Two lectures on theism: delivered on the occasion of the sesquicentennial celebration of Princeton university

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TWO LECTURES ON THEISM

PRINCETON LECTURES.

A series of volumes containing the notable lectures de-
livered on the occasion of the Sesquicentennial
celebration of Princeton University.

The French Revolution and English Literature. Six Lectures.

By Prof Edward Dowden, Trinity College, Dublin.
Theism. Two Lectures. By Prof. Andrew Seth, University of
Edinburgh

The Discharge of Electricity in Gases. Four Lectures. By Prof.

J. J. Thomson, University of Cambridge.
The Mathematical Theory of the Top. Four Lectures. By Prof
Felix Klein, University of Gottingen.

The Descent of the Primates. By Prof. A. A. W. Hubrecht,

University of Utrecht.

The Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders in the Indoger-
manic Languages. By Prof. Karl Brugmann, University of
Leipsic

The Claims Of the Old Testament. Two Lectures By Prof.
Staxley Leathes, D.D., King's College, London.

TWO LECTURES ON
THEISM

DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE

SESQUICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

BY

/

ANDREW SETH, M.A., LL.D.
n

Professor op Logic and Metaphysics in
the University op Edinburgh

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/

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NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRLBNER'S SONS

1897

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Copyright, 1897,
By Chakles Scribner's Sons

SJnttoersitg ^ress:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S. A,

TWO LECTURES ON THEISM
I

Theee are three terms, not perhaps very clearly
defined, — perhaps not employed by different
writers with any strict uniformity of usage, —
still, terms which may suffice to indicate at the
outset the possible lines in which theories of the
divine may move. The terms I mean are Pan-
theism, Deism, and Theism. There is a certain
differentiation between them, even in current
usage. Pantheism either identifies God with the
world of men and things, or, in the emphasis
it lays upon the divine as the only reality,
reduces the facts of finite existence to a mere
show or appearance. Pantheism in its varied
forms moves between these two extremes ; but
the feature common to both is the denial of a
distinction between God and the world. In the
one case, God is explicitly equated with the
world-process, so that there can be no talk of
difference ; in the other case, we are taught that
the difference is only a difference that seems.
1

2 THEISM

Over against pantheism, in either of its phases,
stands the view which I have called Deism.
Deism lays so much stress on the difference, or,
as it is here technically called, the transcendence,
of the divine existence, that it removes God out
of the world altogether, and sets him at a dis-
tance alike from the play of nature's laws and
the thoughts and actions of mankind, — a spirit
beyond the stars, a being who created the world
once upon a time, who may interfere at times
with the machinery, but who contents himself
on the whole with " seeing it go." This view,
though repudiated by religious feeling and by
the more profound theological thinkers, is em-
bedded in a great deal of popular theology and
popular religion. And in more prosaic ages of
thought it is sure to predominate, to the exclu-
sion or neglect of the truth for which pantheism
contends. The deistic God, an Eire supreme or
Great First Cause, is the kind of God whose exist-
ence the so-called "proofs of the existence of
God" are intended to establish. People even
speak in this connection of proving the existence
of a God, — a phrase which obviously implies
that they think of God as an individual among
other individuals, and therefore as a finite being
within the universe in the widest sense of that

THEISM 3

term. This is of course seen to be impossible, as
soon as speculation rouses itself. Monotheism,
conceived in this deistic fashion, is a survival of
polytheistic belief, — a higher development, no
doubt, but not different in kind.

There is a certain amount of authority for the
use of the term Theism to indicate a view which
endeavors — whether it succeeds or not is another
question, but which at least endeavors — to recog-
nize both immanence and transcendence, and so to
do justice to the truths which underlie the one-
sided extremes of pantheism and deism. The
elements which must be combined in a theistic
doctrine which shall satisfy both the head and
the heart — both the speculative and the practi-
cal reason — can only be appreciated after some
consideration of the contrasted extremes which
it endeavors to mediate between, or, as the
phrase runs, to combine in a higher unity.

The contrasts exhibit themselves to some
extent on the stage of history, when we look at
the course of modern philosophy. All historical
generalizations of this kind require modification,
when we look into the detailed history of the
time ; they are in the main simply suggestive
points of view, and I am far from desiring to
press unduly the view of the course of modern

4 THEISM

speculation which I am about to propound, in
face of the exceptions which any one so inclined
might produce against it. Still, it is not uncom-
mon in the best histories of philosophy to regard
the seventeenth century as an age of universal-
ism, followed in the eighteenth century by a
swing of the pendulum to the opposite extreme
of individualism. Universalism, in this philo-
sophic use of the term, implies a tendency to
pantheism. Individualism means, in its first
stage, deism, — an individually separate first
cause, as the originator of the finite individu-
alities whose reality demands explanation. The
difficulties which deism encounters in its search
for such a God lead on this line of thought
towards an atheistic culmination. The astron-
omer sweeps the heavens with his telescope and
finds no God ; reason finds it impossible to stop
anywhere in the infinite regress of finite or phe-
nomenal causes. The proposal to prove by the
scientific law of causality the existence of an
uncaused being seems, indeed, little better than
a contradiction in terms. Hence the deistic God
is at last discarded as a hypothesis which is not
required.

Something like this development reaHy took
place in modern thought, if we look only at

THEISM 5

its main currents. Seventeenth-century thought
may be said, without injustice, to culminate in
the great pantheistic system of Spinoza. This
was what the Cartesian era issued in. And that
this speculative strain is by no means to be
attributed solely to the exceptional individuality
of Spinoza, as a man and a thinker, is conclu-
sively shown by the development of the same
tendency independently by Malebranche, a Chris-
tian priest. Malebranche refers to Spinoza with
virtuous indignation as a miserable, just as Locke,
the individualist and deist, disclaims all kindred
with his "justly decried" name, or as Hume,
the individualistic sceptic, refers, with less excuse,
to " that famous atheist " and his " hideous
hypothesis" (Treatise, Bk. I. Part 4). Male-
branche's system differs from Spinoza's, no
doubt, in some not unessential points, where his
Christian consciousness makes itself felt ; and his
intention is unquestionably theistic. But, in the
main determinations of their systems, the Father
of the Oratory and the excommunicated Jew
coincide so closely that it is plain both are
upborne by a common stream of tendency in the
thought of the time.

Locke and Leibnitz were the minds who chiefly
shaped the thought of the eighteenth century.

6 THEISM

The activity of both carries us back some dis-
tance into the seventeenth, just as the shaping
forces of the nineteenth begin to show them-
selves a good many years before 1800. Leib-
nitz's system is a rehabilitation of the rights of
the individual life against the all-devouring
pantheism of Spinoza. Leibnitz himself was
too profoundly speculative a mind to find the
last word of philosophy in a doctrine of bare
Pluralism, that is, to accept a number of indi-
vidual reals as absolutely self-subsistent and
mutually independent. He endeavored to em-
brace them within the unity and harmony of
a single system ; and, in thus rendering justice
to the truth which the universalistic systems
emphasize, went so far sometimes in his expres-
sions as to lay himself open to the imputation
of Spinozism at the hands of his own degenerate
successors, the prosaic and shallow philosophers
of the Auf klarung, or Enlightenment. For it
was the fate of the Leibnitzian philosophy, as
it was developed in Germany, to be gradually
stripped of its profounder elements. In being
adapted for popular consumption, it was reduced
to a cold and formal rationalism, in which the
relation of God to the world became more and
more external.

THEISM 7

On the other hand, in England and in France,
Locke's "Essay," with its somewhat prosaic com-
mon-sense and narrow horizons, was the philo-
sophical Bible of the century. To Locke himself
an extra-mundane deity was a matter of demon-
strative certainty, on the strength ot the law of
causation. Such demonstrations were frequent
during the century ; but Coleridge complains, not
without reason, that men had come to regard G-od's
relation to the world in much the same light as
that of a mason to his work. A Demiurge or
world-builder was, in fact, a]l that such an argu-
ment could at best succeed m proving ; and as
the stable mechanical conditions of the universe
were more clearly realized, and also the incon-
gruity became more apparent of passing along
the line of phenomenal causation to a non-phe-
nomenal first cause, this mechanical deism
easily gave place to atheism. But deism was
the first development. The first fruit of Locke's
"Essay" in England was the historically impor-
tant movement known as English deism, with
its so-called "religion of nature." It was against
this form of thought that Butler directed his
"Analogy of Natural and Eevealed Eeligion."
But, as was seen in the well-known case of
James Mill, this argumentum ad hominem, in-

» THEISM

tended to drive a deist back upon Christianity,
was a double-edged weapon, and might just as
logically lead a less convinced deist to abandon
his deism for an atheistic or completely scep-
tical position. This free-thinking English deism
was transplanted to France by Voltaire, whose
religion, if any man's, was based upon the pure
understanding. Voltaire was as strenuous an
opponent of atheism as he was of Christianity.
But the drift of empirical philosophy towards
a materialistic atheism went on apace during
his lifetime among the circle of the encyclo-
paedists, of whom Diderot is the greatest name.
The views of this circle were given to the world
in 1770 in the Baron d'Holbach's once famous
"Systeme de la Nature."

