Himself. But this content of truth is
conveyed in the form of a record which was itself an historical
growth. Even in the finished form, as record, which it at-
tained at the completion of the Canon of the New Testament,
it did not escape, and it was not designed or constructed so as
to escape, from all further testing b}^ history and by the devel-
opments of religious experience. Its alleged histories will
always be subject to the critical application of the historical
method, for the proof of their historicity. Its practical maxims,
or ethical generalizations, require the continued exercise of
432 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
enlightened moral consciousness for their approbation and their
right to control conduct. Its insights into the world of invis-
ible realities and spiritual ideals, and its foresights as to the
destiny of the individual and of the race, both incite and culti-
vate, and also appeal for verification to the most exalted and
trustworthy religious experiences and developments of man-
kind. The proof of the practical value and of the ontological
validity of the content of the Christian faith is not dependent
upon details of past history ; but it must continue to exhibit
itself in the history of the present and of the centuries to
come. It is not a matter of scientific induction ; and yet it is
constantly subject to the testing of universal experience. It
is not to be derived by the method of philosophical deduction
from any preconceived, or so-called a priori conception of " the
Absolute " ; and yet it offers itself ever anew as an object for
the reflective thinking and maturing judgment of those spec-
ulatively inclined.
There is one species of the media of revelation of which all
religions make more or less use, that offers peculiar difficulties
to the modern scientific and philosophical conception of the
Being of the World. This is the Miracle. Indeed, so serious
is the objection to the miraculous, and so heated and disastrous
has been the conflict occasioned by its claims, that the present
tendency on the part even of the apologists of the Christian
religion is very strongly set in the direction of dispensing
altogether with the conception. Curiously enough, however,
the most recent discoveries of the physical sciences appear to
be making a rift in the solid, dead, spherical Mechanism of
the eighteenth-century Universe, through which a modified
form of the religious idea of a God-revealing wonder may,
perhaps, enter anew.
The candid student of man's religious evolution from the
point of view of historical facts discovers, however, that much
of the conflict l)etween science and faith over the miraculous,
has been due to misapprehension or to over-assurance on both
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 433
sides. All religions have, indeed, made demands for belief in
the miraculous. As a modern Apologist has said : " Faith
sees miracles everywhere that it unmistakably discerns God's
revelation in the events which affect human interests and hu-
man life. But it does not even raise the question in the lower
stages of development whether these same events have a natural
side or not." Primitive and savage, or even civilized but not
scientifically instructed, man feels no inconsistency between
the two points of view from which the same event may be con-
sidered. Thus the same phenomenon is now natural, — i. e., or-
dinary,— and now a specially impressive sign of the divine
will and intent. This same na'ive and unreflective view of
the matter characterizes the writings of the Old Testament
throughout. The writers of these sacred books have no preju-
dice against the miraculous. But it is absurd to suppose that
during all the Old-Testament period the Jews had little common-
sense, not to say scientific information, about the so-called
natural causes of storms and calm, good fortune and evil for-
tune, birth and death. The coming of a child might indeed
be prayed for, or accounted an omen of extraordinary signifi-
cance from Yahweh. But the formula for genealogies is
frankly naturalistic ; " Abraham begat Isaac, etc." In this
very case of purely natural generation, the Patriarch and his
wife are represented as offending the Lord by laughing in his
face, because they regarded it as naturally impossible, when a
son is promised to parents of such an extreme old age.
Indeed, the established orderliness of nature is poetically
celebrated in the Old Testament, and is made the type of the
divine behavior in spiritual matters. " If ye can break my
covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night, and that
there should not be day and night in his season ; then may also
my covenant be broken with David, my servant." (Jer. xxxiii,
19/.) In that beautiful hymn of praise to Yahweh (Ps. civ),
He is represented as covering himself with light as with a gar-
ment, as moving on the winds as on wings, as using the light-
PR
434 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
nings as his messengers ; aud yet his law is over all ; for to
the perpetual redistribution of the waters He has " set a bound
that they may not pass over," and he has " appointed the moon
to fix the seasons " ; as well as given every living creature
its place in the great system of the Universe. So in tlie other
greater religions : for centuries in China and India belief in
miracles and divine wonders as daily occurrences has subsisted
side by side with a nearly statical social condition and conser-
vation of the popular habits. Nor has the wide-spread belief
in miracles been inconsistent with considerable development
of astronomy, that most exact and certain of the applied
sciences. Even in the case of the most nearly primitive and
savage peoples, where the conception of the extraordinary and
the miraculous is of the lowest possible order, the modern judg-
ment is quite too much given to underestimating the current
intelligence with respect to what is ordinary, or natural, the
thing for the occurrence of which the causes are more or less
completely known. In general the seeming incompatibility of
the scientific and the religious view is a comparatively late
development.
It is when science puts forward its theory of the cosmic sys-
tem as a self-contained and self-explanatory impersonal Mech-
anism, perfectly and rigidly unyielding in its adherence to so-
called fixed laws, that theology responds with its conception
of the miraculous as a violation of tliese laws, as a breach
somehow made in the system by a personal Will from without.
And now begins a terrible battle. On the one side, it is in-
sisted that the whole body of science will be wounded to the
death, if God should be allowed to shoot a single arrow at
man's heart through the joints of its rigid and impenetrable
armor. On the other side, it is claimed that the destruction of
all belief in the Supernatural and in the divine work of spiritual
betterment would follow, if somehow God could not occasion-
ally break througli, and hy a species of violence committed really
against himself, readjust the working of the mechanism. To
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 435
the philosophy of religion, such a scientific conception of the
world is a mockery ; to it, such a theological conception of
the miracle is absurd.
Were this the place it could be shown that the conception of
the miraculous as a violation of natural law, as a something con-
tra naturam, is by no means the only ancient and honorable
theological conception. ^ The Church-Father Augustine, in one
of his several treatments of this subject, considers all events in
nature as alike miraculous, because they are all alike the work
of God. The great mediaeval theologian, Thomas Aquinas,
calls miracles those things done by God " beyond the order of
nature " — that is, beyond the natural causes that are known to
us. And the work of Schleiermacher, Rothe, and others, may
truly be said to have banished forever from modern thought
this view of the miracle as a violation of natural law, among
other views of the post-Reformation theology.
The conception of the miracle as a violation of natural law
is from the very nature of the case untenable. There are
countless events — and the progress of modern science has per-
haps increased rather than diminished their number — for which
it is at present quite impossible to assign adequate causes, or to
bring them into harmony with other events under general
formulas called laws. But from the scientific point of view,
these events must all be looked upon as "natural," because
they are events in nature. They are, therefore, potentially
capable of being at some future time located, so to say, in the
general scheme of events, in accordance with the methods and
generalizations of science. Each one of them may, however, in
its relations to human experience and to human history, be of
such a nature as to have a very special, and even a unique
and not repeatable place and value in the cosmic system. On
the other hand, for the philosophy of religion there is no event
so ordinary or completely explicable that it may not be entitled
1 For the proof of this, see Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, vol. I, part II,
chap. iii.
436 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
to recognition as revealing in some special way, from the stand-
point of the individual observer, the immanent presence of the
Divine Being. Indeed, the same events which science regards
as natural, religion is quite at liberty to regard, without con-
tradicting or limiting the scientific conception, as dependent
manifestations of that Supernatural Power and Presence which
religious faith believes in, and adores, as God.
The whole significance of the miraculous in the history of
the Divine self-revelation is, therefore, amply secured when it
is regarded as a natural occurrence, which, by its special adap-
tation to the experience of the observer, is providentially made
to serve as a sign, or reminder, of some divine thought or pur-
pose. It is its special relation to the experience of man, and
not its altogether unique relation to the divine will, or to other
events and processes in so-called nature, which gives its reli-
gious significance and value to the miracle. This is especially
true of the Biblical miracles. The Old Testament has, indeed,
no name for the miraculous which is not as readily applicable
to events that, in the modern scientific use of the word, are
plainly "natural." The miracles said to have been performed
by Jesus all belong to one of the following four classes ; they
all, therefore, readily conform to the same conception of the
miraculous from the religious point of view. They are either
(1) tokens from which to draw a conclusion as to souiething
not perceivable by the senses ; or (2) symbols which testify to
the nature of the Messianic work ; or (3) witnesses to the
divine power and authorization of the one who performed
them ; or (4) prophecies which carry suggestive moral lessons
as to the present and the future.'
The place of the so-called miraculous in the history of reve-
lation is, therefore, always dependent upon the varying con-
ditions of the religious experience and religious development
of humanity. The attempt of certain theologians to discredit
> Compare Steinmeyer, Die Wunderthaten des Herm in Bezug auf die
neueste Kritik betrachtet.
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 437
the so-called "relative" miracle, and the attempt of certain
" scientists " to rule out miracles altogether on grounds of an
a priori conception of what is possible or impossible in the
sphere of natural phenomena, are alike mistaken. The feeling
of mystery and awe in the presence of natural phenomena has
been seen to be a most important factor in the origin and growth
of religious experience, and of the religious view of the World.
Modern science has, in the thought of the most thoughtful of
its own devotees, done nothing to diminish, but much to in-
crease and deepen this feeling. A relative necessity for the
miracle in the historical and progressive Divine Self-revelation
may, therefore, well enough be admitted. Especially in the
lower stages of race-culture, and for the man who is unable to
receive and hold steadily the general truths and ideals of the
race's higher religious experience, any wonder, or portent, of a
concrete physical kind may become an important means of
making God known. Such an event arrests attention, arouses
feelings of dependence and awe, demands and effectuates the
entrance into consciousness of the invisible and intangible
potencies that so make or mar the success of human life. In
a word, the miraculous stirs up the crude, but most primary and
indispensable elements out of which the evolution of the higher
forms of religious belief, sentiment, and practice are to issue.
That so-called miracles have in the past, in the case of all
religions not excepting the Christian religion, actually been
powerful means for enforcing the conviction of the Reality
corresponding to the subjective content of faith, is a matter of
indubitable historical fact. All the errors, imperfections, and
even encouragement to degrading superstitions and immoral
practices, which have doubtless accompanied this historical
process do not destroy the truth of the main fact. Errore,
imperfections, and degrading superstitions, and immoral prac-
tices, have been connected with all forms of the evolution of
humanity. Neither science, nor art, nor politics, nor industry
has been free from them. Man's religious evolution, if we
438 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
could consider it apart from the other forms of his evolution,
has probably been as little tainted and corrupted in these ways
as have any of these other forms. The blame of it all can
scarcely be laid upon human credulity vvitli respect to the
religious miracle. Priests, oracle-mongers, and medicine-men
have not deluded and corrupted the people more to their harm
than have the politicians and the " captains of industry " ;
probably not more than the artists and even the so-called men
of science.
With a rising estimate of the value of ethico-religious truth,
and with a more rational conception of God, of his relations
to the World, and of the real nature and significance of reli-
gious revelation and inspiration, the place of the miracle be-
comes less important for the religious evolution of humanity.
It is undoubtedly true that modern Christianity, where it con-
tinues at all to believe in its own miraculousness, receives the
essential content of truth, not on account of, but the rather in
spite of, the record of miracles. There are not wanting signs,
however, that this attitude is an extreme concession to a scien-
tific conception of the world which is, even in the minds of
those who hold fast to the scientific standpoints in the most
unprejudiced and liberal fashion, itself only partial, lacking in
comprehensiveness, and destined soon to yield to some larger
and more spiritual conception. " Nature " appears to modern
science so much more grand, subtile, shrewd in resources, and
marvelously wonder-working ; she is ready always to move on
and even to overstep, in her march toward her goal, the limits
wliich she seemed previously to liave irrevocably set for her-
self ! From her fertile womb what incompreliensible but sig-
nificant new products may not at any moment come forth?
The life wliich nature is, in fact, momently producing is, as
to its causes, limits, anil possibilities of development, so full of
hitherto inexplicable riddles, that we will not rate in too lowly
fashion the potentialities now concealed, but ready to be re-
vealed at any moment to the insight of the true seer.
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 439
The persistent belief in miracles is a fact of no small signifi-
cance. And since miracles are not to be regarded as violations
of the laws of nature so-called, or as interferences with the
established divine order, their reality and their value are not
discredited by man's growing ability to explain plienomena
from the scientific point of view. The awakening of the hu-
man mind to the presence of that Spirit on whose Life man's
life depends, and to the belief that this same Spirit is the il-
lumining and redeeming One whose help for his salvation
man everywhere and always needs, is a divinely induced event
in every age. The means of this awakening may change from
age to age. There was truth in the poetical expression of Jean
Paul Richter : " Miracles on earth are nature in heaven."
Since, however, every miracle is a particular, definite event
in nature, the reality of every alleged miracle is a matter of
evidence. Each alleged occurrence of the seemingly miracu-
lous order raises, therefore, a question of fact. This question
can never be settled, in a perfectly definite and finally satis-
factory way, either by a reference of science to the domination
of so-called " general laws," or by a reference of theology to
its confidence in the generally miraculous nature of the facts
and truths that constitute the content of religious faith. No
particular fact is ever to be explained by general laws, even
when admittedly and incontestably coming under those laws.
Many events which have been contested or derided in the name
of established laws of nature, have subsequently vindicated
themselves as facts. " What we call the ' laws of nature ' must
vary according to our frequent new experiences " (Virchow).
"Science is a foe to systematic negation" (Charcot). Nor
can we avoid noticing the extraordinary credulity of many
who promptly deny the possibility of an alleged fact when it is
called " a miracle "; but who are entirely ready to credit the
same mysterious fact, if you will only consent to call it " sub-
conscious," "hypnotic," "telepathic," or whatnot. On the
other hand, the greater number of alleged miracles, even wherk
440 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
before examination they appeared to have sufficient evidence
iu their behalf, have failed to establish themselves as facts.
This experience reasonably creates the cautious and non-
committal attitude of the wise man toward the seemingly mirac-
ulous, whether deemed important to confirm the religious
beliefs of humanity, or not ; and this is not because he is ready
on a priori grounds to pronounce the alleged facts impossible,
but because he has learned how untrustworthy is most of the
evidence that is claimed in support of such alleged facts.
All this, however, puts no intolerable — not to say unreason-
able— burden upon religious faith. Nor does it, on the other
hand, convict of unreason faith's attitude toward the miracu-
lous in general, or toward any miracle in particular. The same
thing is constantly coming to the front in the conclusions of
modern science itself. Have we not had the believers in spon-
taneous generation convicted of seeing new living forms in
shreds of cloth, or of detecting the origin of all life in some
Urschleim that was not living at all ? Is not the whole history
of biological evolution paved with corrected mistakes in matters
of fact — mistakes due chiefly to the prejudices and credulity of
the observers? Is the marvel of the resurrection of Jesus, in
itself considered as mere fact, any more difficult to comprehend
than — to compare mysteries great from the religious point of
view with mysteries great from the scientific point of view —
the new life of the impregnated ovum from which Aristotle
came ? Is the testimony of the witnesses to this marvel any
more conflicting than that of those who bear witness to the
self-regeneration of the cut nerve-fiber? Doubtless the men of
faith, not only in religion but in all other matters of evidence
that needs sifting and can never amount to more than a certain
degree of probability, will continue to credit as fact what those
who have not the same faith will continue to doubt or to deny.
In the large way, and in the long run, the growth of liuman
experience, rellected upon in ita totality, will reveal such truth
as men may hope to know. But in both science and religion,
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 441
there will be no lack of unexplained mysteries of fact until the
end of time.
There are certain considerations, however, which the believer
in the superior credibility of the Biblical miracles may reason-
ably urge in his own behalf. There is, first of all, even in the al-
leged miraculous events of the Old-Testament narratives a cer-
tain commendable moderateness, which in comparison with the
example of all the other most important sacred writings of
the different religions may be called a marked paucity of the
miraculous. Moreover, if we refrain in the interests of sound
scholarship, and in sympathy with the Oriental way of teach-
ing moral and religious truth, from regarding narratives like
that of the book of Jonah, for example, as making any claim to
an historical character, we may note a lack of exuberance and
wildness about these alleged miraculous happenings.
It can scarcely be questioned, in the second place, that from
the standpoint of a rational faith the intimate connection of
many of these natural wonders with the orderly, historical de-
velopment of that ethical and religious truth which the world
owes to Judaism, is favorable to their historical credibility.
That is to say, the place which the miraculous takes in an or-
ganism of revelation, for the mind which accepts the truth thus
revealed respecting God's spiritual relations to the race, lends
an important support to the claim of its reasonableness ; in this
way it also aids in removing antecedent objections to the au-
thenticity of the record of alleged miracles. To reason thus
does not necessarily contravene the accepted scientific method
of historical research. On the contrary, it is itself an example
of the use of that method. Physical science, as soon as the
absurd conception of God " violating " natural law or " inter-
fering" with the world-order is withdrawn, has no more right
to assume dictatorship over the history of the Divine Self-
revelation than over any other species or aspect of the histor-
ical evolution of mankind. The abstractions of chemistry,
physics, and biology, cannot suffice to demonstrate what, by
442 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
way of concrete individual fact, luis happened in the past ;
much less can they show to the religious consciousness that it
is mistaken in interpreting the accomplished fact as a sign,
token, or symbol of some true thought, or holy choice of God.
The entire religious doctrine of the relations of tlie world of
things and selves to the Divine Being interprets them alias
factoi-s in an interconnected but dependent manifestation.
To Christian faith, however, it is the relation of the alleged
miraculous occurrences recorded in the Biblical writings to
Jesus Christ, as preeminently and uniquely the revealer of re-
ligious truth, which is the most potent influence in authenti-
cating these occurrences. Jesus himself never appears as a
miracle-monger : in no instance does he work a Avonder for its
own sake, or for the sake of the applause, or even of the con-
fidence, which it might be expected to win to himself.^ The
miracles he is said to have wrought seem, for the most part, to
flow from his personality with a certain perfect naturalness.
And if the attitude of faith in this personality, as somehow
uniquely divine, is needed in order to accept the truthfulness
of the narrative of his miraculous deeds ; on the other hand, a
certain attitude of reserve, or even — if it seems a better word —
of agnosticism^ is more truly scientific here than is the position
which boldly issues, in the face of the modern mysteries of
both physical and psychical phenomena, a blunt and unqualified
denial to them all.'^
As to the modus operandi of revelation and inspiration little
can be added with assurance to what has already been said.
That most of the religious truth, of which the race has become
possessed, has arisen and developed through tlie reflection of a
few minds upDu man's experience with things and witli his-
J " Faire des miracles Hail une chose d laqucllc il se refusait ohstin^ment ,
cc qui est ridicule ^ un sorcier. Ne soyez pas sorcicr, mais si vous I'rtes,
jaitcs votre metier."
2 On miraclea in gencrnl, and on the Christian miracles iu particular, see
Ilarnack, What is Christianity? pp. 20/7.
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 443
torical events, is undeniable historical fact. The naturalistic
way of explaining this fact speaks of " suggestions," " influ-
ences," " reasons," etc. ; — as though they somehow had an ex-
istence external to human consciousness and operated upon it
as true causes for the production of its insights into, and
inferences about, religious truth. This way of speaking has
its rights and its advantages. From another point of view,
however, not only the religious seer, teacher, and philosopher,
but -tilso the scientific observer, if only his attitude toward
human experience be that of a devout mind, has always been
ready to ascribe the gift of truth to God, and the power to ap-
prehend, receive, and interpret truth to the " inspiration of the
Almighty." This conviction of personal and spiritual relations
between man, as a discoverer and knower of the truth, and
God as the Revealer and Inspirer of man, is too deeply set in
human experience to be easily eradicated. The " men of
revelation " — with their superior insights and cognitions in
science, art, philosophy, morals, and politics, as well as in reli-
gion— have uniformly believed themselves to be divinely helped
to " read after " Him " the thoughts of God."
The revelations and inspirations of the Almighty, however,
have been too democratic to be confined to the select few.
Great upward-movements in the religious development of the
race, — like that which extended from the seventh to the fifth
century b. c, and not only gave to the world such names as
Isaiah, Pythagoras, Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, and Lao-tse,
but also effected a religious revolution among millions of hu-
man kind ; or like that which surrounded on both sides for a
century or two the appearance of Christ ; or, again, like that
which swept over the whole Western World and brought about
a " Reformation " par excellence : — great upward movements in
the religious development of the race bear witness at intervals
to the enormous and epoch-making energy of the Divine
Spirit. The appearance is as though, after slumbering and
slowly gathering itself, this divine energy burst forth with
444 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
increased violence of spiritual uplift upon humanity. And,
indeed, in spite of all that may justly be said to the contrary,
it always has been and still is Religion which is " The Great
Psychic Lift of the Race." ^
This work of revelation and inspiration from the Infinite
Spirit within the finite spirit of the individual man can, in
some sort, be put to an experimental testing. And if any
seeker after truth thinks himself to have tried the experiment
and failed, or to have proved a negative experimentally, he
may quite properly remind himself anew of the conditions on
which all successful scientific experimentation is known to de-
pend. Let, then, any human soul voluntarily remove all ob-
stacles from prejudice, or from the desire to exclude the free
and fuller manifestations of the revealing and inspiring Spirit
of God. With a mind voluntarily opened to an appreciation
of those ideals, in whose ontological and practical value the
race has so persistently believed, let one reflect upon the prol>
lems of human life and human destiny in their manifold rela-
tions to the mystery of tlie cosmic forces and processes. Let
the higher lights come down to illumine the level of the spirit's
better impulses and strivings. Let the profounder aspirations
raise these impulses and strivings beyond their customary
heights. Let heaven and earth be wooed to come together for
at least a momentary embrace. Tear away the mask of the
phenomena in whose frowns and smiles and grimaces our daily
interests are so absorbed ; and now behold ! if possible, the
Reality of things. Some new truth, divinely wrought, about
that Reality ; some new confidence in its supreme value as
serving with its Will to accomplish a "far-off divine event"
in tlie interests of Truth, Righteousness, and Blessedness ;
some added energy and purity of spirit in the daily strife with
weakness, suffering, and temptation ; — all this will surely come
to the soul which thus prepares itself. And whence does it
> A phrase u.scd in Ideiils of Science imd Faith, in the Essay by Victor
V. liraiiford, called "A Sociological Approach toward Unity."
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 445
come? The answer of the growing religious experience of
mankind is this : It comes from the Revealer and I)ispirer of
all Truth, Righteousness, and Blessedness ; and He is our God.
The phenomena of religious revelation and inspiration are the
crowning proof of the truth of the religious conception of God
as perfect Ethical Spirit. " The abiding presence of the Super-
natural in nature is necessary to account for nature and her
process of development The abiding presence of the
Supernatural in consciousness and in human history — as the
object and source of religion, as the giver of moral and reli-
gious truth, light, and life, as the eternal and quickening Holy
Spirit — must also be accounted necessary to explain the ethical
and spiritual progress of humanity. But these fundamental
facts do not exclude the further fact of a special and more
truly creative activity within certain more definite fields of
human consciousness and human history. Such a special crea-
tive activity is exercised in bringing to the race, through pro-
phetic and inspired souls, certain great and preeminently new
moral and religious truths concerning the being and work of
God in history as the Redeemer of mankind." ^
In estimating and explaining the phenomena of religious
revelation and inspiration, the historical qualities of a certain
continuity and gradualness, diversified by epochs and even by
apparent revolutions, are never to be excluded from the ac-
count. In and through his experience with God — an experi-
ence which correctly and reasonably refers itself to God as its
source — man grows in the knowledge and spiritual likeness of
God. The experience is never free from defects, fragmentary
and erroneous elements, blinding and misleading factors ; but
in all these respects religion is not different from science, phil-
osophy, politics, or art. Religion^ which is itself an historical
development, is also a progressive Self-revelation — through a
Spiritual Presence immanent in all humanity, hut especially ener-
1 Quoted substantially as found in the Doctrine of Sacred Scripture, II,
p. 316.
446 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
getic in certain individual spirits — of the perfect Ethical Spirit
of God.
Neither a naturalistic science, which would deny God's work
of revelation and inspiration altogether, nor a super-naturalistic
theology, which refuses to recognize the physical and historical
limitations of this work, is tenable in view of all the phenom-
ena. The conception of God in humanity furnishes the only
key to an understanding of their nature, their source, and
their significance.
That the experience of man with his environment of things
and selves, and with his own development in history, may,
from the point of view of one who takes the attitude of piety,
be considered as warranting the belief that the World is a de-
pendent manifestation of the perfect Ethical Spirit of God, has
been our contention throughout all this Part of our treatise.
But our thought must now be called back to the proviso which
the contention includes. If one looks upon the World with
that spirit of filial piety which is itself subjective religion,
one may rationally interpret the World in this way. But the
attitude of faith itself is not a purely scientific attitude ; sci-
ence, as such, is powerless to bestow the spirit of religion. Nor
can it be denied that the religious attitude constantly temls
somewhat strongly to come into conflict with certain of the
beginning principles, and certain of the terminal conclusions,
of the scientific attitude. The reason for this tendency was
partially disclosed in the treatment given to science and reli-
gion, and to the psychological and historical relations of the
two. In the progress, however, of that reconciliation which
the reflective thinking of philosophy endeavors to accomplish,
the lines drawn upward from these two points of view may be
seen to converge. Science, with all its progress, is not now
able, and never will be able, to comprehend, to constitnte, or
to control, the entire oxperienco of man. Its best established
formulas and principles are partial, in respect of their power
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 447
both to interpret and to direct human life ; and also to satisfy-
completely the aspirations and ideals of the human soul.
Religion, too, in all its more definitely established views and
practices, if these are divorced from or opposed to the interests
of science, art, and philosophy, represents only partially the in-
terests, the cognitive and affective advances, and the noblest
ideals, of humanity. Whether there is not a yet higher point
of view, from which all these sides of human experience may
be disclosed in organic unity, and where all human history and
human ideals appear merged in the realization by man of the
fullness of the Life that is in God, is a question upon which
neither technical science nor religious dogma and ceremonial
can throw an}'- clear light. When the Unity of the Spirit, as
pervasive of all things and of all men, and of man in the to-
tality of his interests and ideals, has completely manifested
itself ; then both the theoretical and the practical differences
of science and religion will be completely reconciled.
But if the picture of the cosmic existences, forces, and proc-
esses, which the modern physico-chemical and biological sci-
•ences have formed, does not everywhere coincide line for line
with the picture of this same Cosmos drawn in the interests of
religious faith, it cannot be said that the one either wholly ob-
scures or obliterates the other. Doubtless much of man's ex-
perience can be partially explained as though it were of a
^' self-contained," " self-explanatory," and " self-maintaining "
Mechanical System. But much of it, even in the realm of fact
and of the ways of the observed behavior of things and selves,
cannot be thus explained. Nor, if the positive sciences should
completely succeed in their ever laudable effort to regard all
existences and their changing relations as explicable from the
scientific point of view, would the religious view of the World
and of its relations to the Object of religious faith, be either
disproved or essentially altered. For religion, conservative as
its particular beliefs are, has also a great gift of adaptability.
This has been abundantly shown by the history of the evolu-
448 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
tioii of religion. This human interest can survive, and keep
its ideals unchanged, after learning from science all the many-
valuable lessons of method and of fact which science has to
impart. " Even so, as you have taught me," religion can say-
to science, " do I recognize with a worshipful and grateful
spirit this system of cosmic existences, forces and processes,
which you describe and explain, as a dependent manifestation
of the perfect Ethical Spirit of God."
But science, in the narrower meaning of that word, is not
the whole of human experience ; it is not even the whole of
cognitive experience. The ideals of art and of morality impel
men to a view, and philosophy introduces them to a reasoned
doctrine, of the Universe, which in many most important char-
acteristics coincides with the view and the doctrine of religion
itself. Art and morality can never look upon the Cosmos, or
upon man's relations to the Cosmos, as satisfactorily stated and
explained in terms of mechanism. Art and morality, either
instinctively or by elaborate processes of ratiocination, come
to regard the Being of the World as Spirit revealing Itself to
the spirit of man. In art, the revelation is significant of what
the world ought to be, because this Spirit is a Spirit of Beauty ;
in morality, it is the revelation of what man ought to be be-
cause this Spirit is a Spirit of Goodness and of Truth. All
revelation is a source of inspiration, too ; for the recognition of
this spiritual nature of the World inflames, vivifies, greatens,
purifies, and ennobles, that spirit of humanity within which it
takes place. This is essentially the same process which reli-
gious faith carries to a higher stage.
And always, in some form and to some degree, when the re-
flective tliinking of the " men of revelation " — whether in
science, morals, art, or religion — considers fairly and develops
fruitfully the ontological meaning and value of these ideals of
humanity, philosophy gives its authorization to the conception
which they suggest and embody, of the Being of the World.
That which the race experiences, and which the positive sci-
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION 449
ences partially reduce to formulas that state the observed rela-
tions of the phenomena, is indeed the manifestation to finite
spirits, in a process of historical evolution, of the Reality of
Infinite Spirit. But religion, with an assured confidence in
its own experience, which is also an important form of the evo-
lution of humanity, extends its Ideals onward beyond the place
where art and morality feel obliged to stop. It thus affirms its
conviction that this very process of evolution itself must be
regarded as a manifestation in history of the divine purpose to
bring humanity into a blessed state of spiritual union and com-
munion with that perfect Ethical Spirit whom religion calls
God.
29
PART Yl
THE DESTINY OF MAN
"Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the upright in heart."
Psalmist.
"In my Father's house are many mansions; . . . . I come again, and will
receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may he also." Jesus.
"He who has known me as the Lord of sacrifice and of penance, the mighty
Ruler of all the worlds and the Lover of all beings, goeth to peace."
Bhagavadgita.
"Dare to look up to God and say, 'Make use of me for the future as thou wiU.
I am of the same mind. I am one with Thee. ' " Epictetus.
" Till this truth thou knowest;
'Die to live again' —
Stranger-like thou goest
In a world of pain." Goethe.
PART YI
THE DESTINY OF MAN
CHAPTER XLin
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION
The final stage of the attempt which philosophy makes to
test critically and to refine the conceptions, beliefs, and prac-
tices of religion, brings us face to face with the third of those
questions into which, according to Kant, the rational nature of
man desires to gain insight. This question, as he gives expres-
sion to it, asks : "What may I hope for?" Expressed in a
way to heighten its significance, it becomes an inquiry into the
destiny of man, both of the individual and of the race. Since,
however, like every question of expectation or hope, it con-
cerns the future, and in its most important aspects, a far-
distant and only dimly discernible future, the answer cannot be
demonstrative, whether as afforded by science or by the faith of
religion. The most trustworthy answer possible can only serve
to establish a rational hope. Like every other similar ques-
tion also, this reach of expectation or reasoned confidence into
the future, must ground itself in human experience belonging
to the present and to the past. From the standpoint of religion,
human destiny is dependent in a large, if not absolute way,
upon the future of religion itself. Our first inquiry is, then,
briefly stated this : " What, in view of man's religious life and
development in the past, and of his present religious nature
and condition, is a most reasonable hope with regard to the
Future of Religion ? "
454 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
To this inquiiy, as a search after a reasonable hope, two an-
swei-s are possible and worthy of serious consideration. These
may be stated as follows : (1) In the future development of
humanity, the other factors and interests of race-culture will
displace religion altogether and will render its function inert
and unnecessary ; or (2) Religion will always remain an im-
portant and even indispensable factor and interest in the ad-
vancing culture of the race, and it will itself be so improved
and developed as to render it worthy and efficacious in the bet-
ter and wider performance of its peculiar function. Or, to
state these conflicting hopes in another form : The highest
social good of humanity will come to exclude religion as some-
thing unessential and passS ; or, The highest social good of
humanity will not only include an improved religious condition,
but will be realized as essentially connected with, if not ab-
solutely dependent upon, the religious development of the
race.
Before considering these two forms of an essentially opti-
mistic view of the future of mankind, it is well to glance at
several other possible attitudes of mind toward the problem,
" What of the future of religion ? " — none of which, however,
can be called " reasonable hopes " by the student of the philos-
ophy of religion. The essentially optimistic view of man's
progress in race-culture may be opposed in toto by a view that
is essentially pessimistic. In this contrast between Optimism
and Pessimism, the terms are used in their most nearly absolute
significance. But the pessimistic as well as the optimistic view
of religion's future may itself be either religious or irreligious.
In either case, however, it is held as a fundamental tenet that
the race is going to the bad. In the one case, only a remnant
will be saved ; for the future triumph of religion is in retribu-
tion rather than in redemption. In the other case, not even a
remnant will Ikj saved ; for the macliine is grinding out poorer
and poorer stuff, and is itself getting more and more worn out.
Now whatever may be said in the name either of theology or
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 455
of science in support of these ultimately pessimistic views, they
can scarcely satisfy any philosophical inquiry after the ground
for a " rational hope."
Another untenable position holds that religion will continue
to dominate mankind in the future, in the same way in which
it has dominated in the past, and still dominates, large por-
tions of the race. By religion in this connection is meant,
either a mass of terrifying or comforting superstitions, or a
formalism enforced by custom and law, or an ecclesiastical or
hierarchical institution, or a system of dogmas rigidly required
and enforced as articles of a standing or falling faith. All
these hopes, however, — if we may use the word " hope " with-
out irony in this connection — imply such a reversal of progress
in all the forms of race-culture, such a turning-back to concep-
tions and institutions which humanity seems in the process of
transcending, as would seem to render them quite unacceptable
to those whose expectations of the future depend upon ac-
quaintance with the facts of history and of psychology. If
one of these forms of pessimism as to the future of religion is
rational without being hopeful ; the other is hopeful without
being rational. We reject both because we are seeking the
grounds in the nature and history of man's religious experience
for a ratioyial hope.
Of all other religions Christianity has the least semblance of
right to expect to dominate mankind in the future by any
forceful means, or by the method of bribes with promises of
material good, on the one hand, and on the other by threats
of exclusion from any measure or manner of that which is
really good. The hope for the future of the religion of Christ
certainly does not lie in a direction to be reached by repeating,
under changed and more hostile and essentially impracticable
conditions, the errors and mistakes of the Christian Church in
the past.
There is little doubt of the prevalence at present of the
sociological doctrine that, in the future development of human
456 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
society, other factors and interests of race-culture are destined
largely or wholly to displace religion. This doctrine is already
realizing itself in the practical attitude toward all positive
religious beliefs and ceremonials, of the great body of the so-
called " working-classes " and also of the men of science and
of culture. An increasing number are ready to say : " He
who already possesses science and art, has also religion. He
who does not possess these two, let him have religion." ^ If
in the light of such an attitude toward the values of Reality
and the interests and ideals of Human Life we examine the
history of Occidental and European civilization during the last
one thousand years, we may make a rough but suggestive divi-
sion of the entire time into three periods. Before the so-called
Renaissance, or during the early Mediseval time, the dominat-
ing view, which seemed to find expression in the very structure
of human society, attributed to religion without social thrift, or
political freedom, or intellectual culture, the power of being
the supreme, if not the quite sufficient, good for mankind.
But this very good of religion itself was not of a character to
stimulate the increase of these other forms of good ; nor was
it in itself considered adapted to satisfy the more profound in-
tellectual, ethical, and social demands and ideals which prop-
erly belong to the religious development of the race. It is
certain, however, that during all this period many aspiring
souls found their higher and purer satisfactions in religion ;
and that multitudes of lives were made happier and purer by
religious beliefs and sentiments, however mingled these may
have been with both intellectual and emotional factors of a
quite inferior and even depressing kind.
According to the ideas and practices which were character-
istic of the Renaissance, religion and culture are closely akin,
if indeed they are not intended and destined to be wholly iden-
tified. During the period of gestation preparatory to this re-
birth of that estimate of the value of culture which hadcharac-
i See Eucken, Der Wuhrhcitsgehult der Religion, p. 2L
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 457
terized au earlier age, — especially wherever the influences of
the Greek spirit and of its achievements had made their
way, — the evolution of the other greater factors of race-culture
had gone on, while that of religion had either been relatively
stationary or had fallen behind. It was inevitable then, that
the very awakening to higher ideals of social thrift, political
freedom, and intellectual advancement should result in a con-
flict with the reigning beliefs, practices, and ideals of religion.
If religion — the age rightly argued — and culture are akin ; it
cannot be such religion as has prevailed in the past and such
culture as the new era is bringing in. It was largely the
arousing of that moral consciousness which always, and by as-
sumed divine right, holds court over all the other forms of
race-culture, that excited and gave its greatest intensity to
this conflict. Thus conscience — at first of the select few and
then of the multitudes of the nations — became arrayed against
a morally ineffective religion, as well as against selfish and sen-
suous art and social unrighteousness. A time of upheaval, of
the breaking-up of the old and the collision of its fragments
as the attempts at reconstruction became more energetic, was
the inevitable result.
