In my last lecture I endeavoured to show that matter, so far from
constituting the ultimate Reality, cannot reasonably be thought of as
existing at all without mind; and that we cannot explain the world
without assuming the existence of a Mind in which and for which
everything that is not mind has its being. But we are still very far
from having fully cleared up the relation between the divine Mind and
that Nature which exists in it and for it: while we have hardly dealt at
all with the relation between the universal Mind and those lesser minds
which we have treated--so far without much argument--as in some way
derived from, or dependent upon, that Mind. So far as our previous line
of argument goes, we might have to look upon the world as the thought of
God, but not as caused by Him or due to His will. We might speak of God
as 'making Nature,' but only in the sense in which you or I make Nature
when we think it or experience it. {30} 'The world is as necessary to
God as God is to the world,' we are often told--for instance by my own
revered teacher, the late Professor Green. How unsatisfactory this
position is from a religious point of view I need hardly insist. For all
that such a theory has to say to the contrary, we might have to suppose
that, though God is perfectly good, the world which He is compelled to
think is very bad, and going from bad to worse. To think of God merely
as the Mind which eternally contemplates Nature, without having any power
whatever of determining what sort of Nature it is to be, supplies no
ground for hope or aspiration--still less for worship, adoration,
imitation. I suggested the possibility that from such a point of view
God might be thought of as good, and the world as bad. But that is
really to concede too much. A being without a will could as little be
bad as he could be good: he would be simply a being without a character.
From an intellectual point such a way of looking at the Universe might be
more intelligent or intelligible than that of pure Materialism or pure
Agnosticism; but morally and religiously I don't know that, when its
consequences are fully realized, it is any great improvement upon either
of them.[1] {31} Moreover, even intellectually it fails to satisfy the
demand which most reflecting people feel, that the world shall be
regarded as a Unity of some kind. If God is thought of as linked by some
inexplicable fate to a Nature over which He has no sort of control--not
so much control as a mere human being who can produce limited changes in
the world,--we can hardly be said to have reduced the world to a Unity.
The old Dualism has broken out again: after all we still have God and the
world confronting one another; neither of them is in any way explained by
the other. Still less could such a world be supposed to have a purpose
or rational end. For our own mere intellectual satisfaction as well as
for the satisfaction of our religious needs we must go on to ask whether
we are not justified in thinking of God as the Cause or Creator of the
world, as well as the Thinker of it.
This enquiry introduces us to the whole problem of Causality. The sketch
which I gave you last time of Bishop Berkeley's argument was a very
imperfect one. Bishop Berkeley was from one point of view a great
philosophic iconoclast, though he destroyed only that he might build up.
He destroyed the superstition of a self-existing matter: {32} he also
waged war against what I will venture to call the kindred superstition of
a mysterious causal nexus between the physical antecedent and the
physical consequent. On this side his work was carried on by Hume.
Berkeley resolved our knowledge into a succession of 'ideas.' He did, no
doubt, fall into the mistake of treating our knowledge as if it were a
mere succession of feelings: he ignored far too much--though he did not
do so completely--that other element in our knowledge, the element of
intellectual relation, of which I said something last time. Here, no
doubt, Berkeley has been corrected by Kant; and, so far, practically all
modern Idealists will own their indebtedness to Kant. Even in the
apprehension of a succession of ideas, in the mere recognition that this
feeling comes after that, there is an element which cannot be explained
by mere feeling. The apprehension that this feeling came after that
feeling is not itself a feeling. But can I detect any relation between
these experiences of mine except that of succession? We commonly speak
of fire as the cause of the melting of the wax, but what do we really
know about the matter? Surely on reflection we must admit that we know
nothing but this--that, so far as our experience goes, the application of
fire is always followed by the melting of the wax. Where this is the
case we do, from the point of view of {33} ordinary life, speak of the
one phenomenon as the cause of the other. Where we don't discover such
an invariable succession, we don't think of the one event as the cause of
the other.
I shall be told, perhaps, that on this view of the nature of Causality we
ought to speak of night as the cause of day. So perhaps we should, if
the result to which we are led by a more limited experience were not
corrected by the results of a larger experience. To say nothing of the
valuable correction afforded by the polar winter and the polar summer, we
have learned by a more comprehensive experience to replace the law that
day follows night by the wider generalisation that the visibility of
objects is invariably coincident upon the presence of some luminous body
and not upon a previous state of darkness. But between cases of what we
call mere succession and what is commonly called causal sequence the
difference lies merely in the observed fact that in some cases the
sequence varies, while in others no exception has ever been discovered.