This book in the first flush of its reputation,
and with all the adventitious charms of a sup-
pressed work, fell into the hands of the youth-
ful ■ Goethe at Strassburg. He tells us in his
autobiography the impression which it made
upon him and his friends. "We did not un-
derstand how such a book could be dangerous.
It seemed to us so gray, so Cimmerian, so death-
like, that we had difficulty in enduring its pres-
ence; we shuddered at it as at a spectre. Not
one of us had read the book through, for we

THEISM 9

found the expectations disappointed with which
we had opened it. 'System of Nature' was the
announcement, and we hoped in consequence
really to learn something of nature, our idol.
But how hollow and empty we felt in this
melancholy atheistic half-darkness (Halbnacht),
in which the earth with all her forms, the
heaven with all its constellations, vanished.
Matter was said to exist from eternity, and to
be in motion from eternity; and through this
motion — to right and to left and in all direc-
tions — it was said to produce, without more
ado, the infinite phenomena of existence. We
might even have put up with this, if the author
had really built up the world before our eyes
out of his matter in motion. But apparently
he knew as little about nature ^as we did ; for
after laying down some general notions, he
leaves them at once, in order to transform all
that appears higher than nature, or as a higher
nature in nature, into a nature that is material,
ponderable, in motion, it is true, but without
direction or form. And he believes that he
has thereby gained a wonderful deal." This
was the meeting of the old and the new. The
highest wisdom of the declining century — or
what gave itself out as such — appeared as

10 THEISM

foolishness — " the quintessence of senility " are
Goethe's own words — to the pulsing life of
the youth who was so largely to shape the
thoughts of the corning time.

In England empiricism developed into scep-
ticism in Hume, while the orthodox theology,
which had at first looked askance at Locke, be-
came more and more impregnated with the prin-
ciples of the deism it had officially to combat.
And the century eventually finds its typical theo-
logical representative in Paley, whose almighty
watchmaker is as true to Locke's conception of
deity as his definition of virtue, as " the doing
good to mankind in obedience to the will of God
and for the sake of everlasting happiness," repro-
duces Locke's account of "the true ground of
morality, which can only be the will and law
of a God who sees men in the dark, has in his
hands rewards and punishments, and power
enough to call to account the proudest offender."
Thus an interested or purely selfish morality —
a heteronomous morality, in the Kantian phrase,
— is the natural outcome of a theory which
makes God a merely external creator and law-
giver. And it is significant that when Goethe
sought refuge with Spinoza from the godless mech-
anism of eighteenth-century materialism, what

THEISM 11

especially attracted him was the disinterested-
ness which breathes in every line of the " Ethics,"
even to the culminating sentence which Goethe
quotes, " He that truly loves God must not de-
sire that God should love him in return." That
is almost certainly not the whole truth either,
but at least it throws into glaring relief the mean-
ness of Paley's view, and the insufficiency of the
theory of which it forms an integral part.

It was by a natural instinct that men turned
in revulsion from the cramping influences of the
current theology, whether orthodox or free-think-
ing, to the great misapprehended Jewish thinker.
For nigh upon a hundred years people had talked
about Spinoza, says Lessing, as if he were a dead
dog. A rationalistic opponent, not content with
the ordinary weapons of controversy, prefixed to
his efforts a portrait of Spinoza with the inscrip-
tion, "Signum reprobationis in vultu gerens."
And, as Goethe humorously adds, the engraving
was so shockingly bad that there was no denying
the allegation. The casual allusions of Locke and
Hume, already quoted, are fair specimens of the
way in which Spinoza is usually referred to all
through the age of individualism. Lessing, that
great and intrepid pioneer of nineteenth-century
thought and literature, was among the first to

12 THEISM

break the spell. Jacobi, though diametrically
opposed to Spinoza's method and result, con-
tributed by his publications to enhance his philo-
sophical importance in the eyes of the rising
generation. Goethe has put on record, in more
than one place, the deep impression which the
"Ethics" made upon him. The influence of Spi-
noza was decisive upon the great German ideal-
ists who developed the philosophy of Kant, more
especially upon Schelling and Hegel. Empha-
size their minor differences from him as they
may, he is yet to them the greatest figure in
modern philosophy. Instead of his atheism
Hegel talks of his Akosmism, just as Novalis
speaks of him as a God-intoxicated man. Through
these and other post-Kantian systems, the univer-
salistic strain became once more dominant in
modern philosophy, while through Schleierma-
cher the same influence made itself powerfully
felt in theology. Schleiermacher's eloquent apos-
trophe is well known, in which he calls upon all
true men to " offer, as in the ancient fashion, a
lock of hair to the manes of the holy and excom-
municated Spinoza. The sublime spirit of the
universe penetrated him ; the infinite was his
beginning and his end, the universal his only and
eternal love."

THEISM 13

And far beyond the limits of the schools,
whether philosophical or theological, the same
movement of man's mind is observable at the
turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In England it was the expansive power of the
poetic imagination that shattered the world of
the prosaic understanding, and communicated to
literature that sense " of something far more
deeply interfused," which Wordsworth, its noblest
exponent, celebrates in his famous " Lines com-
posed above Tintern Abbey," —

" a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man ;
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

Wordsworth and Coleridge had had their con-
versations about Spinoza aod the new German
philosophy on the ferny slopes of the Quantocks
and by the shores of the Severn-sea ; but to
Wordsworth this insight into the unity and
kinship of all that is, flowed directly, without
the need of such intermediary, from " the spirit
of religious love in which he walked with Nature."
Coleridge, we know, claimed to have reached in-

14 THEISM

dependently at an earlier date the same results
as Schelling ; and all his life long he contemplated
a book on the Logos, which was, in his own words,
to unite Spinozism and the mechanical deism in
" the theism of Saint Paul and Christianity." 1
Shelley's aerial flight carries him towards panthe-
ism pure and simple, rising at times to an enthu-
siastic worship of the Spirit of Beauty in all that
lives, and again passing into that pantheism of illu-
sion which may verge closely upon pessimism.

" The one remains, the many change and pass ;
Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly ;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,
Until death tramples it to fragments. — Die,
If thou would'st be with that which thou dost seek."

But, with whatever varieties in accent, all these
poetic voices give utterance to the essential truth
that the divine is not to be sought as a problem-
atical Spirit beyond the stars. God is revealed to
us alike in the face of nature and in our own
self-conscious life, — in the common reason which
binds mankind together and in the ideals which
light us on our upward path. God is not far
from any one of us. Within us and around us,
here or nowhere, God is to be found. This truth

1 Biographia Literaria, chapter 12.

THEISM 15

may be said to have remained a permanent pos-
session of the present century. Jobly empha-
sized by Carlyle and Emerson, it has gradually
leavened that slow-moving mass of popular think-
ing which generally lags so painfully behind the
best insight of its own time. For the enlight-
enment of one century lives on, as dogma and
prejudice, to impede the higher thought of the
next. Carlyle's running polemic against what
he calls "the mechanical system of thought,"
and the grim irony with which he assails the
notion of "proof of a God," — "a probable God,"
— furnish some of his strongest passages, while
the chapter of " Sartor " in which he outlines
the counter-doctrine of "Natural Supernatural-
ism " is one of the most moving pieces of English
prose.