Religion, as represented and guarded by those forms of so-
cial organization and ecclesiastical discipline which, when taken
in their entirety and considered as essentially one, may be
called the Christian Church of the Occident, is necessarily con-
servative of the historical standards of belief and the traditional
views and ideals as to the value of life. It has undoubtedly
been, therefore, on the whole opposed to the greater part of the
modern advances in the other factors and interests of race-
culture. This fact may as well frankly be confessed. Whether
such opposition be regarded as a mistake and a fault, or as an
excellence in the fulfillment of a divinely appointed mission,
the truth of fact remains unchanged. It is not the Church of
Rome alone, but the Christian Church of every name and in
spite of every form of protest arising within itself, which is by
458 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
its very constitution, and by virtue of the conception of its
mission, compelled to regard itself as " the official and divinely
appointed guardian of the depositum fideV This function of
the religious social organization is thus stated in graphic, if
somewhat extreme form, by a recent writer : ^ " She (i. e. the
Church) plays, so far as scientific proof is concerned, the part
taken by the ' Devil's advocate,' in the process of canonization.
She is jealous of disturbing changes in the human medium by
which faith in the unseen is habitually preserved hie et nunc ;
science is placed by her on the defensive ; excesses and fanci-
ful theories are gradually driven out of court ; a truer and
more exact assimilation of assured results in science and the-
ology is thus obtained by the thinkers ; then, and not until
then. Authority accepts such results passively. She is the
guardian, not of the truths of science, but of the things of the
spirit. It is not for her to initiate inquiries beyond her special
province."
But while the modern tendency to separate between religion
and the culture of the positive sciences may be excused or jus-
tified by advocating the rights and duties of the Christian
Church as the guardian of tlie depositum Jidei and of the things
of the spirit hie et nuno, there are other causes of this tend-
ency which cannot be so favorably regarded. That modern
opinion, as shown by both theory and practice, considers social
thrift, political freedom, and intellectual and artistic culture,
without religion, to be the supreme goods for humanity, is
made evident in many ways. Most of these ways reveal and
emphasize a relative neglect of religion ; if by religion we are
to understand any experience or interest essentially identical
with that which the Founder of Christianity, and indeed the
founders, reformers, and teachers of all the great religions,
have had in their minds and upon their hearts. It is not part
of the task set to a student of the philosophy of religion to
discover and discuss at length the causes of this prevailing
1 Wilfrid Ward, Ideals of Science and Faith, p. 318.
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 459
relative neglect of religion. But he cannot overlook the dark
spots in modern Western civilization, if he is intelligently to
make predictions regarding the future of Christianit3\
The rapid growth of material prosperity, the increase of po-
litical enfranchisement (the growth of democracy), the wide-
spreading of a rather superficial and somewhat spurious cul-
ture, have lately absorbed the interests and exertions of the
multitude of mankind. All this has led to an excessive greed
for, and estimate of wealth ; to an exaggerated and disappoint,-
ing appreciation of the degree of wisdom and righteousness
attainable by popular self-government ; and to a vain-glorious
boasting over the value of such intellectual and aesthetic at-
tainments as come from reading many books, and from learning
scattered facts of so-called science or smatterings of many lan-
guages. On the contrary, that training of mind and heart by
reflection upon God and his relations to the world and to the
soul of man ; that steadying and elevating of the standards of
commercial and political righteousness in obedience to a perfect
Ethical Spirit; that appreciation of the refined beauties of the
higher order, as they are manifested by the Divine in nature,
art, and heroic character, — all these things, which religion es-
pecially undertakes to achieve, have been correspondingly neg-
lected and esteemed of relatively small account. Meantime,
under these same influences the organized bodies of religious
believers, and their officers, the clergy and the priests, have
been less efiBcient then formerly in the use of both the direct
and the indirect means for promoting the interests of practical
piety. What wonder, then, that so many — thoughtful and
thoughtless alike — have come to the conclusion that positive
religion will in the future have little or no place in the
progressive development of the race ! Growth in material
prosperity, in political freedom, in social organization, and in
intellectual and artistic culture, without religion, will quite
sufficiently serve to represent the increased good realized by
the labors and achievements of mankind.
460 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
In opposition to all this, we believe that religion will always
remain an important and indispensable factor and interest in
the total development of humanity. To do this, however, it
must itself rise in purity and grow in effectiveness ; only in
this way can it gain in the future an even more influential and
beneficent place in the progressive realization of the supreme
good for humanity. In support of this expectation, and in
defence of the rationality of this hope, we offer all that has
been said in the previous chapters of this book. The grounds
for the hope may be summarized, however, under the three fol-
lowing heads. And, first : From religion's point of view all
that the positive sciences have to say about the natural evolu-
tion of humanity is necessarily considered as a divinely ordered
and divinely induced process — a progressive manifestation of
God the Personal Absolute, as perfect Ethical Spirit in man.
The rise and fall of religious sects and organizations, the suc-
cessive periods of depression or exaltation of the more obvious
religious interests, the devotion to religion or the neglect of it
on the part of generations of men, may influence the speed or
change the form and direction of this process. But its essen-
tial nature remains unchanged ; and the same far-off divine
event remains aloft to the uplifted eye of faith. This faith
itself, with its undying confidence in its own glorious Ideal,
remains its own chief evidence, and most convincing proof.
And the reflective thinking which traces its evolution in
the race, and the evolution of the race as dependent upon
the purity and power of this faith, gains an ever increasing
rational confidence, not only in its practical value but also in
its ontological validity. This is only to say that the religious
view of the meaning and destiny of those cosmic existences,
forces, and processes, which constitute the environment of
man, and the religious doctrine of the nature, significance, and
final purpose of man's historical evolution within this environ-
ment, are as likely to vindicate their essential truthfulness in
the future, as is any other view, from whatsoever stand-
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 461
point of science, history, or philosophy, such view may be
taken.
More specifically, in the second place, the psychological
truths as to the nature and origin of religion tend to confirm
the same conclusion as to the future of religion in the devel-
opment of the race. They show that man's religious nature is
no fragmentary and evanescent affair. Religion is neither a
freak, nor a disease, nor a whim, of human nature. Religion
is essentially natural with man, in the profoundest and most
comprehensive meaning of the words. There is no contradic-
tion inherent in the saying that belief in the Supernatural, and
the outgoing of heart and will, and the shaping of conduct in
view of such belief, are essentially natural. If ever — as fre-
quently happens — a quarrel arises between nature and the su-
pernatural, still it is in man's total experience that both the
sources and the solution of this quarrel must subsist. As long
as man remains man, he will have religion — will, so to say, make
religion for himself. And as long as humanity continues to
advance in the varied important ways of its evolution in his-
tory, humanity will develop also its religious beliefs, senti-
ments, and the practical piety which expresses in conduct the
sincerity of these beliefs and sentiments. He must indeed be
a shallow or a credulous student of religion from the psycho-
logical point of view who can persuade himself that the coming
years are going so to disentangle and detach the interwoven
threads of man's mental and social reactions as to let escape
the religious nature and still leave human nature essentially the
same. For, what has our study of these varied reactions shown
to be true ? They are so involved with one another, and with
the entire mental, moral, and social life of humanity, that they
are not parts of the structure which can be separated from the
structure itself ; they are, the rather, material of the structure,
built into it from footing-stone to cornice, and from wall to
wall. Religious experiences are not fringes of the complex
web ; they are portions of its very warp and woof.
462 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
If now we turn from the psychological to the historical study
of religion, the same truth appears, displayed and emphasized
in another form. For history, too, displays and emphasizes
the universality of religion. This service to a rational hope
for the future of religion it renders in three important ways.
It establishes the fact that, as far back and as far afield as
man's historical evolution can be traced, some form of religious
belief and practice has characterized the process, and has
formed a more or less important means of differentiating
him from the lower animals. It also shows the difficulty,
amounting to a practical impossibility, of any considerable
community, not to say any people or nation, dispensing alto-
gether with religion and yet retaining the other factors and
interests of the community and national life. After each
attempt at banishing the old beliefs, there has been hung out
some such placard as this : " Wanted a new Religion ! " And,
finally, the less obvious but no less real failure of all efforts to
reform and elevate the multitudes by any degree of progress
in social thrift, political freedom, and intellectual and aestheti-
cal culture, with religion left out of the account, is as signifi-
cant as the corresponding failure to effect the same thing by
means of a religion which maintains a standing opposition to
these other forms of culture.
In a word, some form of beliefs, sentiments, and practical
maxims, which will afford satisfactions and motives to aspira-
tion and to endeavor after certain ideal values, such as religion
recognizes, is an essential and permanent interest in the life of
the individual and of the race. The admission of this truth is
customarily made, at the last, even by those who most violently
oppose all forms of positive religion, and who most confidently
predict its somewhat speedy decline and extinction as of im-
portant movient in the development of humanity. A notable
instance of this is the work of M. Guyau on " The Irreligion
of the Future." ' According to this author, all the most
I L'lrr^ligion de L'Avenir, Etude Sociologiciuo, 7tli ed., Paris, 1900.
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 463
cherished dogmas of religion are untenably and irrationally
anthropomorphic, and so doomed by the advances of scientific
knowledge. Religious morality, which is based upon fear and
an unwarrantable feeling of mysticism, with its cult of prayers,
will suffer dissolution. Nor will the popular morality be in-
jured thereby. For religion is not a condition sine qua non of
superiority in the struggle for existence ; and science, free
thought, and art, will be able to find their own rules for the
control of themselves and of human conduct. Nor is the
definitively religious sentiment innate and imperishable, as
some of those (e.g. Renan, Taine, and others) who held the
dogmas of religion to be absurd, have taught. Children can
be educated, the purity and devotion of woman secured, and
the fecundity of the race sufficiently assured, without influence
from the faith of any form of positive religion.
But what will subsist, after all positive religion has disap-
peared from that structure of human beliefs, sentiments, and
practices, which so many thousands of years of human expe-
rience and of human historical evolution has built up ? To
this important question, M. Guyau, in the role of prophet, con-
fidently gives the following categorical reply •} " That which
will subsist of the diverse religions in the irreligion of the fu-
ture, is this idea that the supreme ideal of humanity, and even
of nature, consists in the establishment of ever stricter social
relations among the different beings " that constitute this com-
plex totality. It is, indeed, by force of their secret or open as-
sociations that the greater reUgions have conquered the world.
But what force accounts for, and imparts its force to these as-
sociations, M. Guyau seems largely unable to comprehend, or
even to admit to his thoughtful consideration, except in a very
partial and rather patronizing way. And when he comes finally
to the discussion of that theory of reality, or metaphysics, in
which the faiths, sentiments, and practices of religion cohere,
he has his own conception to propose as one better able than
^Ihid., p. 339/.
464 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
any religious faith to fill the vast vacuum which his negative
criticism has created. It is a " naturalistic monism " which is
to replace the dogmas of every form of positive religion. For
this metaphysical hypothesis, with its deification of Nature
(spelled large and with a capital) really embraces and expresses
in better form the ontological values and virtues of theism, pan-
theism, and atheism. And yet this " irreligion of the future "
can scarcely be called a rational hope for humanity. " To re-
sume," says M. Guyau,^ "in this age of crisis, of religious,
moral, and social ruin, of reflective and destructive analysis, the
reasons for suffering abound, and they end by seeming to be
motives for despair. Each new progress of intelligence or
sensibility, as we have seen, would appear to be productive of
new pains." But what for the individual ? To borrow the
author's own figure of speech ; "^ — " In all that remains of sen-
sation or thought for us, one sentiment only is dominant, that
of being weary, very weary." And so the wise man, like some
traveller through an endless desert, when afflicted with that
fever of torrid climes which exhausts before it kills, will be
glad to lie down upon the sand, and " amicably contemplate,
without a tear, without a desire, with the fixed look of fever,
the undulating caravan of his brethren which is losing itself
in the limitless horizon, toward the unknown wliich he will
never see."
This view of the future of religion, developed with so much
of learning, dialectical and critical skill, fine feeling, and pol-
ished rhetoric, has not been brought forward either for criticism
or for refutation. It, the rather, evinces the indestructible na-
ture of man's religious life itself ; it really reveals more clearly
the grounds on wliich reposes the rational hope of its continu-
ance and continued development in the future. For even M.
Guyau must have a theory of the Universe which will satisfy
his ideals. He, too, is compelled to estimate at something ap-
proaching their real value the satisfactions of an emotional
i/6ui., p. 408. 2/6ui., p. 478.
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 465
and sentimental character which must be provided by this the-
ory. Therefore he virtually adopts the beliefs and senti-
ments thus awakened, as though of the highest importance
in the effort at securing the social evolution and social better-
ment of mankind. He would have the individual, in the con-
fidence of these beliefs and in the experience of these emotions,
suifer and hope and labor to the end for the social good of his
brethren among men. He even regards the higher interests of
science, free thought, and art, as somehow inseparably con-
nected with the attitude of the individual and of society toward
the Universe at large. And when the end comes for the ideal-
ist, the believer, the self-denying devotee who ever hopes
against hope, and persistently expects the triumph of his ideals,
he would have him die as one —
" Who wraps his cloak about him
And lies down to pleasant dreams."
Now there is nothing new about all this; — nothing, indeed,
that does not leave the witness of psychology and of history
substantially the same. It has the value of M. Guyau's solu-
tion of the problems of religion, as they are proposed to reflec-
tive thinking in a form that is dictated absolutely — we might
almost say — by the mental and social characteristics of the
present age. In several important respects, indeed, this an-
swer, which predicts the " irreligion of the future," is essen-
tially the same as the answer which encourages a rational hope
for the future of religion. In a word, the problem remains un-
solved: ]V7icit beliefs, sentiments, and practices, concerning
the Ultimate Ground of man's experience, best accord with
the totality of this experience? We do not believe that a
naturalistic Monism, after the type which M. Guyau proposes,
affords the most satisfactory answer to this problem. Indeed,
the problem itself is proposed by this writer in a manner
which leaves large areas of this experience quite out of the
account.
But if religion is surely to have a future, the questions log-
30
466 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ically follow : Will the future belong to any one of the now-
existing forms of religion? and, If to any one form now exist-
ing, to which one? These inquiries are certain to provoke
differences and hot discussions amongst even the most candid
and well-instructed adherents to the different forms of positive
religion. For the most dispassionate student of the phenom-
ena of man's religious life and religious development from
the philosophical point of view, they do not admit of an an-
swer with the same assurance which may reasonably be had
with reference to the future of religion in general.
Tlie philosophy of religion has no data for a detailed de-
scription of the particular religion which will surely solve the
problem of the future. Nor if an appeal be made to the as-
surance with which the content of any existing form of reli-
gious faith is at present received, does this appeal serve the
purpose of furnishing the desired evidence. In the case of
Christianity, for example, no particular scheme of dogmas, or
plan of ecclesiastical organization, or show of ritual and cere-
monial, or set of practical maxims for the governance of life,
could command the assent of all the so-called authorities. In
the cases of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, the confusion of
opinion on all these topics would be no less great. Even if
the inquiry be made after the barest so-called " essentials " of
any one of the greater world-religions, a harmonious answer is by
no means easy to obtain. Reference to the original constitu-
tion of these religions does not avail either to define the limits
within which their present developments must be accepted as
legitimate and true to the norm ; neither does such reference
afford a sure guaranty for the constitution which they will as-
sume in the developments of the future. Could the Founders
of any of them — especially, e. g., Jesus and tlie Apostles — pro-
nounce judgment upon all that which is to-day covered by
their names ; who can doubt that the cliaracter of the judg-
ment woukl greatly surprise tlie multitude of their followore?
What would Christ say alwut the beliefs, institutions, profes-
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 467
sions, and practices, which bear the name of Christianity at the
present day ?
Uncertainty over the more precise form of its future histori-
cal evolution is not, however, a matter peculiar to the content
of religious beliefs or to the religious life. Such uncertainty
belongs, of their very nature, to all the more complex historical
developments. The world is indeed old ; the world is ever
building itself anew. There is a certain permanency of norm,
a semblance of an enduring and all-comprehending plan ; but
change is everywhere the very life and reality of things, of in-
stitutions, of beliefs, and of ideals. Since man is man, how-
ever, and since a certain constitution of human nature with
relatively, if not absolutely permanent characteristics, subsists
throughout the historical evolution of the race, predictions as
to the future of religion may make a rightful claim to our con-
fidence. At their very least, they are entitled to be received
as a rational hope.
But what — more specifically said — may we reasonably hope
for with reference to the future of religion? Three things
may be said with most well-founded and comfortable assurance
in answer to this question. And, first, the religion of the future
will be social, in the higher and better meaning of this word.
It will more and more be a power to transform society — the
"Great Psychic Uplift" of the race. No form of positive
religion which does not actually effectuate in a large and gen-
erous way the social improvement of mankind can reasonably
hope to have its future prolonged. Second : The religion of
the future will be ethical — in the higher and better meaning of
this word. It will be more and more an inspiring and illumin-
ing motive for the control of the conduct of the individual in
the interests of righteousness, trueness, and all the virtues of
mind, will, and heart. No form of religion which does not in
fact make men better morally can reasonably hope to have its
future prolonged. But, third, the religion of the future will
be a faith, — in the sense that it will retain a certain character-
468 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
istic view of the world, of human life and human destiny, and
of what has worth of the highest and most imperishable kind.
This faith within the soul of man, as subjective religion, will
be the spirit of practical piety, or of loving trust toward the
Divine Being, and of filial feeling and conduct toward all finite
spirits as sons of the Infinite and ethically Perfect Spirit.
And the normal relation between this faith and the social and
ethical functions of religion will be retained ; since it belongs
to the very constitution of man that his positive view of life,
when warmed with emotion, should realize itself in his behav-
ior as a member of society.
The earnest and enlightened believer in any positive form of
relisrion that has advanced a claim to absoluteness and to uni-
versality will naturally shape his hopes in the future of reli-
gion yet more definitely than this. The religion of the future
is to be his religion — perhaps expanded and modified, neces-
sarily purified, and yet essentially the same. From this position
of hope he will not be driven easily, even when he encounters
all the difficulty of trying to discover just what is " essential "
about the religion to which his hope for the future is so firmly
attached. We, too, are Christians. As students of thehistor}%
psychology, and philosophy of religion in general, we think to
enlighten and confirm the hope that an essentially Christian
religion will be the religion of the future of humanity. In
order, however, to impart any semblance of rationality to this
hope, two things must be accomplished. We must introduce
again the distinction with which all our previous investigations
have already made us so familiar : — namely, " between the parts
played in the complex result by the spirit of Christ on the one
hand and by the doctrines and institutions of the Churcli on the
other ; " and we must also try to determine what is meant by
"essential Christianity." In a word: What is the essence of
the religion of Christ?
The claims of the religion of Christ to l)e universal, and to
have an al>8olute content of truth, are themselves a matter of
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 469
historical development and therefore of historical investigation.
But these claims are also open to reexamination by reflective
thinking in the light of all the other truths which humanity
has achieved ; they are therefore in a measure matters upon
which philosophy is called to pronounce.
In their original form the claims to universality put forth in
the name of the Christian religion arose in the belief that it
inherited those hopes of Judaism which were founded upon a
sure divine promise. The principal stages by which this claim
rose to such an heighth were the following : (1) Yahweh, the
tribal and then the national god, is the only true God ; (2) the
heathen, or worshippers of other gods, are going to submit to
Yahweh and in fact become Jews ; (3) the Jewish religion
will continue in spite of the cessation of the national life, will
spread and become universal (this, chiefly through the influence
of the Diaspora) ; (4) Christianity, as the fulfillment of the
Law and the Prophets, inherits the claims of Judaism to uni-
versal acceptance and dominion ; and (5), finally, Christianity
progressively has realized, and is still realizing, its universal
character. This last stage of the claim implies that the Chris-
tian faith is becoming, in fact, adaptable to mankind ; and that
it is being actually adopted by mankind, irrespective of differ-
ences in race, position in history, or stages of race-culture. This
is that characteristic of " historicalness " in the broader mean-
ing of the word, the necessity and value of which for the reli-
gious life and development of humanity has already been made
clear.^ All these claims however, with the exception of the
last, have of necessity largely lost their influence over the
minds of men. The closing words of the Old Testament upon
this subject must now be understood in a quite different mean-
ing from that which they had in the thought of him who ut-
tered them ; if, indeed, its prophetic foresight of the future of
religion is to be justified at all by the history of the race :
" From the rising even to the setting of the sun is my name
1 See Vol. I, pp. 62 f.
470 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
great ; and everywhere will incense be offered unto my name,
and a pure offering" 0'. e., sacrifices and burnt-offerings.)^
" Yaliweli of hosts," even among the remnant of his " chosen
people," is no longer pleased with the sight and smell of burnt-
offerings ; but the sacrifice of a pure heart and an unselfish
life is the moral and social ideal of all believers in the " true
God."
The content of truth for which the claim of absoluteness
and universality is made under the name of Christianity is, as
has already been said, not an altogether easy thing to deter-
mine, either by the historical or by the speculative method of
inquiry. From the days of the earliest Apologists onward it
has been assumed that Christianity is both a revealed and a
rational religion. As Harnack''^ has comprehensively stated
the case : It comprises " tlie rational truths, revealed by the
prophets in the Holy Scriptures, and summarized in Christ
( X/)icrT6s X670S Kai ydfjLos ) ; which iu their unity represent the
divine wisdom, and the recognition of which leads to virtue
and eternal life." More comprehensively defined, tliis in-
cludes— *■' Christianity viewed as monotheistic cosmology (God
as the Father of the world) ; Christianity as the highest moral-
ity and righteousness (God as the Judge, who rewards good-
ness and punishes wickedness) ; Cluistianity regarded as re-
demption (God as the Good One who assists man and rescues
him from the power of the demons.) " And to all this the
truth of history requires that we should add the claim : The
divine redemption comes to man as a revelation of God's gra-
cious love in the person and work of Jesus Clirist, who stands
in a unique relation of sonship to God, and to man as their
Savior, example, and the imparter to them of eternal life.
In the subsequent development of the religion called after
the name of Christ, many important elements of doctrine, rit-
ual, and practice, have been added by all the various Christian
» Malachi, i, 11.
3 History of Dogma, II, p. 203.
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 471
churches and sects ; and not a few of these additions have been
proclaimed as belonging to the "essentials of Christianity."
As a result, there is not one of the greater divisions of Chris-
tianity that can to-day substantiate the claim to represent
faithfully and purely the " religion of Christ." Indeed, those
first three centuries which resulted in the formation of the
Church Catholic were preeminently characterized by the addi-
tion of doctrines, drawn chiefly from the sources of the Greek
philosophy of the age. And never since has Christian dogma
developed itself in any considerable independence of the influ-
ences of its scientific and philosophical environment. On the
contrary, its development has largely consisted in the incorpo-
ration of elements derived from this environment ; or in the new
interpretation of its more primitive and original content of truth,
so as to make it consistent with the truths furnished by this envi-
ronment. What is true of its dogma, is true also of its ecclesiaS'
tical organization, its forms of worship, and its system of maxims
for the control of the Christian life in matters of conduct. So
often in the entire history of this religion, as the attempt has been
made to check development by a return to the so-called sim-
plicity of the original Christian faith, practice, or exact form
of association, the attempt has failed. From the very nature
of the case such an attempt must always fail. In not a few
instances a result far worse than mere failure has been the ex-
perience of such reactionary movements. In dogma, there has
come in this way a new form of bigotry ; in ritual, a new form
of extravagance or of barrenness ; in organization, a new form
either of license or of repressive control ; and in life, new forms
of fanaticism or of sensuous excesses. Reform, renovation, re-
construction, fuU-hllmg of the content of truth, and improved
realization of the spirit of life — these are as much " essentials "
of Christianity, if it is to make good its claim to universality,
as are those precious and immortal truths which were given in
concrete, symbolic, and personal form, by the Founder of this
religion.
472 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
With these thoughts in mind the rationality of the hope for
the future of the religion of Christ may be confirmed hy com-
paring it, as respects its nature and present condition with the
other greater religions. Like eveiy other religion which makes
similar claims to a certain absoluteness and universality,
Chiistianity is now, and for an indefinite time will continue to
be, face to face with friendly or hostile rivals. In not a few
places it is to-day distinctly inferior to some of these rivals
in aggressive force and adaptation to its environment. For
example, — as all our previous psychological and historical
induction, as well as the speculative conclusions which we
have endeavored to found upon it, would lead us to reaffirm, —
Coptic Christianity can never displace the surrounding Muhara-
madism ; and the same thing is probably true of Armenian
Christianity. Nor do we believe tliat the Greek Church can
successfully compete with reformed Buddhism in Japan, or
with Confucianism in China. All the nature-religions may,
indeed, at once be set aside. They can make no claim to the
promise of the future. That they are to be displaced by higher
and purer forms of faith is as certain as that the lower stages
of race-culture with which they are allied will give way to the
higher, in the historical evolution of the race. When the de-
cadent ceremonial, the intolerable bondage of caste, and the
superstitious and largely immoral nature- worehip of Hinduism
are set aside, there remains of it only its religious philosophy.
In some of its best and most distinguishing features this plii-
losophy is already almost, or quite essentially in accord with tliat
of modern Christian Theism. So far forth, the expectation is
reasonable that both will abide. Rut philosophy, no matter
liow interesting, impressive, devout, and true to Reality, cannot
of itself, constitute a universal religion.
They err greatly, wliatever reasons may seem to encourage
the confidence in the decay of the Turkish government, who
regard tlie faith of Islam as destined speedily to ])ass away.
On the contrary, this religion lias a strong and unbroken hold
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 473
on some of the most vigorous races ; and where it gains and
has kept such a hold, it is of all rival religions the most diffi-
cult to displace by Christianity. Its sturdy, combative, and
unquestioning monotheism, and the strength of the appeal
which it makes to those who wish to " square " themselves
with the interests of both worlds, promises to endure
through an indefinite time in the future. And here is where
the current Christianity is especially weak. It wants both
worlds ; and it has, therefore, either deliberately or unthink-
ingly placed itself in an alliance — too often obviously and
discreditabl}^ contrary to the " religion of Christ " — with the
regnant material interests, however oppressive and unrighteous
those interests may, for the present, seem to be. But to serve
God and mammon is less easy and less really profitable for a
follower of Jesus than for a follower of Muhammad. The
weakness of Islam, however, when considered from the defini-
tively religious point of view, is its inability to satisfy the
needs of a soul that longs to be assured of the redeeming love
of God ; nor does Islam furnish to the individual and to society
those purifying and elevating spiritual influences, and that
power of a new life of inner righteousness in union of spirit
with God, which is, after all, the deepest and most honorable
craving of the age.
While Islam has been distinguished for its exclusiveness, the
easy, rapid, and widely spreading syncretism of Buddhism has
always been one of its most distinguishing features. The best
spirit of the religion of Buddha is in accord with the spirit of
the religion of Christ, in its presentation to human need
and human hope of the great and comforting truth of the di-
vine pity, as evinced in a manner irrespective of considerations
of caste, rank, political distinctions, or social standing. In
this most important respect Buddhism is, like Christianity, a
distinctly universal religion. But even its most ardent and
devoted advocates cannot face the facts without being com-
pelled to admit that its cult and traditional dogmas are still in
474 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the Medieval period ; that there is a lamentable lack (not to
fail gratefully to acknowledge individual exceptions) of intel-
lectual culture and moral principle among its priesthood ; and
that, in spite of current, and in certain spots more or less suc-
cessful efforts at increased enlightenment and ethical improve-
ment, its present beliefs, sentiments, and practices are not
adapted to become universal.
Our conclusion, then, as to the reasonableness of the claim
of Christianity to be the religion of the future is a two-fold
conclusion. Its claim to universality, to be the absolutely true
and permanently satisfying religion for all manldiid, is a claim
which every generation, and every individual, may rightly ex-
amine anew — may properly challenge and put to the test. No
age, no school of theologians, no ecclesiastical organization
with its collection of dogmas or rule of faitli, can answer infal-
libly and for all time these inquiries: "What is essential
Christianity ? " and, " Is it the final and absolutely true reli-
gion, destined to be accepted by all mankind ? " The experience
of the individual believer, both as a form of belief and as an
informing spirit of life, may be compared, indeed, with the
norm of experience furnished in the records of his religion.
The comparison may warrant him in affirming the truth of the
declaration : " Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, and to-day,
and forever." (Heb. xiii, 8.) But in order to convert tbis
personal conviction into a scientifically established prediction,
or into a confident hope for all of the race, much more must be
establislied than can be furnished by any individual's experi-
ence. The question is ever recurring anew : What is meant
by the " Jesus Christ," whose name embodies this content of
unchanging experience, and of permanent and absolute truth?
And again: In what sense can that be called "the same,"
which was in Jesus' own case, the unfolding of a life according
to some hidden norm, or ideal ? How can that remain " tlie
same " which has confessedly ever since consisted in a liistory
of changes, a progressive realization of an ideal ? Hence the
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 475
perpetual demand for inquiries as to what this Ideal is ; and as
to its correspondence to some Ultimate Reality.
Whatever criticism may decide, therefore, concerning the
alleged infallibility and authority of the sacred writings of
Christianity, or concerning the truthfulness and practical value
of any of the factors which have been added to its content
since the canon of the New Testament was closed, the concep-
tion of development cannot be denied in its application to this,
as to all other claimants to be the religion of the future. On
the contrary, the ideal of a religion that is absolutely fixed in
an unchanging but infallibly true creed, with an unalterable
form of cult, and a universally binding set of practical maxims,
does not apply to Christianity, in fact. From the very nature
of man, of religion, and of human history, such an ideal could
not be realized in any form of religion. Could any religion
take on such a form, it would on this very account be the fur-
thest possible from the ideal.
It is just this capa.city for variation, united with the persist-
ence of its one high practical aim, and of its point of view
from which to regard all that is, and happens, as manifesta-
tion of the good-will and redeeming love of the Absolute and
perfect Ethical Spirit, which makes Christianity adapted to
become in the future the religion of mankind. This claim to
universality involves the persuasion that Christianity will be
able to throw off all that the growing knowledge of man shows
to be untrue ; all that man's increasing refinement of eestheti-
cal feeling shows to be inconsistent with the sublime beauty of
the Divine Nature ; and all that the rising and purified moral
consciousness of the race pronounces morally unworthy of
God's perfect Ethical Spirit. There can be no more suitable
and convincing proof of the claim to an absolute value than
the power of the life and truth belonging to any religion, to
advance itself to higher stages of self-realization and self-
purifying.
The same claim involves the conviction that Christianity is
476 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
able to appropriate, reconcile with itself, and incorporate into
its doctrine and life, man's growing knowledge of religious
truth, increased refinement and elevation of feeling, and puri-
fied morality. Organized Christianity must undoubtedly in
the future leave science, art, and in a larger measure than
heretofore, ethics and social life, to a free and independent de-
velopment. That is to say, henceforth it cannot assume by its
dogmas to control scientific discovery, or the statement and
applications of natural laws. It can no longer, as in the Middle
Ages, absorb the devotion and practice of the arts. Neither
can it assume to control directly the functions of civil govern-
ment, or the associations and procedure of society. But the
spirit of the religion of Christ may be expected to recognize all
truth as God's truth, all beauty as the revelation of the all-
beautiful Being of Him who is the World's Redeemer (the
" beauty of holiness " in a magnified meaning of this ancient
phrase), and all human conduct and social association as having
its significance in the effort to obey Him, whose righteous and
loving command is life, and to disobey whom is to enter upon
the course of death eternal. It is this magnanimity and hos-
pitality toward all the good of truth, beauty, and righteousness
that must take the place of the original exclusiveness and nar-
row intensity, which was natural and inevitable under its
original conditions ; if Christianity is to become in the future
the religion of all mankind.
A certain rare combination of the rational with the practical,
of the ideal and mystical with the effectual direction of the
daily life of the individual and society, of what is universally
human with the possibility of adaptation to what is peculiar to
particular races and even to particular jjersons, has been
throughout its history a distinctive merit of the Christian
religion. This same qualification is a distinction in greater or
less degree of all those religions wliich, like Buddhism, Islam,
and Christianity, liave proclaimed salvation for man as man ;
and these same religions have been conquering and wide-
THE FUTURE OF RELIGION 477
spreading world-religions. But the traditional sayings of the
founders of these three great missionary movements, given as
parting commissions to their disciples, are not without signif-
icance in determining the differences of the three. According
to Buddha the future of his religion was to be characterized
by a succession of " Great Uproars," — (1) the Cyclic Uproar,
(2) the Buddha-Uproar, and (3) the Universal-Monarch-
Uproar. The method of meeting these times of emergency was
to be passive; and the final result was pessimistically con-
ceived. Muhammad, on the contrary, thought to leave to his
followers a finished religion, that could be enforced in his
name upon a resisting and unbelieving world. " This day,"
said he at the "Farewell Pilgrimage," "have I perfected your
religion unto you." But Jesus, recognizing the futility of all
attempts to realize in Judaism a universal mission, and fore-
seeing more clearly than Buddha the ages of conflict and strife
which were before the new religion he had been divinely com-
missioned to establish among men, planted his word, as a seed,
a kernel containing the spirit and norm of a higher and ever
higher form of moral and spiritual life. This seed he bade his
followers disseminate, as truth should always be disseminated,
— not by violence but by inspired proclamation of the word.
He then looked confidently into the future to see it winning
the acceptance and controlling the lives of the multitude of
mankind.
In a word, we find in the nature and past history of what
we may call — although confessedly in a somewhat loose and
indefinite way — " essential Christianity," the grounds for a ra-
tional hope in the future realization of its claims to universal-
ity, to be the religion of mankind. In saying this it is to be
noticed that by a long circuit around-about, our thought has
returned to the point from which the investigation began. A
certain ideal standard for the evaluation of religion was then
set up. This standard took account of the adaptation of any
group of religious beliefs, sentiments, and practices, to satisfy
478 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the needs of human nature, to abide in history, and to grow
in correspondence to the advancing and rising life of man. Nor
did the standard admit of religion being in an attitude of pas-
sivity only toward this ideal. On the contrary, it must itself
be the great force in the progressive realization of its own ideal ;
and the ideal was complex, including the ideals of truth,
beauty, goodness, and happiness. How it is that religion —
and above all other religions, the Christian religion — pro-
gressively corresponds to, and contributes toward, these ideals,
as a living force in history, our examination should now have
made more clear. The more permanent factors and universal
values of religious experience have been tested by the method
of philosophy. The result has been to establish faith and hope
as rational postulates. As to proof — in the strictest meaning
of the word — for the claims to universal and absolute validity
of so-called "essential Christianity," we cannot do better than
to say in the words of another ^ : " From the point of view of
philosophy the absoluteness of Christianity is an hypothesis, like
any other philosophic theory, which must be tested by its abil-
ity to explain all the facts, and as to the truth or falsehood of
which the final decision belongs to the future." But to him
who accepts the content of its faith and has experience of its
inner life, this religion converts what might otherwise remain
a faint but rational hope into a firm and joyful conviction.
1 Professor William Adams Brown, The Essence of Christianity, p. 310.
CHAPTER XLIV
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL
During the entire history of man's religious development the
"belief in an existence after death has been connected with the
body of beliefs and practices that have determined the very
nature of religion. In the cruder and more primitive stages of
this development the connection has, indeed, been neither con-
sciously intimate nor logical and consistent. Examination from
the psychological point of view shows, however, that the same
instinctive and impulsive sources of emotion, and the same ac-
tivities of imagination and intellect, in which religion has its
rise, form also the springs for the belief in the immortality of
the individual. An unreflecting spiritism has its origin in the
projection of the idealized human spirit into the environment,
filling it with a variety of superhuman, invisible spiritual pow-
ers. The projection of the same human spirit into time future
originates a belief in its existence after death. In fetishism,
totemism, and in most forms of animal and nature worship, as
well as in all ancestor-worship or worship of deified man, the
same process supports in their interdependent relations the be-
lief in invisible spirits and the belief in the continued existence
of the human spirit after bodily death. Only in some such
meaning of the words, then, can this earliest form of belief in
a future existence for the individual be called a religious belief
at all.
In the higher forms of religion the connection just referred
to becomes more consciously intimate and logical. Still later,
the belief in the continued existence of the human spirit after
480 PHlLOSOPlir OF RELIGION
death rises to the significance of an important religious doc-
trine, and becomes related to the conception of God as Ethical
Spirit in a manner powerfully to affect the whole logical struc-
ture and moral significance of man's religious beliefs and prac-
tices. In these various degrees of its development, and of its
dependent connection with the development of religion among
mankind, we may therefore say that this belief if not strictly
universal, is exceedingly wide-spread and extends back into the
remotest history of the race. Wundt, indeed, affirms ^ that all
primitive races believe that the spirit is a sensible existence
separable from the body. This, although not convertible with
the belief in immortality, is contributory to it. Neither must
the separability of the soul be confounded with its immateriality.