No matter how frequently we observe that a sensation of red follows the
impact upon the aural nerve of a shock derived from a wave of ether of
such and such a length, we see no reason why it should do so. We may, no
doubt, make a still wider generalization, and say that every event in
Nature is invariably preceded by some definite complex of conditions,
{34} and so arrive at a general law of the Uniformity of Nature. And
such a law is undoubtedly the express or implied basis of all inference
in the Physical Sciences. When we have once accepted that law (as the
whole mass of our experience in the purely physical region inclines us to
do), then a single instance of A B C being followed by D (when we are
quite sure that we have included all the antecedents which we do not know
from other experience to be irrelevant) will warrant our concluding that
we have discovered a law of nature. On the next occasion of A B C's
occurrence we confidently predict that D will follow. But, however often
we have observed such a sequence, and however many similar sequences we
may have observed, we are no nearer to knowing _why_ D should follow ABC:
we can only know that it always does: and on the strength of that
knowledge we infer, with a probability which we do no doubt for practical
purposes treat as a certainty, that it always will. But on reflection we
can see no reason why a wave of ether of a certain length should produce
red rather than blue, a colour rather than a sound. There, as always, we
discover nothing but succession, not necessary connexion.
These cases of unvaried succession among phenomena, it should be
observed, are quite different from cases of real necessary connexion. We
don't want to examine thousands of instances of two {35} added to two to
be quite sure that they always make four, nor in making the inference do
we appeal to any more general law of Uniformity. We simply see that it
is and always must be so. Mill no doubt tells us he has no difficulty in
supposing that in the region of the fixed stars two and two might make
five, but nobody believes him. At all events few of us can pretend to
such feats of intellectual elasticity. No amount of contradictory
testimony from travellers to the fixed stars, no matter whether they were
Bishops of the highest character or trained as Professors of physical
Science, would induce us to give a moment's credence to such a story. We
simply see that two and two must make four, and that it is inconceivable
they should ever, however exceptionally, make five. It is quite
otherwise with any case of succession among external phenomena, no matter
how unvaried. So long as we confine ourselves to merely physical
phenomena (I put aside for the moment the case of conscious or other
living beings) nowhere can we discover anything but succession; nowhere
do we discover Causality in the sense of a necessary connexion the
reversal of which is inconceivable.
Are we then to conclude that there is no such thing as Causality, that in
searching for a cause of everything that happens, we are pursuing a mere
will o' the wisp, using a mere _vox nihili_ which has {36} as little
meaning for the reflecting mind as fate or fortune? Surely, in the very
act of making the distinction between succession and causality, in the
very act of denying that we can discover any causal connexion between one
physical phenomenon and another, we imply that we have got the idea of
Causality in our minds; and that, however little we may have discovered a
genuine cause, we could not believe that anything could happen without a
cause.
For my own part, I find it quite possible to believe that a phenomenon
which has been followed by another phenomenon 9999 times should on the
10,000th time be followed by some other phenomenon. Give me the
requisite experience, and belief would follow; give me even any adequate
evidence that another person has had such an experience (though I should
be very particular about the evidence), and I should find no difficulty
in believing it. But to tell me that the exception to an observed law
might take place without any cause at all for the variation would seem to
be pure nonsense. Put the matter in another way. Let us suppose an
empty world, if one can speak of such a thing without contradiction--let
us suppose that at one time nothing whatever had existed, neither mind
nor matter nor any of that mysterious entity which some people find it
possible to believe in which is {37} neither mind nor matter. Let us
suppose literally nobody and nothing to have existed. Now could you
under these conditions rationally suppose that anything could have come
into existence? Could you for one moment admit the possibility that
after countless aeons of nothingness a flash of lightning should occur or
an animal be born? Surely, on reflection those who are most suspicious
of _a priori_ knowledge, who are most unwilling to carry their
speculations beyond the limits of actual experience, will be prepared to
say, 'No, the thing is utterly for ever impossible.' _Ex nihilo nihil
fit_: for every event there must be a cause. Those who profess to reject
all other _a priori_ or self-evident knowledge, show by their every
thought and every act that they never really doubt that much.
Now, it would be just possible to contend that we have got the bare
abstract concept or category of Causality in our minds, and yet that
there is nothing within our experience to give it any positive
content--so that we should have to say, 'Every event must have a cause,
but we never know or can know what that cause is. If we are to talk
about causes at all, we can only say "The Unknowable is the cause of all
things."' Such a position can be barely stated without a contradiction.