But it is time to return from this general sur-
vey of modern thought to the more strictly philo-
sophical discussion of the subject. And in doing
so, we shall find our natural starting-point in the
philosophy of Kant, from which all the lines of
modern speculation may be said to radiate. The
great German idealists, I said, were under the
decisive influence of Spinoza ; and they are some-
times treated as if they had simply revived his
pantheism, and grafted it upon the Critical phi-

16 THEISM

losophy of Kant. That, however, would be a
superficial view. The history of philosophy
shows no such resurrection of the body of a
philosophical system, though the spirit of it may
live again in another age. So the dominant uni-
versalism of Spinoza's thought lived again in
Schelling and Hegel; but the body it took to
itself was developed under other auspices and in
another intellectual atmosphere. It was as much
the natural outgrowth of Kantianism, as Spinozism
was the natural outgrowth of Cartesianism. And
in Hegel's philosophy, at all events, the new uni-
versalism certainly aims at correcting the defects
of the old, — and not only aims at doing so, but
in important points succeeds. While subscribing
unreservedly, as every speculative mind must, to
Spinoza's fundamental proposition, " Quicquid est
in Deo est," and accepting therefore his doctrine
of immanent causality, Hegel differentiates his
own system from Spinoza's, in that he defines the
Absolute not as Substance, but as Subject. He
endeavors, that is, to conceive the universe as
the process of a self-conscious life, and not as
the determination of a substance that in itself is
bare of all determinations, and possesses, there-
fore, no creative nisus (so to speak), which might
explain its self-determination into the manifold

THEISM 17

forms of the finite world. Hegel escapes in this
way, too, the negative logic of Spinoza, which, by
finding true reality in the perfectly undetermined,
reduces all the distinctions of finite existence to
a species of illusion. The process of history and
of human life is to Hegel eminently real. That
at least is his prevailing attitude of mind.

How, then, did this new universalism spring
from the philosophy of Kant? Kant's philos-
ophy has many sides, and one strain of Kantian
thought has contributed much to the strength
of agnosticism in the present century. The sub-
jectivity and agnosticism which cling to Kant's
doctrine of knowledge must, however, in fairness
be regarded as incidental to the way in which he
reached his main results, not as themselves con-
stituting his permanently valuable contribution
to modern thinking. On the intellectual side,
that contribution undoubtedly consists in his
doctrine of the categories, — in the demonstra-
tion, to put it generally, of a system of rational
conceptions which are involved in every self-
conscious act of mind, which enter, therefore,
into the construction of every object we know.
They are the conditions of the very possibility of
experience as such, and may be regarded, there-
fore, as the irreducible essence of the rational
2

18 THEISM

world. Kant himself did not give a complete
list or an exhaustive account of these concep-
tions, nor can he be said to have, in all cases,
treated satisfactorily their relation to one another
and to the supreme unity of self-consciousness
whose forms they are. But he named the most
important, and bequeathed to his successors the
fruitful idea of an organized system — an organ-
ism — of reason.

Kant himself regarded the categories as merely
subjective, as a necessary equipment of human
understanding if we are to have experience at
all, bat still merely a subjective mould, as it
were, into which we run the fluid and form-
less material of sensation, — something, in short,
contributed by the subject in the act of knowl-
edge, and therefore of essentially limited validity,
not predicable of reality as such. But such
mere subjectivity is, in the very nature of the
case, impossible to prove. Even if our cate-
gories were purely subjective, it is impossible
we should ever come to know it; and the idea of
a world of things in themselves, apart from the
world we know, may easily be shown to dissolve
in contradictions. A world, real and independent
of the individual's transient acts of knowledge, is
not a world divorced from intelligence altogether.

THEISM 19

The fact, therefore, that a category lives subjec-
tively in the act of the knowing mind is no proof
that the category does not at the same time truly
express the nature of the reality known. It
would be so only if we suppose the knowing sub-
ject to stand outside of the real universe alto-
gether, and to come to inspect it from afar with
mental spectacles of a foreign make. In that
case, no doubt, the forms of his thought might
be a distorting medium. But the case only re-
quires to be stated plainly for its inherent ab-
surdity to be seen. The knower is in the world
which he comes to know, and the forms of his
thought, so far from being an alien growth or an
imported product, are themselves a function of
the whole. As a French writer 1 puts it, " con-
sciousness, so far from being outside reality, is
the immediate presence of reality to itself and
the inward unrolling of its riches." When this
is once grasped, the idea of thought as a kind of
necessary evil — Kant really treats it as such —
ceases to have even a superficial plausibility.
Unless we consider existence a bad joke, we have
no option save tacitly to presuppose the harmony
of the subjective function with the nature of the
universe from which it springs.

1 M. Fouillee, in his " L'Evolutionnisme cles Idees-forces."

20 THEISM

The subjectivity of Kant's treatment of the
categories was, however, incidental to the scheme,
and was immediately abandoned by his idealistic
successors. It is the point against which Hegel
brings some of his heaviest artillery to bear. His
criticism of Kant in this respect is absolutely
conclusive. "Thoughts," as he says, "do not
stand between us and things, shutting us off
from the things ; they rather shut us together
with them." In Hegel's hands, therefore, the
analysis of the structure of thought is, in his
own daring phrase, "the exposition of God as
he is in his eternal essence, before the creation
of nature or a single human spirit." Or, to put
it perhaps less alarmingly, nature maybe viewed,
in its formal essence, as a system of objective
thought, — a fossilized intelligence, according to
the phrase which Hegel repeats from Schelling.
The finite mind elicits these thoughts in the
process of experience, and in doing so may fitly
be said to rethink the thoughts of the creative
reason. But the finite mind is itself an effluence
or reproduction of that reason. Thought there-
fore shuts us together with things because it is
the common essence both of the subject and the
object ; and it is their common essence only be-
cause it expresses, on the intellectual side, the

THEISM 21

nature of God himself, the ultimate fact within
which nature and man are both somehow con-
tained. Hence the central position assigned to
logic in the Hegelian scheme; for logic inves-
tigates the abstract types, the conceptions, of
which we find the real exemplifications in nature
and history. So that Hegel says sometimes that
the other philosophic sciences, the Philosophy of
Nature and the Philosophy of Mind, may be re-
garded as, so to speak, an applied logic. Eeason,
or thought, is not an accident of man ; it is the
presence in him of the universal world-reason,
the light that lighteth every man that cometh
into the world. In virtue of its presence in all
men, interchange of thought becomes possible,
and, with that, the growth of society and all the
history of civilization, all these things being
based upon a common system or organism of
reason. And, in like manner, the fabric of ex-
ternal nature becomes transparent and intelli-
gible to the mind, seeing that it reveals itself
as the embodiment of the same conceptions.
" We recognize in nature's inner heart only our
own reason and feel ourselves at home there.
Spirit has the certainty which Adam had when
he saw Eve. ' This is flesh of my flesh and bone
of my bone.' " Thought is thus the great unifier ;

22 THEISM

it is that which welds God and Nature and Man
together as members of one whole. To know
reason, therefore, is to know God ; the presence
of reason within us is the presence of God ; the
progressive rationalization of the world by sci-
ence is a continuous extension of our knowledge
of God, — a cumulative theistic proof, if it is
right to talk of proof in a case where necessary
assumption might better express the real state of
affairs.

But this purely intellectual account of the
divine, as a system of thoughts or conceptions, is
obviously not in itself a sufficient doctrine of
God. It requires to be supplemented from the
ethical side. And here again we must take our
start from Kant, who is the modern ethicist par
excellence, who has in fact founded upon ethics
his whole positive teaching. The ethical the-
ology in which Kant's system culminates is, to
my mind, by far the most important contribution
of modern philosophy towards a vital theism.
And this remains true, although we may be just
as little able to accept Kant's doctrine here in
the precise form in which he clothed it, as we
were able to accept his theory of the categories
as subjective forms of the human mind. Al-
though he opened the way for the whole course

THEISM 23

of nineteenth-century thought, Kant remained
himself in many particulars a man of the eigh-
teenth, and in his ethics we have to disengage the
theory from its eighteenth-century vestments.

Kant goes to work in the ethical sphere in
much the same way as in the intellectual ; he
sets out by asking what is the condition, or what
are the conditions, of the possibility of ethical
experience at all. The fundamental condition,
he discovers, is the unconditional " thou shalt "
of Duty, — what he calls the categorical impera-
tive. Here his position is impregnable ; there
is no passage from " is " to " ought." Whatever
scheme of ethics we follow, whatever standard
we adopt as the touchstone of the lightness of
an action, — say we are utilitarians, for example,
or even enlightened hedonists, — the ultimate
judgment which enjoins the realization of that
standard must contain an unconditional and irre-
ducible " ought." If we are to have ethics at all,
then, as a system of precepts, we must rest some-
where upon a categorical imperative. Having
established this point, Kant proceeds to ask
what more this " ought " involves. First of all,
" ought " involves " can." It is essentially absurd
to address a command to a being who has no
power to conform to it. The ethical " ought "