In remarking upon the religion of the Greeks, Rohde declares "^ :
" We have sufficient reason to conjecture that a soul-cult, an
honoring of the spiritual essence which lies hidden in man, and
after his death separates itself for an independent existence,
belonged in the land of the Greeks, as, indeed, everywhere on the
earth, to the most ancient practices of religion." According to
D'Ahdella,^ the primitive custom of burying the dead in the
uterine posture, and the wide-spread primitive belief in one's
own double, are evidences of the existence of this tenet of faith
in prehistoric times. Indeed, the characteristic mental attitude
of savage and primitive man is the complete absence of doubt.
As Von den Steinen says "' of the native of Brazil : " He knows
he will not die."
As to the details of the belief in the soul's existence after
death, what can be said of one people can generally be said of
all who are in the same stage of race-culture. But so mani-
fold and confused are, of necessity, the beliefs connected with
a subject about which nothing can be known by immediate ex-
1 Ethics, I, p. 100.
2 Die lleligion dcr Gricchen, Uectoratsrcdc, IIei<iell)erg, 1S91. (Italics
ours.)
3 r)riKin and CJrowth of flic Conreption of God, pp. l.") and 7.S/.
* Naturvolker Zentrttl-Braailiens, p. 348/.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 481
perience, that no definite and concordant doctrine of immor-
tality is anywhere to be found. A medley of views, arising from
similar motifs, is everywhere existent.
The problem of destiny as connected with the beliefs of reli-
gion concerns either the individual man or the race ; and these
two forms of the problem, while interdependent, are not by any
means the same. On the one hand, it might be that the species
should live on indefinitely and perhaps make progress toward
some worthy social ideal ; but that the individual members of
it should drop out of conscious existence, — that is, should
cease to be individuals at all. Or, on the other hand, it might
be that the race should quite perish from the face of the earth ;
but that some, or all, of its individual members should continue
to exist under other and non-earthly conditions of existence.
In examining the doctrine of the immortality of the individual
as a tenet of religion, therefore, it is necessary to know from
the beginning what that doctrine, in its most highly developed
form, means to assert. For as Professor Royce has well said ^ :
" Now when we ask about the immortality of man, it is the
permanence of the individual man about which we mean to in-
quire, and not primarily the permanence of the human type, as
such, nor the permanence of any other system of laws or rela-
tionships." Yet more definitely said : It is the reality of the
existence of a Self, of the self-conscious life, connecting itself
by recognitive memory with its own past, and so related in char-
acter to this past as to constitute a continuous self-develop-
ment, about the continuance of which, after death, religion is
chiefly concerned.
It has already been said that the same impulsive and emo-
tional stirrings and activities of intellect and imagination in
which religion arises give birth to the belief in a soul separable
from the body and so capable of being permanently continued
in existence after the death of the body. But the causes for
1 See the entire very suggestive discussion of "The Place of the Self in
Being," in The World and the Individual, * * Lecture VII.
31
482 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the belief in the immortality of the iudividual, and for the
characteristic development of this belief, may be conveniently
grouped under the following three heads: (1) The psycho-
logical and metaphysical ; (2) the social and sympathetic ; and
(3) the more definitely ethical and religious, in the liigher
meaning of these words. This belief seems to man to be de-
manded in order to explain the phenomena of his dreams, and
those other psychic manifestations which indicate the separa-
bility of the soul from tlie body. It also seems needed to
satisfy his emotional and affectional relations, — such as fear,
reverence, pride, love, etc., — toward members of his family, his
circle of friends, or Ids tribe. And, finally, the same belief
affords to his maturer reflection additional ground for faith in
a moral and religious significance of the world-order ; and for
an ethical conception of the World-Ground. In the reverse
process of reasoning, man's ethical view of God and of the
divine manifestation in the world of human experience nour-
ishes and supports, on grounds of moral reason, the belief in
immortality.
When we speak of the psychological and metaphysical source
of man's belief in immortality, the addition of the-^latter of
these two terms is no matter of indifference, either to the
historical account or to the rationality of the argument. In-
deed, a recognition of the activity and validity of the " onto-
logical consciousness " is indispensable, if the causes of this
belief are to be converted into reasons or rational arguments
in its defense. That objective and constitutive action of the
mind of man wliich endows the Self and things with their,7'6'(jZ
heing, is at the base of the belief in the immortality of the Self
as truly as it is at the base of all scientific and religious beliefs.
The consciousness of being real, bestows upon tlie flowing
stream of conscious states, with their fringes, of past memories
and anticipations of the future and with their referableness to
the same Subject as its objects, ceitain enduring qualities neces-
sary to its ArirHicli^Sain ('' In-itself-being ") and its Fitr-aich-Sein
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 483
("For-self-being"). Thus when in dreams/ and in other ex-
periences, primitive man becomes aware of the familiar presence
of the dead, or of those whose bodily selves are known to be far
away, he explains the phenomena by the persistent existence in
reality of the active, self-constituting Ego. For the same rea-
son he cannot think of himself as dead ; for to think of himself at
all, he must be thoroughly alive, — self-conscious and thoughtful,
— an attentive Subject picturing himself as an object for himself.
The force of these natural impulses to the belief in the im-
mortality of the individual is made yet more impressive by the
fact that quite universally among some people, and extensively
among others, a continuance of conscious existence is regarded
as a thing greatly to be dreaded and deplored. " Life is like
a horrid corpse bound to the neck," is the dictum of Buddhism
in a land where the only known conditions of continued exis-
tence are fraught with pain and suffering ; where the tempera-
ment of the people is not favorable to strenuous endurance of the
struggle upward ; and where religious superstitions are mainly
terrifying. This fact goes far toward depriving of its cogency
the so-called argument for immortality from the satisfaction
of the soul's irrepressible longings. On the other hand, the
same fact shows how man's imagination persists in prolonging
existence, even in spite of the desire to cease from the pain
and strife of life. 'Hence the pathetic meditation of the Bud-
dhistic faith : ^ —
" Subject to birth, old age, disease,
Extinction will I seek to find,
Where no decay is ever known,
Nor death, but all security."
1 It is easy, however, to attribute too much influence to dreams in form-
ing the belief in the immortality of the individual. As Rohde has remarked,
although the separability of soul from body, and the endowment of every
living thing with the dual existence which man knows himself to have, is
Homeric enough, the Homeric world is not troubled with ghosts, and the
soul after the body is burned does not any longer show itself even in dreams
(Psyche, pp. 8; 10/.).
2 Compare Buddhism in Translations, p. 6.
484 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Or, in the more bitter form of complaint, the same fact ex-
presses itself as in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus : —
" Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul ?
All beasts are happy,
For when they die,
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in hell."
In this connection it becomes clear that, from the psychologi-
cal and metaphysical points of view, the expectation of living
on — or even of living again, so to say — is an integral, constant,
and essential factor in the Self's consciousness of really being
alive at all. If the Ego could not project itself into the future,
by activity of imagination and intellect suffused with the ever-
present " ontological consciousness," it could not in the present
serve the purposes of that self-knowledge which characterizes
a real Self. This self-projection into the near future we
achieve, however, every time we lie down to sleep, expecting
whether sleep be dreamless or not, to awake in the morning.
The awakening itself may easily be imagined under greatly
changed conditions, both internal and appertaining to the states
of the soul, or external and having to do with the soul's physi-
cal and social environment. But to imagine the extinction
of the Self is simply to refuse to apply imagination to the case
at all ; it is to rest in a purely negative attitude toward the
future.
The intelligent recognition of the significance and value of
the " ontological consciousness " in the performances just de-
scribed, implies a relatively advanced stage of culture. On the
contrary, the social and sympathetic causes of the belief in the
continued existence of the individual after death are power-
fully operative in all stages of civilization. The emotions of
fear, resentment, awe before the mystery of the invisible or un-
intelligible, and the domestic and friendly affections of pride,
love, admiration, and desire for communion, furnish strong
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 485
motives to induce and to foster this belief. Universally among
primitive and savage peoples, and as well as among multitudes
of civilized communities, the dead are feared. They are natu-
rally endowed with more or less of those superhuman qualities
which the invisible and divine spiritual beings inherently pos-
sess. They continue to exist — so it is imagined and believed
— in relations toward the living that are similar to those which
were maintained when they were themselves alive. But per-
haps these spirits of the dead may have wrongs to set right or
to avenge ; or they may have needs and desires to be satisfied
which it is difficult for their survivors to meet or even to antic-
ipate ; then, indeed, they must be feared. If, however, they
have been objects of pride, admiration, or affection, while they
have lived as men among men ; why should they not be con-
ceived of as still living in such relations as to satisfy, perhaps
in increased measure, the same feelings of pride, admiration,
and affection?
It is for these reasons that the belief in the immortality of the
individual is so universal in its logical and necessary connection
with ancestor-worship.^ Propitiatory offerings to ancestore, as
though they were in active and living relations with men, are
everywhere to be found. The worship of the Fravashis ^ among
the Iranians, of the Pitris among the Hindus, the ivayiffnara
among the Greeki^ the Inferiae or Parentalia among the Romans,
are in evidence on this point. Among prehistoric men, as in
the relics at Aurignac, somewhat doubtful evidences of the
same belief are found.^ The pathetic outstretching of vain
hands toward the dreaded or the beloved dead, even among
the most degraded savages, reveals the same work of human
1 Compare Renouf, Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 129/.
2 The Fravashis were heavenly types, or "spiritual doubles" of all cre-
ated things, — gods, men, mountains, rivers, etc. Each man had his own
fravashi, or genius. So the Ka, or disembodied spirit, of the Egyptian.
Ka— the eiSuXov, or imago, or ghost, or genius.
3 See Sir Charles Lyell, Antiquity of Man, p. 193 (?); but, per contra, Mr.
Dawkins, in Nature, IV, p. 208.
486 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
imagination prompted by the human heart.^ In the tombs of
Egypt, at the foot of the memorial tablet which invariably
faced the East, there lay a tablet of granite, limestone, or ala-
baster, which was designed to hold the offerings for the dead.
Thus, as elsewhere, belief in immortality, and honor approach-
ing, if not amounting to worship, were bound together in an-
cient Egypt.^ The spirit of this belief is finely caught as we
read the inscription of Rameses II at Abydos. " Awake !" he
addresses his deceased father, Seti I, " raise thy face to heaven,
behold the sun, my father Mineptiih, thou who art like God.
Here am I who make thy name to live." Connected with this
worship was the belief that the most terrible curse which could
light upon a man was to have " no son or daughter to give him
the lustral water." Just as the Brahman believes that his en-
trance into Nirvana depends upon his having a son to perform
the funeral rites.
The third class of causes which operate to produce the be-
lief in the immortality of the individual are the more defin-
itively ethical and religious. These causes come into efficient
operation later, and only as the moral and religious develop-
ment of man attains a certain stage. But they furnish the
more permanent grounds for belief ; they are, indeed, the only
secure reasons for a rational faith and hope. In this case, £is
in all others, the defensible character of the^eligious belief is
chiefly dependent upon the ethical development which has
been given to its form. The conception of righteousness as
somehow seated at the heart of the Univei'se, the impression
that the cosmic existences, forces, and processes, are somehow
interpretiible in terms of a moral World-order, stimulates and
strengthens tlie belief in immortiility. As man's conception
of God in terms of Ethical Spirit becomes established in human
1 Compare the Chapter on "Life and Death" in Jevon's Introduction to
the History of ReliRion; and see Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, p. 52/.
2 See the Articles of E. de Rouft6 in the Revue Arch<5ologique (New Series),
vol. I; Eludes aur le Ritual FuiUraire des Ancicns Egyptiens.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 487
belief, the ethical considerations bearing upon the tenet of his
own continued existence become more influential. In the
highest form of the doctrine, it is the moral Being of God, and
the divine work with the race as their Moral Ruler and Re-
deemer, which guarantees that sort of a future for the indi-
vidual man in which the hope of immortality becomes a reason-
able hope. In fact, it is the presence or absence, the degree
and the development, of these ethical factors which more than
anything else, characterizes and differences this belief as it ex-
ists amongst different peoples and in different eras of their
history. There is, therefore, no little historical support to the
claim of Schopenhauer, that if man could sustain the belief in
his own unending existence without belief in the existence of
God, then " faith in the existence of God would cool." But
the more rational point of view reverses this dictum and finds
in the kind of God whose existence faith accepts, the power to
sustain the belief in at least the possibility of an unending ex-
istence for the " sons of God."
Now since the activity and value of the " ontological con-
sciousness " makes itself felt throughout the entire process of
religious belief, the particular conception held as to the charac-
ter of the entity called " soul," conditions the belief in its im-
mortality in a very important way. What really is this soul,
which is regarded as somehow separable from its body, and so
capable of continuance after death ? Beyond the earlier stages
of an " unreflecting spiritism," three principal answers have
been given to this inquiry by the reflective thinking of man-
kind. Of these one affirms that the soul is an indestructible
entity, which maj?- be conceived of as continuing in existence
without manifesting those activities of self-consciousness, re-
cognitive memory, and rational and ethical self-determination,
in which the very essence of the self-known Self consists. Its
being may be conceived of as persisting after the analogy of
the permanent material elements, or units of force. Another
opinion affirms that the soul is really only a succession of
488 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
psychoses, — the character of which is, however, self-like, be-
cause it falls under the law of habit and thus has a sort of self-
perpetuating quality. Or, in the third place, the soul may be
conceived of as just that reality which it knows itself to be,
and which consists in its being actually the self-determining
subject of its own peculiar forms of functioning. To be self-
conscious, to exercise recognitive memory, and rational infer-
ence, and to shape conduct in the pursuit of moral and aesthetical
ideals, — this is really to be a Self.
So vague and shifty are the notions of the nature of the
soul's reality which are in general held by savage and primi-
tive peoples, that their beliefs make it impossible to determine
which one of the several souls possessed by any individual is
going to be preserved. Indeed, it seems «asily possible that
several of them should continue at least for a time in existence
after death. The savage, in his effort to ^account for all his
experiences, readily endows Himself with the necessary number
of souls. The natives of West Africa^ are the possessors of no
fewer than four spirits each ; the Sioux have three souls ; some
Dakota triVjes rejoice in the sacred nuriiber four ; and the
Navajos, according to Dr. Matthews, think of one of their souls
as a sort of " astral body." Other tribes of savages are proud
of, or troubled with, no fewer than six or seven. Taoism in
China provides each individual with three souls ; one remains
with the corpse, one with the spirit's tablet, and one is carried
0"ff to purgatory. And lest the civilized sceptic scoff at this,
he may be asked to remember, not only the threefold designa-
tion of the Hebrews, of the animal (^nephesh), the human
(runcK)^ and the divine (neshamah') soul, but also Plato's
thumon, epithumia, and nous ; or the various conscious, subcon-
scious or '^subliminal," and dual, triple, or quadruple selves
of some modem psychologists. From the only tenable point
of view,'^ as it seems to us, so far as the interests of the re-
1 Sec XfiHsan, Fetichism in West Africa, p. 52/.
2 Compare the author's I'hilosophy of Mind, chapters IV-VI.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 489
ligious doctrine of immortality are concerned, the modern
scientific divisions of the classes of phenomenal experience are
no more important than are those belonging to the centuries-
old spiritism of savage and primitive tribes. It is enough to
secure a reasonable hope in the permanency of one soul, if only
that one be enough of a soul. And this sufficiency of values
can, from the nature of the case, belong only to the rational
and moral Self, with its developing forms of life in the realiza-
tion of its legitimate ideals.
The doctrine of Atman in ancient and modem Brahmanism,
the mediaeval and scholastic pre-Kantian conception of the soul,
and much of both the popular and the scholastic theology of
to-day, require a conception of the soul's entity in the first of the
three meanings of the term. This conception, however, when
logically carried through, naturally allies itself either with the
doctrine of transmigration in some of its cruder forms, or with
the theories of pantheism touching the absorption of the human
individual soul-entity into the all-embracing entit)'- of the Al>
solute. From the point of view of modem psychology the
conception itself is as invalid scientifically as the conclusion
derived from it is unsatisfactory to the aesthetical and ethical
sentiments of value. Buddhism was in the right, in an ex-
ceedingly important way, when it rejected in the interests of
morals and of religion the Brahmanical tenet of an imperish-
able and substantial soul-entity, separable from all contingencies
of change in its environment and independent, for its continued
existence, of its own conscious and voluntary manner of behav-
ior. But it committed a fatal mistake when it put forth tlie
doctrine that the substantial existence of the soul is a mere
name for the presence of the " five attachment-groups " : " In
the absolute sense," said its doctrine, " there is no living en-
tity there to form a basis for such figments as ' I am,' or ' I.' "
The Ego thus becomes only a " serial succession "; one element
perishes and another arises. But this doctrine of Buddhism,
like that of Brahmanism which it was intended to displace,
490 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
is based upon a quite insufficient and even false conception of
the nature of that unity and permanency of existence which
makes the so-called " serial succession " a really existing Self.
The dependence in a rational way of the belief in the im-
mortality of the individual upon the conception held as to the
nature of the soul's reality is intimate and unalterable. If the
reality of man's Selfhood consists in the imperishable existence
of some unconscious " soul-stuff " ; or if it is exhausted by a
mere series of conscious or half-conscious states, that may at
any time cease to be articulated by self-consciousness, memory,
and rational inference, into the life-history of a true Self ; then,
in either of these cases, we cannot identify its existence after
death with an immortality that is satisfactory to the tenets of
monotheistic religion, or with an ideal of the future that calls
for an exercise of rational faith and hope. More definitely
stated : A belief in the immortality of the individual must, on
the one hand, satisfy the modern scientific views as to the soul's
nature and relations to bodily existence ; and on the other hand,
it must take its place in a system of religious beliefs which em-
phasizes the significance and value of the self-conscious and
rational life of personal spirit in the progressive realization of
its ideals. Neither of these conditions is fulfilled by that view
of the soul's entity which destroys or impairs the conception
of it as a true Self. It is the Self tha^ is immortal., if immor-
tality await man in any form whatever.
Neither is a merely figurative permanency, in the " life of the
race," or by way of influence over others (as, for example, is
indicated in George Eliot's hymn, beginning : " O might I join
the choir invisible "), a real immortality of the individual.
The belief in the immortality of the individual, like all reli-
gious beliefs, has been the subject of development in dependence,
more or less immediate and complete, upon the advance of race-
culture. In determining the stages and rapidity of this ad-
vance, the principal factors have been the prevailing concep-
tions (1) as to the nature and value of the Self; (2) as to the
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 491
Being of God and his relations to men ; and (3) as to the
social conditions and ideals which evoke the feelings and judg-
ments of value. Here, as in general with human efforts to
picture the invisible and the ideal, no rigid application of any-
so-called laws of the evolution of the belief can be made in
reliance upon the facts of history. A certain order may, how-
ever, be said to control the appearance and the prevalence of
the various forms of this belief. They may, therefore, be ar-
ranged under the following four heads ; although they are not
actually kept distinct or free from various admixtures with
one another.
The lowest historical form of the belief in the continued ex-
istence of man's soul after death affirms of it some shadowy
and ghost-like character. In this form, the belief fits in with
that stage of religious development which was characterized as
an unreflecting spiritism. Indeed, the belief in immortality at
this stage is akin to the belief in ghosts, and is motived chiefly
by fear. Although some of the dead may be supposed to be,
as some of the living certainly are, more powerful than others,
and better situated and conditioned in the spirit world, any
division among the dead does not appear to rest upon ethical
grounds. Hence ancestor-worship may form a hindrance to
the rise of the doctrine of immortality toward a higher ethical
and spiritual form. To make the condition of the dead depend
upon their relation to the passions and affections of the living,
whether fear, pride, hatred, or love, is certainly injurious to the
conception of a moral world-order, extending into invisible
regions of time and space.
A next higher stage — at least in some respects — of this be-
lief takes the form of the opinion that all souls pass upon death
into some other embodied manifestation ; and that the character
of this transmigration depends somehow upon considerations
realized in the life of those souls previous to death. The more
elaborate and definite doctrine of the transmigration of souls
seems to have arisen, especially in ancient Egypt and in India,
492 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
in the sixth and fifth centuries B. c. ; and to have resulted
from a development of the ethical views of the next life mingled
with a basis of totemism and animal-worsliip. In Egypt this
doctrine appears to have been first taught as a means of re-
warding the good and then of punishing the bad ; in India of
both alike.^ Thus one Upanishad declares : " All who depart
from this world go to the moon. In the bright fortnight the
moon is gladdened by their spirits ; but in the dark fortnight
it sends them forth into new births. Verily the moon is tliQ
door of heaven. Him who rejects it, it sends on bej'ond ; but
whoso rejects it not, him it rains down upon this world. And
here is he born either as a worm, or a grasshopper, or a fish, or
a bird, or a lion, or a boar, or a serpent, or a tiger, or a man,
or some other creature, according to his deeds and his knowl-
edge." 2
The belief in the continued existence of the soul as a human
individual, and under conditions dependent for their character
upon " deeds done in the body," represents a still higher stage
of development. In connection with this form of belief, the
growth of moral sentiment from which it proceeds results in
either adding special miseries to the wicked in the underground
world common to all ; or else, finally, in separating locally the
abode of the good dead from that of the wicked dead. The
modification of this view which is introduced by the Buddhis-
tic doctrine of Karma emphasizes, indeed, the doctrine of retribu-
tion, but in such a manner that it can scarcely be said to apply
to the human individual. For Buddhism holds that no soul
which corresponds to the true conception of a Self exists, either
before or after death; what persists after deatliis only "the ac-
1 The doctrine of trunsmigration is a natural and almost inevitable deduc-.
tion from the belief of Animism; and some anthropologists have therefore
argued for its universality. Rhys "Davids denies, however, that any trace
of it is found among the Aryans previous to their migration into India;
and also that the Aryan races generally held to the belief. See Origin and
Growth of Religion, p. 74; and the quotations, p. 76/.
2 Rhys Davids, Ibid., p. 81/.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 4U3
cumulated results of all your actions, words, and thoughts."
Yet popular Buddhism has its doctrine of heaven and hell, as
vividly pictorial and intensely realistic as that of any other of
the greater world-religions.
A still greater maturity of philosophical reflection leads to
the belief that the character of the soul's future after death de-
pends upon the relations it will sustain to the Absolute Being
from which its existence is derived. In a word, the immortal-
ity of the individual is secured by, and subsists in, the relation
which it permanently assumes toward its own Source or
Ground. Thus the immortality of the Pantheism of the
Brahmanical type is conceived of as an absorption of the soul
of the individual into Atman, or the World-Soul, from which it
came forth. The immortality of the enlightened Buddhist is
Nirvana, or the cessation of that otherwise endless succession of
conscious states, rendered miserable by unsatisfied desires, in
which the necessity of Karma involves the soul. Metemp-
sychosis is now the object of dread, as the prospect of it
extends indefinitely into the remotest future. But when re-
flection puts a sufficiently high estimate upon the ethical
values involved, and adopts the conceptions of God as perfect
Ethical Spirit, and of man as potentially a son of God, then it
is a moral and spiritual union with the Divine Being, in a king-
dom of redeemed and blessed spirits, which furnishes the high-
est type of the soul's immortality and which becomes the
object of the soul's highest endeavor.
Among peoples which have attained a considerable degree of
civilization, the most various forms of belief may coexist — either
as distributed somewhat definitely amongst the correspond-
ing grades of existing culture, or as a rather confused mingling
of elements from them all. Even among rude tribes there are
traces to be found of higher views ; and whether such views
are survivals from a far distant and better past or are due to
the later reflections of the more thoughtful few, it is not al-
ways possible to say. The more general theory of the continu-
494 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
ance of soul-life affirms that each tribe or clan somehow
lives on as it knows life to be when men are associated in
bodily shapes. Wounds, sicknesses, mutilations, etc., are carried
over into the beyond. As a belief which was perhaps origin-
ally connected with burial in the earth, the dead inhabit the
vast and gloomy and indefinite " underground." Thus was
conceived of, the Hebrew Sheol and the Babylonian "land
whence none return." But the place of souls may be on the
summit of some mountain, as on the top of Kina Balu in
Borneo, or of Gunjung Danka in West Java. It may be over
the mountains, or over the seas ; as with the Chilians, who
located among the peaks of Mexico the joyous garden of
Tlalocan, where their dead ancestors were. Some peoples, quite
below the Hebrews in their conception of Deity, have been
altogether in advance of them in their conceptions of the future
life of the individual. When men come to regard a separation
of the dead as demanded on moral grounds, the division is
facilitated by the natural phenomenon of the setting sun.
Through the gate which its arrival in the Western horizon
seems to open, the blessed may enter into a place of light and
happiness, which is made all the more attractive through its
striking contrast with the darkness and gloom of the under-
world. Natural, however, as it appears to suppose that the
different views of the fate of tl)e soul after death must be
connected with the treatment, by burial or by burning, of the
corpse, tlie supposition is not borne out by all the facts.
Among the Teutons in the North, botli customs seem to
have been practiced without any clear demarcation of either
topography or periods of time.^ And the same thing is sub-
stantially true of India.
From time immemorial in ancient Egypt the "darling idea "
of the people was the continued existence of the souls of their
dead.^ An elaborate doctrine of immortality is proved by in-
1 See De la Saussaye, The ReliKion of the Teutons, p. 57/.
2 Comp. Erman, iEgypten und iEgyptischea Lcbcn iin Altcrtum, pp. 413^.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 495
scriptions on the walls of pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dy-
nasties, that are as old as 3000 b. c. But as to the How? and
the Where? there were no clearly sustained and universally
recognized views. Some thought the departed souls were in
heaven among the stars ; others that they were with the birds
on the trees, or with their bones under the ground. Some held
that the dead changed their form, and existed " to-day as herons
and to-morrow as beetles, and the day after as a lotus blossom
on the water." The part that survived was the spirit or Ka^ —
a self-existent entity which dwells in man and by its presence
bestows upon him life and health and ]oy. For the uses of
this spiritual entity the body must be preserved, in order to
become again its dwelling-place. But the Ka itself needed
food and drink to preserve it, and to prevent hunger and thirst.
In the thought of the ancient Egyptians, a combination of mag-
ical with ethical elements determined the condition of the dead,
whether good or bad. Besides the righteousness of the Osiris,
the candidate for a happy immortality needed to know the
names of the bolt on the door, of the panels, the sill, the lock,
the door-posts and the door-keeper, of the " Hall of Truth."
Moreover, the continuance of the complete man in a satisfied
life depended upon getting together the component parts which
had become separated by death. And although in the later
doctrine the Ka had become so completely identified with the
Self that even the king is represented as presenting offerings
and petitions to it, as to his own personality, and as receiving
the reply : " I give unto thee all Life, all Stability, all Power,
all Health, and all Joy ; and although even the gods of Egypt
had their Kas, which were embodied and represented in tlieir
statues ; still there were at least two other immortal parts of
the individual man. One of these was his heart or ah. Tlie
immortal heart of man, which stood in somewhat the same rela-
tion to the material heart as the Ka to the whole body, ^ left
1 See Wiedermann, The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of the Immortality
of the Soul, p. 29; and Rehgion of the Ancient Egyptians, p. 240/.
496 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
him at death and journeyed to the " Abode of hearts." An
artificial scarabseus of hard greenish stone, to represent the
provisional heart between death and the renewal of the com-
plete life, was the symbol of the expected event of resurrec-
tion. The third immortal part of man was his Ba., or soul ; and
this was symbolized by a human-headed bird (or later, a ram-
headed scarabceus), which at death flew away to be with the
gods. The same thought was set forth among the Greeks by
a winged human figure ; and among the Romans by a butterfly.
That higher moral and spiritual Self-hood, however, which
needed somehow to be preserved if the belief in immortality
was to become both rational and satisfying to the higher senti-
ments and ideals, was provided for by the conception of Osiris.
The Egyptians called their dead Osiris. For as the first Di-
vine King of Egypt, when overcome by death, descended into
the under-world, but afterwards rose from there and went to
dwell with the gods and to lead the deathless life of the blessed,
so each man might hope it would be with his Osiris. There-
fore the soles of the mummy's feet were excised, that the mire
of earth might be removed and that he might tread the Hall
of Judgment with pure feet. The view of the retribution he
was sure to meet was, indeed, emphasized chiefly by the " Neg-
ative Confession": " I have not robbed, nor murdered, nor lied,
nor caused any to weep, nor injured the gods " — and so on.
The punishment of the wicked consisted in withholding his heart
and other immortal parts; his real Self accordingly perished.^
But the state of blessedness with which the good were re-
warded, in the Egyptian doctrine, was not an absorption into
the All, nor a condition corresponding to the Buddhist Nirvana.
In his independent individuality he continued on with the
gods, being esp(!cially devoted to the successful and happy pur-
suit of agriculture in the " fields of tlie blessed." Tlius in the
later doctrine, at least of the Egyptians, transmigration of souls
1 < )ii the " Doctrine of the Heart" see Wiedermaun, Religion of the Ancient
Egj-ptians, p. 285/.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 497
was not compulsory ; nor was it a reason for depressing fear.
And in general the Egyptian doctrine of immortality is in most
favorable contrast with most of the pre-Christian views. The
lofty ethics of the Egyptian " Book of the Dead " has already
been referred to in another connection.
The prosaic and intensely practical character of the Chinese
appears in their prevalent belief as to the continued existence
of the dead. Still their doctrine is by no means Avanting in
strongly ethical factors. The view of Taoism promised, as a
reward for a prolonged discipline of the body, that it should
undergo a sort of refining or ^'wast-dematerializing process
which would render it unassailable by death. Its doctrine is
like that of Egypt, a species of conditional immortality. At
the ferry of death, " the profane multitude, not being suffi-
ciently concentrated to resist the inroads of decay, vanish into
air, and cease to be ; while the favored few, by dint of perse-
vering effort, subdue their animal nature and weave its fibres
into a compact unity that defies its destruction." Of this view
Dr. Martin ^ says : " It is scarcely possible to represent the ex-
tent to which this idea fires the minds of the Chinese for ages
after its promulgation, or to estimate the magnitude of its
consequences." If we may trust the tradition, however, Con-
fucius himself refused to lend his authority either for or
against the belief in the immortality of the individual. He
was an agnostic on grounds of practical results. A discourse
attributed to him makes him teach : " If I should say the dead
have knowledge of the services rendered to them, I fear the
filial would neglect their living parents in their zeal to serve
their deceased ancestors ; if, on the contrary, I should say the
dead have not such knowledge, I fear lest the unfilial should
throw away the bodies of their parents and leave them un-
buried." ^ While the earlier doctrine of retribution punished
iLore of Cathay, p. 182.
2 In the Chia Yii — a collection the authority of which, however, is not
above suspicion.
32
498 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
the wrong-doer in this life, and let the residue of retribution
fall upon his descendants after his death, the Taoism and
Buddhism of the popular religion of China to-day is a frightful
doctrine of purgatory and hell, with only a chance of obtaining
by special and expensive ceremonies the deliverance of the
three souls and perhaps also, their reunion " for an ascent to
the region of the Immortals or for a new career of trial on
earth." '
In China — probably above all other countries, — the develop-
ment of the moral elements in the belief in immortality has
been checked and degraded by the increased prominence given
to the benefits of ancestor-worship. According to the highest
and purest notions the rule of personified and deified Heaven
was over all spirits, and could not be bribed or influenced to
do wrong. Speaking of It, the words of the young King
Ch'ang in the twelfth century B. c. assure us :
" There in the starlit sky
It round about us moves,
Inspecting all we do,
And daily disapproves
What is not just and true."
But later a tyrannical or notoriously wicked imperial or other
ancestor could apparently, when dead, be put upon an equality
with the virtuous by being worshipped and prayed to for suc-
cour and help.
Of the ancient Babylonian and Assyrian belief, we may
affirm with Professor Jastrow, it " does not transcend the be-
lief characteristic of primitive culture everywhere, which can-
not conceive of the possibility of life coming to an absolute
end."^ Even "a divine fiat could not wipe out what was en-
dowed with life and the power of reproduction." The dead
1 See Legs^e, The Religions of China, pp. ISO//. This author affirms, how-
ever, that he has never found the doctrine of "reunion" discussed in any
Tdoi.st book.
2 ( )ii the entire subject, see his Religion of Babylonia and Asayria, chap.
XXV.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 499
were accordingly thought of as contmuing their existence in a
great cave underneath the earth, — in the " house of Aralu."
Another name for this abode was Shualu, or a " place of in-
quiry " ; for the dead have superior means of information
about certain matters, and can aid living men by answering
their questions and by furnishing them with oracles. Indeed,
the dead are often also closely associated with the divine
beings, or even identified with them. The nether world is,
however, a joyless prison ; and although a goddess may escape,
no man who enters there can ever return. This view is quite
similar to that of Sheol as depicted in the classic passages,
Isaiah xiv, 9-20 and Ezekiel xxxii, 18-31.
The continued existence from which the religion of Buddha
desired to furnish a way of escape was a ceaseless succession
of births, deaths, and rebirths — a doctrine of inescapable me-
tempsychosis controlled by the principles of Karma. But this
inability to die was the very antithesis to immortal life con-
sidered as the promise and goal of a religion of salvation such
as Buddhism designed to be. The immortal life was Nirvana,
which in its more primitive form is thus described : " When
the fire of lust is extinct, that is Nirvana ; when the fires of
infatuation and hatred are extinct, that is Nirvana ; when
pride, false belief, and all other passions and torments are
extinct, that is Nirvana." ^ In another passage,^ in that ex-
ceedingly touching account of the Death of the Buddha (so
like, in some respects, to Plato's account of the death of Soc-
rates), " The Blessed One " is made to speak as follows :
" Enough, Ananda, do not grieve, nor weep. Have I not al-
ready told you, Ananda, that it is in the veiy nature of all
things near and dear unto us that we must divide ourselves
from them, leave them, sever ourselves from them ? How is it
possible, Ananda, that whatever has been born, has come into
being, is organized and perishable, should not perish ? That
1 See Buddhism in Translation, Introduction to Jataka, i, 60.
2 Namely, Maha-Parinibbana-Sutta, v. 53.
600 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
condition is not possible." . . . . " And now, O priests, I take
my leave of you ; all the constituents of being are transitory ;
work out your salvation with diligence."
And this was the last word of the Tathagata. And then we
are told how the Buddha entered a series of four trances ; and
rising from the last of these he passed through the four realms
of (1) " the infinity of space," (2) " the infinity of conscious-
ness," (3) ''the realm of nothingness," (4) "the realm of
neither perception nor yet non-perception ; " and rising from
this " he arrived at the cessation of perception and sensation."
But it was only after traversing in reverse order the same four
realms and four trances, that " immediately The Blessed One
passed into Nirvana." The saint who reaches this release from
consciousness is " deep, immeasurable, unfathomable, like the
mighty ocean." To say that he is either reborn or not reborn,
does not "fit the case."^ This "incomparable security," free
from birth, this "incomparable peaceful state," is the mm-
mum honum of Buddhism — its fulfilled promise of immortal
life. Just as the individual trance is a sort of " temporary
equation made between Karma and nullity," whereby subject-
ive terms are wiped out and only nothingness remains, so
when the condition is regarded as permanent, it is called Nir-
vana.
It was, however, neither the Semitic nor tlie Oriental, but
the rather the Greek conception of the immortality of the indi-
vidual, which, through its essential agreement with the teach-
ings of Jesus Christ as to the value of the soul and of its life
of trust and love toward God, the Father, and through its
early incorporation into the body of Christian beliefs, seemed
for centuries most fit to endure the assaults of science and of
a sceptical and agnostic philosophy. To say this Ls not to deny
the existence, contemporaneously or even earlier, of similar
lofty views of the soul's nature and destiny, in India and, es-
pecially, in ancient Egypt; nor is it easy to solve the historical
1 So the Majjhima-Nikaya, i, 487.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 501
problem by deriving — one from the other of tliese countries —
any of the particular factors of these views. Notions similar to
those of the Greek philosophy existed in Egypt centuries before
Plato. And when much later, — about 300 b. c. — Megasthenes
was in India, he found those " most estimable " philosophers,
the Brahmans, "discussing with many words concerning
death ;" and to him they seemed in many things to " hold the
same opinions with the Greeks." Although they regarded
" death as being, for the wise, a birth into real life — into the
happy life," they weaved in myths, just as Plato did, " in re-
gard to the soul's immortality, judgment in hell, and such
things." ^ In spite of all such similarities, however, and quite
independently of the answer to questions of historical priority,
it was Greek thinking which wrought into terms corresponding
with Greek philosophy those conceptions which seemed to the
Church Catholic also to correspond best with the truthfulness
and practical effectiveness of a certain aspect of its own
teachings respecting the nature and destiny of the individual
human soul.
