Mr. Frederic Harrison's Creed 'is open to every objection which he so
justly brings against what he regards as Mr. Spencer's Creed. These
reasons are broad, common, and familiar. So far as I know they never
have been, and I do not believe they ever will be, answered. The first
objection is that Humanity with a capital H (Mr. Harrison's God) is
neither better nor worse fitted to be a God than his Unknowable with a
capital U. They are as much alike as six and half-a-dozen. Each is a
barren abstraction to which any one an attach any meaning he likes.
Humanity, as used by Mr. Harrison, is not an abstract name for those
matters in which all human beings as such resemble each other, as, for
instance, a human form and articulate speech.... Humanity is a general
name for all human beings who, in various ways, have contributed to the
improvement of the human race. The Positivist calendar which
appropriates every day in the year for the commemoration of one or more
of these benefactors of mankind is an attempt to give what a lawyer
would call "further and better particulars" of the word. If this, or
anything like this, be the meaning of Mr. Harrison's God, I must say
that he, she, or it appears to me quite as ill-fitted for worship as
the Unknowable. How can a man worship an indefinite number of dead
people, most of whom are unknown to him even by name, and many of whose
characters {239} were exceedingly faulty, besides which the facts as to
their lives are most imperfectly known? How can he in any way combine
these people into a single object of thought? An object of worship
must surely have such a degree of unity that it is possible to think
about it as distinct from other things, as much unity at least as the
English nation, the Roman Catholic Church, the Great Western Railway.
No doubt these are abstract terms, but they are concrete enough for
practical purposes. Every one understands what is meant when it is
asserted that the English nation is at war or at peace; that the Pope
is the head of the Roman Catholic Church; that the Great Western
Railway has declared a dividend; but what is Humanity? What can any
one definitely assert or deny about it? How can any one meaning be
affixed to the word so that one person can be said to use it properly
and another to abuse it? It seems to me that it is as Unknowable as
the Unknowable itself, and just as well, and just as ill, fitted to be
an object of worship.'--SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN, 'The Unknowable
and Unknown,' _Nineteenth Century_, June 1884.
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