24 THEISM

applies not to the inanimate things of nature,
which act according to laws of which they them-
selves know nothing ; it applies only to beings
who have the capacity of acting according to
the idea of a law, that is, who have the power of
determining themselves according to the idea of
an end, — beings who have a will, who are free.
Moral freedom is therefore the first implication
or postulate of the ethical life. And to it Kant
adds, in a somewhat forced and artificial fashion,
the two other postulates of God and immortality.
Immortality is postulated because the conflict
between the law of duty and the lower self of
inclination cannot be brought to a victorious
conclusion within the present life, or indeed
within any finite period of time. The perfect
will which morality demands is a flying goal,
" which fades for ever and for ever as we move."
An infinite progress of approximation is all that
the finite being can realize, and for that infinite
progress an infinite time is demanded. In other
words, the ethical being is necessarily immortal.
The postulate of the divine existence suffers
most from the way in which it is introduced.
Kant had resolutely discarded all considerations
of happiness from his ethical imperative and his
idea of the virtuous man. Duty is to be done

THEISM 25

for duty's sake alone ; otherwise the act has no
ethical value whatever. But though the moral
man must take no account of happiness in his
actions, it would still contradict our sense of
righteousness and justice if there were to be a
fundamental divorce between virtue and hap-
piness, or even a total want of any correlation
between them. Correlation of some sort is a de-
mand which the ethical consciousness makes of
the universal scheme of things. This is a postu-
late of morality, in the sense that without it mo-
rality would not be fully intelligible ; without it
morality would have no root in the nature of
things. The appearance of morality would be
an unexplained intrusion in a cosmos which took
no account of it one way or another. The man
who was moral in such circumstances could be so
only in a spirit of stoical despair or defiant re-
volt. If morality is to be fully justified, we
must believe that in morality we have the uni-
verse somehow behind us. But the system of
natural causes in the midst of which our present
life is lived, shows no inevitable adjustment of
happiness to virtue. The wicked flourish like a
green bay-tree. " All things come alike to all :
there is one event to the righteous and to the
wicked ; to the good, and to the clean, and to the

26 THEISM

unclean ; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that
sacrificeth not."

" Streams will not curb their pride
The just man not to entomb,
Nor lightnings go aside
To give his virtues room ;
Nor is that wind less rough that blows a good man's
barge."

But there is no need to enlarge upon a discre-
pancy which has furnished moralists with a theme
since history's dawn. Kant's argument based
upon it is that if the present sensible world
offers no guarantee of such adjustment, the
adjustment must be made in the interests of
morality hereafter by a moral governor of the
universe, to whom the sensible world is only
part of a wider scheme of things.

However important the truth it embodies,
it is obvious that Kant's statement here is pain-
fully bald and mechanical. He first separates
what he has no right to separate, and then
brings what he has separated externally to-
gether again. God is not here directly con-
nected with the substance of the moral law ;
he is not represented as the source of the ideal
which it sets up within us. He is simply, as it
were, the official of the law, the instrument for

THEISM 27

carrying out the demands which the ethical
consciousness makes. The law of duty is self-
imposed, according to the fundamental tenet of
the Kantian ethics. It is true, Kant afterwards
enjoins us, in his philosophy of religion, to obey
the law as the law of God. But there is no direct
and inevitable connection between the two posi-
tions ; for God, as we see here, is treated by Kant
in the most extreme deistic fashion, as a being
entirely apart from the self of the individual.
It is not, however, as an external lawgiver that
God is the source of the ethical law or ideal.
Against that view, Kant rightly insists on the
necessity that the law shall be self-imposed, if it
is to carry with it an authority against which
there is no appeal. He does not fully see, how-
ever, that if its imposition is referred to the self
of the isolated individual, we are thrown back
into subjectivity, and are quite as much at a loss
as before to account for the authority of the law,
the consciousness of absolute obligation which
accompanies it, — an obligation not only for me,
but for all rational beings. This authority,
claimed and exercised by the higher self, is
only intelligible if the ideals of that self are
recognized as the immediate presence within us
of a spirit leading us into all truth and goodness.

28 THEISM

The moral law is not first imposed by the indi-
vidual self (in the theory of ethics), and then
ratified or re-imposed by an external lawgiver
(in the theory of religion). Bather the two are
one from the beginning. God is the source and
author of the law, but only in the sense that he
is the higher self within the self which inwardly
illuminates all our lives.

Instead of connecting God in this direct way
with the substance of morality, Kant gives him
an external and instrumental relation to it. But,
if it is not right to treat a human being merely
as a means, it must surely be a false way of
putting things to present God in this merely
instrumental light. The undignified nature of
the position is enhanced, when it is seen that he
is treated simply as a means to the happiness of
the individual, — a deus ex machina, introduced
to effect the equation of virtue and happiness.
This is, even from the point of view of morality
itself, an unfortunate way of stating the postu-
late in question. The puritanic preacher of duty
for duty's sake lapses curiously, we might al-
most say, into the hedonistic morality of the
eighteenth century, which he elsewhere so
strenuously condemns. For, after all, it is not
happiness in any banal sense that the ethical

THEISM 29

consciousness claims as the wages of well-doing.
It sets up no demand that all its acts of self-
restraint or self-sacrifice shall be recompensed by
doles of happiness, — as if, says Spinoza, men
expected to be decorated by God with high
rewards for their virtue and their best actions,
as for having endured the direst slavery. What
the ethical consciousness does demand is rather,
as I have put it, to feel the universe behind it, to
know that we are living in a moral cosmos, where
our efforts avail somewhat, and where virtue may
have the wages of going on and not to die.

It will be observed also in how baldly indi-
vidualistic a spirit the moral order is here con-
ceived by Kant. I am far from being satisfied
with a universalism which sacrifices the indi-
vidual to the progress of the race. As I have
ventured to put it on another occasion, " even if
the enormous spiral of human history is destined
to wind itself to a point which may be called
achievement, what of the generations that per-
ished by the way ? ' These all died, not having
received the promises.' What if there are no
promises to them ? " If there are not, this opti-
mism of progress seems to me as tragic at heart
as any pessimism. I agree with Kant that the
immortality of the individual is necessary, if we

30 THEISM

are to have a solution that can really call itself
optimistic, a solution that we can really embrace
as satisfying in the largest sense. But there is no
reason why the recognition of this should make
us ignore the solidarity of the race, and treat the
individuals in sheer isolation, as Kant seems here
to do. If we can recognize a moral purpose in
history, as the education of mankind as a whole,
that gives our entire ethical conception a greater
grandeur of outline without impairing our convic-
tions as to the destiny of the individual.

But the severance of the individual from the
life of the race is due to Kant's initial separation
between the individual self and the inspiring
presence of the divine life. And it is finally to
be noted that, just because Kant makes an abso-
lute separation of this kind, the imperative of
duty becomes for him an empty form without any
ethical content. It is an unconditional command,
but it commands nothing in particular, because
it has no organic connection with the material of
moral duty, as that has been evolved in the course
of history by the moral experiences of mankind.
The applicability of the imperative to any par-
ticular course of action becomes a matter of ab-
stract and somewhat round-about demonstration.
This is the formalism of Kant's ethical theory

THEISM 31

which almost all his critics have condemned, and
which is, in many ways, the counterpart of the
subjectivity of his doctrine of reason.

The advance of Kant's successors, particularly
of Hegel, was to connect the ethical as well as
the intellectual experience of man directly with
the divine life, and by so doing to root Kant's
abstract individual in the historic life of human-
ity. In other words, they universalized the ethi-
cal as they had done the intellectual theory. The
progress of man upwards from ' the ape and tiger '
to the civilization of the present day, with its
altruistic and humanitarian ideals, — this whole
ethical process, with the customs and institutions
in which it embodies itself, its laws, its public
opinion, its shifting but ever deepening and
widening ideals of honor and chivalry, of hero-
ism or saintly life, of justice and self-control, —
all this development can be rightly understood
only when regarded as the progressive unfolding
from within of an ideal of goodness, which in
itself is the most real of realities. The ideal is
not communicated to all men in the same form,
or to the earlier ages with the same fulness as to
the later ; for it is the nature of morality to be
a progress, — a progress won by effort. Character
is not born, but made ; it takes shape under the

32 THEISM

pressure of temptation and difficulty. The ad-
vance of historical study has long lifted us above
the notion of an abstract conscience promulgat-
ing to all men the same perfect moral law. The
content of the moral law grows in every way from
age to age. An age is not furnished with more
light than it needs to solve its own problems ;
revelations are not made till the fulness of time
has come, that is, till the hearts and minds of men
are prepared by their previous training to under-
stand and appreciate the new truth. If it were
otherwise, the revelation would pass uncompre-
hended over the heads of the generation to which
it was addressed. It would be as unprofitable as
the gift of prophesying in an unknown tongue.
So natural is this process of divine education that
it seems as if the new insight were wrested by
man himself from the void and formless infinite,
— as if the new truth, the new ideal, were the
creation of his own spirit. And he then bows
down and worships himself as a god in a godless
world. These, however, are but the two sides of
the shield which may be opposed to one another
to all eternity. All moral and religious truth is
won by the race for itself, in the sweat of its own
moral experience, but not without the indwelling
spirit of God.