From time immemorial the Greeks regarded man as a dual
being, body and soul ; and the soul as an existence which
could be separated from the body, and leaving it behind could
go away to another place.^ This dual way of thinking of every
living being might be extended not only to single objects, but
even to the elements out of which the earlier philosophers
built up the world of experience. On the one hand, these
elements seemed to have souls ; and the Cosmos which they
built up, since it was a rational and beautiful unity, was
worthy of being endowed with a World-Soul. But, on the
other hand, the soul had some sort of shadowy corporeality. In
the Homeric times and much later among the Greeks the life
of the individual soul after death of the body had much the
1 Quoted from Schwanbeck's Megasthenes, by Hopkins, Religions of In-
dia, p. 1/.
2 See Rohde, Psyche, pp. 1-62.
502 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
same colorless character which has nearly or quite universally
prevailed at a certain stage in the evolution of this belief.
With them, as with the Egyptians, the love of life and the
feeling that it was good to be in conscious existence always
availed to prevent the gloomy and depressing dread of im-
mortality, and the frightful doctrine of metempsychosis, as these
maintained themselves in India. And the effort to realize this
hope of a better life after death, upon condition of compliance
with certain moral and spiritual requirements, was a compara-
tively early development with this people. As Rohde has
shown,' what was needed was not so much a strengthening of
the belief in the fact of continued existence after death ; for
the Greeks already shared with all other peoples in this belief.
The need was, the rather, of some assurance as to the content of
this life ; as to a preferred form of existence for those who
fitted themselves to realize the hope of it. The change to the
higher point of view was in Lirge measure due to the spread
and the democratizing of the Eleusinian ]\Iysteries. *'The
testimony of all antiquity," says one writer,"'^ " to the inspiring
and uplifting influence of the mysteries is impressively unani-
mous ; no voice is raised in criticism." A certain marked
resemblance exists between the confidence in the overcoming
power of spiritual life which these mysteries produced and the
triumphant note of the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the
Corinthians. According to the Orphic tlieology, too, the body
is a prison house ; but the soul is akin in its nature to God.
If purified, then, tliis spiritual part of man is fitted and destined
for a union with the Divine Spirit. The rites of the mysteries
were, therefore, not mere ceremonials, or magical perform-
' Ihid., pp. '2.V>ff, Accordinf^ to Rohde, the confidence which those ini-
tiated into the mysteries had as to a blessed life for themselves after death
was not derived from any doctrine, whether taiipht by a form of words or
of ceremonial, that confirmed their belief in the natural indestnirfibiiity of
the soul. It was the promise of blrssrfl life for the initiated which pave to
the mysteries their hold npoii th(3 mind.
2 Wheeler, Dionysus and Immortality, p. 32.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 503
ances : they were symbolic of that inner purification which is
the beginning and the pledge of immortal life. " Blessed is
he," says Pindar, " who having seen these rites goeth under
the earth. He knoweth the end of life ; he knoweth, too, its
god-disposed beginning." " Thrice-happy they among mortals,"
exclaims Sophocles, " who depart into Hades after their eyes
have seen these rites. Yea, for them alone is there a life ;
for all other men there is ill." " He who arrives there after
initiation and purification," declares Plato, " will dwell with
the gods."
It was philosophy, however, which by its reflections upon
the everywhere-present, architectonic Life of the World, de-
veloped among the Greeks the more permanent and higher
conception of the nature and destiny of man's soul. With
this people " immortal " and divine, or " godlike," were inter-
changeable conceptions. " Immortality," says Rohde,^ " is the
essential predicate of God and only of God." To become im-
mortal, therefore, is to partake of the Divine Life. Thus the
hylozoistic doctrine of the soul became the forerunner of the
Platonic and, then, of the Christian philosophic conception.
Indeed, the Platonic philosophy of the soul's nature and des-
tiny may not improperly be said to have been, in some of its
most important factors, the doctrine prevalent in Christian the-
ology almost down to the present time. Plato's firmly rooted
belief in the soul's immortality depends upon the ontological
and necessary priority of reason to matter ; it is also essential
in order to make reasonable a moral view of the world-order
and of its future history. For the whole of man's life is a
process of education ; but the process is only begun in this
life and is to be carried on into a future existence. For the
individual soul there are in his doctrine, as in the doctrine of
the Catholic Cliurch, three possibilities : those who have been
purified by virtue and knowledge will find eternal blessedness ;
some will pass at death into a state of purgatory ; others will
1 Psyche, p. 296.
504 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
be finally condemned without hope of future redemption.^ In
other respects, indeed, Plato's doctrine of the future for the
individual soul differed from that evolved by the Cliristian
Church. But it can scarcely be questioned that the most pow-
erful outside influence in developing the Christian doctrine of
immortality was that which came from Greek, and especially
from the Platonic philosophy.
If it were not for the connection which the development of
the belief in a future existence for the individual had among
the early Hebrews with the entire body of beliefs and doctrines
constituting the religion of the Old Testament, its liistory
would scarcely be worthy of special recognition. Up to the
beginning of the third century b. c. the Hebrew conceptions
of the state of the dead — its nature and relations to the char-
acter of the life before death — remained in the crude and un-
formed stiige characteristic, for example, of the Homeric age
among the Greeks. The conception of Yahweh had indeed
undergone a considerable ethical development ; he had for
some time been worshipped as the Living God, the Giver of
life, and had been prayed to in order that death might be
averted. Yet this shadowy realm of the dead did not seem
particularly to concern Him. The gloomy underworld was not
thought of as an integral part of Yahweh's moral dominion,
over which He reigned, as He did over Israel and over the
heathen, in righteousness and fidelity. Sheol lay outside of
the Divine Rule.'^
This backwardness and lack of interest in, and this absence
of intelligent conceptions of, the destiny and condition of the
dead, were largely due to two causes : — namely, to the want of
any development in psychological instincts and philosophical
insight ; but more particularly, to the fact that the people as a
whole were regarded as tlie subject of religion, and the object
• See Sir A. Grant, The ICthics of Aristotle, Introductory Essay, III.
2 Sec R. II. Charles, A Critical Ilistorj' of the Doctrine of ii Future Life,
p. 35/.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 505
of divine care, rebuke, warning, reward, and punishment. In
other words, the thought of the dignity and value of a Self,
and of the importance of the relations to the Divme Spirit of
the individual finite spirit, had scarcely dawned upon the Jew-
ish mind. The eschatology of Judaism was particularly de-
fective as respects the individual.^ Even in the writings of
Jeremiah, with their predictions of retributive judgment for
the heathen and for disobedient Israel, and of comfort and res-
cue for the faithful, and in spite of certain strong individual-
istic tendencies, it is still " a people " that are for the future
to be the real " subject of religion." ^
Influences were at work, however, in the very heart of Ju-
daism which, in response to the historical experiences of the
people, could not fail to bring about an improved view of the
relations of the individual to God, both in this life and es-
pecially in the future. More and more, under the influence of
that marvelous succession of prophetic teachers, did the Divine
Being appear to believing minds as perfectly righteous, just in
keeping the covenant, and tenderly merciful and graciously
forgiving as well. But more and more was the fate of the
nation impressing upon these same minds the truth that their
sad fortune was Yahweh's punishment for the nation's sins.
This punishment culminated in the exile. "With the destruc-
tion of Jerusalem the prophetic threatening had been com-
pletely fulfilled, and at the same time the prophetic faith had
definitely prevailed over the popular religion." ^ In two re-
spects an important change in the attitude of the believer's
mind toward the future was thus brought about. The whole
body of the Jewish people could no longer expect to reap the
reward of their fidelity to God in the form of national pros-
perity ; they must henceforth be treated as two classes, — the
1 Compare Charles, Ibid., p. 19/.
2 See Smend, Lehrbuch der Alttestamentlichen Religionsgeschichte,
p. 248/.
3 Smend, Ibid., p. 307.
5U6 PHILOSOPHY OF RP:LIGI0N
faithful and the faithless, the righteous and the wicked, the
godless and the true worshipper of the true God. But since'
there is now nothing more in sight of a character correspond-
ing to the older notions of good or evil for the entire people,
that need be feared by the wicked or hoped for by the good,
it is comfort for the present, through hope for the future,
which gives the key-note to prophecy. The individual who
trusts the righteousness of Yahweh shall no longer satisfy his
demand for a theodicy by saying that the " fathers have eaten
sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge ; " let
him the ratlier believe that " the soul that sinneth, it shall
die," and make himself righteous by turning from his sins in
the faith that thus "it shall be well with him." With such
messages as these, Ezekiel and the later prophets became
caretakers of the souls of individuals, and held out to them-
selves and to others the hope that by the gathering together
of those who repented and made a truly spiritual return to
God, a " new Israel " might arise, " a remnant " might be
saved.'
But in what should this salvation, now promised to the
righteous few, consist? It must be in some form of life; in
the rescue of individuals somehow from the gloom and non-
being of death. For how can the dead praise God ? How can
those, who are as though they were not, magnify the Yaliweh
who has rescued them ? Still — as witli tlie second Isaiah pre-
eminently— the prophetic eye sees in the future the whole
people arising to a new and glorious heighth of national life,
through the regenerating influence of the faitliful remnant.
For "Judaism is from the beginning, and remained to tlie end,
a religion of hope." This form of future welfare was, then, to
be effected by Messianic influences. This is the prophetic solu-
tion. A much less confident answer, but also from the ctliical
point of view, was given l)y the bouks of Wis(h)m which tried
— with a trial tliat must always cud vainly — to fill-full the
> Conipurc Charles, Ibid., p. ]t)l/.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 507
future of the righteous with promises of good that stop with
the present life. Religion, however, can never be converted
into mere prudence.
Another movement of religious thought and feeling, which
was to change the ideal of hope, was both arising from witliin
and being imported from without. This movement was the
"individualizing of religion " as a "pre-condition for the estab-
lishment of a people " such as God demanded for his own.^
Thus the hope of the future detached itself from the mass,
considered indiscriminately and without reference to personal
and moral worth, and attached itself to the personality of
the few devotees of righteousness. They were the men w^ho
risked all, for this life and for that which, if anything, is be-
yond death, in confidence that God is wholly righteous, is in-
deed the perfection of Ethical Spirit in whom the man of the
same spirit may repose a hope which the fear of extinction, or
of the gloomy underworld, cannot destroy. The doctrine
finally evolved by this individualizing and intensely ethical
movement, in order to meet the disappointed hopes of the pious,
was a doctrine of the resurrection.
The production of the belief in a resurrection of the dead
was on Jewish soil the result of no little contest with unbelievers,
and of no inconsiderable heart-burning and painful doubt and
struggle with temptation. At all costs the dogma of Divine
Righteousness must be maintained, unimpaired in its control
over the heart and the life, and undiminished in moral dignity
and comprehensiveness. But, in fact, if the pious often had
occasion to rejoice, because the godless were visited with
retributive justice ; the latter had even more frequent occa-
sion for scorn and mocking, when the righteous died unfor-
tunate and forsaken. At the last, however, somehow and at
some time in the future, the perfect justice and goodness of
God would surely be vindicated. Such a hope necessarily pro-
1 See Smend, Ibid., p. 456, and Comp. Bousset, Die Religion des Juden-
tums im Neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, pp. 277^.
608 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
jects itself beyond death ; out of the dead themselves it creates
a realm for its own realization in the future.
It has been well said that the hope of the resurrection of the
dead constitutes the most significant difference between the
prophetic ideal of the Old Testament and the apocalyptic ideal
of the later Judaism.' This expectation not only divides all
men, whether living or dead, into classes with respect to their
character and their destiny ; but it also separates the entire
history of man's existence into two great seons. As an ethical
doctrine, in solution of the problem of the future life of the
individual, it indeed emerged relatively late in Judaism. But
it wrought powerfully and widely when it once became estab-
lished. At first it was apparently promulgated as a divine
judgment upon the inhabitants of the earth who did not glorify
God, and a call to the righteous to trust Him as their ever-
lasting strength ; it was also a promise that those in the dust
who did thus trust should hear a voice calling them to arise, to
awake, and sing (Isaiah xxiv — xxvii). But in Daniel (xii, 2)
the dogma is put forth that certain individuals at least shall
have a resurrection : " Many of those that sleep in earth's
dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, othei-s to scorn and
everlasting shame." It is, however, the yet later Apocalyptic
writings of Judaism which for the first time in perfectly defi-
nite form announce the expectation that all the dead — those on
the earth, and in Sheol, and in hell — shall arise.
In spite of opposition, the belief in the resurrection of all
the dead seems to have established itself as a dogma throughout
Palestine and to have become the faith of multitudes of the people.
*' The Gospels and the Acts show us plainly that, at the time
of the life and work of Jesus and his disciples this stage of the
development of the Jewish religion had been reached."- In
the popular belief, however, the characteristics and conditions
of this new life were conceived of in a gross and materialistic
fashion. Eating and drinking, being free from labor, pain, and
I So Bousset, Ibid., p. 255. 2 Quoted from Bousset, Ibid., p. 2G1.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 509
sickness, and wandering by pleasant streams and in green
meadows, wers then, as they are to-day among multitudes of
Christian believers, the objects of the popular desire and hope.
Only some of the more spiritual of the Rabbis would have an-
ticipated the truth of Paul's declaration (Rom. xiv, 17) : " The
kingdom of God is not meat and drink ; but righteousness,
and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." Everlasting life had
its foil in everlasting damnation ; to happiness and light and
healthful life were opposed darkness, nothingness, or pain of
burning and other tortures. That is to say, at last and most
tardily of all the greater religions, Judaism had developed a
doctrine of the immortality of the individual upon a quasi-
ethical basis of the individual's relations in this life to the Ob-
ject of religious faith and worship. The same process of indi-
vidualizing and democratizing, which had been applied to the
other religious beliefs and practices of Judaism (as, e. g.^ in
the substitution of the service of the Synagogue for that of the
temple), had moulded this belief also. " The religious develop-
ment of the later Judaism had prepared the way for the ' high-
strung ' individualism of the Gospel. But, indeed, the Prophet
and Master must first come, who with the magical might of
his personality could stir the sleeping forces to action and en-
ergetic development."
The apocalyptic views of the later Judaism shaped the
pictorial and symbolic form in which early Christianity re-
ceived the doctrine as to the future after death of the individ-
ual man. Jesus represents the Old-Testament worthies as still
alive, — Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; — for their God is not a
God of the dead but of the living. Those that are accounted
worthy to obtain the resurrection from the dead are the chil-
dren of God and henceforth became equal to the angels (Lk.
XX. 35-38). But one's place in this kingdom of the departed
is determined differently according to the " deeds done in the
body." The righteous beggar Lazarus is in " Abraham's
bosom," but the unjust rich man is *' afar off " and "in torments
510 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
(Lk. xvi, 19-31). This separation of the dead on moral
grounds is connected, in the thought of the writers of the
Gospels, with the resurrection and the judgment of the world
which terminates the present world-age ; and these momentous
events are dependent upon his " Return " (^Parousia), which
Avill be sudden and unexpected. Then all nations of the earth
will be called to judgment ; sentence will be passed according
to the standard of the filial spirit toward God and of brotherly-
love toward man ; and the decision in respect of the future's
weal and woe will be definitely pronounced.' All this corre-
sponds quite completely, so far as imagery is concerned, with
the Rabbinical notions of the time. There are, however, certain
other utterances which, if they are not obvious departures from
this point of view, are difficult to reconcile with it. Such are
Jesus' conversation with the Sadducees (Matt, xxii, 23-33),
his mention of " everlasting tabernacles " into which are re-
ceived those who arrive at the end before the general resurrec-
tion (Lk. xvi, 9), and his promise to the penitent thief of an
immediate entrance into Paradise (Lk. xxiii, 43).
Whether it is possible to obtain a consistent doctrine of the
immortality of the individual from such teachings as the
foregoing, or not, is in our judgment a matter of compara-
tively little moment. The large sweep of thought about the
future of tlie person who becomes attached to God, in the
spirit of Christ, comes into view in connection with the
promise of salvation as a new and higher spiritual life ;
more emphatically yet wlien the future of the race is made
to *be determined by the progress and increasing triumph of
God's Kingdom. The advance of this salvation, as it belongs
to the earthly life, carries with it the sure promise of its per-
fection in the super-earthly life ; and death cannot put any in-
superable obstacles in the way of this triumphant progress.
The Spirit, which has controlled Christ himself, has been in
him, he will continue to send from the Father; and this same
»See Matt, xxv, 31-4G; xiii, 39-42; xix, 28.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 511
Spirit in all who are his followers, will unfold itself as life, and
will secure the soul against perishing by being cut off from God.
Such a spiritual development has two sides. On the one
side, it is the unfolding of the life of faith in higher and higher
degrees of self-denying love, after the pattern of Christ, and
in purifying the soul from all the imperfections, weaknesses,
and sins, which belong to its natural existence amidst its earthly
environment. On the other side, it is the securing of more and
more of peace, joy, and blessedness, by a constant and increas-
ingly complete union of the soul with God.^
It is, however, in the heavenly future and not in the earthly
present that the perfection of life, which is " eternal life," the
" life in God," is to be attained by true, faithful, and persever-
ing believers. There, "in the heavens," is their great reward
(Matt. V, 12). What matters it, if the gate be strait and
the way narrow ; or if the cost be a hand, a foot, or an eye ;
the life to come is worth it all. For it is the true life, and
there is the "Father's house " (John, xiv, 2), the "everlasting
mansions " (Lk. xvi, 9), where Christ is and where his disci-
ples shall be glorified with him. In the confidence of this
hope his followers were to cast all their cares for this life and
the life to come upon God. To secure, by being of its Spirit,
a place in the Kingdom of God should be their chief aim ; and
all else desirable and really good would follow. The fate
of the sparrow was embraced in the Divine Love ; how much
more the lives of God's dear children. With them, as with
him, eternity should ever be near at hand, in the mind's
eye and in the affections of the heart. The veil between
the two worlds is thin ; indeed, there are no two separate
worlds, but only one — the realm of the Father — in which the
life of the man of filial spirit is spent. "The approach of
eternity awakened in Jesus the recognition of all that is essen-
tial, of all that endures in the sight of God." ^ This is the
1 Compare Schmid, Theologie des Neuen Testamentes, 264/.
sWemle, Beginnings of Christianity, I, p. 94.
512 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
attitude of mind and will toward all life, present and future,
earthly and super-earthly, which essentially accords with the
religion of Christ. " And even though later on the eschato-
logical drama receded ever further into the background, and
this earth and the present raised their claims on man ever
louder, yet eternity surrounds us ever in the garb of time,
and its demands are the same, yesterday, to-day, and for-
ever. . . . Jesus' words condemn His own Church down to
the present day."
Within the New-Testament period, the doctrine of the per-
fecting of salvation for the individual, and the connected view
of the immortality of the human soul, were chiefly developed in
the writings ascribed to the Apostles Paul and John. The
former had his training in the apocalyptic views of the Jew-
ish Rabbis. The terms which he employs, and the pictures
which he draws, to represent his conceptions of the future des-
tiny of the individual and of the race are, therefore, saturated
with the influences of this training. Yet in his conception of
the resurrection, as made an assured hope for the believer, he
far transcends the doctrine of later Judaism. It is his firm
confidence that the same loving Divine Will which has be-
stowed countless bodily forms upon all created things, from
fish to sun and bird to star, will not be defeated in his pur-
pose by the dissolution which must overtake the "natural
body " of those who have put their trust for life eternal in him
(I Cor. xv). Nor is Paul's conception of the wa}^ in which
this triumph over death will actually be brought about, at
all the gross material thing which has so often been attributed
to him. Just as the psyche, or natural soul, has had its body
appropriated to its uses in its earthly existence, so when it
has been "sown in corruption," will there be developed by
the divine power another incorruptible bodily manifestiition
for the spirit that has been made truly alive by the same
Lord who is the Giver of all life. In this connection the apos-
tolic vision is greatly enlarged until its horizon encircles the
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 513
entire race from first to last. Wtiat has already taken place
with him who was the Son of Man, and is now the glorified Son
of God, shall take place with all his many bi-ethren. Death
shall have its sting drawn ; and from the grave shall be taken
away its boast of victory. Thus tliis Apostle is led on to
indite a hymn of triumph which has resounded through the
centuries ever since, to the uplift and comfort of millions of
mourning and doubting souls ; and which there is every reason
to believe, in spite of all criticism of the details of its concep-
tion, will go on resounding to the end of time. In yet another
passage (Rom. viii, 19-23) this same Apostle sees all Nature
(even that Kx/o-ts which includes the irrational creation in dis-
tinction from man), which hitherto has been " subjected to
bondage " by the Will of the Creator, regenerated, uplifted,
and made gloriously to share in the comprehensive process of
redemption by this same Will.^
In the writings that bear the name of John, tlie conception
of eternal life as a supreme good which comes through spiritual
union with its source, is dominant. The essence of this " eter-
nal life " is a spiritual likeness to Christ ; as to its form, this
has not yet been made manifest, but will be at Christ's appearing
(I John, ii, 28 — iii, 3; iv, 17). In that New-Testament writ-
ing which is preeminently called the " Apocalypse," there is a
decidedly backward movement upon a confusion of imagery
and lurid pictorial representations such as characterize the
Jewish Apocalyptic, and from which only a few clear thoughts
occasionally emerge. Yet the promises afforded in this way
are full of words of consolation and hope to those who face
death with the consciousness of a personal and spiritual agree-
ment between themselves and the Will of God as made known
in redemption.
As has already been shown, the hope of immortality for the
1 According to Charles (Ibid., pp. 379/.), there were four stages in Paul's
eschatology. It is probably more correct to say that four different points
of view may be detected, which were never quite brought into harmony.
33
514 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
individual which Christianity held out came to an age prepared
to embrace the hope. As says Harnack ^ of the religious dispo-
sition of the Greeks and Romans in the first two centuries,
and of the current Grseco-Roman philosophy of religion :
" What was sought above all, was to enter into an inner union
with the Deity, to be saved by him and become a partaker in
the possession and enjoyment of his life." The Platonic, the
Stoic, and the Cynic philosophical speculation had led the minds
of men almost universally to the recognition of something
divine in man's spirit (^irveOiM or voOi ). But the popular belief
in the bodily appearance of the gods among men still prevailed ;
and the need of repentance, purification, and an improved life
was keenly and widely felt. All this was favorable to the
spread of tlie Christian doctrine of immortality for the indi-
vidual. But this doctrine, in order to gain acceptance, needed
a certain remoulding, or at least an explanation and develop-
ment, which should the better fit it to accord with the concep-
tions of the soul's nature, rights, and destiny, then held by the
current philosophy of religion. This belief, too, like all the
other beliefs, began to assume new forms in adaptation to the
demands of the age. Under this process of development, we
have on the one side, the extremely sublimated ideas of Gnos-
ticism, and on the other, the lingerings of the crass eschato-
logical notions of the later Judaism. Between the two, al-
though with many differences of opinion as to details, and
amidst much hot and wordy strife over obscure and even un-
intelligible thoughts, the belief of the Church Catholic suc-
ceeded in maintaining as an essential part of its creed the
doctrine that Christianity is the religion which delivers man
from death and leads him to a blessed union with God.'
It is not necessary, and it would be' profitless, to follow the
Christian l)elief in tlie immortality of the individual through
all its changes of opinion as to How, and Whore, and Wlien,
and under Wliat Conditions, and by Whom primarily, this pos-
» History of Dopma, I, j). 117. 2 Ilarmick, Ibid., II, pp. 169^.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 515
session of life beyond death is effectuated. All the more im-
portant differences of view on all these points have thought
themselves able to appeal for support to the teachings of Jesus
and of the Apostles ; or to some valid psychology of the nature
and potential development of the human soul ; or to some indis-
putably true conception of the Being of God, and of his perma-
nent and essential relations to the history and destiny of man.
From this brief historical survey certain tentative conclu-
sions may be drawn respecting the religious conception of im-
mortality for the individual as it appears for examination in
the light of modern science and philosophy. And, first, escha-
tology, or the attempt at a rational doctrine of the future, is,
historically considered, a relatively late development. " The
eschatology of a nation," says Charles,^ " Ls always the last part
of their religion to experience the transforming power of new
ideas and new facts." For the same reasons the very structure,
and the confirmatory evidence, of any particular belief on this
subject must always remain relatively imperfect. But, second,
as the ethical and spiritual conception of the nature of man's
self-hood expands and deepens and becomes more surely
founded, the belief in the immortality of the individual Self
becomes at the same time more rational and more purified from
mechanical and unethical elements. Even in the eschatology
of the New Testament, and certainly in much of theology down
to the present time, the existence of such elements is un-
doubted. And, third, it is above all the conception of the
ethical being and rule of God, as extending over the whole race
and as concerned in the historical process of redemption, as the
Spirit that is in the World of humanity to effect its Uplift
toward a moral union with the Divine, which itself purifies,
confirms, and elevates the hope of immortality for the indi-
vidual Self and for humanity.
1 Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, p. 310.
CHAPTER XLV
THE rVEVIORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL [CONTINUED]
The belief in the existence of the individual after death, on
account of its spontaneous origin and nearly universal exten-
sion, may properly be called " natural ; " in its highest reli-
gious form this belief becomes the confident trust that God
will, in his dealings with each human being, maintain the per-
fection of his own ethical Being. Our inquiry now becomes,
whether the doctrine as to the soul's nature and destiny which
the belief produces can sustain itself in the light of scientific
knowledge respecting man's constitution and his place in Na-
ture at large. Is the faith of religion in the immortiility of
the individual tenable in view of other classes of facts ? Any
satisfactoiy answer to this question requires that certain dis-
tinctions, which in the history of the belief have often been
CQnfused or not properly made, should now be rendered clear.
The clearing-up of these distinctions is required both by the
complexity of the problem and by the variety of the forms of
belief which have attempted its solution. The grounds for
the distinctions lie in the nature of the problem itself, and in
these same varied forms of the belief. Their examination,
therefore, involves the reaffirmation of certain religious faiths
and sentiments, with the psychological origin and development
in history of which we have by this time become so familiar.
There is one fundamental assumption which, whether in a
somewhat naive or elaborately scientific and philosophical form,
underlies all belief in the immortality of the individual. This is
the assumption that the so-called " soul " is separable from the
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 517
body. Whatever the essential nature of the principle of thought,
feeling, and will, may appear to be, and however loosely or in-
timately related to the bodily organism, unless its separability
from this organism may be affirmed, its existence after death is
incredible. For the fact of death, and the accompanying more
or less complete destruction of the body, is the one indisputa-
ble and universal fact. But the observation that the vital
processes not infrequently continue after all signs of self-
existence (as with the dying) have forever ceased, and even (as
in sleep) when such signs are temporarily suspended, leads the
primitive mind to the belief in two souls. Thus one of these
souls can leave the body and go elsewhere, while the other is
left to perish with the body, or to take its departure later.
The belief in the separability of the soul from the body is
not, however, in itself dependent upon any mature conception
as to the nature of the soul's essence ; much less is it equiva-
lent to the doctrine of its immateriality or ability to get along,
so to say, without any bodily manifestation. On the contrary,
in all the more primitive forms of the belief in the individual's
immortality, some shadowy, ghost-like form of a body is, as of
necessity, implied. And along that line of the development
upon which at the beginning the Christian faith seized, the doc-
trine of a resurrection — or coming again into the possession of a
living body — was an essential part of the belief in an existence
after death. Even the grossest conception, however, such as
would make the new body consist of a reunion of the material
elements that had composed the former body at the time of its
death, must somehow provide for a temporary continued exis-
tence of the soul, apart from its former material organism. In
a word, either for a short time, or for a long time, or for ever,
the soul of the individual man must be capable of existence
apart from its present tenement of flesh, if the belief in im-
mortality is to be maintained. The senses testify in the most
unequivocal fashion to the dissolution of this, its present,
bodily manifestation.
518 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Now it is just this separability of the soul from the bodily-
organism, to which modern science offers such strenuous, and
— as they seem to many — quite conclusive objections. Unless
these objections can be answered, at least so far as to negative
their seemingly conclusive character, the doctrine of the im-
mortality of the individual cannot maintain itself in the light
of the evidence to the contrary. To scientific evidence it is vain
to oppose the so-called " natural belief " in an existence after
death. For this belief itself, when regarded from the scientific
point of view, is seen to be " natural " in much the same manner
as is the belief in ghosts or in the reality of the objects which
visit us in dreams. At the best, this is what seems true from
the purely scientific standpoint : The same activity of imagina-
tion and thought which projects itself into the future always, and
of necessity, appears to itself as a living thing, a conscious pro-
cess of a here-and-now existing soul. To try to imagine how
it will be, not to be at all, is to try something quite foreign to
the powers of the human mind ; equally so, to ask the mind
to express in thoughts what it will be to have no thoughts at
all. Therefore, a mental picture of the non-existence of the
Self, drawn true to life — or rather, to the absence of all life —
by the Self's own constructive skill is impossible. No positive
conception can be gained of that which negates all conception.
Such an inability is, however, in no respect a guaranty, or even
an argument to establish the probability, of the soul's everlast-
ing life. Every night that is spent, in part, in dreamless sleep,
is an experience which includes the reality of that of which,
from its very nature, no positive conception can possibly be
formed. Imagination and intellect close over the gap in the
life of the Self by bringing together the conscious states on
either side. What it was, if anything, for us meanwhile to be
a soul, we can no easier tell ourselves then what it would have
been to cease forever to be ; if we had indeed never awakened
from that dreamless sleep. Vot so little, then, until the Self
has attained the consciousness of its moral ivorth and its ideal
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 519
value in a world where Ethical Spirit is supreme, does the so-
called natural belief in the soul's existence after death count
as a valid argument for the immortality of the individual.
The brief historical survey of the last Chapter was sufficient
to show that the rational grounds on which the attempts of
reflection to establish the immortality of the individual have
relied, have had a two-fold character. These attempts them-
selves, however, have by no means always recognized this fact.
Indeed, in Christian theology, from the time when it came
under the dominating influence of Greek philosophy onward,
both these lines of evidence have been employed to establish
the Tt'itionality of the hope of immortal life. Of these two,
the one builds upon a certain view of the soul as an entity;
the other turns the rather in faith toward God as pledged to
be the soul's Redeemer. The former culminates in a demon-
stration of the so-called natural immortality, or inherent inde-
structibility, of the principle of the individual's self-conscious
and personal life. It claims to know the human soul to be of
such a nature, that we may safely deduce from its very con-
ception a non posse mori. The other line of argument, if taken
by itself, reaches its supreme expression in the confidence that
a finite spirit, which has entered by a voluntary act into a
moral and spiritual union with the Infinite and perfect Ethical
Spirit, has in this very fact a pledge for its continued existence
and development. It places in this experience of faith and
life in God, the valid reasons for the firm conviction of a posse
non mori. Such a Self has acquired the ability to triumph over
death ; it has received the divine gift of immortal life.
The feeling of the difficulties which arise from the very
nature of man's two-fold being and from the more obvious
facts which show the dependence of his highest spiritual ex-
periences upon the condition of the bodily organism is no
modern affair. The materialistic view of the problem is as
old as human reflective thinking. But the more definite,
scientific knowledge on which similar difficulties are now
520 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
supported is comparatively modern. Its effects upon the re-
ligious beliefs and hopes that are connected with the tenet of
immortalit}' are already only too obvious. The estimate of
the moral value of the individual has, indeed, been on the
whole much enhanced. In the light of modern science man's
life seems more than ever worth the saving and perpetual im-
proving. But the study of his mental activities and develop-
ment from the biological, physiological and psycho-physical
points of view places a tremendous weight of emphasis upon
the absolute and complete dependence of these activities, and
of this development, on the functions and the evolution of the
material organism. One may easily refuse to go to the absurd
length of regarding the life of self-consciousness, recognitive
memory, rational tliinking, and self-determination in view of
a possible realizing of sesthetical and ethical ideals, as a mere
series of " ^/)i-phenomena," as the effluence of brain functions.
One may indignantly reject the position of out-and-out mater-
ialism ; but it is still a short and easy step over a seductive
path from the phenomena to the conclusion that the soul's
dependence upon the bodily life, really is, as it seems to these
sciences, final and absolute.
The candid searcher for the truth of the religious doctrine
of the immortality of the individual must, therefore, face again
the problem of the separability of the soul from the body. This
problem undoubtedly appears more complex and tremendous
than ever before, in the light of modern scientific discoveries.
The objections offered by these discoveries may be conveniently
summarized under the six following heads.' Of these lines of
evidence, the fii-st is derived from studies in general biology,
and considers man's place in the biological series. This ob-
jection looks upon all psychical phenomena, upon life from
» It will not, perhaps, be out of place in this connection to say that the
following necessarily brief summary expresses the conclusions of many
years of careful and detailed study of the subject, "Mind and Body," and
the relations actually existing between the two.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 521
the psychological point of view, as dependently related to the
life which the biologist regards simply as the phenomena of
natural organic bodies. This physical life has its explana-
tion in the character of the chemical processes which perpet-
ually construct these bodies : " The miracle of life," says
Haeckel,^ " is essentially nothing else but a change in the mate-
rial of the living substance, or metabolism of the plasma."
These processes, although their products vary enormously in
complexity, all the way from a single living cell which, how-
ever, in spite of its relative simplicity somehow knows the
way to go through the most astonishing performances, up to
the incredibly gifted and ingenious nervous structure of man, —
composed of countless millions of such highly differentiated
elements, — are essentially the same. The evolution of bio-
logical life is one vast continuous process. And the human
animal, although standing at the head of the process, is only
one member in the biological series ; man is a development,
embodying all that is behind him in time, and below him in
the scale of the entire series. Everj-where in this series, how-
ever, biological death consists in the ceasing of that balance of
interplay, in whose continuance biological life consists, between
the building-up and the falling-apart of the " protoplasmic
molecules." Everywhere, biological death is at once followed
by the cessation of all signs of psychical life. The amoeba
seems to have a " will of its own " ; the white blood-corpuscle
behaves as though moved by some sort of a purposeful, con-
scious soul. But dissolve tlie atomic structure of the amceba,
desiccate the blood-corpuscle, and thus stop once for all the
" metabolism of the plasma," and this purposeful, soul-like be-
havior of the living thing never returns. With the cessation
of the chemical processes goes the cessation of all signs of
psychical life. In man's case, although he stands at the head
of countless aeons of continuous or violently interrupted evo-
lution, the conditions of biological life and development are
1 Das Lebenswunder, p. 111/.
522 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
known to be the same ; the dependence of his psychical life
and development upon tlie fulfilment of organic conditions
appears to be equally complete.
What conclusion, then, in man's behalf does general biology
warrant other than the conclusion to which it is forced by its
experience with the whole of the series of natural living bod-
ies? Nowhere does the psychical, however inexplicable in
terms of the physical, its origin, development, and essential
characteristics may be, seem to escape this dependence upon
the integrity of its supporting organism. We may not indeed
affirm that immortality for the individual cannot develop in
that soil of the organic, where a definite race between the up-
building and down-pulling forces must always terminate in
favor of the latter. But is not the science of life compelled to
assert that all its experience of the facts forbids its holding
out any promise to the hope that it will be so ?
When attention is directed more particularly to the develop-
ment of the individual man, the second of the objections to
belief in the separability of the soul from the bodily organism
at once becomes obvious. This objection arises from the ap-
parently complete parallelism between the psychical and the
organic processes of evolution. The beginnings of the life of
the human individual, like those of the individual member of
all the higher animal species, coexist with the fusion of a cell
from the male (a spermatozoon') with a cell from the female (an
ovum). The spermatoviim, which originates from this fusion
of the two cells, straightway proceeds upon its business of
building out of the pabulum with which it is supplied — whether
from the maternal organism or after it has left this organism —
a complicated structure of the species from which it was itself
derived. Not only does this cell, with its elements derived
from the two parents, somehow serve as the bearer of all the
characteristics common U) the species ; but it also transmits
those more particular traits of a physical and organic or tem-
peramental sort which have come down from countless gener-
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 523
ations of its own ancestors ; even minute idiosyncrasies of bodily
and mental sort are carried over in tliis same compound of
living cells. At every step in the evolution of this physical
germ, the same relation between it and the psychical develop-
ment seems to be illustrated. As the embryo develops in the
mother's womb, signs that the lower and more plant-like forms
of a quasi-ipsy chical functioning have already begun, are b}'' no
means wanting. At birth the development of the nervous sys-
tem has proceeded just far enough to fit it for the prompt and
effective responses to those attacks from the sensory stimuli of
its new and strange physical environment, in which the founda-
tions of a psychical development must be laid. But the asso-
ciation-elements in the brain are not as yet ready for use ; and
even the fibers in the voluntary tracts of the higher part of
the spinal cord have not yet been myelinated ; — so determined
is nature to have the functions and manifestations of the so-
called soul develop only pari passu, as it were, with, if not in
absolute dependence upon, the evolution of the physical organ-
ism. All the way through life, the semblance of at least this
rough form of a parallel evolution is maintained. In connec-
tion with the increasing use of the higher cerebral centers, the
higher functions of thought and of feeling display themselves.