THEISM 33

II

We considered in the preceding lecture the
contributions of Kant and Hegel toward a the-
istic position, and we found that these contribu-
tions were of the most fundamental importance.
The idea of the world as a system of reason, and
the idea of it as a moral order, are surely the most
essential constituents of an adequate conception
of God. But we have still to ask whether this
contribution constitutes in itself an adequate
account of the Divine Being. Does this phi-
losophy — does Hegel in particular — carry us
beyond this conception (so far abstract and im-
personal) of a system of reason and a moral
order ? Beyond doubt, many who have called
themselves Hegelians have believed that their
master's system was not only consistent with
theism, but was neither more nor less than the
philosophical expression of the deepest Christian
doctrine of God. It is certainly possible, there-
fore, to interpret the system in this sense ; but it
may be that this interpretation relies to a consid-
erable extent on the beliefs which the interpreters
bring with them to the study of their author.
The Hegelian system itself, if interpreted with

34 THEISM

logical consistency, and according to its dominant
spirit, scarcely seems to carry us to such conclu-
sions ; and by the most brilliant followers of the
master they have been explicitly denied.

The strength of Hegel's philosophy lies, as we
have seen, in his insistence on the doctrine of im-
manence, — the immanence of divine reason in
the world. The polemical emphasis of the system
is directed against the agnostic relativism of the
Kantian Critique with its doctrine of the thing-
in-itself, and against the easy mysticism of Schel-
ling's Philosophy of Identity. Our knowledge
does not banter us with shows and phantasms ;
it is a knowledge of reality, its result is truth. In
ultimate terms, it is describable as a revelation of
the nature of God. God, therefore, is not an Un-
knowable, nor is he, as Schelling said, a Neutrum,
— a pure identity in which there are no distinc-
tions, and of which, therefore, we can make no
predications. But, in reaction against this error,
Hegel's gift of forcible statement led him into ex-
pressions which seem to imply a no less question-
able extreme. In preaching the truth that the
Absolute is revealed in the world of its appear-
ances, not craftily concealed behind them, Hegel
seems to pass to a sheer identification of the two.
But while it is true that the two aspects must be

THEISM 35

everywhere combined, — an absolute which does
not appear or reveal itself, and an appearance
without something which appears being correla-
tive abstractions, — that is not tantamount to say-
ing that the appearance of the absolute to itself,
— the divine life as lived by God himself, — is
identical with the appearance which the world
presents to the Hegelian philosopher.

Hegel does tend, however, in many of his state-
ments, to put the philosopher in the place of deity,
and literally to identify the history of humanity
with the development of the Absolute. But,
surely, although we may reasonably hold that the
evolution of mankind, and the fashioning, by the
manifold experiences of time, of spirits fitted to
take their place in one great spiritual common-
wealth cannot be a mere show or appearance for
an eternally complete Deity ; though religious
feeling compels us to think that the long disci-
pline of our mortal life, its joys and sorrows, its
sins and struggles and infinite aspirations, cannot
be indifferent to God himself, as if it were merely
a pageant that passed before him, but must rather
be conceived as a process in which he bears a
guiding part, a process whose results are truly an
enrichment of his own life, — although all this
may, or shall we say, must be true, yet surely

36 THEISM

we cannot so identify God with the process of
human history as to say that we have in the his-
tory of philosophy, for example, the successive
stages by which God arrived at a knowledge of
himself, complete knowledge being dated from
the publication of Hegel's works in the beginning
of the present century. What we really have is
the history of man's repeated attempts to solve
the problem of the universe, — a history which,
even from this point of view, we may not un-
reasonably expect to show marks of progress and
increasing insight ; though, as I ventured to say
on another occasion, even at the end, if we are
honest with ourselves, the insight is so dim that
the title of absolute knowledge applied to it has
the sound of Mephistophelian mockery.

It is, if possible, even more plainly so in the case
of religion. What is religion, if not an attitude
of the subjective spirit of man ? We are here alto-
gether on human ground. And the same is true of
art and of history itself, — the history of civiliza-
tion, of States and empires. Is it not effrontery to
narrow down the Spirit of the universe to a series
of events upon this planet ? Can we believe, as.
Lotze puts it, " that the creative cause of the uni^
verse issued from its darkness into the light of
manifestation only by the narrow path of earthly

THEISM 37

nature, and after having formed man and human
life retreated again into infinity, as if with all its
ends accomplished ? For this dialectical idyll
we must substitute an outlook into the bound-
lessness of other worlds, not with the vain effort
to know the unknowable, but with the view of
letting the boundlessness of this background
mark out the narrow limits of the realm of exist-
ence actually knowable by us."1 And when, in
the realm of action and political history, Hegel
formulates the characteristic thesis of an absolute
philosophy, " The real is the rational," or tells us
that the State is the divine Idea as it exists
on earth, does not the optimistic verdict sound
again like hard-hearted mockery, when we turn
our eyes upon the miserable inadequacies, the
cruel wrongs, the festering sores of civilization
even at its best ? Certainly the State may be said
to be of divine institution, inasmuch as it is a
schoolmaster to lead us into the ethical life of
self-surrender, mutual respect, and mutual ser-
vice, making us feel ourselves members one of
another, and teaching us, if need be, to lay down
our lives for our native land. In all these things,
we do well to regard the fabric of society and the
State as the instrument of a divine educative pur-

1 Lotze, Microcosmus, I. 458 (English translation).

38 THEISM

pose ; but if we name it " the divine Idea as it
exists on earth," surely the stress must be laid at
least equally on the second part of the phrase.
We must distinguish, as Plato does, between the
pattern laid up in heaven of a perfect common-
wealth and any earthly realization of it, marred
and defaced by human weakness and passions.

The defect of Hegel's way of stating things is
thus that he apparently refuses to recognize any
distinction between the process of human experi-
ence and what we may call the divine experience
— the actuality of the divine life. He recognizes
only one process, and one spirit or subject as
the bearer of the process, the being that passes
through the process. At times, this subject is
spoken of as the world-spirit, which is a meta-
phorical expression like the Humanity of the
Comtists,- gathering up into unity innumerable
finite individualities ; but we are plainly intended
to identify the world-spirit with the Absolute Be-
ing himself, the spirit in all spirits, as Hegel some-
times calls him. Now, obviously, if this identi-
fication is pressed, it is tantamount to a denial
of any self-centred divine life, — any actuality of
God for himself, in the Hegelian phrase. There
is no knowledge, that is to say, in the universe,
no understanding of the scheme of things any-

THEISM 39

where, more comprehensive than that which
works itself out in laborious patchwork in
this and the other human brain. There is
no goodness, no justice, no tenderness, save
that which springs in the human heart. This
is the sense in which Hegel's doctrine was
developed by many of his ablest followers,
those who are known as the Hegelians of
the Left ; and such a doctrine differs in no
essential particulars from the Eeligion of Human-
ity, except that it goes metaphysically a step
farther, and identifies humanity with the abso-
lute ground of the universe. And, among English
Hegelians at the present day, it is observable
that this negative polemic reproduces itself in
certain writers, yielding a phase of thought which
may not unfairly be described as Hegelian posi-
tivism. The doctrine of immortality, or of any
world beyond the present, and the idea of any
God beyond what it calls " the civilization of
Christendom," are especially obnoxious to this
phase of thought.

But, to my mind, the deification of humanity
has only to be stated in order to condemn itself.
When the matter comes to this issue, we have a
right to fall back upon the elemental simplicities
of thought, — such as we find, for example, in the

40 THEISM

Book of Job : " Where wast thou when I laid
the foundations of the earth ? Whereupon are
the foundations thereof fastened ? or who laid the
corner-stone thereof, when the morning stars
sang together and all the sons of God shouted for
joy ? " And it is not only the immensities of space
and time and resistless might that raise this per-
tinent question ; it applies no less to the moral
qualities in which we recognize the true great-
ness of our race, — a greatness with which nothing
physical can be put in comparison. For the
Positivist is right, when he recognizes in the
spiritual nobilities of human character the only
fitting object of adoration or worship ; mere ex-
tent, mere power, however vast, have nothing
godlike in themselves. " Should the universe,"
said Pascal in a well-known passage, " conspire
to crush him, man would still be nobler than
that by which he falls ; for he knows that he
dies, and of the victory which the universe has
over him the universe knows nothing." It is
the physical universe which both Pascal and the
Positivists have in view, when they oppose to it
the conscious life of man ; and the Positivists
would have us suppose that man, a physical
creature, outcome of a physical world, developed,
or rather actually created, out of himself the god-

THEISM 41

like qualities of justice and mercy and all the
varied forms of goodness, crowning himself thus
the rightful superior of the godless universe from
which he sprang.

I cannot for a moment accept the view of evo-
lution which makes it consist in this cunning
manufacture of something out of nothing. Man
certainly does develop these moral qualities, and
he develops them himself, for only what is self-
acquired is a moral acquisition at all. But in his
own strength he can do nothing. It is to misread
the whole nature of development to suppose that
man, as an isolated finite creature, could take a
single step in advance. Such a being, supposing
it possible for such a being to exist, would re-
main eternally fixed in a dead sameness of being.
What it was, it would remain. Development or
progress is not the making of something out of
nothing, but the unfolding or manifestation of that
which in another aspect eternally is. It is possi-
ble, therefore, only to a being who forms part of a
divinely guided process, and who draws in conse-
quence from a fount of eternal fulness. Just as
it is impossible, therefore, to believe that there is
no knowledge in the universe greater than that of
man or of beings like him, so it is incredible that
there should be no Eternal Goodness, as the source

42 THEISM

of those ideals of which we are conscious as the
guiding star of all our progress, but which we our-
selves so palpably fail to realize.

In justice to Hegel, it is only proper to say that
it is precisely his contribution to a true doctrine
of evolution which forms one of his most im-
portant services to philosophy. Hegelianism has
insisted that a development is not an addition of
that which was in no sense there before ; con-
sequently a developing series can only be under-
stood in the light of its highest term. The true
nature of the cause becomes apparent only in the
effect. All explanation of the higher by the
lower, such as the naturalistic theories attempt,
is philosophically a hysteron proteron, — a precise
inversion of the true account. The antecedents
assigned are not the causes of the consequents ;
for by antecedents the naturalistic theories mean
the antecedents (matter and energy for example)
in abstraction from their consequents, the ante-
cedents taken as they appear in themselves, or as
we might suppose them to be if no such conse-
quents had ever issued from them. So conceived,
however, the antecedents have no real existence
— they are mere entia rationis — abstract aspects
of the one concrete fact which we call the uni-
verse. The true nature of the antecedents is only

THEISM 43

learned by reference to the consequents which
follow ; or, as I put it before, the true nature of
the cause becomes apparent only in the effect.
All ultimate or philosophical explanation must
look to the end. Hence the futility of all at-
tempts to explain human life in terms of the
merely animal, to explain life in terms of the inor-
ganic, and ultimately to find a sufficient formula
for the cosmic process in terms of the redistribu-
tion of matter and motion.

The stress, therefore, which Hegelianism has
laid upon the true interpretation of evolution con-
stitutes, as I have said, one of its great claims upon
our gratitude in an age when evolution is every-
where in the air, and when the most misleading
ideas of its nature are current. The interpreta-
tion, it is true, is no new insight on Hegel's part ;
it is substantially what we find in Aristotle.
But inasmuch as Hegel has incorporated it in
the very structure of his thinking and given it a
powerful modern expression, we rightly connect
the doctrine with his name. It is obvious, how-
ever, that the line of thought which identifies
the divine source and goal of evolution with its
highest human manifestations — which believes
that the Absolute first arrives at self-conscious-
ness in man, and has no other self-conscious

44 THEISM

existence — falls away from the profound Aristo-
telian view of the ivepyeia, or completed actual-
ity, as the eternal prius of all its evolutionary
phases, and falls back upon the naturalistic view
according to which the new stage adds to its
predecessor something which was not there be-
fore at all. The appearance of man becomes
then identical with the creation of God; man
creates himself, and at the same time brings God
to the birth. On such an interpretation, Hegel-
ianism plainly declines upon the level of the
purely materialistic theories ; and however we
may judge of Hegel's own meaning and inten-
tion, history shows that this danger is inherent
in his method of statement and in the excessive
emphasis laid on the doctrine of immanence.1

The real explanation of Hegel's sheer identi-
fication of the divine existence with the human
process is doubtless to be found in the too exclu-
sive intellectualism of his system. Knowledge
as such does not force into view the differences
between one personality and another. Eather,
so far as we merely know, we sink those cliffer-

1 It may be added in passing that, even if such a view of
evolution were competent to explain the actual stage reached
by man in knowledge and morality, it would be quite unable
to explain the possibility of progress and the existence of the
ideal which guides that progress.

THEISM 45

ences, and occupy what is called an objective or
impersonal standpoint. If we regard the world
simply as a system of thought, as something to
be intellectually understood and reproduced, we
all place ourselves at the same point of view.
We are re-thinking the same thoughts; and it
becomes not unnatural to treat the different
finite thinkers as reproductions, functions, or
modes of one universal self-consciousness. This
unification of consciousness in a single Self is
sometimes carried so far that to speak of self-
consciousness or mind in the plural is branded as
an apostasy from the only true philosophic faith.

But any plausibility which this point of view
may possess within the realm of pure intellect
vanishes at once as soon as we turn to the moral
sphere ; we are not merely contemplative intel-
lects, we are, above all, agents or doers. It is
well, as Hegel does, to insist on the rational
character of the universe, but to make Thought
the exclusive principle is either to fall into a
one-sided extreme or to use " thought " in a non-
natural sense. Thought cannot fairly be made
to include will, and any theory of the universe
which neglects the fact of will omits that which
seems to communicate a living reality to the
whole. A system which, like Hegel's, lays ex-

46 THEISM

elusive stress on thought is always in danger
of reducing the universe to a phantasm of the
intellect, — an impersonal system of thought-
harmony, — or, in Mr. Bradley's vivid phrase,
"an unearthly ballet of bloodless categories."
It is in the will, in purposive action, and par-
ticularly in our moral activity, as Fichte, to my
mind, conclusively demonstrated, that we lay
hold upon reality. All that we know might be
but a dream-procession of shadows, and the mind
of the dreamer no more than the still mirror in
which they are reflected, if indeed it were any-
thing but the shifting shadows themselves. But
in the purposive " I will," each man is real, and
is immediately conscious of his own reality.
Whatever else may or may not be real, this is
real. This is the fundamental belief, around
which scepticism may weave its maze of doubts
and logical puzzles, but from which it is eventu-
ally powerless to dislodge us, because no argument
can affect an immediate certainty, — a certainty,
moreover, on which our whole view of the uni-
verse depends.

Now the individuality or self-hood of which we
are conscious in willing, is felt as one which im-
plies a real difference not only between me and any
other finite self, but also a real difference or dual-

THEISM 47

ism between me and the absolute spirit. I exist
in God. " The human soul," as has been said, " is
neither self- derived nor self-existing. It would
vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance
is God."1 God is the fountain light of all our
day, the master light of all our seeing, inasmuch
as we share in the common or universal reason;
and his are the ideals which illuminate and guide
our life. But in our wills we feel a principle of
self-hood, which separates us even from the
Being who is the ground of our existence. This
is most manifest in the sphere of moral duty.
" Our wills are ours to make them Thine," as the
poet finely puts it. But they must be really
ours, if there is to be any ethical value in the
surrender, — if there is even to be any meaning
in the process at all. If there are not two wills
involved, then no relation between them is pos-
sible, and the imaginary duality is an illusion
incident to our limited point of view. But the
ethical consciousness places its veto once for all
upon any such sophistication of its primary and
absolute deliverance; and by that absolute de-
liverance, we shall do well, I think, to stand.
The speculative reason sees no alternative be-
tween absolute dependence, which would make

1 Lord Gifford, quoted by Professor Upton, Hibbert Lectures,
p. 284.

48 THEISM

us merely the pipes upon which the divine mu-
sician plays, and absolute independence, which
would make the world consist of a plurality of
self-subsistent real beings. These are the only
kinds of relation which it finds intelligible. But
it seems to me that it must be, in the nature
of the case, impossible for the finite spirit to
understand the mode of its relation to the in-
finite or absolute Spirit in which it lives. That
relation could only be intelligible from the ab-
solute point of view. The fact, then, that we
cannot reconcile the partial independence and
freedom of the finite self with its acknowledged
dependence upon God in other respects, need not
force us to abandon our primary moral convic-
tion, in deference to a speculative theory which
may be applying a finite plumb-line to measure
the resources of the infinite. After all, why
should the creation of beings with a real, though
partial, freedom and independence be an absolute
impossibility ? It is certainly the only view
which makes the world a real place, — which
makes the whole labor of history more than
a shadow fight or aimless phantasmagoria.