Memory — or rather a complex system of more or less definitively
allied and interrelated memories — develops in dependence
upon the creation and preservation, intact, of association-tracts
in the brain. With the maturing vigor and continued sound-
ness of the nervous system, and its education in the prompt
and unimpeded performance of its functions, the period of
greatest mental vigor is reached ; and with the decaying
strength and impaired character of these functions, in which
old age compels the human individual to share the law of all
life, the psychical weaknesses peculiar to this period begin
more abundantly to appear.
What is illustrated by the details of the physical and ps3'chi-
cal evolution of each individual man is also impressively en-
524 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
forced by a study of the parallelism between the two, in the
entire human species ; it is even yet more impressively illus-
trated by a comparative study of all the animal kingdom.
In this way more or less successful attempts have been made
to scale the intellectual capacities of different species of ani-
mals and different races of men, according to the size of the
brain, and the complexity of the convolutions of its cortex.
Nor have such attempts been willing to stop short of estimating
the place in the mental scale of the two sexes, or of different
individuals from either sex, by weighing and observing the dif-
ferences in this rind of gray matter, the more abundant posses-
sion of which is the crowning physical glory of the human
species.
This general and relatively rough paralleling of the charac-
teristics and evolution of body and mind in man, for purposes of
emphasizing the dependence of the latter upon the former, has
now become much more definite and scientific through the
recent discoveries in the so-called localization of cerebral func-
tion. Since the year 1870, more especially, physiological
science has been somewhat steadily winning its way in this
direction. What areas of the brain-cortex are somehow es-
pecially concerned in the motor functions of the different
principal parts of the body, and — more surprising and impor-
tant still — in psychical or intelligent seeing and hearing, is now
so well known as to serve the purposes of the surgeon in the
locating and relief of various psychical troubles that originate
in diseased conditions of the brain. And there are just now
indications which cannot be wholly discredited, that a number
of those beliefs of the early explorers in this field — like Gall and
Spurzheira, — which have hitherto been discarded as altogether
fanciful, are by no means devoid of foundation in fact. Thus
does cerebral physiology seem to be pinning ever more tightly
to the cerebral areas the different principal forms of conscious
psychical functioning.
In close sequence upon the third class of objections to the
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 525
separability of the soul of the individual from the bodily or-
ganism follows another. This fourth class comes from observing
the mental effects of functional bodily disturbances. It is the
fundamental character of this dependence of the conscious ex-
periences of the soul upon the healthy or the abnormal
discharge of the organic functions which gives all their signifi-
cance to such phrases as "feeling well" or "feeling ill." In-
deed, in not a few diseases the psychical symptoms are quite
as specific as are the physical ; the obvious results in conscious-
ness serve to characterize their causes in the concealed distur-
bances of the bodily system. Especially noteworthy is the
dependence of the train of associated ideas for the rapidity and
trustvvorthiness of its flow, for its coloring, and indeed for its
very continuance, upon the quantity and the character of the
blood-supply furnished to the brain. Thought and memory
stumble, when this supply is interrupted or is loaded with the
decomposition products of diseased or exhausted tissues. All
psychical phenomena cease entirely when pressure on the
arteries cuts off this supply altogether. Different drugs, when
introduced into the circulation either through the lungs or the
digestive tracts, or directly by injection mto the veins, produce
specific forms of hallucination and other kinds of psychical dis-
turbances. There is little need, however, to multiply illustra-
tions of the dependence of mind upon the healthy discharge of
the organic functions ; every man's daily life is full of such
illustrative experiences.
"When, instead of temporary functional disturbances, with
their inevitable accompaniment of disturbed conditions of the
psychical life, we have to consider the mental effects of serious
organic lesions or other injuries, the evidence appears yet more
conclusive against the separability of the soul from the bodily
organism. Especially impressive is this evidence in all cases
of organic diseases of the brain. If wounding, or a tumor, or
an abscess, attacks and destroys certain cerebral areas, then
aphasia is the result ; and the character of the aphasia will de-
526 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
pend upon the seat and the extent of the disease. In one case,
the articulate word-image is lost ; in another, the written word-
image ; in still a third, the unfortunate patient can recognize,
select, and will the proper sound or yisual sign for the idea,
but he has lost command of the center of voluntary control.
As that degeneracy of the tissues which is the misfortune of
old age invades the cerebral areas, memory of the higher and
more intelligent sort begins to fail. And if that progressive
paralysis of the brain-centers known as general paresis attacks
our friend, we stand by helpless while we see the divine and
god-Hke faculties of the spirit fade away, one by one, and mark
the inevitable end, which will be the reduction of them all
to the lowest terms of the merest animal or plant-like exis-
tence.
In concluding this list of objections to the separability of the
soul from the bodily organism, the admissions of modem psy-
chology may be summoned to support the lines of evidence ad-
duced by modem biology and phvsiology. These admissions
emphasize the dependence of even the higher forms of the men-
tal life upon that sensory-motor basis of experience, which, in
turn, we know to be most intimately and obviously dependent
upon the functions of the nervous system. Thus the highest
spirituality in man is made to appear as mediated only by the
sensuous and the physicaL For '* we seem warranted in insist-
ing that the following five great groups of correlations between
body and mind are always maintained during the mind's con-
scious existence.'* '" (1) '* The quality and intensity of the
sense-element in our experience is correlated with the condition
of the nervous system as acted on by its appropriate stimuli."
(2) **The combination, whether simultaneous or successive, of
our conscious experiences is correlated with the combination
of tlie impressions made, from whatever source, upon the ner-
Tous organism," (3) " Those phenomena of consciousness
» Quoted — as are the succeding statemeDta upon this point — from the
author's Elements of Physiological PEVchology, p. 579/.
IMMORTALITY OF THE IXDRIDUAL 527
which we designate as • memoiy * and • recollection,' as weU as
tlie play of the reproduced images in general, are correlated
with the molecular constitution and tendencies, and with the
so-called ' dynamic associations ' of the elements of the nervous
system."' (4) " The course of thought, and all the higher
forms of self-conscious experience are correlated with the con-
dition of the cerebral centers."' (5) " The statical condition
of the body (by which we mean all those inherited peculiarities
of the organism, the sexual and tribal bodily characteristics,
the corporal constitution as dependent upon age, which change
only slowly and within narrow limits, or do not change per-
ceptibly at all) and the general tone or coloring of conscious
experience, are correlated."
What wonder, then, that those who are either ignorant or
deliberately neglectful of other considerations, regard the ar-
guments against the immortality of the individual as quite con-
clusive ? For, whatever might be said to encourage the hope
of life after death, this hope seems already cut up at the very
roots, as it were, by the proof of the inseparabilin;- of the sup-
posedly immortal, from the confessedly mortal, nature of man.
But the complex problem offered by this religious doctrine is
not so easily and quickly solved, even when the arguments
are kept within this their lowest and most manageable stage.
For no one of these six groups of considerations is conclu-
sive ; neither is a fatal argument against the doctrine to be
made complete by all of them corn'oined. On the contrary,
each one of these groups of phenomena is not only equivocal
and inconclusive, even when taken at its highest valuation,
but is also inclusive of phenomena whose interpretation en-
courages, if it does not demand, another explanation.- This
1 It is doubtless pxartly on this account, as wdl as partly on account of a
certain tenderness toward so dear a hope that, as Professor James has said
(Human Immortality, note 2. p. 49\ while there are plenty of passages
in modem writers which maintain that mind is eoterminoas with brain-
function, there is hardly one in w^hich the author explicitly doiies the possi-
bility of immortality.
528 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
revei'se aspect makes it apparent tbat, in the unity of man's
total experience, the functioning and even the upbuilding of
the structure of the bodily organism is dependent upon the
activities and the development of the self-conscious, and ra-
tional Self.
Evidence in support of a certain primacy and relative inde-
pendence of the psychical life may be derived from man's rela-
tion to the other members of the biological series. In the case
of all the countless species which compose this series, the value
of the psychical and the conscious activities, for their struc-
tural development and specific variation, is becoming more ap-
parent to students of biology. From the lowest members up-
ward, conscious strivings that appear like anticipations of future
realizations, have served as stimuli to induce important changes
in the constitution and functioning of the organism. Every-
where the psychical appears as a force, which modifies and
shapes to higher and higher uses the physical and the struc-
tural. So that from a no less realistic — however less scien-
tifically productive — point of view, the entire development
of animal life upon the globe may be treated, in respect of its
sources and causes, from the point of view of comparative psy-
chology. From this point of view, biology becomes a history
of the way in which the obscure feelings of irritation, unrest
need, desire, or the more definite forms of the appetites of food,
drink, and sex, and tlie emotions of pride, love, hate, and do-
mestic affection, have driven onward toward their goal the
more and more organically complex evolutions of the " proto-
plasmic molecules." Thus considered, even " the metabolism
of the phisma " is a psychical function. When man is reached,
and taking into account the whole liistory of his past evolution
as a species, it becomes eminently impracticable to regard his
spiritual development as standing only in the relation of effect
to cause, toward his organic and specific supremacy. Witli the
first beginnings of Selfhood — whenever or however these begin-
nings may liave come about — the psychical life commences in
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 529
no unimportant way to dominate the physical. From this time
onward, it is quite as true to the facts to say that man has raised
himself above all the other members of the biological series, as
tx) say that he has been raised by the forces of organic evolution
to the headship of this series.
When we turn to consider the evidence from the parallel de-
velopments of body and of mind, we find abundant proof that
the relation of dependence is not a one-sided relation. In fact,
the most impressive thing, however mysterious, about the evo-
lution of the human nervous organism is just this discovery
that the building of the structure anticipates the psychical uses
of that structure ; and at the same time waits for these uses
for its own maturing. It is under the excitement of the soul
by the external sense-stimuli and from its own blind strivings
and cravings, that the nervous organs acquire their complete
ability to perform their higher functions. Thus it is a by no
means inapt figure of speech that enables us to say : The soul
demands of the body those forms of service which the vital
energies, stimulated by the demand, prepare the body to
perform.
It is also possible to regard the phenomena which have led
to the more definite localization of cerebral function from a
point of view more favorable to the separability of the soul
from the body. For within certain limits, not easy definitely
to fix, when the appropriate cerebral areas are so injured, de-
stroyed, or otherwise hindered, that they can no longer func-
tion in the customary way, other closely contiguous areas on
the same hemisphere, or corresponding areas on the opposite
hemisphere, can be substituted in their place. But in order to
effect this substitution the enlistment of the soul's strivings
and efforts is of the first importance. The whole theory of
training, and the perfection and ease in the performance of
function which are acquired through practice, when regarded
from this psychological point of view, emphasizes the depen-
dence of the histological structure and the functioning of the
34
530 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
cerebral centers upon psychical preconditions. The most
patent thing about this acquisition of skill by striving and try-
ing is this : Changes in different localities of the nervous
mechanism, and in the association-tracts connecting these locali-
ties, are actually dependent upon causes that are conscious and
voluntary.^
If now attention be given to the relations actually existing
between organic disturbances of function and the accompany-
ing psychical excitements and disturbances, these relations, too,
no longer appear as a one-dimensioned affair. Indeed, here the
case can be even more favorably made out for the advocate of
the primacy and supremacy of the psychical over the physical,
of the mind over the body. Even the flow of the gastric juice
in the stomach seems to be a psychically initiated rather than
a purely mechanical affair. The pleasures of taste, experienced
or anticipated, are the potent cause of this form of organic
functioning rather than the action of the food-substance in the
organ and upon its walls. " The nutrition of the tissues, the
circulation of the blood, the secretion of different kinds of
fluids, the healthy or diseased nature of the vital processes,
are dependent upon the states of the mind. If abnormal diges-
tion produces melancholy, it is equally true that melancholy
causes bad digestion." Care, chagrin, and ennui poison the
arterial blood. The sthenic and asthenic effect of various
emotions upon the organic functions is quite as obvious and
undoubted as is the effect of the functional disturbances of
the organs in producing the various emotions themselves. In
the curing or reUef of acute mania or of the melancholy of grief,
the diverting of interest and the enlisting of will are of primary
importance. Indeed, the attitude of will is of prime importance
for the recovery from disease generally. All the explanatory
theories of tlie strange phenomena of hypnosis depend chiefly,
'In proof of this contention see "A Suggestive Case of Nerve-Anastomo-
sis" as discussed by the author, in the Popular Science Monthly, for August,
1895.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 531
or largely, upon the principle of " suggestion." But suggestion
is a psychological principle; it is a way of inducing func-
tional results in the organism through the introduction of ideas
and the stirring of desire and effort within the mind. So far as
" suggestive therapeutics " is concerned, this is only another
name for what is more vulgarly called, and dangerously em-
ployed, under the term " mental healing."
Not even in the most desperate, incurable, and fatal cases
of organic disease is the complete and final dependence of the
soul upon the body indisputably evinced. Indeed, the power
of the cheerful mind, the resolved and indomitable will, the
trustful and joyful religious spirit, over the nutrition and re-
pair of abnormal changes and lesions in the bodily organs, is
not altogether easy to reduce within clearly assignable limits.
When the bewitched Redskin wraps himself in his blanket,
turns his face to the wall, and dies to order as he has been told
that he will do ; he illustrates to the extreme the same un-
doubted principle to which many cases of recovery from severe
illnesses must be referred. If "suggestion" can elicit brands,
stigmata, and other more deeply-seated observable organic and
permanent responses, it can fairly be said also to be able to
stimulate and effectuate organic repairs in the highly sensitive
and responsive tissues of the brain. But it is from these
tissues outward that the peripheral organs have their nutrition
and upbuilding so largely controlled. On the one extreme,
stand the dangerous errors of fanaticism ; on the other, lie
the risks and misses of opportunity to which the over-estimate
of the physical and the depreciation of the spiritual is always
subject. Somewhere between lies the truth ; but it is a truth
which reaffirms our confidence in a certain important depen-
dence of the body upon the soul. Even in the case of that soul-
destroying disease, the progressive paralysis of the insane,
there have been instances, where the psychical life has seemed
to reappear in a manner approaching its natural vigor, as
though it had by one supreme effort broken loose from the
532 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
barriers which had been closing round it through the decadence
of the brain.^
When at the close of this re-survey of facts from the domi-
nant psycliical point of view, we come to consider the relations
in which its higher activities stand to the lower, and through
them to the bodily organism, the argument is strengthened for
the possibility of an existence for the soul after the death of
the body. However necessary the sensational and motor basis
may be for the development and bodily manifestation of these
higher activities, they themselves distinctly transcend the
limits of this basis. Changes in the intensity, the time-rate,
the combinations, the locality, of the organic excitements are
correlated with changes in the intensity, the time-rate, the
combinations, and the qualities, of our sensory-motor experi-
ences. In these and closely allied respects the relation be-
tween soul and body can be thought of, in accordance with the
facts of experience, as a relation of reciprocal dependence.
Body influences mind, and mind influences body ; — this is the
popular, the common-sense way of expressing the two sides,
or two directions, of this relation. And psycho-physical science
cannot improve upon the expression, cannot essentially alter its
accepted meaning as stated to explain the universal experience.
Science can only investigate more minutely, and formulate
more accurately, what these reciprocal influences, these actions
and reactions, actually are experienced to be.-^ But above the
sphere of these investigations, rises a development of the soul's
self-conscious and self-determining life, as related to certain
ethical and sesthetical ideals, to which all language derived
1 The reference here is not to those periods of seeming improvement in
general paresis, which give to friends false hopes of recovery, but to certain
caaes where, in spite of the most undoubted post-mortem proofs of the dis-
ease, an exhibition of a Btill vigorous mind has been made, near the time of
death. Such cases have seemed to the attending physicians like the coming
to life of an already dead soul.
2 Compare an Article by the author in Mind (new series), vol. XII,
pp. 374fJ.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 533
from a study of psycho-physical formulas seems utterly inap-
plicable. Certainly, artistic and moral sentiments and ideals,
religious beliefs and conceptions, and the spirit of filial piety
in which the essence of subjective religion consists, are all ex-
periences of the same soul whose sensory-motor life is so
strictly correlated with the functions of the bodily organism.
Certainly, too, these higher activities are rarely or never di-
vorced from their accompaniment of the lower. For it is as an
embodied soul, and not as an already disembodied spirit, that
the human being is an artist, a devotee, a religious idealist.
On the other hand, neither a scientific psychology, nor a meta-
physics of the Self when based upon such a psychology, can fail
to recognize this so-called " higher nature " in which — to use
the language of Kant — is the root that furnishes "the indis-
pensable condition of the only worth that men can give them-
selves." This is the " power which elevates man above him-
self ; . . . a power which connects him with an order of things
that only the understanding can conceive, with a world that
commands the whole sensible world, ... as well as the sum-
total of all ends." " This power is nothing but personal it i/,
that is, freedom and independence of the mechanism of nature,
... a faculty of a being which is subject to special laws . . .
given by its own reason." ^
In a word, this species of animal called " human," by what-
ever processes stretching through seons of time the result has
come about, and however conditioned upon lower psychical
and organic attainments, has, in fact, developed Self-hood.
And having developed selfhood, man has felt within him, and
has responded to, the obligations inherent in the very being of
a Self ; the feeling and the response pledges him to develop
this selfhood in higher and higher stages toward the realiza-
tion of its own Ideal. Indeed, he has made this Ideal of Self-
hood the Object of his supreme faith, the pattern of his loftiest as-
piration and endeavor, and the guaranty of the realization of
1 See the Analytic of Pure Practical Reason, chap. III.
684 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
his purest and most uplifting hopes. All this experience of the
present actuality, and the further possibility, of a share in the
Divine Life can neither be accounted for nor understood, in
terms of the physical organism or of that life which biology
investigates. All this experience tends to emphasize the
primacy and the supremacy of spirit over a material body.
The conflict between modern science and the ancient hopes
of religion over the separability of the soul from the bodily
organism, when fought out fairly within the province of ex-
perience open to biological, physiological, and psycho -physical
researches, ends, at the worst, in a drawn battle. If religion
cannot establish its affirmative view, .and demonstrate experi-
entially this separability ; neither can science bring to the point
of a demonstration the opposite and negative view. Can the
psychical life, or any part of it, escape destruction when that
mechanism of " protoplasmic molecules," in connection with
which it has developed, is dissolved? Neither biology, nor
physiology, nor psychology of the physiological or psycho-
physical type, can give a final answer to this question.
One conclusion, however, which is of service to the religious
hope is fairly to be derived from our survey of the problem
upon these scientific grounds. No words that imply the pos-
sibility of resolving either series — the organic and physical, or
the conscious and psychical — into the other, fitly express the
real connections between the two. The psychical is neither
the " product " nor the " function " ^ of the organic ; nor is the
1 For this reason we may well take exception to the admission with which
Professor James {Ibid., p. 10) begins his attempt to remove objections to
the belief in the immortality of the individual: — namely, that thought is a
"function" of the brain, and that "the various special forms of thinking
are functions of special portions of the brain." The word /w nc< ion seems
to us wholly inappropriate to such a correlation. Moreover, the distinc-
tion between different kinds of fimctions does not seem necessarily to
help the case. A "permissive" or " transmissive " function may just as
properly, and just as probably, have an indi.s-snhible and necessary connec-
tion with the brain as a "productive" functioy. If the^lassis shattered,
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 535
reverse statement any more true. No such words reduce the
mystery of the connection ; no such words express the truth of
fact. What we have to observe, is two intimately interrelated
developments of wholly different species ; neither of which can
be resolved into the other, and neither of which is either com-
pletely describable or wholly explicable in terms of the other.
To scientific observation merely, they seem to begin together ;
in a measure only, they proceed with something like an equal
pace ; and, then, they seem to cease together. But the traces
of both are permanently made in the world's subsequent history.
Science assumes that the physical elements continue to exist and
to have their value expressed in the reality of the system of
things ; religion believes in, and hopes for, something of the
same sort for the life of self-conscious striving, doing, and
realizing of its own spiritual ends.
If modern psychology supports the religious hope of immor-
tality for the individual by refusing credence to the objections
of biology and physiology, the same thing cannot be said of
some of the more positive grounds on which this hope has tried
to build an argument in its own defence. This is especially
true of the doctrine of the so-called " natural immortality " of
the human soul. The essential feature of this doctrine in each
of its several forms consists in the belief that the known unity
and reality of the soul can properly be stated in such terms as
necessarily to imply its indestructibility. So it was held by
the Hindu conception of Atman ; and in like manner by that
theological proof which the Kantian criticism undertook to
overthrow. In the latter case the argument ran : (a) The
soul is known to be a unity, in the strictest meaning of the
term ; (b) it is, therefore, indiscerptible and cannot, like the
body be resolved into its elemental constituents ; (c) but this
or resolved into sand and potash, it will no longer transmit the light. A
complete disagreement would seem to be inevitable with all the quasi-
materialistic ways of representing the relations of mind and body, if one
is to make room in this sphere for the doctrine of the separability of the
one from the other.
536 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
is the equivalent of its absolute indestructibility. It is cus-
tomary to represent Kant as overthrowing this so-called proof
by the force of his criticism. On the one hand, this criticism
showed that what we really know as the Ego^ or soul, in con-
sciousness, is only a phenomenal reality and no *' thing-in-
itself ; " on the other hand, it was pointed out that in experience
the soul plainly shows itself to be capable of parting with its
existence by a process of diminishing down to zero, or to the
vanishing point, all the activities in which its phenomenal
reality consists.
Both the theological proof, and its critical and sceptical refu-
tation, have alike ceased to have much pertinence or available
meaning for modern psychology. In its scientific estimate
there is no actual, or even conceivable evidence to show the
existence, either within consciousness or out of consciousness,
either as inseparably connected with the bodily organism or
as presumably separable from this organism, of a " thing-in-
itself " soul. From the very nature of the case, an Atman-
like entity, which could continue to exist after it had ceased
to vindicate its existence by doing anything knowable or imag-
inable in the system of actualities, cannot be empirically known.
Nor need religion mourn the loss of such a soul. For it would
be as totally without value as it is confessedly without charac-
teristics. To lose it and to save it would be alike a matter of
indifference.
It is at this point tliat modern psychology reveals the path
along which the hope of religion may travel to its desired goal.
The unity and reality of the human soul consixtsin it:* actually
heiny a Self. To be self-conscious, to remember recognitively,
to reason rationally, to feel the worth of ethical and ajsthetical
obligations and ideals, and to determine conduct with a view
to discharge these obligations and to realize these ideals — this
it is really to be, and to be one, after the pattern of a human
soul, or Self. To attain more in quantity, and higher degrees
of quality, of this life of Selfhood ; — this is to reach more com-
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 537
pletely the ends of unity and reality, as these ends are divinely
natural for man — the potential son of God. It is the hope
that death does not set the final limit, the impassable barrier,
to this process of the realization of immortal life which religion
aims to secure. If these aims cannot be furthered by a dem-
onstration of the natural indiscerptibility, and separableness
from the dissolving organism, of an indescribable " thing-in-
itself " soul, the disappointment has its sting quite -withdrawn
when it is shown that the modern psychological view recog-
nizes no such present existence of a soul.
It remains, then, to inquire on what positive grounds the
hope of immortality for the individual can most securely re-
pose ? To this question the one inclusive answer can be given :
On the grounds of that faith in the Being of the World as per-
fect Ethical Spirit, and in man's potential likeness to this Being,
which religion itself accepts and establishes. If this faith is
rational ; then the hope of immortality may be esteemed
rational. If this faith cannot susuiin the tests of modern sci-
ence and reflective thinking ; then much less can the hope of
immortality for the individual sustain these tests. In other
words, it is the world-view of religion which is on trial ; — and
this as enfolding and involving the destiny of the race and of
the individual man. He who believes that the system of cos-
mic existences, forces, and processes, in the midst of which man
has hitherto developed, in which lie is now set. and with which
his destiny is interlocked, is moral and spiritual to the core, he
may cherish the hope of immortality without being inherently
inconsistent in his thinking and his beliefs. For him, however,
who finds in this system no Presence of the Infinite Personal
Life, to expect his own conscious life to tn\nscend the particu-
lar combination of " protoplasmic molecules " which forms for
it a temporary physical abode, is to indulge an illogical, if not
an altogether illusory-, hope. The hope of immortality for the
individual is a hope in God as perfect Ethical Spirit, regnant
over all life in every stage and form of its manifestation.
588 PPIILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
This general argument, or ground of confidence, may be
analyzed, as it were, into a number of particulars. In con-
sidering the value of each of these so-called " proofs," how-
ever, it should be remembered what is the essential character
of the tenability — the nervus prohandi — belonging to them all.
For example, while it must be held that the naturalness of the
belief in the continuance of the psychical life after death is not
a proof of the natural immortality of the individual, the crav-
ings, anticipations, fears, and hopes, of the race with regard to
the future are a most impressive spectacle. They show how
deeply set in persistent human feeling, and in permanent allied
convictions, is the belief of man in his own power to survive
death. The spectacle is no less impressive when it takes the
form of those fears of this permanency, which give the doctrine
of Karma such control over millions of minds. At the other
extreme, stands the joyful expectation of realizing at once the
blessings of a more intimate communion with, and a more per-
fect likeness to, the Divine Being, with which millions of
Christian and other religious devotees have contemplated death.
There is in this spectacle no demonstration, indeed, of a reality
for that which awakens such fears or such hopes ; science can,
indeed, point its finger to many another wide-spread fear and
hope for which it has been compelled to expose the absence of
any correlated actuality. But on the assumption that God is
in the world, and in tlie race, as a righteous Ruler and a loving
Redeemer, these persistent feelings and permanent beliefs ac-
quire a new significance and a greatly increased value.
When these more primitive forms of feeling are developed
into the more refined forms of lestlietical and ethical sentiment,
they become powerful and effective pleadere for the belief in
the possibility of the finite Self attaining the gift of immortal
life. Our entire study of man's religious experience and reli-
gious development has made us familiar with the undoubted
ontfilogical value of his a3sthetical ideals. Whether from the
scientific and philosophical, or from the more definitely reli-
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 539
gious point of view, the human mind insists upon constructing
its theory of reality under the influence of these ideals. Only
in this way can the world seem actually to be the sublime, beau-
tiful and orderly, though profoundly mysterious totality, which
affords satisfaction to this side of human nature. If the astro-
nomical and physical sciences compel him to believe that this
marvelous mechanism of a Cosmos has built itself up, only to
end in self-destruction, and then to begin over again the pro-
cess of self -building, the lover of truth tries to remain faithful
in feeling as well as thought to the truth, and comforts hi niself
as best he may. But by universal confession, the conclusion
that the end-all is the destruction of all, takes much of the ad-
miration, and most of the sesthetical satisfaction, out of the
spirit with which man regards the totality of the cosmic proc-
esses and forces. If, at the last, it all comes to this : Why
was it at all ? and Is it worth while that it should be at all ?
And when his own destiny is so conceived of as to be help-
lessly and inextricably entangled in this march to final ruin of
the cosmic Mechanism, there is evolved a strong reaction against
so shocking and repulsive a theory of the purposeless and ideally
unproductive character of man's evolution in history. It is
difficult, or impossible, to state this theory in terms that do not
rob human history of its aesthetically grand and sublime fea-
tures. And when the attempt is further made — as it is pretty
sure to be made, so strong and persistent are the demands for
satisfaction which the sesthetical nature continues to put forth —
to elevate our depressed spirits by lauding the artistic qualities
of the Mechanism, or by praising the system under terms of do-
mestic endearment, as our " Universal Mother," etc, ; the suc-
cess of the attempt is measured by the exact distance of its
virtual departure from its own chosen point of view. In the
cosmic family circle Dame Nature's character cannot be im-
proved at the expense of the perfection of God the Father.
It is under the same pressure of demands from the rising and
broadening sesthetical ideals of humanity that science has built
540 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
up its engaging picture of a perfect cosmic order, and that re-
ligion has attained to the conception of the all-admirable and
sublime Being of God. Worshipful admiration and obedience
is the correct attitude of the human soul toward this Object.
If the one structure has, for the time being, seemed the rather
to belittle the importance of man in the World-All ; the other
structure has more and more emphasized his importance. Tlie
social and political development of humanity has taken sides
with the religious in this regard. The lives and the destiny
of the millions of mankind can no longer be regarded as of
little or no account, without giving a shock to the dominant
sesthetical ideals. Neither the Court of Heaven nor the courts
of earth are longer tolerated by the more truly refined sestheti-
cal feeling, if they continue to treat these millions as things of
little worth. The very fact that the physical and biological
sciences recognize the obligation to make grander and more
beautiful the brief earthly life of these lowly ones, is an un-
conscious testimony toward the confirmation of the truth for
which we are contending. The belief in the value of human
Selfhood — that supreme product of evolution which has cost
the Cosmos so many countless seons of struggle, pain, and sac-
rifice— is a belief which is ever taking firmer roots in the ses-
thetical nature of humanity. This estimate of value is greatly
enhanced by the belief in the immortality of the individual.
Thus this belief has increasingly on its side the demands for
satisfaction of the profoundest cesthetical sentiments of human
nature.
Closely allied with, and indeed scarcely separable from, the
influence of sesthetical sentiments and ideals is the powerful
influence which comes from the demands for satisfaction of
the choicest affections and purest altruistic sentiments. It has
already been repeatedly shown how, in their cruder form, these
feelings have operated in the production and development of
certain nearly or quite universal religious beliefs. Especially
true is this of the worship of ancestors and of deified men.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 541
This pathetic and persistent following of the beloved dead with
the hope of future life and the expectation of future reunion,
is not an argument for immortality which can be thrown into
the form of a syllogism ; much less is it a demonstration that
is unassailable by modern science. That it is, however, a most
potent cause of the actual arising and persistence of the belief
in immortality, those who have had experience with the thoughts
of men cannot for a moment doubt. Plutarch speaks for count-
less millions of human souls when, in a letter of consolation
to his wife on the death of their young daughter, he tries to
show that those who die in infancy and youth will earlier feel
at home in the other world.^ This is the reason why the laws
do not allow mourning for children of such tender years :
"because they have gone to dwell in a better land, and to
share a diviner lot." Plutarch is well aware that such ques-
tions are involved in great uncertainty ; but he finds it more
difficult to disbelieve than to believe."* All such beliefs and
sentiments, however, are only " outstretching of vain hands,"
if the fundamental faith of religion in God as perfect Ethical
Spirit, and in the experienced world as a dependent manifesta-
tion of God, cannot be rationally sustained. When connected
with this fundamental faith, however, they rise to a quite dif-
ferent level of significance and value as arguments for the
belief in the immortality of the individual.
These sesthetical and altruistic affections and sentiments
are, moreover, closely allied with certain demands for satisfac-
tion of the moral consciousness itself, on the side both of feel-
ing and of thought. In trying to estimate that evidence from
the presence and the persistence of evil which makes a theodicy
so difficult, it was found that the unfinished, imperfect, frag-
mentary character of human ethical experience had chiefly to
be taken into the account. At this point the doctrine of
development afforded us a logical retreat and a source of con-
1 Consolatio ad Uxorem.
2 Compare also his thought as expressed, De Defect. Orac, 43/.
542 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
solation and hope. The extension of this doctrine into the
life beyond, both for the individual and for the race, is con-
nected in a most important way with the belief in God as per-
fect Ethical Spirit — the Moral Ruler and the Redeemer of
mankind, in and through a process of history. If death ends
all for all men, it is difficult or impossible to see how the per-
fect Divine righteousness can vindicate itself. An " over-
World " seems required in order that the " over-Man " may be
evolved, and secure his appropriate sphere of conduct ; in
order that justice may be done, wrong righted, and character
find its legitimate, full expression and outcome. It was con-
fidence in the perfection of the World's moral order, if only
the theatre for the exhibition of this order could be made
extensive enough, and if the play could be carried through
to the end, which gave to the Kantian critique its argument
for immortality as the necessary postulate of an absolute
truth for the moral reason. This moral reason must be some-
how satisfied. The conditions of man's earthly existence,
however, could never be conceived of as so modified that the
unconditioned and perfect ideal could be set into reality in
the midst of them. Thus the largeness and the permanency
of the faith of moral reason in its own ideal guaranteed the
realization, somewhere and somehow, of this same ideal. But
such a realization implied the immortality of the individual ;
for it could only be accomplished through the continuance of
a kingdom of ends, in which personal wills, and the relations
of such wills, attained their completeness in an historical de-
velopment. Defective as the Kantian argument is, in respect
of its alleged apodeictic character, the considerations which
flow from those ethical ideals and principles to which the
argument appeals, will always remain the most firm and reason-
able of the supports for this important hope of the religious
man.
It is at this point that the considerations to which Greek
philosophy gave a preference unite with the later faith of
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 543
Judaism, as modified and reinforced by the religion of Christ
and by the Christian experience. Greek religious philosophy
had come to appreciate the intrinsic worth of the life of the
Self ; — the lofty, imperative character of its ideals, and the
promise of a higher and more perfect realization of those
ideals. Thus it gave the legitimacy of reason to the attempt
of the individual to realize the ideal life. All the Platonic
arguments, for example, spring from the deathless conception
of a worth to the soul-life, which can neither be measured nor
expressed in terms of this sensuous and earthless existence.
But Judaism had developed the conception of God as the per-
fectly righteous ruler of the living and of the dead. And
Jesus, out of his own consciousness of a perfect union between
his own spirit and the perfectly holy and pitiful Spirit of the
Father and Redeemer of mankind, had brought the hope of
immortal life into the clear light of an experienced fact.
This Greek estimate of the inherent worth and dignity of Self-
hood, and of the place and value of the individual's soul in the
universal scheme, is not precisely the equivalent of the argu-
ments current in Christian theology for the so-called " natural
immortality " of the individual. But so far as it tends to
secure the interests of the individual as against the specific and
the general, and especially of the individual person as against
all that has only material values or physical magnitudes upon
its side, it is thoroughly in accord with the most indisputable
conclusions of modern idealistic philosophy. The current phys-
ical science tends constantly to overestimate the importance
of what bulks large ; or of what is so minute, and at the same
time multitudinous, that to express it requires impressive rows
of figures long drawn-out. The greatness of individual men is
something to be scaled accurately and put into mathematical
terms with marketable values ; and the worth of nations is
deemed to be best statable in terms of the size of their popula-
tions, of their armies and navies, of their agricultural and other
products, their imports and their exports. Biological science
544 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
emphasizes the value of the improved species — at however great
expense of countless individuals. But there is another side to
all this, even in the case of individual beings far below the scale
of moral and spiritual values which are applicable to human
lives. Under certain not inconceivable, but frequently recur-
ring circumstances in human history, a few atoms may be more
influential to determine its course, than are scores of the bulk-
iest worlds ; and a single fertilized human ovum may become
the bearer of a soul that shall influence the destiny of millions
of the race.
There are not wanting indications that both science and
philosophy are approaching a common point of view, from
which the significance and the value of the individual — of
whatever species or kind — are made much more important and
emphatic than has hitherto been the case. From this point of
view it would seem that every atom, every mass, every organ-
ized being, every ovum or germ, has its own peculiar existence,
special value, and unique part to play in the planful system of
the universe at large. Nothing is to be regarded as accurately
defined or sufficiently estimated, when it has simply been
classified and assigned to its proper species. Everything has
just that reality which it has, because it is an individual being,
the exact like of which never has been, and never will be
again ; that is to say, the essence of its reality, and the pledge
of its continuance in existence, whether for a longer or a
shorter time, is its individuality. No thing is so mean, no ex-
istence so transitory, no so-called force so impotent to produce
actual changes, as that it can be adequately conceived of, or
expressed, in terms of the species, or in the nomenclature of
the universal. For us, and also " in-itself," the Ultimate
Reality, is concretely present and actual, in the infinite differ-
entiations of individual beings — self-like Things or developed
Selves.