I have dwelt, in the foregoing, upon the inade-
quacy of any theory which pushes the doctrine

THEISM x49

of immanence to the extreme of absolutely identi-
fying the finite and the human process. Let me
exemplify, by a recent instance, a counter error
into which it is easy to fall. The first danger we
found historically exemplified in the Hegelian
system, or at least in important developments of
Hegelian thought. Mr. Bradley's recent work
on " Appearance and Reality " may be regarded,
in many respects, as an attempt to supplement
and correct the defects of the Hegelian state-
ment; and as it is without doubt the most im-
portant metaphysical work which has appeared
in England for a considerable time, I make no
apology for using it in illustration of the next
part of my argument.

Mr. Bradley has always protested against the
reduction of the life of the world to a set of
logical categories ; and in this volume he recalls
his fellow Hegelians from a too narrow human-
ism to an insight into the vastness of the sus-
taining Life that operates unspent throughout
the universe. The whole book is a praiseworthy
attempt to treat the life of the Absolute for
itself as a reality, as the most real of realities.
The truth on which he insists may seem toler-
ably elementary ; the strange thing would rather
seem to be that man should ever forget his

4

50 THEISM

position as a finite incident in the plan of things,
and measure himself with the unmeasurable
Spirit of the universe. Is it not both absurd
and blasphemous to suppose that the Power
which cradles and encompasses all our lives
is not itself a living fact, and that it is re-
served for man to bring the Absolute, as it were,
to the birth ? True as it is, in the proper refer-
ence, to say that the Absolute realizes itself in
human self-consciousness, the statement becomes
fundamentally absurd, if it is taken to mean that
the Absolute exists, so to speak, by the grace of
man, and lives only in the breath of his nostrils.
But the most elementary truths are sometimes
most easily forgotten in the heat of polemic
against some particular error. And therefore
the stress which Mr. Bradley lays throughout his
volume upon the necessarily superhuman charac-
ter of the Absolute — its inexpressible and
incomprehensible transcendence of human con-
ditions of being and thinking — constitutes a
salutary corrective to a good deal of current
speculation. But Mr. Bradley has not been con-
tent simply to restore to us this fundamental in-
sight. He offers us himself a constructive theory
of absolute experience — in vague outline, as he
often admits, but still a constructive theory in

THEISM 51

pretty definite terms. And the reason why I call
attention to this theory is that it illustrates so
effectively the counter-error against which we
must guard in forming our conception of the
divine nature, — the pantheism or akosmism
which reduces all finite experience to a species
of illusion.

This goal is indicated already in the title of
the hook "Appearance and Eeality " ; for " reality "
is restricted to the life of the Absolute for itself,
and all the world of our knowledge and experience
is described as " appearance," — branded, indeed, as
" mere appearance," " irrational," " self-contradic-
tory " appearance, not to mention other deprecia-
tory adjectives and terms of excommunication.
According to Mr. Bradley, knowledge, inasmuch
as it is relational throughout, is defective as such ;
it makes distinctions (it distinguishes qualities,
for example, in a thing) but it never re-
duces its distinctions to a real unity. The very
relation of subject and object, which ' must
exist in every instance of knowledge, implies
a difference not overcome. But in the Absolute
all differences must be overcome, perfect unity
must be realized ; there must be what is called
an "all-pervasive transfusion." Now, the only
hint we have of such a state, according to Mr.

52 THEISM

Bradley, is in pure feeling — the diffused sense
of being, out of which our conscious life seems
continually to emerge. The first dawn of active
consciousness introduces the distinctions of know-
ledge into this characterless unity. Indeed,
Mr. Bradley admits that we hardly possess this
state of mere feeling " as more than that which
we are in the act of losing." I would go farther
and say more definitely that it is a state which
we never actually realize, though we seem at
times to approximate to it, and conceive it as
being approached asymptotically in the lowest
forms of organic life. Such asymptotic approach
consists simply in dropping one by one the dis-
tinctions of our own conscious existence. Con-
sequently, the state is describable only by nega-
tives, and its realization would mean a lapse into
unconsciousness altogether.

Be that as it may, in the meantime, this is
the analogy which Mr. Bradley uses throughout,
in his attempt to construct or body forth the
experience of the Absolute. It must be a higher
experience in which thought shall, as it were,
return to the immediacy of feeling. "We can
form the general idea," he says, "of an abso-
lute intuition in which "phenomenal distinctions
are merged, a whole become immediate at a

THEISM 53

higher stage without losing any richness . . .
a total experience where will and thought and
feeling may all once more be one." But though
Mr. Bradley is constantly saying that no rich-
ness is lost, that all the distinctions are some-
how retained and preserved, it is nothing more
than saying. His own logic, which stumbles
persistently over the fact of difference and re-
lation, and his own analogy of the distinction-
less life of feeling, carry him irresistibly to a
Brahmanic pantheism, in which all finite ex-
istence simply disappears as an unreal dream.
He runs riot in metaphors to describe the consum-
mation of finite appearance in the Absolute ; and
the nature of these metaphors is of itself suffi-
ciently instructive. Appearances are said to be
"merged," "fused," " blended," " absorbed," " run
together," " embraced and harmonized," " dis-
solved in a higher unity," " transformed," above
all, "transmuted." "Transmuted" is the blessed
word from which Mr. Bradley seems to derive
most comfort. But for " transmuted " we find at
times the sinister synonyms " suppressed," " dis-
solved," " lost." In one place " transmuted " and
"destroyed" are expressly coupled, while in another
we are told that the " process of correction," which
finite existence undergoes in the Absolute mav

54 THEISM

" entirely dissipate its nature." In this fashion,
the finite self-consciousness, among other things,
is to be embraced and harmonized by being
"transmuted and suppressed as such." Or, as
he puts it elsewhere with audacious irony, "the
individual never can in himself become a harmon-
ious system. In the complete gift and dissipation
of his personality, he, as such, must vanish." A
gift of personality which is at the same time the
dissipation of the personality in question, a har-
monizing which means disappearance, recall too
forcibly the Koman method of pacification, — they
make a desert and they call it peace.

In fact there can be no doubt that Mr.
Bradley's speculation, with its repudiation of
the form of knowledge as such, on the ground
of the difference and relation which it involves,
leads, not to any higher or larger unity, but to
the pit of undifferentiated substance, out of
which Hegel took so much pains to dig phi-
losophy. The greater part of Mr. Bradley's book
seems to me to reproduce in essence, and often
almost in expression, the Spinozistic doctrine of
Imagination, which makes finite existence a
species of illusion. No doubt there were two
tendencies at strife in Spinoza, too; but his
dominant thought is that " all determination is

THEISM 55

negation," and so is not truly real. Hence all
determinations vanish, like clouds before the sun,
in the viewless unity of the unica substantia.
But if finite existence is illusory, and its distinc-
tions simply disappear, then of necessity the
unity which we reach by the denial of these
distinctions is quite characterless. We have
illusion on the one side, and, as the counter
stroke, nonentity on the other. For does not
Scotus Erigena tell us, at the end of a similar
line of thought, " Deus propter excellentiam non
immerito nihil vocatur " ?

The mention of Erigena suggests the extent
to which this mode of reasoning has prevailed.
Although it is chiefly associated in modern phi-
losophy with Spinozism and the doctrine of
undifferentiated substance, as the most typical
example of the tendency, it dominates not only
the Brahmanic speculation of the East, but, from
Philo downwards, has formed a constant element
in the religious philosophy of the West. Neo-
Platonism culminates in the doctrine of the abso-
lutely transcendent One, " beyond " both the
sensuous and the intellectual world, elevated
above all thought, all being, all goodness, neither
conscious, therefore, nor active ; nameless, and
without any quality whatsoever. So Plotinus

56 THEISM

reasoned, while his followers endeavored to scale
a still giddier height in refusing even to desig-
nate the ineffable as " One." Iamblichus and
Proclus superimposed upon the One of Plotinus
a still higher, completely ineffable, principle.
The Neo-Platonic philosophy had a powerful
influence upon Christian thought. It was re-
vived in the great system of Erigena at the
beginning of the ninth century, and it is the
underlying thought of all speculative mysticism.
Under the name of " negative theology," it has
continually reappeared in the higher walks of
theological philosophy ; perhaps its most recent
and noteworthy reappearance being made in
Dean Mansel's celebrated Bampton Lectures,
which employ the weapons of agnosticism in
defence of the churchly faith. I may be able,
perhaps, before I close, to indicate what seems to
me the truth which this negative theology
inaptly expresses. But taken as it stands, and
as it states itself, it produces the effect of a
dangerous falsehood. Striving to exalt the
Divine into a region beyond thought and beyond
expression, it leaves us with nothing in our
grasp at all. The Absolute Being becomes a
mere abstraction or, like Shelley's Demogorgon,
"a mighty Darkness filling the seat of power."