When any individual member of the species called " humuii "
has reached that acme of all evolutionary processes, so far as
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 545
these processes are subject to investigation at all, which con-
sists in the attainment of a moral and spiritual Selfhood, some-
thing has come into being which reflection pronounces to have
an incomparable worth. Each individual Self is, indeed, only-
one of many; but this fact gives a supreme value to the
existence and destiny of a race which is the summing-up of all
that lies behind in the history of the Cosmos, and the promise
of all that is to come. Nature has now produced a kind of
individual which, however it may be compelled to sacrifice
itself for others of its kind, can never be reasonably compelled
to this sacrifice by the offer of a good less valuable than that
which measures up to the full value of the perfected life of a
Self. Hence the determination of the multitudes — essentially
reasonable and sure to prevail, however blind and unconscious
in its exercise — to force the few to count them all, each one
therein, too, as a thing of greatest worth ; because each indi-
vidual of these multitudes is a Self among selves, is one among
the many brethren that are all children of God.
This estimate of the " cosmic value " of a perpetuated self-
existence, such as the human species has already somehow come
to share, is further enhanced by considering its inherent capac-
ity for an unlimited future development. There is no sad-
der or more impressive example of a certain incongruity be-
tween the spiritual potentials and the actual achievements of
the evolutionary forces than that afforded by the fate of the in-
dividual man. If his development is fortunate, it is just when
this development becomes most promising and most aspiring
that its physical basis begins to show most marked signs of an
oncoming decay. In the order of nature, it requires all the
earlier years of youth and manhood, well spent, to equip the
Self with such self-possession as fits it for the beginning of a
truer realization of its awakening and rising ideals. Then
comes almost at once an experience born of the degeneration of
animal tissues, — a sure prognostic of the approaching dissolu-
tion of the organism. The spirit has just got ready to live,
35
646 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and the body is beginning already to die. Thus the capacity
of the individual man for self-development — a capacity which
is inlierent in the very being of every Self — does not seem to
be exhausted, or in any satisfactory degree provided for, by
even the four or live-score years which mark the extreme
limit of time allowed by nature for this development. How-
ever we may seem compelled by the facts to assume an attitude
of indifference to the influence of such considerations, it is
difficult not to sympathize with the complaints of the most
highly gifted men as they contemplate this seemingly pre-
mature cessation of opportunity. All their most worthy and
cherished attainments of knowledge, skill, social influence, and
moral character, seem as nothing compared with what might be
in the future — if only that future lay open before them.
Of course, if the Being of the World has no mind to com-
prehend or heart to feel this pitiful irrationality in its procedure,
then all such arguments are powerless to produce a rational ex-
pectation of immortality for the individual. But we have not
so learned the Being of the World. We may, therefore, agree
with the declaration of a modern writer who has approached
this problem from a quite different point of view. This writer
maintains that the belief in immortality is " a supreme act of
faith in the reasonableness of God's work."' This so-called
" reasonableness," however, is not that which science recognizes
as inherent in the Cosmos when regarded only as a system
of physical forces subject to the poetic sovereignty of a so-
called "reign of law." It is moral reason immanent in Self-
hood, and regnant, in spite of all appearances to the contrary,
in human history. He who holds valid the conception of God
as Ethical Spirit, absolute in power and infinite in perfections,
1 Fiske, Destiny of Man, p. 115/. This statement is made as in agree-
ment with the view of the authors of the "Unseen Universe;" and the
opinion is added that our increase of knowledge as to the process of evolu-
tion enables us to claim "the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element
in man," or elae we "rob the wliole process of its meaning."
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 547
and who therefore takes the predominatingly sesthethical and
moral view of the cosmic system of things and selves, secures
in this way a reasonable ground of hope for the immortality of
the individual.
As to the formal and material details of the immortal life of
the individual, a confession of ignorance is the only justifiable
attitude of mind. In its highest realization the hope of immor-
tality is an experience of a relatively small number of those
who have most closely followed Jesus, the founder of the
hope in its more definitely Christian form. Such examples are
afforded by the Apostles Paul and John and by other Christian
saints. In all the experience of these men, the central and
controlling factor is the consciousness of a new spiritual life
already begun, the essential character of which is expressed by
calling it a life " in Christ " or " in God." The actuality and
progress of this life, it is not in the power of death, either to
destroy or effectually to interrupt. It may, indeed, be mo-
mentarily obscured by periods of bodily weakness and mental
depression. But such periods are succeeded by an increase of
confidence, by a more assured hope brought about by a more
perfect trust in God. It is on account of the characteristic
marks of such a life of ecstacy, longing, and faith, that the
Apostle Paul is said to have become " the type of the mystics." ^
As to his detailed teachings about the way in which the hope
of immortality is to be realized, this Apostle, in common with
other writers of the New Testament, shows the influence of
the current views of the later Jewish apocalypse, although
in a form modified by intimations of those profounder and
more ultimate spiritual conceptions which were inherent in the
Christian doctrine of redemption.
Such experiences prove that it is possible for the individual
believer, who has realized the convictions of subjective religion
in their highest intensity, to develop a certainty of immortal
life, which admits no doubt, and which feels no lack of joyful
1 Wemle, Beginnings of Christianity, I, p. 354.
548 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
assurance. The Self is couvinced that it has already gained
possession of life eternal. But such experiences cannot be
converted into an argument valid for all. The experience
itself, however, is a fact ; it is not confined to the Christian reli-
gion ; in varying degrees and intensities its conviction of hope
has been, and still is, the possession of millions of mankind.
As to the doctrine of the resurrection more particularly, the
modern highly refined theories of the molecular constitution
and amazingly subtile nature of material bodies may perhaps
be held to favor the prospect of finding in tlie near future a
more firmly established scientific basis for this doctrine. They
certainly on the whole tend toward confirming the conclusion :
" Matter is not that which produces consciousness, but that
which limits it and confines its intensity within certain
bounds." ^ In this connection a passing reference to physical
manifestations of the continued existence of the dead, is not
inappropriate. Judged by those standards of moral and spirit-
ual values which the philosophy of religion must ever keep in
mind, these alleged manifestations, even if their reality be ad-
mitted, cannot be given any important place. They may serve
as comforting and cheering phenomena to those who believe in
them, but they contribute little or nothing to the rationality of
religious hope and faith, in the large, so to say. Toward them
the open and yet somewhat severely critical attitude of mind
is still the only rational attitude. The essential beliefs, senti-
ments, and practices of the religious life cannot safely be al-
lowed to be at all intimately entangled with the so-called
'* spiritualistic " proofs of an existence after death.
There are two important deductions, however, from the con-
ception of God as perfect Ethical Spirit which may confidently
be hold to be api)licable to the immortal life of the individual.
One of these establishes the moral continuity of the two lives —
or rather the two stages of the one life of the same Self. In
this reasonable conviction the Egyptian harper sang: "Mind
» So Schiller, Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 293.
IMMORTALITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL 549
thee of the days when thou, too, shalt start for the land to which
one goeth to return not thence. Good for thee will have been
a good life ; therefore be just and hate iniquity ; for he who
loveth what is Right shall triumph," About all this there is
no word to be uttered more penetrating and final than the pro-
phetic exhortation : " Say ye to the righteous, that it shall be
well with him " ; " Woe unto the wicked, it shall be ill with
him."
With this moral principle in its application to the life after
death, if such life there is to be for the individual man, goes
another as its supplement, which is the specially precious gift
of the religion of Christ to the faith and hope of mankind.
Widespreading restorative and redemptive influences are in
the Divine plan ; and these influences cannot be limited to this
side of bodily death. Here again, a confession of ignorance,
in closest conjunction with a confession of faith in the perfect
justice and goodness of God, best accords with the spirit of
piety. As, however, the conception of the perfection of the
Divine Spirit, and so of the fullness and completeness of the
work to be expected from Him, rises and greatens, one of two
consequences would seem to follow with reference to the per-
manent condition and values of the life of every individual
human Self. This life must either come to be rooted in a vol-
untary, moral union with the Divine Life ; or else it must per-
ish, lacking life in itself ; it cannot attain immortality apart
from life in God. In a word : The essentials of the belief in
immortality for the individual can be maintained only in the
form of a confidence that God, in whom every individual of
the human race lives and moves and has his being, will con-
tinue to preserve and to develop the life of all those whose
preservation and progress accord with his most holy and benefi-
cent World-plan. But the rising faith of religion is that this
Divine World-plan will somehow show itself in the future as
the redemption of the race.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE
It has been made obvious by our historical and psycho-
logical investigation that religion, in accordance with its very
nature and especially in its more important developments, does
not fail in adaptability either to the individual or to the race.
It is for each human being a very particular affair ; it provides
for him an object of belief, feeling, and devotion, which is spe-
cific, and which comes into the most intimate relations with his
daily life. But religion is also preeminently a social influence of
incalculable power and worth. This two-fold aspect of experi-
ence applies to the hopes as well as to the more definite dog-
mas, rites, ceremonies, and practices of religion. Religious
hopes are not merely individual, but appertain also to the com-
munity of believers. Thus in a broad way the race's expecta-
tion of a better future, from the religious point of view, may
be said to be the social aggregate of the expectations respecting
the future of individual believers.
The different religions differ greatly, however, in regard to
their interest in, and their hopes for, the future of mankind.
At the one extreme stand such beliefs as Brahmanism and
Buddhism ; at the other, are Judaism and Christianity. The
former concentrate the endeavors of the religious life upon the
individual's obtaining for himself that relief from the miseries
of a changeful existence which is afforded by Nirvana. It is
true that early Buddliism showed an almost Christian pity for
the multitude of men ; and tliat, in the spirit of this pity, it
strove to point out to the multitude the way of a salvation in
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 551
which all might have a share. But Buddhistic salvation itself
was not a social affair. All those desires and affections which
go out toward others must be extinguished as the indispensable
condition, on the part of the individual, of his realizing its hope
of salvation. The good which was for all, was as far as possi-
ble removed from being a supreme social good. On the
contrary, early Judaism held out to the individual little or no
hope of any realized good in the future, except as he could in
imagination continue to picture for the earthly religious com-
munity an era of prosperity in which he was to share. The
important hope was Israel's hope ; the future belonged to the
people ; — but to the people as continuing to live in their descen-
dants and not as inclusive of the faithful dead. When, how-
ever, the hope of Judaism for the future burst through the
gates of Hades, it retained its valuable and distinguishing so-
cial characteristics. It enlarged its own heart and became the
hope of the nations, extending through time and over both the
dead and the living. It was Christianity, above all other reli-
gions, that answered for the individual the inquiry, What may
I hope for? in the name, and in the behalf, of all mankind.
Thus it alone of all religions combined the more egoistic ap-
peals to the individual's longing for an immortal life, with the
more altruistic promises of the fulfillment of the most exten-
sive social hope.
Christianity answers the question of hope for the future of
the race with a conception which is the loftiest and grandest
ever framed by the human mind. This conception bears the title
of the " Kingdom of God," or the " Kingdom of Heaven " — the
realization of the perfect social Ideal. Christianity received
this conception from Judaism, in whose prophetic and poetical
imagination and thought it had been developing through several
centuries of national experience, both joyful and distressing.
But the religion of Christ did something far more than merely
to commend and hand on this conception in unaltered form.
We have already seen that its Ideal is too comprehensive and
552 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
lofty to be identified with any ecclesiastical organization, or
even with the conception of the Christian Church Universal.
The latter has constantly, on the one hand, to guard itself
against collective tyranny and, on the other, to avoid an exces-
sive individualism. The religious community must have its
dogmatic formulas, its modes of worship, and its practical rules
that are enforceable by discipline over its members. But the
supreme social Ideal which offers itself to the hope of the be-
liever in God as perfect Ethical Spirit, and as the Redeemer of
mankind by a complex historical process, is a much larger and
more incorporeal affair. It is the equivalent in its reach and
in its perfect realization, to the refinement, intensifying, uni-
versal extension, and perfect sway, of spirituality among men.
As organized and visible Christianity has repeatedly proved
itself faithless or ineffectual in the work of transforming soci-
ety in accordance with this social Ideal, there has been a return
to the original and fundamentally Christian position. This
position aflfirms that the significance of the work of Jesus and
his followers is to be found in just this transforming and up-
lifting spiritual power for the whole race of men. The express
design of the religion of Christ is to bring the spirit of man
into right relations of faith, love, and obedience, with the Ab-
solute Ethical Spirit who is man's Father and Redeemer.
Only in this way of repeated self -purification, and of increas-
ing reform, does the Christian Church accomplish, at all satis-
factorily, its great mission of devotion to the progressive real-
ization of the Kingdom of God among men.
But all tlie meanwhile, the uplifting and purifying spiritual
forces which exist and are effective in other religions, and in
other forms than the definitely religious activities of man's
developing life, are tending toward the same supreme Good.
Science, philosophy, art, and industrial and commercial as well
as political and social improvement, furnish forms of eneigy
which co-operate with religion in furthering the coming of the
Kingdom of Heaven to mankind. This at any rate, is the
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 553
answer whicli religion itself offers to the question: What
may I hope for as to the future of the race ?
Merely to raise the question of the ultimate destiny of hu-
manity, as measured by its prospective approach in the remotest
future of its existence to its own most highly developed social
Ideal, implies an advance in race-culture of no mean degree.
The problem of the future of the race is, in its very nature,
not one to concern the mind of the savage or so-called primitive
man. Yet tribes of a low degree of culture do entertain cer-
tain beliefs of a future idealized existence, or improved destiny,
for thsir own members. Such an ideal has also been developed
repeatedly in a semi-speculative way by individual thinkers who
represented the highest expressions of the culture of their own
age ; — as, for example, in Plato's " Republic," Augustine's " City
of God," and in a more restricted way, in the admissions and
suggestions of the latter part of Kant's " Critique of Judgment."
But the one most distinguished example of an historical evolu-
tion of this social Ideal, under the influence mainly of religious
beliefs, but not by any means uninfluenced by collateral con-
siderations, is the biblical conception of the " Kingdom of God."
At the one end of this historical evolution we are invited to see
how the conception of a happy and prosperous Israel under
the rule of Yahweh arose ; at the other stands the picture in
the Apocalypse of "a new heaven and a new earth," a " great
city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God,"
where " the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the
light of it : " " and there shall be no more curse ; but the throne
of God and of the Lamb shall be in it ; and his servants shall
serve him : and they shall see his face, and his name shall be
in their foreheads."
The barest attempt to criticise this conception of an ideal
social future for mankind, involves the investigation of an in-
conceivably vast range of subordinate inquiries ; and it requires
a confidence in the conclusions of speculation as to the prob-
able outcome of tendencies extending over vast stretches of
554 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
time, which is not both easily and wisely to be attained. Yet
here is tliis beautiful dream of humanity, which the convictions
and faiths of a religion of redemption undertake to convert
into a rational hope.
In support of this hope, which is the somewhat peculiar gift
of Christian faith to the world, no appeal can indeed be made
to considerations which are worthy to be called proofs, much
less demonstrations of the irresistible kind. And yet the hope
is by no means left without support. Thus the reflective mind
may come either confidently to believe in, or at least to indulge
the rational expectation of a realization of the social Ideal in
the future of the race. The considerations which lead to this
faith, this hope, may be said to be of two kinds. One kind is
chiefly collateral, and is not derived from definitely religious
beliefs and conceptions. But the more positive and convin-
cing considerations depend upon certain fundamental faiths of
religion.
Neither science nor philosophy is at present able to propose
any certain, or even highly probable, solution for the problem
of the future destiny of the human race. Nor does it seem
likely that either will acquire a firm grasp upon the data nec-
essary for such a solution, for a long time to come. Both
science and philosophy, however, create expectations which
may serve even now to modify and correct, or to corroborate,
those faiths and hopes respecting the future of humanity, which
the developed religious consciousness has come to entertain.
The astronomical and physico-chemical sciences are now deal-
ing largely in the role of prediction as to the final fate of the
earthly habitation of man. On the whole, it cannot be said
that their utterances are encouraging to the literal interpreta-
tion of the apocalyptic vision of a " new heaven and a new
earth," which shall Ix; wholly free from those physical discom-
forts and restrictions whose effects in the social evolution of
mankind are now quite universally hehl to have been so indis-
pensable. The advocate of the possibility of a realization of
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 555
this vision cannot safely forget that the recognition of the im-
perative need and extreme value of the struggle for existence,
with its immense toll of hardship, suffering, and death, is an
important part of that theodicy which is made somehow neces-
sary in order to place the religious doctrine of the Divine Love
and of the reality of the redemptive process upon grounds of
fact and of history. On the other hand, these sciences may
properly be reminded — a thing which their most prudent and
learned students are readiest to admit — that they really Icnow
little or nothing of an assured scientific character about even
the remotest physical future of the earth. Indeed, the scepti-
cal and agnostic attitude toward the prophecies of astronomy,
physics, and chemistry, is peculiarly appropriate just at present.
For all the most assured principles of these sciences are under-
going a very severe testing which is resulting in exceedingly
rapid and diversified revision. Moreover, if the most pessimistic
conclusions were indubitably warranted with regard to the fu-
ture physical condition of the earth, this would not of necessity
settle the destiny of the human race as considered from the
point of view of the religious ideal. In the expression of this
ideal, whether for the individual man or for human society, the
detailed descriptions of those most gifted with insight and
firmest in faith and hope, are confessedly figurative and sym-
bolic. How far the actual fulfillment of the faith, the realiza-
tion of the hope, is dependent upon the continuance of the
cosmic system in substantially its present form, we are quite
unable to say, either in the name of science, religion or specu-
lative philosophy. We simply do not know. And physical
science does not know, whether this cosmic system may not
retain substantially its present form through incalculable aeons
yet to come. On the other hand, when philosoph}' and theol-
ogy begin to discourse about " eternity," in the strictest tem-
poral application of the word, the conceptions of both are
equally misty, negative, and unfit for discussion in terms of
knowledge or even of reasoned opinion.
556 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The predictions of biology and anthropology, when these
sciences attempt to extend the role of prophec}'' to the end of
the existence of the human race, while they come nearer to
our daily experiences and to our more immediate interests,
cannot be said to have any truly scientific character. And,
indeed, as they are actually made by the students of these
sciences, they are indefinite and vacillating in a high degree.
There are existent in man's past history and present experience
grounds for each one of several quite different opinions as to what
the far-away future destiny of the race will be. One of these
opinions sees the inevitable conditions of human existence, and
of the multiplication of the species, slowly but irresistibly
tending to increased and more complicated miseries, and to a
condition of arrested development followed by decay and death.
In the natural history of the individual man this opinion reads
the future history of the race of men. According to another
sociological theory which can make at least an equally trust-
worthy appeal to certain sides of experience, the time will
come when the forces that favor the various kinds of progress,
and those forces that induce retrogradation, will be in a state
of equilibrium. A third opinion is yet more frankly and joy-
ously optimistic ; and they who are blessed with the ability to
hold it firmly in project see a continual advance of humanity
— unlimited by time and bounded only by the geographical
limits of the habitable globe — toward the realization of its
economical and social ideals. Each one of the three views,
which the biological and anthropological sciences attempt to
place upon a basis of recognized facts, has had its counterpart
in the religious doctrine of the future of the race. Religious
pessimists have held that even at the last only a few will be
saved ; and these few will be translated to some Paradise apart,
while misery and death eternal will be the fate of the race at
large. Others, more optimistically inclined, have pictured the
social salvation which is in the end to come to the great ma-
jority, if not to all of the race, as a fortunate condition, eitlier
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 557
of stable equilibrium or of ceaseless and indefinite progress in
blessedness. In the details of its pictures of the future, his-
torical Christianity has varied all the way from the grossest
and most revolting to the most refined and spiritual conceptions.
If these forms of natural science contribute little either to
the defense or to the refutation of the hopes of religion for
the future of humanity, the case is somewhat more illumining
when we regard the indications which are offered by the past
history of man's spiritual development, as to the probabilities
of his future development. Here the notable thing is the
rising of the Social Ideal in the consciousness of mankind,
and the increasing dissatisfaction with the conditions already
attained toward the realization of this ideal. No other social
phenomenon is so impressive at the present time as this con-
stantly rising and widespreading restlessness under existing
conditions of every sort. This pervasive spiritual influence
is stirring the millions of Russia; and the more numerous
millions of the Orient are awakening as from centuries of
sleep. The interest of the present age in the social future of
the race, whether its life is to be continued in the environment,
physical and psychical, of an earthly existence, or amidst other
unimaginably different circumstances, although it is congenial
to the spirit of the religion of Christ, is a comparatively modern
affair. " The sense of duty to the race," as Rhys Davids has
said,^ is largely a result of the " continuity of human progress."
If we study more profoundly this social unrest, as respects
both its causes and its significance for the future, we cannot
fail to realize several important respects in which it resembles
the belief and hopes that sustain the religious doctrine of the
coming, in an historical way, of the kingdom of God among
men. One of the marked points of resemblance is a certain
divinely induced pessimism. With all the advances of the
social status, whether over smaller or wider areas of society,
there has almost uniformly come an increased dissatisfaction
1 Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 111.
558 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
with the advances already made. The ideal end seems no
nearer than before ; indeed, the ideal has risen faster than man
has risen in his progress toward its realization. Thus the cry
of the reformer who is intensely interested in the social better-
ment of humanity, whether from the more purely social or the
more definitively religious point of view, is the same in all
periods of history and under all changes of race-culture. He
is always a John the Baptist ; and his cry is always the same :
" Repent and bring forth fruits of repentance in righteousness,
for the end is pressing but is not yet attained." It is only the
final and far-away look of either sociology or religion that can
be thoroughly optimistic. Changes of governments and of
other forms of social organization, no matter how much of
social betterment they may seem to carry with them, never
fully satisfy the demands for reconstruction. They all leave
behind, or they actually produce, a more intense feeling of the
schism between the actual and the Ideal, between what is and
what ought to be. There follows, of course, a yet more keen
and imperative demand for further progress.
In this way the doctrine of social betterment, considered as
a purely natural and meclianical process, suggests the insuf-
ficiency of its own conception, and the hopelessness of all at-
tempts that are governed solely by this conception. The
conception itself implies a process of the conservation and sum-
mation of a vast number of spiritual and " worth-having "
energies, co-operating through long stretches of time to pro-
duce a common valuable result. But this is to say that the
conception is an Ideal. In order progressively to realize such
an ideal in the actual experience of mankind, confidence must
be placed in some discriminating and unifying Force which is at
work in and through all the conflicting, or the sympathetic and
mutually assisting, human organizations. This force we may
call the riaing Spirituality of the race. But this is substantially
what religion means when it regards its own mighty social up-
lift of humanity as the work of God's Spirit in advancing the
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 55y
coming of God's Kingdom among men. From this point of
view we may regard the restlessness and dissatisfaction of the
present age, whose imperative demands for spiritual gifts,
spiritual development, and spiritual greatness, seem so incon-
sistent with its extravagant estimate of the worth of sensuous
and temporal goods, as humanity's unceasing cry to God for
the presence and work of his Holy Spirit with redeeming power.
The cry is also prophetic of the confession to which this same
age will soon be forced ; for the social Ideal will never be
reached, or even successfully followed, except by means of a
progressive purification and transformation of finite spirits by
the omnipotent Ethical Spirit of God. That which so-called
sociology, too often ignorantly, worships is declared by religion
to be the Kingdom of God that is ever coming, but is not yet,
among the children of men.
No breach is made, then, in the continuity of human science
when we turn to the beliefs of religion for a more positive sup-
port to our hope for the future of the race. As for the indi-
vidual's hope of immortal life, so for humanity's hope of a pro-
gressive realization of the social ideal, it is the conception of
God as perfect Ethical Spirit, in which the rational grounds
must, if at all, be chiefly found. This conception attributes to
the Being of the World, to the Personal Absolute, the titles of
the loving Father and Redeemer, as well as the Creator and
Preserver of mankind. Thus there is seated in the very heart
of Reality the unchanging ground, as a conscious final purpose,
of the progressive realization of the social Ideal. God will
see to it that his Kingdom in its perfection is brought to actu-
ality for the race. Intimations of this hope, as based upon
faith in the moral perfection of the divine purpose, are ex-
pressed by the inspired seers, poets, and philosophers of all
ages. But the hope itself is an essential deduction, or corollary,
from the central truths and most firmly founded faiths of the
Christian religion.
When, however, this hope is taken before the facts of history
560 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
and of present experience, and its validity tested by estimating
the power actually inherent in Christianity to overcome the
enormous obstacles in the way of its own Ideal, the answer is
not so clear and confident as could well be wished. As esti-
mated by the tendencies of the times, the redeeming force of
the religion nominally espoused by those nations which are at
present inherently most vigorous, and most influential in mould-
ing the destiny of humanity, seems to present two diverse, if
not contradictory, aspects. On the one side, the forces which
make for the advancement of race-culture, and for the social
progress of mankind, appear to be separating themselves more
and more from socially organized religion. On the other side,
religion itself as an affair of the human spirit seems to be more
and more friendly to every other important influence that ad-
vances this culture and that contributes to social progress.
The observer who is chiefly influenced by one set of appear-
ances might conclude that the social ideal is being realized
apart from the active participation of religion, either as sub-
jectively considered — a filial attitude toward God — or as a
system of beliefs and a form of social organization. But on
regarding more patiently the other set of appearances, he might
experience the encouraging impression that, in Christian com-
munities at least, all the forces of civilization and of social
progress are becoming, if less obviously and, so to say, tech-
nically, still more truly religious than ever before.
Upon the present tendencies to divorce science, art, business,
politics, and all other forms of social organization except the
Church, from definite connections of control or influence from
religion, we liave already remarked at sufficient length. It has
been made sufficiently clear that this divorce, if it could be ac-
complished, would not result in the lasting benefit of any of
these interrelated forms of race-culture and of social progress.
But it is now in place to notice that religion was never before
so cordial — not to say complainant — in its attitude toward all
these forms of human interest, as it is in the so-called Christian
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 561
nations of to-day. In all kinds of charitable works, and of
efforts for the education, increased culture, and social improve-
ment of the multitudes, the believer and the unbeliever, the
man esteemed a saint and the so-called sinner, are more than
ever before standing side by side and working together with a
common will. It is true that irreligious and immoral ways of
acquiring the resources which are dispensed in these efforts at
promoting the social ideal are tolerated in the very bosom of
the Christian churches. Thus religion is more discredited on
the side of the acquisition, than it is credited on the side of
the disbursement, of the good things provided by God for man.
And certain grave risks, — such as arise from remoteness of
personal connection, the breeding of dependence, of laziness,
and of professional pauperism, oflQcial extravagance, and loss of
the reactionary beneficial influence over the giver, — encompass
the present form of so-called " organized charities." Essentially
the same thing is true of much of the non-sectarian and non-re-
ligious education, of the practice of art, and the pursuit of
social advantages and comforts, without regard to religious
restraints, which is characteristic of the age. Above all is it
becoming palpably felt that no merely economic arrangements,
or legal enactments, or civil organizations, which leave the
Christian principle of brotherly love out of their working, will
avail to effect the desired social uplift of the race. Yet tliis
prevailing spirit of co-operation is doing much to resolve antago-
nisms and to unite the forces of all kinds that make for man's
betterment ; it is, therefore, most divinely significant and di-
vinely promising with respect to the progressive realization of
the religious Ideal.
The modern conception of an ideal Social Democracy, and
all that this conception means when taken at its highest terms
and in its most comprehensive form, is the product of Chris-
tianity more than of any other influence. At its very begin-
ning this religion broke away from the old tribal notion, which
united a certain group of men under the social principle : " Thy
562 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
god is my god," because " thy people is my people." But
Christianity became, as of necessity, a Church or social organ-
ization ; and then, instead of steadfastly adhering to its funda-
mental idea of a spiritual unity which should include all
redeemed humanity, it gave itself a variety of more or less
rigid constitutions in conjunction with the locally prevalent
forms of the social organizations of family and of state. If,
therefore, we cannot quite completely condemn (following a
modern writer on apologetics) all state churches and territorial
ecclesiastical systems as "heathenish," we certainly cannot
consider them as fit to represent the Christian social Ideal.
Good citizenship is an essential manifestation of all truly
religious spirit ; it is especially so of the Christian life, whose
principle of brotherly love is the highest and mightiest of all
forces to initiate and to accomplish political and social reforms.
But here it is necessary to clear the mind of certain errors as
to what good citizenship really is, in the truly Christian sig-
nificance of the phrase. The religious ideal has no tendency to
secure the support of the existing government in all its policy,
whether this policy be in accordance, or not, with the present
wishes and aims of the multitude of the people. Neither is it
patriotism, as that word is too frequently employed. For the
fact remains substantially unchanged among the modern Chris-
tian nations, as it was of old among the heathen empires : —
they are governed veiy largely by selfish and hypocritical men,
and their behavior toward one anotlier and toward the weaker
races is anything but pious and benevolent. Indeed, there is
no more awful and absurd mockery of the spirit of Christ than
to call these governments by his name. Therefore good citizen-
ship of the truly religious sort is sometimes forced into passive
compliance with what can neither be approved nor changed
at once ; and sometimes it is active resistance and steadfast
refusal to conform to the existing regulations. But it is uni-
formly an active co-operation, according to tlie individual's
opportunity, with all other good citizens to secure a more
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 563
moral and truly enlightened government; and especially to
reform the abuses existing in the present government. And
never, under any circumstances, does fidelity to the principles
of religion allow the individual to fail of regarding the exhorta-
tion, whatever others may think or do, " to keep himself un-
spotted from the world."
All other ways of realizing the social Ideal by a progressive
betterment of human conditions are, however, secondary and
subordinate when regarded from the more definitely religious
point of view. From this point of view, the supreme good for
the individual is that immortal life whose essence is a union
of the finite spirit with the Infinite Holy Spirit ; and the per-
fection of which is attained through the continuance of this
spiritual union. From the realization of this ideal in an in-
creasing number of the race there follows of necessity the
realization of the social Ideal. For as has been already said,
the Kingdom of God is the " social aggregate " of all the re-
deemed ones of the individuals who have become true " sons
of God." Thus Christianity attempts to unite the hope of the
future after death of the individual with the hope of the future
of the race. Thus would it bind together in one holy society
all men of good- will, quite irrespective of the time at which
their spirits have been released by death from their connection
with the bodily organism. Here, too, however, the manner of
effecting this social unity is not made clear to religious faith.
From the very nature of the case, it is probable that it cannot
be made clear. The expectant mind is invited to look along
two lines which do not run parallel, but which cannot be seen,
but can only be imagined, somehow to converge and to come
together at the last. Looking along one line, the observer is
bidden to behold the Christian Church, or social organization
of believers, universal and triumphant. This organization is
to extend itself through all the ages, and over every age, tribe,
people, and nation — until all the earth shall know the Lord.
Then the race is bound together in bonds of love and fraternal
564 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
union ; war is no more ; all preventable disease and death are
abolished; and the world that "lay in the Wicked One," ac-
cording to the early Christian conception and figure of speech,
has become a new world, an ideal social community of re
deemed ones. But looking along another line, he is bidden to
imagine the fulfilment of that apocalyptic vision which early
Christianity received from Judaism ; and which, largely by
the speculative insight and skill of Paul, was made for cen-
turies the prevalent belief of the orthodox Christian Church.
Christ returns to earth ; the dead are raised ; the judgment is
made final ; and the union of all the sons of God in one com-
munity of the blessed is made complete.
The extravagance of views and of conduct which the apoca-
lyptic beliefs of early Cliristianity produced, and the patent
failure of the subsequent history to correspond to these beliefs,
brought them into disfavor with the more reflective thinking
of the Christian world. A similar experience has been repeated
over and over again in the history of the Christian Church.
At whatever cost to a dogmatic confidence in the teachings of
the New Testament, the growing indisposition to conceive of
the future of humanity after the precise pattern of this apoca-
lyptic cannot be overlooked or easily overcome. The great
truths that the righteous dead, and the righteous among the
living, are to be considered as subjects of one glorious hope,
as members of one Divine society, and that the time is coming
when this union of interest and of life shall be obvious, are
better conserved by taking them out of their more definite,
sensuous and symbolical setting. That which is pictured in
temporal and cataclysmal fashion by this Apocalypse may then
be believed in, and hoped for, as a good that is ever present,
and ever accumulating in higher and liigher degrees of energy
and of extension. Thus for the individual believer the saying
of Jesus becomes the more impressive, that the Kingdom of
God is within hiin ; and tliat its universalizing is tlie very proc-
ess that is going on around hiui, in which he is bidden to take
THE FUTURE OF THE RACE 565
his part. And although neither science nor private experience
have served to penetrate the vail which separates all the mem-
bers of the Kingdom on this side, from those who are on the
other side of death, still this vail is to Christian faith a very
thin one. And to that one larger faith, which unites the indi-
vidual's hope of immortality with humanity's hope of its social
ideal, this vail is destined ultimately to disappear completely.
The light which science and philosophy can throw along
either of the historic lines of the early Christian expectation
for the future is, indeed, dim and quite insufficient to encour-
age the attempt at further definition and argument to establish
details. There remains, however, the fact of the hope itself ;
religion, in the highest form of its manifestation of faith and
hope respecting the future of mankind, expects the progressive
realization of the social Ideal, in the establishment, by an his-
torical process of redemption, of the Kingdom of God among
men. This hope reposes in the faith tliat such is the Good-
Will of the omnipotent, omnipresent, and perfect Ethical
Spirit, who is the Fountain, Guarantor, and Goal, of every form
of good. Of a share in this hope every finite spirit who shares
in the good-will of this Infinite Spirit is invited to partake.
Somehow, and at some time, God is pledged to unite all his
many sons in a common life that shall realize the conception
which the experience of redemption has inspired, but which
the imagination has striven in vain definitely to reproduce.
Thus the promise of religion for the future remains : " What
eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into
the heart of man to conceive, God hath laid up for them that
love him." And, "forgetting those things which are behind,
and reaching forth unto those things which are before," the
effort to realize this promise in their own lives and influence
is the practical religion of all the true sons of God.
CHAPTER XL VII
SUMMARY AND CONCLCTSION
It remains only to gather into a few sentences the more
obvious and important truths which our long journey of ex-
ploration may be said fairly to have established. And fii"st
among them is the profound depth, measureless extent, and
sublime height, of the facts, suggestions, and implicates of
the religious experience of humanity. Were we in need of
another picturesque and on the whole truthful, but not
strictly scientific definition of man, we might be tempted to
say that he is above everything else, a religious animal.
For a faithful and full description of the sources, aspects,
and products, of human religious experience involves all those
forms of functioning in their most extensive and intensive
energy, which constitute what is more vaguely connected
by any such term as a " human nature." In the development
of the race, therefore, no other concourse of motives, and of
guiding psychical and spiritual influences, has been more pro-
ductive of important results, than that which may be fitly
designated as Religion, in the most comprehensive meaning
of this term.
To point out the same essential and fateful trutli as seen
from a slightly different patli of ap[)roach: Man alone is
capable of conceiving of the Being of the World as an invis-
ible, spiritual Power, and of feeling the desire, and making
the effort to adjust liimself to this power and to secure good-
fellowsliip with it. Since this way of conceiving reality is
necessarily anthropomorphic — /. f., is essentially his own way,
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 567
is man's way — the Divine Being is imagined, thought of, and
treated, as though it were self-like. But as humanity devel-
ops, and as the conception of what it is to be a Self great-
ens and rises in character, in accordance with the progressive
realization of a larger and higher Selfhood in human history,
the mental picture of the Being of the World is correspond-
ingly changed. In the greater religions of humanity, and
above all in the highest and purest types of Christian belief,
this Ideal of religious faith and worship has come to be rep-
resented by the conception of a personal Absolute, who is at
the same time perfect Ethical Spirit, and who stands in re-
lations to humanity that are fitly symbolized by such terms
as Father and Redeemer. And, indeed, the formation of this
Ideal is the crowning achievement of man's religious expe-
rience ; it has actually gathered together and incorporated into
itself all the supremest efforts of reflective thinking, of
purest and noblest feeling, and of the practical life of piety
and devotion, on the part of the religiously best of the race.
This Ideal therefore, appears to religious experience, to be
the revelation of the true nature of the Being of the World
as made in and through the " sons of God." Supreme among
these sons of God and religious leaders and revealers, is
Jesus the Christ. So much as this, together with all the
manifold and profound influences which this form of the de-
velopment of man has exercised upon the other principal
forms of his development, would seem to be properly placed
amongst the indubitable facts of human history.
But at once must we remind ourselves that such an Ideal can-
not be regarded as mere idea^ that has been hatched in warmth
of sentiment and has thus grown wings which enable it to rise
above the realm of fact and reason, and to float with rhythmic
and beautiful motion in the thin air where science and even phi-
losophy lose their breath and fear to ascend. Against a similar
conception of the ideals of humanity in general we must once
more utter our most emphatic protest, not only in the name of
568 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
history and psychology, of art, ethics, and religion, but also of
science and philosophy as well. None of man's ideals — ^such
as abide in history, because they spring from, and are nourished
by, the most permanent and fundamental needs and aspirations
of human nature — can by any means reasonably be treated as
purely subjective, as so-called mere ideas. On the contrary,
they all have a most well assured and an inexpressibly precious
ontological value. What is called "science" — in the hardest,
narrowest, and if you please most bigoted meaning of the
word — cannot afford to overlook their valuable and productive
presence even in the midst of its own self. For, indeed, there
would be no science, in any tenable meaning of the word, were
it not for the impulsive energy and moulding force of the ideal.
And the so-called scientific conception of the Being of the
World, especially as this conception has framed itself in the
most modern times, is all interfused with the presence, and
dominated by the power, of tlie ideal. Were this not the fact,
this conception would not be the respectable and interesting
theory, explanatory of a certain limited aspect of the total ex-
perience of humanity, which it most certainly is. But to argue
that philosophy accepts the truth of the ontological value of
ideals is quite unnecessary ; for this is the assumption which
alone makes even the beginning of any positive form of philo-
sophical opinion to be a possibility for the reflective thinker.
In this treatise we have been interested chiefly, and indeed
exclusively, in affirming and testing the truth that a candid
examination of the problems of the philosophy of religion es-
tablishes yet more firmly, uj)on a broad basis of trustworthy
and unquestioned facts of human experience, the ontological
value of man's reli'/ious ideals. In a word, this form of the
experience of humanity is just as entitled to judge clearly con-
cerning the real nature of the Ultimate Reality, tl)e invisible
and mysterious Being of the World, as are the various forms
of the positive, pliysico-cliemiLal sciences. There are no
charges of unverifird conjecture, extravagant imaginings, or
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 569
anthropomorphic procedure, which science can hurl at religion
in the field of belief as to the nature of this Reality, which re-
ligion cannot return with equal force and show of violence.
For religion, too, has its firm foothold over a vast area of the
most indubitable human experiences. And if there are many
truths about all things, even including man's soul, to which
only the investigations of these sciences can contribute, there
are other truths concerning the same things, and especially
concerning man's soul, about which religion is chiefly entitled
to be heard. Science, in any of the several stricter meanings
of that word, can never explain all experience. Its theory of
reality is always one-sided, partial, and in certain aspects un-
satisfying. Religious beliefs, religious sentiments, and the
practical life of piety — these are actual facts of a limited form
of experience. But they are also integral parts of that total
experience which science, in the broadest and vaguest meaning
of the word, and philosophy are ever striving to explain. The
Ideal of religion is therefore rooted in actuality. It is a valid
evidence for the essential nature of that Reality out of which
its own nature is a never-ceasing growth. Indeed, above all
other ideals do those of religion incorporate themselves into
the actualities of man's life, in an abiding, influential, and in-
destructible way.
The religious conception of the Being of the World, when
taken at its best estate and in the form of its supreme develop-
ment, and after being subjected to critical testing in the light
of the allied conceptions of science and philosophy, is indeed,
of the very highest evidential value. This conception is, of
course, subject to continuous development, always in need of
reconstruction, of improved construction. There are many un-
solved problems still latent or obvious within its content ;
there are many differences as to the expression of its details or
even of its more important characteristics ; there is the envelop-
ing mist of the incomprehensible and the inexpressible ; — all
this, and more, to perplex us in the religious Ideal of God as
570 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
absolute and perfect Ethical Spirit. But such defects belong
in an inevitable way to ideals in general ; and especially to
that Ideal which, whether primarily assuming the scientific or
the philosophical or the religious point of view, aims to compre-
hend within itself the entire system of experienced realities, in
the form of one explanatory principle that shall satisfy best
the intellectual, affective, and practical needs of human life.
Neither in the name of science nor in that of philosophy can
the finite mind escape these defects. But neither in religion,
nor in science, nor in philosophy, does their presence warrant
us in indulging either in dogmatic agnosticism, or indifference,
or despair. , All human truth is approximate, subject to re-
examination and restatement, interfused with the mysterious
and as yet uncognizable. If, however, our knowledge has been
advanced by the foregoing critical investigation somewhat
further toward the clearer light, and our faith in the greater
verities of religious experience has been somewhat strength-
ened and made more rational, the long labor of the investiga-
tion has been by no means without its sufficient reward.
And, finally, we should be glad to have it undei-stood that
the result of the investigation corresponds to the spirit in which
it was begun, and in which it has been conducted throughout.
This is constructive, irenic, conciliatory ; and wherever it has
seemed to be for the moment destructive, polemical, or antag-
onizing, the change has been merely seeming and necessitiited by
the momentary exigencies of the discussion. Science, philoso-
phy, and religion, all have their own peculiar theories of reality,
tiieir own more proper conceptions of the Being of the World.
To science the sum-total of experienced realities seems best
conceived of as an orderly, law-abiding, self-evolving, mechani-
cal system. To philosophy, with its profounder insights and
more far-reaching critical analysis, this same totality appears
as the expression of a Unitary Being, that is absolute Will,
functioning teleologically as omnipresent, immanent Idea.
But religion conceives of the ground of its experience in a
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 671
way to satisfy more immediately and perfectly certain sestlieti-
cal and ethical cravings and certain demands for support to
exigencies of the practical life. As its thought becomes more
comprehensive and deeply reflective, it frames the conception
of God, as perfect Ethical Spirit, the Object of faith, of wor-
ship, and of service.
The World, however, is One and man is one. Therefore the
steady pressure of the demands for some theory of reality that
shall take fuller account of the different aspects of this cosmo-
logical Unity, and that shall appeal to the total experience^ in
a harmonizing way, of this psychological and anthropological
unity, can never be long resisted. Science and religion, and
philosophy and religion, cannot long refuse to take account of
each other's truths. They are all aiming at the One Truth ;
and this one truth must base itself upon, and be understood in
the light of, the totality of human experience. Inasmuch,
however, as only a prolonged study of history and of psychology
can tell us what the so-called religious experience actually is,
and inasmuch as only the critical, reflective, and Sjjeculatively
constructive method of thought can fruitfully avail itself of the
data furnished by this study, the Philosophy of Religion is the
only arbiter and reconciler of all strife in this domain. But
the very data are never all given ; the exploration of those
which belong to the past is scarcely as yet more than well be-
gun. Moreover, the powers and achievements of reflective
thought are taxed to their utmost, and very speedily tran-
scended, when employed upon the piofounder problems and
larger thoughts of the religious life and development of human-
ity. Religion itself is an ever-developing experience. Its
Object of faith is essentially an ever-expanding Ideal-Real.
Therefore any attempt to treat the truths of the religious ex-
perience of humanity by the method of philosophy can only
terminate in a still imperfect condition of knowledge, although
in an improved condition of rational faith.
INDEX
AB, Egyptian doctrine of, II, 495 f.
Ahh6 de Broglie, I, 45, 72, II, 275
Absolute, the, Neo-Platonic views of,
I, 6; as Self, I, 253 f., 263 f., 333 f.,
344 f., 347 f., 359, 493 £., 605 f.,
II, 13 f., 81 f., 94 f., 117 f., 139 f.,
147 f., 217 f., 259 f., 282, 345 f.,
449 f. ; as indetermined conception,
I, 267 f., 615, II, 111 f., 117 f., 222
f., 259 f., 347.
Absoluteness, of religion, I, 71 f., II,
467 f.; of God, I, 431, II, 107-121,
348 f.
Acquoy, Prof., I, 5 f.
Adi-Buddha, as Creator, II, 321.
Agni, worship of, I, 175, 183.
Agnosticism, in religion, I, 24, II,
15, 20, 23 f., 238 f.; arguments
against, II, 239 f.; both religious
and anti-religious, II, 239 f .
Agriculture, connection of, with re-
ligion, I, 392 f.
Ahura-Mazda, I, 184, 199, 246,
II, 166, 321, 355, 391.
Akbar, I, 7, 10.
Akiba, Rabbi, I, 475.
Al-Ash' Ari, I, 582.
Algonkins, worship of manito, I, 101.
Allah, conception of, I, 200 f., 406,
II, 129, 132, 135, 358.
Al-Uzza, I, 201.
Amalgamation, nature of, in religion,
I, 166 f., 194 f.
Amon-Ra (see Ra, the god).
Ananda, II, 499 f.
Ancestor-worship, in China, I, 148,
171 f., 268, II, 7 f., 498; Japan,
I, 149, 403, 571, II, 7f.; and
Babylonia, I, 170; among the
Hindus, I, 171; of the dead, II,
479, 484 f.
Ani, Maxims of, I, 532.
Animals, as worshipped, I, 97 f.,
101 f. (see also, Theriolatry).
Animism, nature of, I, 89, 90 f.
(note), 101 f., 385.
Anselm, his argument for the Being
of God, II, 46.
Anthropology, relation of, to philoso-
phy of religion, I, 12 f., 31 f., 110 f.;
on primitive man, I, 135 f.
Anthropomorphism, necessary to re-
ligion, I, 321 f., 347 f., 352 f.,
II, 41 f., 92 f., 241 f., 566 f.
Apocalyptic, of Buddha, I, 577 f.,
II, 499 f.; the Persian, II, 390 f.;
of later Judaism, II, 508 f., 512 f.,
547; the Christian, II, 509 f., 511 f.,
513 f., 547 f., 553, 564 f.
Apollo, I, 280, 465.
ApoUonius, I, 437.
Apologists, the Christian, I, 431 f.,
II, 283, 425 f.
Aquinas, his conception of miracle,
II, 435.
Arabia, its worship of trees and
stones, I, 102 f., 155; natural
characteristics of, I, 165 f.; bloody
sacrifices of, I, 525.
Aricia, Frazer on priest of, I, 34 f.,
188 (note).
Aristides, Apology of, II, 283.
Aristotle, on conception of Deity, 1,
317, II, 53, 55; nature of justice, II,
180, 185; on love of the gods, II,
190.
574
INDEX
Arnold, Matthew, I, 348, II, 275.
Art, relation of, to religion, I, 435 f.,
437 f., 447 f.; of Egypt, I, 447;
and Babylonia, I, 447.
Aryans, primitive religion of, I, 34,
58, 221 f., II, 6 f.
Ashera, I, 521.
Asoka, King, I, 54, 117.
Atheism, position of, II, 237 f., 244 f.
Athenagoras, II, 328.
Atman, conception of, I, 107, 326,
354, II, 17 f., 167 f., 262, 280, 323,
489 f., 493, 535.
Augustine, on "two-fold truth," I,
56 (note); nature of Christianity,
I, 70, 127, 553; mysticism of, I,
344; on doctrine of the Church,
II, 401; his conception of miracle,
II, 435.
Aurora, worship of, I, 291.
Australia, religion of tribes of, I,
122 f., 225 f., II, 315, 316; tribes
of, as primitive, I, 136.
Awonawilona, the god, II, 315 f.
Aztecs, religion of, II, 7 (see Mexico
and Peru).
Babism, I, 167.
Babylonia (and Assjrria), religion of,
I, 105, 287, 396, 399, 518 f., 524,
II, 318, 358; incantations of, I,
517 f.; sacrifices of, I, 524; cos-
mogony of, II, 318 f.; belief of, in
existence after death, II, 498 f.
Bacon, on proof for God, I, 55.
Barton, on primitive Semitic com-
munity, I, 166, 176 f. (note), 571;
on the conception of Allah, 1, 201.
Being of the World, conceived of as
spiritual Entity, T, 108 f., inf.,
2.34, 351 f., 614 f., II, 331 f., .537 f.,
546 f., 568 f.; and Universal Prin-
ciple, 1, 1 14 f., 614 f., II, 9 f., .3.31 f.,
.'537 f.; as Ideal-Real, I, 114 f.,
.331 f., .351 f., 614 f., II, 568 f.,
570 f.
Ben Dosa, I, 208.
Ben Zakkai, I, 208.
Bhagavadglta, I, 294, 545, II, 233 f.,
324.
Bhuts, worship of, I, 58.
Bonhomie, as religious feeling, I, 292.
Book of the Dead, I, 179, II, 204,
496 f.
Book of the Great Decease, II, 202.
Bosanquet, on Christian art, I, 209
(note), 408, 441 f., 445 (note),
450.
Bousset on later Judaism, I, 209,
407, 475, 501, II, 507; on Philo, I,
501, II, 27 f., 191.
Bradley, Mr., I, 271, II, 259 f.
Brahma (neuter), I, 222, 439, II, 86,
172, 252.
Brahma (personal), I, 316, 401, II,
324.
Brahma-Atma, I, 222.
Brahmanas, the, I, 543 f.
Brahmanism, as a religion, I, 108,
197, 380 f., 401, 427, 461 f., 543 f.;
its doctrine of the World-Soul, I,
197, 363, II, 108, 167 f.; as post-
Vedic Pantheism, I, 380 f.; ethics
of, I, 461 f., 543 f.; doctrine of
salvation, I, 543 f., II, 168 f.;
higher morality of, II, 202.
Brinton, origin of religion, I, 281,
292, 418 (note), II, 413; nature
of religious sentiment, I, 292
(note), II, 210; difference between
science and religion, I, 418 (note);
power of the word, I, 513; con-
ception of Deity, II, 123.
Brown, Prof. Wm. A., on essential
Christianity, II, 478.
Bruchmann, K., I, 21 (note).
Buddha, the, nature of his salvation,
T. 197 f., 547 f., II, 499 f.; "Book
of the Decease" of, I, 547 f., 576 f.,
II, 199 f.; founder of n religious
community, I, .575 f.; "Apoc-
alyp.se" of, I, 577 f., II, 499 f.;
death of, II. 199 f.
Buddha-tathata, 11, 253 (note).
INDEX
575
Buddhism, as religion, I, 106 f.,
130 f., 195 f., 197, 427, 472, 491 f.,
522, II, 18 f., 168 f., 255, 550 f.;
its power of amalgamation, I, 107,
195 f., 578 f.; and claim to univer-
sality, I, 130 f., II, 473 f.; develop-
ment of, I, 197 f., 578 f., II, 393,
476 f.; as moral reform, I, 106,
472 f., 491 f., 546, II, 202; its
alleged lack of a creed, I, 491 f.;
its cult of prayer, I, 522; and
doctrine of salvation, I, 546 f.,
II, 168 f., 392 f., 551; and of exis-
tence, II, 49 f., 483 f.; of moral evil,
II, 168 f.; belief of, in the future,
II, 483 f.; on nature of the soul,
II, 489 f.
Bundehesh, II, 165.
Bunsen, Baron, I, 48.
Burnouf, I, 12 (note), 42 (note),
151.
Bushmen, shyness of, in religious
matters, I, 122 f.; their views of
creation, II, 315.
Busse, Dr., II, 280.
Cairo, Principal, on the ontological
proof, II, 49.
Caldecott, II, 11.
CaUery, M., I, 515.
Carlyle, I, 109 f.
Carlyle, Rev. A. J., I, 559.
Carus, Dr., on Christianity, I, 255.
Gastrin, M., I, 96, 265, 405.
Chabas, M., I, 463.
Chamberlain, Prof., on Kojiki, II,
201.
Charles, R. H., on Hebrew view of
the under-world, II, 504 f.; on
eschatology of Judaism, II, 506,
514; and of Paul, II, 513 (note).
China, rehgion of, I, 94, 98, 104, 148,
156, 164, 171 f., 194 f., 268 f., 384,
403, .541, II, 144 (note), .321 f.;
idol-w'orship in, I, 156; religious
literature of, I, 464 f.; cosmogony
of, 11, 322 f.
Christianity, an historical religion, I,
63 f., 204 f., II, 404 f., 407 f.; a
world-religion, I, 64 f., 70 f., 407 f.,
II, 407 f., 455 f., 468 f., 471 f.,
474 f.; its claims to absoluteness,
I, 71 f., 113 f., II, 468 f., 471 f.,
474 f., 477 f.; as doctrine of su-
preme good, I, 82, 209 f., 283 f.,
476, II, 396 f., 470; and univer-
sality, I, 130 f., 295 f., II, 407 f.,
455 f., 468 f., 471 f., 474 f.; rela-
tions to Judaism, I, 204 f., 209 f.,
295 f., 407 f., 474, .500, 529, II, 187;
and to Neo-Platonism, I, 213; its
conception of God, I, 247, 296 f.,
409 f., 476, 501 f., 529 f., II, 7 f.,
187 f., 206 f., 3.59 f., 470; and in-
fluence on development, I, 407 f.,
428 f., 449 f.; its dan, I, 475 f.; as
faith in Christ, I, 501 f.; its spirit
and form of worship, I, 529 f.; and
way of salvation, I, 552 f., II,
396 f.; as the "religion of Christ,"
II, 187 f., 400 f.; and doctrine of
redemption, II, 402 f . ; as a special
Revelation, II, 425 f., 427 f.
Churci'., the Christian, early attitude
to art, I, 4.50 f.; its moral code, I,
476 f., 587 f.; and dogmatic devel-
opment, I, 505 f., 587 f., 589 f.,
II, 458 f . ; its social character, I,
572, 587 f. (note), II, 457 f.; and
organization, I, 588 f., II, 457 f.;
as guardian of the faith, II, 458 f.
Cicero, I, 57, 429.
Civilization, relation of, to religion,
I, 215, II, 1.58, 4.59 f; present
characteristics of, II, 459 f.
Clarke, R. F., II, 63.
Clement of Alexandria, I. 48.
Community, the religious, formation
of, a necessity, I, 564 f., 568 f.,
591 f.; as a "Church," I, 569 f.; in
Babylonia, I, .573 f.; the Hindu, I,
574 f.; the Buddhistic, I, 576 f.,
578 f.; the Muslim, I, 581 f., 583 f.;
the Jewish, I, 584 f.
576
INDEX
Comparative Religion, its nature, I,
7 {., 18 f., 31 f.; effects of travel
on, I, 9 f.; recent advances in, I,
31 f., 124 f.; limitations of, I, 32 f.,
34 f.
Confucianism, its ethics, I, 171 f.,
II, 183; as religion, I, 193 f., 195,
II, 497; in Japan, I, 195.
Confucius, his teaching as to ancestor-
worship, I, 268, II, 497; as to
knowledge, II, 25; use of term
"Heaven," II, 78, 183, 429.
Consciousness, the religious, I, 36 f.,
51 f., 112, 137 f., 261 f., 269 f.,
274 f., 299 f., 346 f., II, 30 f.; of
sin, I, 60, 471, 528; awakening of,
I, 138 f., 374 f.; analysis of, I, 261-
277; curiosity as spring of, I, 300;
rational elements in, I, 303 f.;
necessarily anthropomorphic, I,
321 ; influences of environment on,
I, 374 f.; the so-called "God con-
sciousness," II, 31 f.
Cooke, Prof. J. P., I, 417 f.
Corban, nature of, I, 325.
Creation, theistic doctrine of, II,
223 f.. 226 f., 313 f., 317 f., 319 f.,
326 f.; creatio ex nihilo, II, 317 f.
Creation Epic, II, 318 f.
Creator gods, early views regard-
ing, I, 225 f., 346, II, 314 f., 317.
Creeds, absence of, among early re-
ligions, I, 490 f.
Criticism, Kantian, the, I, 303 f., 309.
Crooke, W., on folk-lore in India, I,
67, 79 f., 141.
Crozier, I, 70, 2.56 (note), 373 f., 476.
Cult, the religious, forms of, I, 512 f.,
516 f., 520 f.; among the Romans,
I, 517, II, 416; motives of, I, 520 f.,
523 f.; the Hebrews, I, 524 f.
D'Alviella, on nature of religion,
I, 115, 126, 154, 4.56; on palaeolithic
man, I, 126 (note), 240; growth of
personality, I, 243; on conception
of God, I, 364 f., II, 52, 68, 1S2,
389; religion and morality, I, 456 f.,
II, 175; on belief in existence after
death, II, 480.
Danziger, I, 207.
Darmstetter, I, 199.
Darwin, on religious devotion, I, 514;
argument from design, II, 55.
Davids, Rhys, on science of religion,
I, 10, 239; on doctrine of Buddha,
I, 197, 547 f., 575, 576 f.; and
order of development in religion,
I, 239; on the Brfihmanas, I, 543 f.;
and transmigration, II, 492 (note);
on future progress, II, 557.
Dead, the, worship of, I, 170 f., 184
(note), 268 f., II, 479, 488 f.; belief
in continued existence of, II,
479 f., 488 f.
De Groot, on religious system of
China, I, 94; on fetishism, I, 98.
Deism, its theory of origin of religion,
I, 141 f., II, 53 f.; among savages,
I, 153 (note).
Demeter-Ceres, I, 280, 392 f.
Demons, early Christian belief in, I,
432 f., II, 170, 388; Plutarch on
the, II, 42 f., 387.
Descartes, on argument for Being of
God, II, 46 f.
Design, in nature, II, 54 f., 59; ar-
gument for God, from, II, 55, 58 f.,
77 f., 103 f.
Determinism, influence of, I, 336 f.
Deussen, I, 10, 118, II, 167.
Development, conception of, a neces-
sity, I, 26 f., 69 f., 85, II, 154 f.,
335 f.; as distinguished from dif-
ferentiation, I, 159 f., 166 f., 168,
187 f.; theory of, as applied to
religion, I, 203-258; forces at work
in, I, 176 f., 203 f., 214 f., 218 f.,
229 f., II, 154 f.; order of, I, 236 f.,
247 f.; laws of, I, 247 f.
Devil-worship, I, 156, 164, 167, 233,
578.
Dharma, conception of, I, 235, II,
183.
INDEX
577
DhAtar, II, 319.
Diana, origin of worship of, I, 188.
Di Indigetes, 1, 178 f., 186.
Di A'oven^ides, I, 186.
Divi famuli, I, 186.
Divine Being, importance of con-
ception of, I, 59 f., 76 f., 309 f.,
431 f., II, 5 f., 7 f.; developed con-
ception of, I, 113, 130 f., 322 f.,
353 f., 431 f., 494 f.; as a unity,
I, 175, 322 f., 381 f., II, 213 f.; as
Universal Life, I, 190, 376 f., 438 f.,
444 f., II, 213 f.; pantheistic ideal
of, I, 438 f., II, 178, 252 f., 258 f.;
j)erfection of the, II, 213 f.
Djinns, I, 102 (and note).
Dogma, the religious, I, 487 f., 490,
495 f., 503 f., 506; importance of,
I, 503 f.
Dorman, II, 355.
Domer, A., on nature of religion, I,
118, 274, 493, 510, 539 (note); on
Protestantism, I, 213; on religious
faith, I, 496, 510; and reality of the
Ego, II, 341.
Domer, J. A., nature of revelation,
II, 421.
Dravidians, religion of the, I, 169,
170 f.
Dualism, on moral grounds, II, 165 f.
Diihring, I, 116.
Durga, worship of, I, 96.
Earth, worship of, I, 175, 294 f.,
392 f.
Egypt, Religion of, material for
study, I, 33; character of, I, 52,
149, 181 f., 220 f., 224, 365, 392,
463 f., 537; II, 204, 213, 387, 494 f.;
morality of, I, 463, II, 204; gods
of, II, 213, 387; belief in existence
after death, II, 494 f.
Emerson, I, 55 f., 510.
En-lil, the god, I, 168.
Epictetus, his conception of God,
I, 467, 474 f., 476, II, 191; and of
the problem of evil, II, 172.
Epistemology, assumptions of, I,
23 f . ; relations to philosophy of
religion, I, 23 f., 44 f.
Erman, on religions of Egypt, I,
181 f., 529, 537, II, 494.
Eskimos, religion of, I, 100, 227.
Etruscans, religion of, I, 111.
Eucken, on religious truth, I, 56, 81
(note), 86, 217, 425, II, 156, 390,
456; on irreligious culture, I, 217,
II, 456; and virtues of the an-
cients, I, 340 f.; on problem of
evil, II, 156, 169.
Everett, Prof. C. C, I, 270, 342.
Evil, the problem of, II, 148 f., 156 f.,
160 f., 193 f.; principal kinds of,
II, 148; of suffering, II, 149 f.; and
of sin, II, 152 f.; "medicinal
theory" of, II, 156 f.; as a theodicy,
II, 158 f., 193 f.; polytheistic view
of, II, 163 f.
Evolution, theories of, II, 290 f.,
330 f.; conflict of, with Theism,
II, 292 f., 299 f., 308 f.; anti-
theistic, II, 294 f., 296 f.; failure
of, II, 301 f.; concept of, as applied
to God, II, 308 f . ; parallel between
bodily and mental, II, 524 f.
Experience, the Religious, its char-
acteristics, I, 4f., 24 f., 263 f.,
360 f., 406; 493 f., 595 f., 603 f.,
II, 312, 403 f.; factors of knowl-
edge in, I, 24 f., 298 f., 333 f., 493 f.,
360, II, 38 f.; basis of philosophiz-
ing, I, 27 f., 279 f., II, 38 f., 312 f.;
untrustworthy statistics of, I, 36
(note); as evidence for God, II,
38 f., 311 f.; and for redemption,
II, 403 f.
Faith, the religious, I, 88 f., 240 f.,
288 f., 415 f., 485 f., 492 f., 499 f.,
II, 240, 306 f., 359 f.; relation of,
to dogma, I, 487 f., 490 f.; specific
nature of, I, 480, 493 f., 496, 499,
II, 23 f., 511; Christian doctrine of,
I, 500 f., 502 f.; God as Object of,
37
578
INDEX
II, 3f., 21 f., 306 f.; as way of
Salvation, I, 559 f.
Fakirs, I, 67.
Fate, Greek conception of, II, 356 f.
Feeling, the religious, I, 269 f., 271 f.,
284, 289 f., 292 f., 297 f., 377 f.,
439 f.; the so-called "cosmic," I,
275 f., 377; not simply fear, I, 284;
the sexual, in religion, I, 293;
higher forms of, I, 298 f., 439 f.;
the a^sthetical, in religion, I, 327 f.,
377 f., 439 f.
Festival, the religious, I, 571 f.
Fetishism, I, 92; nature of, I, 96 f.,
104 f., 124, 233 f., 385, II, 317;
combined with higher conceptions,
I, 124 f., 385; forms of, I, 223 f.
Fichte, on nature of religion, I, 117 f.;
and the ontological proof, II, 49;
nature of life, II, 306.
Finns, religion of, I, 386.
Fire, worship of, I, 174 f., 281, 386.
Fiske, on destiny of man, II, 546
(note).
Flint, Prof., on proof for Being of
God, II, 27, 35 (note), 72; on ag-
nosticism, II, 238; and pantheism,
II, 253.
Fravashis, II, 485 (note).
Frazer, J. G., I, 34 (and note), 103,
144 f., 188 (note), 265, II, 130, 203
(note).
Freedom, nature of the human, I,
334 f., 338, 601 f., II, 156, 157,
349 f. ; necessity of, to religious ex-
perience, II, .342 f., 344 f.
Fuegians, morals and religion of, I,
461.
Funeral Rites, I, 126.
Gatry, on the argument for the
Being of God, II, 48 (note).
Gaunilo, on Anselm's argument, II,
46 f.
Gautama Csee Buddha).
GeiiiuH, worship of, at Rome, I, 402 f.
Gloo.skap, II, 212.
Gnostics, doctrine of, I, 343 f., II,
425 f.
God (see also Divine Being), concep-
tion of, I, 59 f., 132, 206 f., 231 f.,
333 f., 349 f., 432 f... 444 f., II, 3 f.,
41 f., 53 f., 101 f.; as infinite and
absolute, I, 185 f., 265, 333 f.,
344 f., 347 f., II, 4f., 12 f., 53 f.,
94, 105 f.. Ill f., 122 f.; his Father-
hood, I, 205 f., 245, 247 f., 410,
II, 187 f., 191 f., 216, 354; Old-
Testament conception of, I, 206 f.,
II, 186 f.; as righteous, I, 206 f.,
333 f., 460 f., 471, II, 177, 204 f.;
and a unity, I, 206 f., 231 f., 246 f.,
288 f., 310 f., 369 f., II, 68, 143 f.,
230, 254 f . ; savage conceptions of,
I, 224 f., 364 f., II, 314 f., 317;
various names for, I, 252, 364 f . ;
as "Ultimate Reality," I, 309,
357 f., II, 12 f.; and the "Good
One," I, 333, II, 179 f., 185 f.,
213 f.; as Spirit, I, 349 f., 369 f.,
409 f., 493, 511 f., 534, 611 f., II,
12 f., 64, 68, 105 f., 147 f., 213 f.,
268 f., 310 f., 345 f., 445 f., 537 f.,
546 f., 559 f.; as Ideal-Real, I,
369 f., II, 98 f., 105, 211 f.; and
transcendent, I, 432 f., II, 279 f.;
importance of conception of, II,
3 f., S f., 19 f. ; argument for Being
of, II, 21 f., 26 f., 32 f., 36 f., 40 f.,
45 f., 50 f., 54 f., 66 f., 80 f.; as
"First Cause," II, 53 f.; as self-
conscious, II, 71 f., 81 f., 90 f.,
115 f., 136 f.; metaphysical predi-
cates of, II, 122 f.; as power,
II, 123 f., 128, 214, 230; eternity
of, II, 130 f., 132 f. ; omniscience
of, II, 134 f., 137 f., 141 f.; moral
attributes of, II, 177-199; holiness
of, II, 200 f., 202 f., 210 f.; wisdom
of, II, 212 f., 286 f.; perfection of,
II, 213 f. ; relations of, to the world,
II, 222 f., 226 f., 2.37 f., 247 f.,
2.54 f.. 266 f., 276 f., 286 f., WOl {.,
363 f.; equal the Supernatural
INDEX
579
II, 265, 278 f., 282 f.; as Creator,
II, 314 f., 320, 326 f., 330 f., 337 f.;
as "Upholder," II, 335 f.; and
Moral Ruler, II, 343-381, 386 f.;
perfection of his rule, II, 359 f . ; as
Providence, II, 373 f.; and Re-
deemer, II, 382-409; as source and
object of revelation, II, 411 f.,
419 f., 444 f.
Goethe, I, 4, 116,430.
Gospel, the, its nature, I, 132 (note),
210 f., II, 396 £., 398 f.
Granger, I, 21.
Grant, Sir A., II, 504.
Grasserie, Raoul de la, on classifica-
tion of religions, 1, 162 f.; his theory
of "expropriation," I, 324 f.
Greeks, religion of, I, 177 f., 183 f.,
244, 400 f., 465 f., II, 394 f.;
naturalistic divinities of, I, 400;
democratic influence over, I, 400 f.;
ethics and morality of, I, 465 f.,
474 f., II, 394 f.
Gregory, the Great, I, 451.
Griffis, on ancestor-worship in Japan,
I, 172; and unwritten religions, I,
242; on Ku-Sha teaching, 511 ; and
doctrine of evil Kami, II, 164.
Grimm, J., I, 32 f.
Gruppe, I, 104 f., 140, 177.
Guga, worship of, I, 67.
Guyau, M., I, 16, 82, 115 (note),
276, 591, II, 462 f., 464 f.
Haeckel, I, 240, II, 270, 521 f.
Hamilton, Sir Wm., II, 209 (note).
Harms, II, 49.
Harnack, on nature of Christianity,
I, 70, 132 (note), 210, 478, 507, 554,
II, 188 f., 329, 398, 427, 470, 514;
on the work of Paul, I, 212; the
asceticism of Jesus, I, 478; on
dogma, I, 507; on the Logos-
doctrine, II, 329 (note); on the
primitive community, II, 405.
Harris, Prof. S., on a theodicy, II,
159, 192 f.
I Hartmann, von, on nature of modern
criticism, I, 71 (note); nature of
religious consciousness, I, 138,
283 f., 298, 327 f.
Hatch, on assumptions of early or-
thodoxy, I, 71, II, 101 f.; influences
of Greek philosophy, I, 212 f.,
432 f., 501; early Logos-doctrine,
II, 329.
Heaven, worship of, I, 148, 348 f.,
463 f., 549 f., II, 322 f., 357 f.,
498; rule of, II, 357 f.
Hebrews, cosmogony of, II, 317 f.,
319 f., 325 f., 333 f.; doctrine of
souls among, II, 488 f., 504 f.
Hegel, on philosophy of religion, I, S,
56; on nature of religion, I, 113,
510; and proofs for the Being of
God, II, 37.
Henotheism, I, 1,54 f., 179, 189.
Herder, I, 8, II, 49.
Herodotus, I, 30.
Hesiod, I, 387.
HiUel, I, 208, 475.
Hinduism, its metaphysics, I, 77,
180 f., 381 f., 543 f., II, 319; its
jumble of religions, I, 94, ISO,
574 f., II, 391 f. (note); and schools
of philosophy, I, ISO f.; its ritual,
I, 294 f.; its emotionalism, I, 381;
and bondage to tradition, I, 461 f.;
its doctrine of salvation, I, 543 f.,
II, 391; cosmogony of, II, 319.
Hoffding, on nature of religion, I,
274 f., 498; validity of faith, I, 498.
Hoernes, on paleeolithic man, I, 126
(note).
Holiness, early conceptions of, I,
233 f., II, 200 f.; not passionless,
II, 207 f.; God as the All-Holy,
II, 204 f. (note), 211.
Honovar, Persian conception of, II,
428.
Hooker, Dr., I, 123 f.
Hopkins, on religion of Dravidians,
I, 169; and of the Vedas, I, 242,
401, 544, II, 183; on the pantheism
580
INDEX
of the Upanishads, II, 120, 323;
Vedic conception of Right, II, 183;
on the Hindu cosmogony, II, 319,
323; on Nirvana, II, 393.
Howard, I, 156.
Howison, II, 12 f., 40.
Howitt, I, 145.
Hozumi, Prof. N., on ancestor-
worship in Japan, I, 173, 403, 571.
Huacas, II, 265.
Humboldt, I, 282.
Ideal, the, of religion, I, 26, 74 f.,
129 f., 257 f., 351 f., 443 f., II,
211 f., 559 f., 562 f., 565 f., 567;
the moral, I, 76 f., 258 f.; the
social, II, 557 f., 561 f.
Idol, the, forms of, I, 155 f.; origin
of, I, 155 f.
Imagination, use of, in religion, I,
93 f., 315 f., 367, 436 f., 448 f.; and
in art, I, 436 f.
Incantation, nature of, I, 267, 517 f.,
II, 423; relation of, to prayer, I,
517 f.
India, religions of, I, 28, 31, 58 f., 94,
182 f., 401, 518 f., II, 201 f.; their
motley character, I, 182 f.; con-
ception of worship, I, 518 f.,
II, 201 f.; and of purity, II, 201 f.
Individual, the, reality of, I, 594 f.,
II, 543 f.; religion, as related to,
I, 595 f., 598 f., 602 f.; experience
of, I, 600 f., 604 f.; immortality of,
II, 479 f., 503 f., 510 f., 516 f.,
520 f . ; physical development of,
II, 522 f.; value of, II, 543 f.
Indra, worship of, I, 58, 619 f.,
II, 183; as destroyer of N&ga,
I, 101.
Infinite, the, conception of, in reli-
gion, 1, 153 f., II, 108 f.; as applied
to Deity, II, 107 f.. Ill f.; as
negative notion, II, 109 f.
Inspiration, as distinguished from
revelation, II, 422 f. ; the Christian,
II, 421, 431 f.; a personal affair.
II, 422 f.; through ecstasy, II, 424;
post-Reformation doctrine of, II,
429 (note); Hindu doctrine of,
II, 430.
Instinct, influence in religion, I,
279 f.
Ishtar, worship of, I, 162, 467.
Islam, its claim to universality, I,
130 f., 199 f., 550 f., II, 472 f.; its
characteristics, I, 199 f., 201 f.,
217, 235, 406, 550 f., II, 472 f.;
attitude toward civilization, I,
215 f., 397 f.; conception of Allah,
I, 406, 582 f., II, 85, 124; church
of, I, 581 f.
Jacobi, I, 510.
Jainism, as a reform, I, 159, II, 392;
its doctrine of salvation, II, 392.
James, Prof. Wm., II, 527 (note), 534
(note).
Japan, ancestor-worship in, I, 149,
172, 403, 571; mfiuence of Bud-
dhism in, I, 396, 492, 578, II, 393;
sects in, I, 492; the Ku-Sha teach-
ing, I, 511; and that of Shinran,
II, 394.
Jastrow, Morris, on study of religion,
I, 8 (note), 218, 239, 456; on reli-
gion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1,68,
90 (note), 234, 287, 396, 399, 421,
447 f., 518, 573, II, 318, 498; on
Judaism, I, 206; on founders of
religion, I, 229 f. (note); religion
and morahty, I, 456, 471.