THEISM 57

This is well exemplified in the conclusions to
which Mr. Bradley is driven. Morality, he
says, cannot, as such, be ascribed to the
Absolute. Goodness, as such, is but appearance,
and is transcended in the Absolute. Will can-
not belong, as such, to the Absolute. In the
Absolute even thought must " lose and transcend
its proper self." If the term "personal," he says
again, is to bear anything like its ordinary sense,
then assuredly the Absolute is not merely per-
sonal. "The Absolute," he says roundly, "is
not personal, nor is it moral, nor is it beautiful
or true."

What is the inevitable effect upon the mind
of this cluster of negations ? Surely it will be
this : Either the Absolute will be regarded as a
mere Unknowable, with which we have no con-
cern; or the denial of will, intellect, morality,
personality, beauty, and truth, will be taken to
mean that the Absolute is a unity indifferent to
these higher aspects of experience. It will be
regarded as non-moral and impersonal, in the
sense of being below these distinctions; and our
Absolute will then remarkably resemble the soul-
less matter of the materialist. Nothing, indeed,
is more certain than that extremes meet in this
fashion, and that the attempt to reach the super-

58 THEISM

human falls back into the infra-human. Of
course Mr. Bradley intended his unity to be a
higher and not a lower unity. " The Absolute,"
he says in one place, " is not personal, because it
is personal and more. It is, in a word, super-
personal." And as if aware of the danger that
lurks in his denials, he even warns us that, if
there is a risk of falling back upon the lower
unity, it is better to affirm personality than to
call the Absolute impersonal. But there is more
than a risk ; I maintain there is an absolute cer-
tainty that this will be the end.

Hence the somewhat unexpected result of Mr.
Bradley's attempt to transcend experience and to
determine the Absolute as such — its nature and
mode of existence for itself — is to throw into
relief the strong points of the Hegelian scheme.
The negative results of Mr. Bradley's search are
an involuntary confirmation of Hegel's wisdom
in refusing to step beyond the circle of know-
ledge and the process of history. We have seen
that Hegel's theory is indefensible, so far as it
equates the Absolute with human experience.
But the theory is false only so far as it proposes
to confine the spirit of the Universe to these
earthly tabernacles. So understood, I have urged
that it cabins the spirit of man within a narrow

THEISM 59

and self-sufficient positivism. It undermines the
sentiment of reverence, and dulls our sense of
the infinite greatness and the infinite mystery of
the world. But it is profoundly true, so far as it
asserts that only by predicates drawn from hu-
man experience can we determine the Absolute
at all, and that, moreover, such determination is
substantially and practically, though doubtless
not literally, true.

For here is the core of truth that gives vital-
ity to "negative theology," and ensures its con-
stant re-appearance. The nature of the existence
which the Absolute enjoys for itself is, and must
be, incomprehensible save by the Absolute itself.
We cannot construct the Divine life even in vague
generality, and that for the simplest of all rea-
sons, — we are men, and not God. Mr. Bradley's
discussion seems to me to prove afresh that the at-
tempt metaphysically, scientifically, or literally,1
to determine the Absolute as such is necessarily
barren. Where the definition is not a mere tau-
tology, it is a complex of negatives, and if not
technically untrue, it has in its suggestions the
effects of an untruth. Our statements about the
Absolute are actually nearer the truth where
they give up the pretence of literal exactitude,

1 I use these here for the moment as equivalent terms.

60 THEISM

and speak in terms of morality and religion, ap-
plying to it the characteristics of our highest
experience. Such language recognizes itself in
general (or at least it certainly should recognize
itself) as possessing only symbolical truth, — as
being in fact " thrown out," as Matthew Arnold
used to say, at a vast reality. But both religion
and the higher poetry — just because they give
up the pretence of an impossible exactitude —
carry us, I cannot doubt, nearer to the meaning
of the world than the formulae of an abstract
metaphysics.

Such a conclusion may be decried in turn as
agnostic, but names need frighten no one. The
agnosticism which rests on the idea of an un-
knowable thing-in-itself — the agnosticism which
many of Kant's and Spencer's arguments would
establish — is certainly baseless. But there are
regions of speculation where agnosticism is the
only healthy attitude. Such a region I hold to
be that of the Absolute as such. But because
the Absolute in this sense cannot be compassed
by the finite mind, it by no means follows that
such an all-embracing experience is not a reality ;
on the contrary, the denial of such a possibility
would seem to be more than presumptuous. And,
again, the ineffable transcendence of the Absolute

THEISM 61

must not be construed to mean that our experi-
ence is a vain show, which throws no light on the
real nature of things. Kightly agnostic though
we are regarding the nature of the Absolute as
such, no shadow of doubt need fall on the truth of
our experience as a true revelation of the Absolute
for us. Hegel was right in seeking the Absolute
within experience, and finding it too; for cer-
tainly we can neither seek it nor find it any-
where else. The truth about the Absolute which
we extract from our experience is hardly likely
to be the final truth ; it may be taken up and
superseded in a wider or fuller truth. And in
this way we might pass, in successive cycles of
finite existence, from sphere to sphere of experi-
ence, from orb to orb of truth ; and even the
highest would still remain a finite truth, and fall
infinitely short of the truth of God. But such a
doctrine of relativity in no way invalidates the
truth of the revelation at any given stage. The
fact that the truth I reach is the truth for me,
does not make it, on that account, less true. It
is true so far as it goes, and if my experience
can carry me no further, I am justified in treat-
ing it as ultimate until it is superseded. Should
it ever be superseded, I shall then see both how
it is modified by being comprehended in a higher

62 THEISM

truth, and also how it and no other statement
of the truth could have been true at my former
standpoint. But before that higher standpoint
is reached, to seek to discredit our present in-
sight by the general reflection that its truth is
partial and requires correction, is a perfectly
empty truth, which, in its bearing upon human
life, must almost certainly have the effect of an
untruth.

We do well, therefore, to take human experi-
ence, not indeed as itself the Absolute bodily, but
as constituting the only accessible and authentic
revelation of its nature to us. And, in the inter-
pretation of experience, our most essential help is
to be found in a true theory of evolution ; for the
divine must be held to be most fully and ade-
quately revealed in the highest aspects of our
experience. If, again, we are asked how we dis-
tinguish between what is higher and lower, it is
clear that no formal or merely intellectual test,
such as " growing complexity of detail harmon-
ized within a single whole," will suffice. This
may be a characteristic of the higher stages, but
clearly the realization of an abstract formula like
this possesses in itself no interest or value. It
is the content of any experience which makes it
higher in any vital sense, and makes it of decisive

THEISM bd

importance as throwing light on the meaning of
experience as a whole. And in any such esti-
mate we must ultimately rest our whole case on
an absolute judgment of value. Man, says Kant,
is, in his typically rational activities, an End-in-
himself. The life, that is to say, which is guided
by the ideals of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness,
and which partially realizes these, possesses an
absolute and indefeasible worth. Such a judg-
ment represents a conviction so deep that we are
prepared to stake everything upon it. Strictly
speaking, such a conviction is not the result of
argument, or a deduction from any philosophic
system. It might rather be spoken of as an
assumption, the fundamental assumption upon
which all subsequent philosophizing must de-
pend. Without this assumption of the infinite
value and significance of human life, argument
about God is simply waste of time. The man
who does not start from this assumption — the
man who can embrace the opposite alternative
— is not accessible to any argument. For him
the world has no serious meaning, and he him-
self has no serious function to discharge in it.
He has denied his calling, or, as Fichte puts it,
he has elected to be a thing and not a person. Of
such an one it can only be said, He is joined to

64 THEISM

his idols, let him alone. Faith in God can only
rest securely on the basal certainty of duty, and
the view of human destiny and the universal
purpose that springs therefrom. This faith in
the divine significance of life has never perhaps
been more nobly expressed than it is by Words-
worth in the sonnet with which he closes his
sonnet-series on the Eiver Duddon, and I do not
think that these lectures could be concluded in
any more fitting words: —

" I thought of Thee, my partner and my guide,
As being past away. — Vain sympathies !
For backward, Duddon ! as I cast my eyes,
I see what was, and is, and will abide ;
Still glides the Stream, and shall forever glide ;
The Form remains, the Function never dies ;
While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise,
We Men, who in our morn of youth defied
The elements, must vanish ; — be it so !
Enough, if something from our hands has power
To live, and act, and serve the future hour ;
And if, as toward the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent

dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know."

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