Jehovah (see Yahweh).
Jesus, his attitude toward Judaism,
I, 209 f., 407, 529 f., 536, 556 f.,
II, 396 f.; Gospel of, I, 210 f., 407 f.
432. 501 f., 554 f., II, 187 f., 396 f.;
personiil influence of, I, 228 f.,
IT, 400 f.; as Pounder of Christian-
ity, I, 407 f., 546, 554 f., II, 187 f.,
425 f. ; doctrine of his sonship,
I, 431 f.; II, 187 f., 397, 400;
asceticism of, I, 478; faith in, I,
501 f., 530, II, 400 f.; his doctrine
INDEX.
581
of prayer, I, 536, 538 f.; and self-
sacrifice, I, 558 f.; of God as
Father, 11, 187 f., 282 f., 425 f.;
view of nature, II, 282 f.; as
Redeemer, II, 396 f.; and "son of
man," II, 397 (note); death of,
II, 399 f.; as special Divine revela-
tion, II, 425 f., 442; miracles of,
II, 442 f.; views of the future, II,
509 f., 511 f., 564; his doctrine of
"the Kingdom," II, 564 f.
Jevons, on origin of religion, I, 143,
155 f.; and nature of cult, I, 517,
521 (note); on savage logic, II, 266.
Judaism, an historical religion, I, 63 f .,
204 f., 558, II, 469 f.; its exclusive-
ness, I, 82, 208, 407; development
of, I, 204 f., 407 f., II, 469 f.;
characteristic tenets of, I, 206 f.,
209, 247 f., 295 f., 473 f., 538; its
conception of God, I, 295 f., 407,
473 f., 500 f., 558, II, 8 f., 177 f.,
204 f., 469 f.; as religious faith,
I, 500, 558 f.; its "Priestly Code,"
I, 524, 534; as doctrine of salvation,
I, 558, II, 395 f.; "churchifyingof,"
I, 584 f.; eschatology of, II, 505 f.,
507, 509 f.
Juno, I, 188 f.
Jupiter, I, 187 f.
Ka, conception of, 485 (note), 495 f.
Kami, conception of, II, 6, 164, 265.
Kami-no-Michi (see Shinto).
Kafir, logic of, II, 266.
Kaftan, II, 209.
Kamschatka, religion of, I, 112,
II, 224.
Kant, on nature of religion, I, 115,
142, 303 f., 442, 486; his concep-
tion of reason, I, 303 f., II, 34; on
argument for Being of God, I,
309 f., II, 33 f., 46 f., 48 f., 54 f.,
63, 100; feeling of the sublime, I,
327 f., 440, II, 93; on faith and
knowledge, I, 367, 487 f., II, 23 f.,
240 f.; the ends of life, I, 486 f..
II, 453 f . ; on value of personality,
II, 533; his argument for immor-
tality, II, 535, 542.
Karma, doctrine of, I, 285, 472,
547 f., II, 50, 168 f., 386, 492 f.,
500.
Keary, Mr., I, 300, 388 f.
Khonds, legends of, I, 385; prayer
of, I, 532.
Kingdom of God, conception of,
I, 410, 585, II, 427 f., 551 f., 553,
559 f., 563 f.; Jewish hope of, II,
551, 553; Christian view of, II,
551 f., 559 f., 563 f., 565 f.; not
identical with the Church, II,
552 f., 560 f.
Kitchen-Middens, I, 126 (note).
Klostermann, II, 205 f.
Knowledge, character of the reli-
gious, I, 24 f., 426 f., II, 22 f., 36,
100, 141 f., 242 f.
Kojiki, I, 173, 520, 531, II, 201, 319.
Koran, I, 232, 469, II, 129, 132, 135,
143.
Krishna, I, 294 f., 467.
Kuan Yin (see Kwannon).
Kuenen, II, 202 f., 206.
Kwannon, worship of, I, 164, 253.
Lang, Andrew, on origin of religion,
I, 153 (note), 223 (note), 226; on
belief in "creator gods," I, 226;
and relation of morality and re-
ligion, I, 461.
Lares, the, I, 187, 393.
Law, Wm., I, 272.
Law, the, Jesus' attitude toward, I,
209 f.; Judaism's conception of,
I, 209, 407; the Levitical, I, 526.
Laws, in development of religion,
I, 247 f.; in nature, II, 54 f., 57 f.,
161 f., 311 f., 435 f., 439.
Lea, H. C, I, 468.
Le Conte, Prof., II, 279.
Legge, on fetishism in China, I, 97;
on Confucianism, I, 194; and
Taoism, II, 498 (note).
582
INDEX
Leibnitz, II, 14, 49.
Lepchas, I, 124.
Lessing, I, 8 (note).
Levins, R., I., 343.
Li-ceremonial, I, 515.
Lindsay, II, 54.
Ldngam, worship of, I, 155, 162, 294,
II, 6.
Lippert, on nature of religion, I, 147.
Livingstone, David, on religious be-
liefs of Africa, I, 127.
Locke, on argument for Being of
God, II, 35.
Logos, doctrine of, I, 431 f., II,
191 f.; the Greek, II, 191 f.; the
Christian, II, 327 f. (note), 328 f.
Longinus, I, 441.
Lotze, on relations of theology and
science, I, 422; on personality of
God, II, 87 f., 244 f.; and Divine
relations to the world, II, 224 f.
Lubbock, Sir John, claims religion,
not universal, I, 121 (note), II,
316.
Moat, the two-fold, II, 204.
Magic, as religion, I, 103 f., 153 f.,
II, 416; impulses of, I, 208.
Mahoj-jana, II, 253 (note)
Maha-Vagga, I, 576 f.
Mallock, I, 363 f.
Man, a religious being, I, 3 f., 12 f.,
25, 133 f., 138 f., 215 f., 262 f.,
323 f., 346 f., II, 306 f., 339, 383 f.,
411 f., 566 f.; spiritual unity of,
I, 20, 2.5, 134 f., 215, II, 5.58 f.;
as differenced from lower animals,
I, 20, 138 f., 324 f.; paL-rolithio, I,
126 (note), 240; as "maker of
religion," I, 262 f., .346 f., II, .383 f.,
411 f.; as rational, I, .324 f., 333 f.;
aelf-determininp, I, .3.33 f., 338 f.,
II, 339 f.; in "the divine image,"
I, 345-.371, .3.39 f.; his place in
nature, II, .306 f.; need of redemp-
tion, II, 383 f., .385 f., .386 f.; as
subject of revelation, H, 411 f..
424 f. ; dual existence of, II, 483 £.,
520 f.; animal nature of, II, 520 f.;
future of the race of, II, 550-565.
Manichajism, II, 166.
Manito, I, 101, 316, II, 317.
Marcion, I, 170.
Marcus Aurelius, II, 191.
Marduk, the god, I, 52, 168, 220, 287,
531, 533, II, 183, 318 f.
Mariner, II, 180.
Martin, Dr., on religions of China,
I, 164, 172 f., II, 78, 376, 497.
Martineau, I, 115, 159.
Maxwell, Clerk, on nature of atoms,
II, 78 f., 297.
Maya, I, 359, II, 167 f., 337.
Meadows, Dr., I, 464.
Mechanism, as theory of origin, II,
243 f., 247 f., 250 f.; in modem
science, II, 245 f., 434 f.
Mediator, conception of, II, 388 f.
Megasthenes, on religion of India,
II, 501.
Menant, on Zoroastrianism, II, 320 f.
Mencius, I, 532.
Mercury, I, 280.
Merz, I, 17.
Metaphysics, in religious experience,
I, 23 f., 47, 274; necessary to re-
ligion, I, 47 f., 274 f., 309, 354 f.;
the Hindu, I, 77.
Mexicans, religion of the, I, 386.
Mexico, (and Peru), religions of, I,
20 f., 127 f., 149, 457 f.
Meyer, H. A. W., II, 425 (note).
Mill, J. S., I, 116.
Miracles, present objections to, II,
432 f., 437 f.; Old-Testament con-
ception of, II, 433 f.; not violation
of law, II, 435 f., 441 f.; of Jesus,
II, 436 f., 442 f.
Mithras, worship of, in Rome, I, 189,
254.
Monism, philosophical, as a religious
doctrine, I, 27 f., 204, 438 f.;
ethical, I. 3.33 f., II, 166 f.
Monotheism, Hebrews did not origi-
/
INDEX
583
nate, I, 206; early advances toward
I, 224 f.
Montefiore, II, 205.
Morality, ideal of, I, 76 f.; relation
of, to religion, I, 59, 78, 89, 116 f.,
454 f., 457 f., 460 f., 466 f., 480 f.,
II, 353 f.; "double code" of, I,
476 f.; involves personality, II,
353 f.; of natural law, II, 360 f.
Morris, Mr. Wm., I, 451.
Mosaism, I, 205 f.
Miiller, Max, on savage religions, I,
106; and primitive man, I, 136,
148; origin of religion, 1, 148, 153 f.,
275 (note), II, 65.
MuUer, Otfried, I, 111.
Muhammad, as a prophet, I, 200, 581,
II, 416 f.; his doctrine of salvation,
I, 550 f.; as founder of a church,
I, 581 f.; inspiration oi, II, 416 f.,
428.
Muhammadism (see Islam).
Mungan-ngaur, belief in, I, 145.
Mura Mura, the "rain-givers," I, 145.
Mysticism, I, 344, 381.
Myth, the, in religion, I, 145 f., 456 f.
Mythology, not same as religion, I,
146 f.
Naga, worship of, I, 79, 101.
Nassau, on fetishism in Africa, II,
317, 488.
Nature, religious conception of, I,
230, 355 f., 383 f., II, 269 f., 273 f.,
276 f., 284 f., 362 f., 418 f.; scien-
tific conception of, I, 355 f., II,
269 f., 271 f., 283, 292, 294 f.,
301 f., 434 f., 438 f.; influence of,
on man, I, 375 f., 377 f., 383 f.,
II, 360 f.; Unity of, I, 384, II, 72,
230, 246; distinguished from the
Supernatural, II, 264-289; moral
elements in, II, 360 f., 418 f.;
revelation in, II, 418 f.
Nature-worship, mystery in, I, 16 f.,
230, 383 f.; extension of, I, 173 f.,
394 f.; elevation of, I, 394 f.
Navajos, religion of, I, 100, 532,
II, 224, 488.
NavUle, M., II, 210 (note).
Ndengei, the god, I, 226.
Nebuchadnezzar I, religious char-
acter of, I, 52, 287, 574.
Neo-Platonism, its views of the Ab-
solute, I, 6; influence upon Chrish
tianity, I, 213, 256.
Newton, Sir Isaac, II, 145 (note).
Nichols, E. L., II, 76 (note).
Nirvana, II, 168, 169, 391, 392 (note),
493, 496, 499, 500.
Nitzsch, C. I., I, 137.
Njambi, the god, II, 317.
Novales, I, 284.
Oakesmith, II, 42, 103, 428.
Old Testament, as revelation, I, 210,
II, 431 f.; attitude of Jesus toward,
I, 210 f.; views of, on inspiration,
II, 423 f., 431 f.; and miracle, II,
433 f., 436 f.
"Ontological Consciousness," I, 47,
309 f., 311 f., 332 f., 351, 358 f.,
493 f., II, 484 f., 487.
Ophiology (see Serpent, worship of).
Orelli, on classification of religions,
I, 162 f. (note); and conception of
civilization, I, 215.
Osiris, I, 179, 181, 392, II, 124, 394 f.,
496 f.
"Other-Soul," belief in, I, 89 f.
"Over-Soul," belief in, I, 89 f.
Owen, I, 57.
Panpsychism, I, 438 f.
Pantheism, that of India, I, 183,
380 f., 438 f., II, 178, 236, 252 f.;
its conception of God, I, 438 f.,
II, 178, 252 f., 258 f.; as theory of
origins, II, 251 f.; identifies God
and the World, II, 252 f., 256 f.,
258 f.; criticism of, II, 256 f.
Paradise, early pictures of, I, 146.
Parsis, their worship of fire, I, 175.
Pascal, I, 327, II, 68 (note).
584
INDEX
Paul, his influence on Christianity,
I, 211 f., 587 f., II, 189 f., 369 f.,
547; founder of the Church, I,
587 f.; theology of, II, 189; doc-
trine of spiritual development, II,
369 f., 509; and of revelation, II,
417 f., 427; eschatology of, II, 509,
512 f., 547.
Personality, conception of, in re-
ligion, I, 154 f., 362 f., 443 f., II,
259 f., 346 f., 354 f.; the religious
Ideal, I, 353 f., 443 f., II, 87 f.,
259 f., 346 f.; relations of, between
Divine and human, II, 344 f.
Personification, process of, I, 238 f.,
352 f., 354 f., 362 f., 386.
Peru (see Mexico and Peru).
Peschel, I, 299.
Petronius, I, 284.
Pfleiderer, on nature of religion, I,
111 f., 118, 151, II, 49 f.; and its
origin, I, 151; on religious cult, I,
516; and the ontological argument,
II, 49 f.; the moral argument, II,
62 f. ; the Divine predicates, II, 97
(note), 128; on Zoroastrianism, II,
165; and Paul, II, 369 f.
Phallus, worship of, I, 155 (see also
Lingam).
Philo, his Logos-doctrine, I, 433
(note), II, 27 f., 191 f.; his doctrine
of faith, I, 502 f.; and conception
of God, II, 27, 191 f.
Philosophy, nature of, I, 4 f., 21 f.,
43 f., 61 f., 607 f., II, 213 f.; method
of, I, 6f.; need of, I, 12 f., G5 f.,
428 f., 607 f., TI, 213 f.; temper of,
I, 22 f.; a "Mystagogue" to the-
ology, I, 43, 429; relation of, to
religion, I, 428 f., 607 f., II, 213 f.
Phy.sicu3, 11, 295 f., 297.
PiM'iH Sophia, I, 506 (note), 120.
Pilrin, worship of, I, 172, II, 485.
Plato, on the gods of mythology,
I, 316, 466; on the theological ar-
gument, I, 55; and nature and
destiny of the sovil, II, 503 f.
Plotinus, I, 445 (note), II, 28 f.
Plutarch, attempt of, to construct a
philosophy of religion, I, 42 f., 430,
II, 42 f.; on the mysteries, I, 524;
and demonology, II, 42 f., 190;
on the conception of God, II, 103 f.,
184, 190, 387; doctrine of creation,
II, 320; on immortality, II, 541.
Pluvius, prayer to, I, 285.
Powell, Baden, II, 58 f.
Prayer, as form of cult, I, 512 f.,
516 f., 530 f., II, 377 f. ; universality
of, I, 516 f.; Christian practice of,
I, 530 f.; theory of, II, 377 f.
Preiss, on classification of religions,
I, 161 f. ; on primitive man, I, 241;
on Chinese religions, II, 322.
Priesthood, influence of, I, 404 f.;
legislation of Jewish, I, 407.
"Primitive Man," our ignorance of,
I, 134 f., 137, 391 f.
Prophetism, in Israel, I, 207 f.
Prophets, the Hebrew, work of, I,
63 f., 206 f., 208, 220, 534 f.; in-
spiration of, II, 424 f.
Providence, Jesus' view of, II, 282 f.;
doctrine of, II, 373 f., 379 f., 417;
general and especial, II, 374.
Prussians, worship of the dead
among, I, 170 f.
Psychology, relation of, to philoso-
phy of religion, I, 12 f., 18 f., 21,
55, 60, 261 f., 275 f.; tests furnished
by, I, 60, 125 f.
Ptah, I, 155; maxims of, I, 463.
Piinjcr, I, 7.
Puluga, I, 226.
QtTATiiEFAGEfl, On Universality of
religion, I, 124.
Ra, the god, I, 52, 149, 181, 532,
II, 73 f., 375.
"Race-culture," conception of, I
215 f., II, 456 f., 459 f., 467 f.
Rainmakers, I, 103.
INDEX
585
Rameses II, religion of, I, 52, 533,
II, 375, 486.
Rationality, as final test of religion,
I, 73 f., 80, 274 f., 303 f., 312 f.,
320 f.; of the savage man, I, 305,
310; analysis of the human, I,
305 f., 309 f., 312, 324 f., 330 f.;
divine nature of, I, 346 f., 356 f.;
of belief in God, II, 43 f., 50, 74 f.
Rationalism, I, 351.
Reality, religion a theory of, I, 18,
73 f., 115, 274 f., 350 f., 357, II, 70,
568 f.; man a believer in, I, 47,
274 f., 308 f., 357 f.; Ideal of, I,
73 f., 115 f., 350 f., II, 568 f.; of
the Object of religion, I, 307 f.,
II, 568 f.
Reason, conception of, I, 40 f., 43 f.,
54 f., 303 f., II, 28 f., 358 f.; ac-
cording to Kant, I, 303 f.; appeal
to, by Plutarch, I, 43; God, as the
Universal, II, 28, 358 f.
Redskins, theriolatry among, 1, 100 f.
170; regarded as not human, 1, 123
belief of, in "creator gods," I,226f
Religion, nature of, I, 3 f., 11 f., 15 f.
18, 24 f., 35 f., 39, 57 f., 60, 85 f.
93 f., 103 f., 110 f., 114 f., 125 f.
269 f., 274 f., 319 f., 411 f., 594 f.
II, 383 f., 410 f., 412 f., 444, 461 f.
566 f.; origin of, I, 19 f., 86 f.
133 f., 142, 150 f., 261 f., 269 f.
274 f., 281 f., 346 f., 11, 411 f.
rationality of, I, 40 f., 54 f., 73 f.
274 f.; meaning of word, I, 87
definition of, I, 89; as "unreflecting
spiritism," I, 89 f., 103 f., 110 f.
not same as magic, I, 103 f.; de-
velopment of, I, 112 f., 158 f.
190 f., 203-258, II, 412, 454 f.; as
doctrine of Divine Being, I, 113
universality of, I, 120 f., 125 f.
characteristics of, fitted to survive
I, 129 f., 159 f., II, 454 f.; cause of
the differentiation of, I, 159 f.
165 f., 185 f.; founders of, I, 229 f.
impulsive sources of, I, 278 f.
rational sources of, I, 305 f.; as
belief in the supernatural, I, 319;
ethical elements in, I, 326 f., 369,
456 f.; physical environment of, I,
372 f., 377 f.; relation of, to science,
I, 412 f., 419 f., 423 f.; and to art,
I, 435-453; and to morality, I,
455 f.; the cult of, I, 512 f.; indi-
viduality of, I, 594 f.; as doctrine
of salvation, II, 383 f.; and as reve-
lation, II, 410 f., 445 f.; as "psychic
uplift," II, 443 f., 467 f.; future of,
II, 453 f., 462 f., 465 f.
Religion, Philosophy of, its nature,
I, 3 f., 7 f., 27 f., 607 f.; as criterion
in religion, I, 110 f.; relation to
different sciences, I, 12 f., 17 f., 22;
its method, I, 3 f., 7 f., 10 f., 13 f.,
17-28, 62 f., 607 f.; is psychologi-
cal, 19 f.; epistemological assump-
tions of, I, 23 f., 607 f.; basis in
racial experience, I, 27 f., 66 f.;
difficulties of, I, 29 f., 35 f., 42 f.,
121 f.; conditions of success in, I,
46; value of, I, 46 f., 65 f.; standard
of values in, I, 51 f.
Religion, Science of, I, 10 f., 42 f.;
possibility of, I, 10 f., 42; a psycho-
logical study, I, 11 f., 18, 21; early
mistakes in, I, 30 f., 35 f.; recent
advances in, I, 31 f.
Religions, variety of, I, 88, 157 f.,
II, 355 f . ; so-called world-religions,
1, 128 f.; differentiation of, I, 158 f.,
165 f., 185 f.; classification of, I,
161 f., II, 355 f.; amalgamation of,
I, 166 f.; syncretism in, I, 166 f.,
179 f.; theocratic and theanthropic,
II, 355 f.; of salvation, 11, 382 f.,
389 f.
Renan, M., I, 530 f.
Renouf, M., on religion of ancient
Egypt, I, 33, 155, 224, 392, 463,
II, 73, 320.
Resurrection, Jewish belief in, II, '
507 f., 509 f.; Paul's doctrine of,
II, 512 f., 548 f.
586
INDEX
Revelation, as origin of religion, I,
153 f., 432, II, 410 f., 413 f., 415 f.,
426 f., 442 f., 445 f.; early Christian
belief in, I, 432 f.; source of, II,
411; subject of, II, 411 f.; condi-
tions of, II, 412 f.; psychology of,
II, 415 f. , 442 f.; means of, II, 416 f.;
Christianity as, II, 425 f., 442;
by miracle, II, 432 f., 442 f.; modus
operandi of, II, 442 f.; epochs of,
II, 443 f.
R^ville, M., on religions of Mexico
and Peru, I, 20 f., 127 f., 227 (note),
457 f., 520; on science of religion,
I, 42 (note); universality of re-
ligion, I, 125, II, 32; and religious
cult, I, 520.
Ri, Chinese conception of, II, 28.
Richet, M., on rapport, I, 266.
Rohde, on soul-cult among the
Greeks, II, 480; and dual existence,
II, 489 (note), 501 f.; on Eleusinian
mysteries, II, 502 f. (note); and
Greek doctrine of immortality, II,
503 f.
Romanes, I, 418 (note).
Romans, worship of, I, 174 f., 186 f.
(note), 392 f., 402, 517, 522 f.; list
of gods of, I, 186 f., 394 f.; mental
characteristics of, I, 186 f.; later
phase of their religion, I, 189 f.,
401 f.
Rofjkoff, on fetishism, I, 96; on magic,
I, 104; on universality of religion,
I, 122 (note), 124 f., 279; and re-
ligious consciousness, 1, 279, II, 52 f .
Roth, I, 264.
Roug6, M., I. 224.
Royce, Prof., I, 281, 496, 597, II, 80,
134, 222, 481.
Sabatier, on characteristics of the
age, I, 50, 479; on the word "re-
ligion," I, 87; and its natiire, I, 116,
125, 2.36 f., 272; classification of
religions, I, 163; on influence of
Jeaua, I, 229 (note); on the forma-
tion of the religious community,
I, 564; and belief in God, II, 39,
284; and ministry of pain, II, 152.
Sacrifice, as form of cult, I, 511 f.,
519 f., 523 f.; origin of, I, 519 f.;
bloody, I, 522 f., 524 f.; connection
of, with mysteries, I, 523 f . ; of the
"Priestly Code," I, 524; value of,
I, 523 f., 538 f.; early Jewish, I,
526 f., 534.
Sakya-Muni, not a founder of new
religion, I, 106 f.; his ethical teach-
ing, I, 473 f.
San-Pdo, II, 141 (note).
Santals, I, 227.
Sarkar, Kishori Lai, I, 77, 246, 381.
Saussaye, De la, on religion of the
Teutons, I, 146, 190 f., 480 f.,
II, 184; on origin of religion, I, 151;
and its classification, I, 161; on
cult, I, 513.
Savage, the religious experience of,
I, 35 f., 106, 122 f., 137 f., 156 f.,
277 f., 205, 391 f., 461; shyness of,
in religious matters, I, 122 f.; our
knowledge of, I, 134 f.; conception
of spirit, I, 156 f., II, 383; belief of,
in "creator gods," I, 225 f. ; ration-
ality of, I, 305 f., II, 266 f.; ethics
of the, I, 461, II, 180; logic of,
II, 265 f.
Sayce, I, 154.
Sbok, the god, I, 181 f.
Schleiermacher, on nature of religion,
I, 116 (note), 269.
Schmid, on Jesus' views of the future,
II, 511 f.
Schopenhauer, his conception of re-
ligion, I, 117, 279; on argument for
Being of God, II, 40; and belief in
immortality, II, 487.
Schultz, D. H., on Judaism, I, 82,
207; origin of religion, I, 379 f.;
religious faith, I, 496, II, 39 f., 63,
410; on pessimism, II, 386.
Schurman, on argument for Being of
God, II, 19 f., 35, 110.
INDEX
587
Science, anthropomorphizing neces-
sary in, I, 321 f.; aims and ideals
of, I, 412 f.; methods of, I, 413 f.;
influence of, on religious develop-
ment, I, 423 f . ; restrictions of,
II, 448 f.
Scotus, Erigena, I, 344, 446.
Self, the Absolute, I, 253 f., 263 f.,
265, 333 f., 344 f., 347 f., 595,
II, 13 f., 81 f., 91 f., 139 f., 143 f.,
259 f., 345 f.; the so-called "sub-
liminal," I, 266 f., 345; man, as
self-determining, I, 333 f., II, 341 f.,
349 f.; the individual, I, 341 f.,
353 f., 595 f., 603 f., II, 482 f.,
484 f., 490, 528 f.; the so-caUed
"social," II, 353 f.; immortality of
the, II, 481 f., 490 f., 510 f., 518 f.,
528 f., 538 f.; actuality of, II, 536 f.,
544 f.; value of the, II, 544 f.
Selfhood, knowledge of, I, 16 f.,
II, 341 f.; developing conception
of, I, 112 f., 232 f., 253 f., 362 f.,
366, 598 f., II, 533 f.; the gods as
having, I, 177 f., 232 f., 598; ideal
of, II, 533 f . ; Greek estimate of,
II, 543 f.
Semites, religion of the early, I, 141,
204 f., 219, II, 182, 395 f.; general
characters of, I, 204 f., 219 f.
Seneca, I, 430, II, 190 f.
Serpent, worship of, I, 79 f., 100, 170,
268, 402, 519.
Shamanism, I, 92; nature of, I, 95 f.,
385, 405.
Shamash, I, 287, II, 135, 182.
Shang Ti, I. 193 f., 224, 386, 393,
533, 549 f., II, 177, 233, 357.
Sheng Jen, II, 429.
Sheol (and Shualu), II, 494, 499, 504.
Shinran, I, 394.
Shinto, I, 164, 173, 385, 520, II, 164,
200, 201; cosmogony of, II, 319.
Shiu-Ki, I, 172.
Shiva, II, 323 f.
Shiwaiism, I, 295.
Shraddha, I, 171.
Shushi, his doctrine of creative Rea-
son. II. 321.
Sin, consciousness of, I, 60 f., 233 f.,
470, II, 152 f., 384; committed
against God, I, 470 f., II, 1.52 f.,
384; as evil, II, 152 f.; the theo-
cratic form of conscience, II, 384.
Smend, on the worship of Israel, I,
526, 527; sacrifice among the
Arabs, I, 534; on eschatology of
Judaism, II, 505 f., 507.
Smith, Arthur H., on Chinese religion,
I, 173 (note); and morahty, I, 464.
Smith, W. Robertson, on nature of
tabu, I, 37; religion among the
Semites, I, 141, 204 f., 455, 525;
and Greeks, I, 400; on creeds, I,
490.
Sociology, relation of, to study of
religion, I, 15 f., 276 f.
5oma-plant, worship of, I, 58, 101 f.
Sorcerer, different examples of, I,
104.
Soul, conception of, in all things, I,
103 f.. Ill f., 147 f., 177 f., II, 488,
500 f.; the World-Soul, I, 147 f.,
183, 326 f., II, 501 f.; importance
of, in religion, I, 232 f.; existence
of, after death, II, 479 f., 484 f.,
493 f., 516 f.; immortality of the,
II, 481 f., 487 f., 490 f., 500 f.,
518 f., 542 f.; reality of, II, 482 f.;
number of souls, II, 488 f., 501 f.;
transmigration of the, II, 492
(note), 496 f.; Greek conception of,
II, 500 f., 542 f.; Platonic philoso-
phy of, II, 503; separability of,
from the body, II, 516 f., 518 f.;
arguments against, II, 519 f.,
526 f.; and for, II, 528 f., 531 f.,
540 f.
Spencer and GUlen, on totemism in
Australia, I, 99; religion of tribes
of Australia, I, 136, 145.
Spencer, Herbert, on origin of reli-
gion, I, 148; God as infinite, II, 53,
228 f.; on ethical man II, 99 f.
588
INDEX
Spinoza, I, 5, 286; on nature of sub-
stance, II, 261 f.
Spirit, conception of, in religion, I,
157, 349, II, 69 f.; God as, I, 349 f.,
409 f., II, 69 f., 105 f., 403; spiritu-
ality, struggle for, II, 385 f.
Spiritism, religion as "unreflecting,"
I, 89 f., 92 f., 104 f., 112 f., 137,
142 f., 220 f., 370, II, 122, 479.
Starbuck, I, 276 f. (note), 292 (note),
342 (note), II, 14.
Steinen, von den, I, 480.
Steinmeyer, on miracles, II, 436.
Stones, worship of, I, 101 f., 104; as
fetishes, 104 f.
Strauss, II, 259.
Sun, worship of, I, 149, 164, 227
(note), II, 7.
Supernatural, The, conception of,
necessary to religion, I, 39 f.,
II, 264 f., 272 f., 276 f.; relations
of, to the natural, II, 264 f., 272 f.,
282 f.
Symbolofideismus, I, 511.
Syncretism, nature of, in religion,
I, 166 f., 179 f., II, 16.
Tabu, nature of, I, 37 f., 139, 324,
565.
Tangaloa, the god, II, 316 f.
Taoism, as form of Spiritism, I, 104,
282, 384, 541, II, 488; asceticism
of, I, 397, 541; its doctrine of sal-
vation, I, 541 ; and of souls, II, 488,
498.
Tellus, ciilt of, I, 392 f.
Tengere Kaira Kan, I, 385.
TertuUian, I, 56 (note).
Teutons, religion of, I, 146, 190 f.,
192 f., 389, 4S0f., II, 1N4; princi-
pal gods of, I, 190 f.; influence of
Christianity on morals of, I, 480 f.,
II, 184.
Theism, mystical forms of, I, 381 ;
its doctrine of God as Ethical
Spirit, I, 473 f., 610 f., II, 64 f.,
147 f.; arguments for, II, 45 f.
(note), 82 f., 221 f., 294 f.; position
of, II, 221 f., 230 f.; doctrine of
God and the World, II, 221 f.,
252 f., 258 f., 262 f., 307 f.; con-
flict of, with theory of evolution,
II, 291 f., 294 f., 299 f., 308 f.
Theodicy, problem of, II, 158 f.,
169 f., 193 f.; the Christian, II,
170 f., 193 f., 215.
Theology, relation of, to science, I,
421 f., II, 231 f.; and to philoso-
phy, I, 429 f.; the so-called "natu-
ral," II, 231 f., 418 f.
Theriolatry, I, 93 f., 99 f., 101 f., 181.
Thiasi, the, I, 400.
Thibet, religion of, I, 578.
Thing, conception of, I, 367 f., II,
269 f.
Thompson, R. C, on evil spirits of
Babylonia, II, 423.
Thum, Im, I, 226.
Ti&mat, Babylonian conception, II,
318.
Tiele, on science of religion, I, 11 f.,
II, 355 f.; on animism, I, 90 (note);
on fetishism, I, 97 (note); on uni-
versality of religion, I, 125; and its
cult, I, 516; on the religious com-
mimity, I, 564; the conception of
God, il, 5, 72, 203, 284; and prob-
lem of evil, II, 163; theanthropic
religion, II, 355; religion as revela-
tion, II, 413.
T'ien, worship of, I, 193 f., 386,
II, 233 (see also Shang Ti).
Tigert, on conception of the infinite,
II, 109 (note).
Totemism, I, 92; nature of, I, 97 f.,
143 f., 305, 385; among Redskins,
I, 98 f.; not the original religion,
I, 143 f., 1.55 f.
Toy, Prof., on sacrifice, I, 228.
Trees, worship of, I, 101 f., 104, 141.
Trinity, of god.s among Saxons, I,
191; and Hindus, II, 323 f.
Tulsi, the plant, worship of, I, 102,
381.
INDEX
589
Tylor, I, 49; analysis of religious con-
sciousness, I, 266.
Ueberweg, on the ontological argu-
ment, II, 47 f.
Uitzilopochtli, I, 297, 458.
"Unconscious," the, a negative con-
ception, I, 267, II, 60, 94 f.
Upanishads, the, I, 197, 222, 544,
545, II, 120, 167, 252 f., 492.
"Unknowable," the, conception of,
I, 351, 416 f., II, 24 f., 110 f., 222,
347.
Valentinus, II, 170.
Value-judgments, place of, in re-
ligion, I, 51, 54 f., 61 f., 80 f..
336 f . ; philosophy deals with, I,
61 f.
Vedanta, philosophy of, II, 260.
Vedas, writings of, I, 222, 242 f., 401,
438 f., II, 260, 430 f.
Vemes, M., I, 243.
Vignoli, Prof., on primitive society,
I, 399.
Virgin, the, worship of, I, 164 f,
Vishnu, II, 323 f.
Voltaire, I, 142, II, 19, 154.
Waitz, on man's spiritual unity, I,
20; on fetish- worship, I, 96, 154;
and primitive man, I, 135, 152,
154 (note), 241 f.; early monothe-
ism, I, 225; influence of religion on
civilization, I, 405 f., 455; on re-
ligion and morality, I, 455; on
prayer, I, 516; and religion of the
Redskins, II, 317.
Waitz and Gerland (see Waitz).
Ward, Wilfrid, on mission of the
Church, II, 458.
Watson, Prof., I, 206, 271, II, 34.
Way of Salvation, religion a doctrine
of, I, 60 f., 197, 485 f., 540 f., 559 f.,
561 f.; Buddhistic doctrine of, I,
197, 472 f., 546 f.; by faith, I,
485 f., 552 f.; Dionysiac doctrine of.
I, 543; Chinese view of, I, 549 f.;
the Christian, I, 552 f., 554 f., II,
174 f.
Weismann, II, 61.
Wellhausen, II, 158.
Wernle, I, 588 (note), II, 511, 547.
"Wheel of Existence," the, I, 546 f.
Wheeler, B. I., on religion among
Greeks, I, 178, 183 (note); on Eleu-
sinian mysteries, II, 502.
Wiedemann, on religion of ancient
Egypt, I, 94, 181, II, 495 f.
Will, the human, I, 333 f., 338, 601 f.,
II, 156 f., 349 f.; the Divine, I,
334 f., II, 75, 125 f., 150 f., 206,
217 f., 349 f.; World-Ground as,
II, 75 f., 91 f., 125.
Williams, Sir Monier, on religions of
India, I, 94, 171, 461 f., 574; on
Brahmanism, I, 108.
Wilson, J. Leighton, I, 127.
Wissowa, on religion of the Romans,
I, 186 f. (note), 190, 280, 394 f.,
523.
Wodan, I, 190 f.
World, unity of, I, 112, II, 72, 230,
246; philosophical conception of,
II, 222 f., 303 f.; scientific theory
of, II, 330 f., 447 f.; different con-
ceptions of, II, 446 f.
"World-Ground," conception of, II,
51 f., 62 f., 69 f., 74 f., 91 f., 146 f.,
173, 225 f., 311 f., 370 f., 446 f.;
as Will, II, 75 f., 79 f., 91 f., 102 f.,
372; and Mind, II, 77 f., 83 f., 91 f.;
as Person.al Life, II, 145 f., 370 f.
Worship, nature of, I, 155 f., 518 f.;
Greek notion of, I, 178; higher
forms of, I, 536 f. (see also Cult).
Wundt, on origin of religion, I, 146;
and its relation to morality, I, 456,
460, II, 62; belief in existence after
death, II, 480.
Yahweh, "first- word" of, I, 52;
moral nature of, I, 77 f., 206 f.,
460 f., 525, II, 182, 186 f., 255 f.,
590
INDEX
359; origin of conception of, I, 128,
206 f., 525 f., II, 127; as "Lord of
hosts," I, 220; holiness of, I, 527 f.,
II, 204 f. (note), 206; and Power,
II, 124; as God of the nations,
II, 469.
Yoga, nature of, I, 180, II, 26 f.,
391 f., 393.
Yogins (or Yogis), I, 397, II, 27, 29.
Zarathustra (see Zoroaster).
Zeller, on origin of religion, I, 151.
Zend-Avesta, I, 198, 245, II, 391.
Zeus, .ffischylus' conception of, I,
185, 465 f.; justice of, II, 183 f.,
357; Epictetus' conception of, II,
357 f.
Zi, worship of, I, 155.
Zoroaster, I, 198, II, 165, 391.
Zoroastrianism, its worship of fire,
I, 175; its general characteristics,
I, 198 f., II, 165 f.; doctrine of
evil, II, 165 f., 320 f.; and of crea-
tion, II, 320 f.
Zulus, belief of, in "creator gods,"
I, 225 f.; clairvoyance among, I,
267.
Zunis, II, 315.
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