But surely it is a very difficult one. Nature does not generally supply
us with categories of thought, while it gives us no power {38} or
opportunity of using them. It would be like holding, for instance, that
we have indeed been endowed with the idea of number in general, but that
we cannot discover within our experience any numerable things; that we
have got the idea of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., but have no capacity whatever for
actually counting--for saying that here are three apples, and there four
marbles. And, psychologically, it would be difficult to find any
parallel to anything of the kind. Nature does not first supply us with
clearly defined categories of thought, and then give us a material to
exercise them upon. In general we discover these abstract categories by
using them in our actual thinking. We count beads or men or horses
before we evolve an abstract idea of number, or an abstract
multiplication table. It is very difficult to see how this idea of Cause
could possibly have got into our heads if we had never in the whole
course of our experience come into any sort of contact with any actual
concrete cause. Where then, within our experience, if not in the
succession of external events, shall we look for a cause--for something
to which we can apply this category or abstract notion of causality? I
answer 'We must look within: it is in our experience of volition that we
actually find something answering to our idea of causal connexion.' And
here, I would invite you not to think so much of our consciousness of
actually {39} moving our limbs. Here it is possible to argue plausibly
that the experience of exercising causality is a delusion. I imagine
that, if I will to do so, I can move my arm; but I will to stretch out my
arm, and lo! it remains glued to my side, for I have suddenly been
paralysed. Or I may be told that the consciousness of exerting power is
a mere experience of muscular contraction, and the like. I would ask you
to think rather of your power of directing the succession of your own
thoughts. I am directly conscious, for instance, that the reason why I
am now thinking of Causality, and not (say) of Tariff Reform, is the fact
that I have conceived the design of delivering a course of lectures on
this subject; the succession of ideas which flow through my mind as I
write or speak is only explicable by reference to an end--an end which I
am striving to bring into actual being. In such voluntarily concentrated
purposeful successions of thought I am immediately exercising causality:
and this causality does further influence the order of events in physical
nature. My pen or my tongue moves in consequence of this striving of
mine, though no doubt for such efforts to take place other physical
conditions must be presupposed, which are not wholly within my own
control. I am the cause, but not the whole or sole cause of these
physical disturbances in external nature: I am a cause but not an
uncaused cause. {40} My volition, though it is not the sole cause of the
event which I will, is enough to give me a conception of a cause which is
the sole cause of the events.
The attempt is of course sometimes made, as it was made by Hume, to
explain away this immediate consciousness of volition, and to say that
all that I immediately know is the succession of my subjective
experiences. It may be contended that I don't know, any more than in the
case of external phenomena, that because the thought of my lecture comes
first and the thought of putting my pen into the ink to write it comes
afterwards, therefore the one thought causes the other. Hence it is
important to point out that I have a negative experience with which to
contrast the positive experience. I do not _always_, even as regards my
own inward experiences, assume that succession implies Causality.
Supposing, as I speak or write, a twinge of the gout suddenly introduces
itself into the succession of my experiences: then I am conscious of no
such inner connexion between the new experience and that which went
before it. Then I am as distinctly conscious of passivity--of not
causing the succession of events which take place in my mind--as I am in
the other case of actively causing it. If the consciousness of
exercising activity is a delusion, why does not that delusion occur in
the one case as much as in the other? I hold then that in the
consciousness of {41} our own activity we get a real direct experience of
Causality. When Causality is interpreted to mean mere necessary
connexion--like the mathematical connexion between four and twice two or
the logical connexion between the premisses of a Syllogism and its
conclusion,--its nature is fundamentally misrepresented. The essence of
Causality is not necessary connexion but Activity. Such activity we
encounter in our own experience of volition and nowhere else.[2]
Now, if the only cause of which I am immediately conscious is the will of
a conscious rational being, is it not reasonable to infer that some such
agency is at work in the case of those phenomena which we see no reason
to attribute to the voluntary actions of men and animals? It is well
known that primitive man took this step. Primitive man had no notion of
the 'Uniformity of Nature': it is only very gradually that civilized man
has discovered it. But primitive man never doubted for one instant the
law of Causality: he never doubted that for any change, or at least for
any change of the kind which most frequently attracted his attention,
there must {42} be a cause. Everything that moved he supposed to be
alive, or to be under the influence of some living being more or less
like himself. If the sea raged, he supposed that the Sea-god was angry.
If it did not rain to-day, when it rained yesterday, that was due to the
favour of the Sky-god, and so on. The world for him was full of spirits.
The argument of primitive man's unconscious but thoroughly sound
Metaphysic is well expressed by the fine lines of Wordsworth in the
_Excursion_:
Once more to distant ages of the world
Let us revert, and place before our thoughts
The face which rural solitude might wear
To the unenlightened swains of pagan Greece.
--In that fair clime, the lonely herdsman, stretched
On the soft grass through half a summer's day,
With music lulled his indolent repose:
And, in some fit of weariness, if he,
When his own breath was silent, chanced to hear
A distant strain, far sweeter than the sounds
Which his poor skill could make, his fancy fetched,
Even from the blazing chariot of the sun,
A beardless Youth, who touched a golden lute,
And filled the illumined groves with ravishment.
The nightly hunter, lifting a bright eye
Up towards the crescent moon, with grateful heart
Called on the lovely wanderer who bestowed
That timely light, to share his joyous sport:
And hence, a beaming Goddess with her Nymphs,
Across the lawn and through the darksome grove,
(Not unaccompanied with tuneful notes
By echo multiplied from rock or cave),
{43}
Swept in the storm of chace; as moon and stars
Glance rapidly along the clouded heaven,
When winds are blowing strong. The traveller slaked
His thirst from rill or gushing fount, and thanked
The Naiad. Sunbeams, upon distant hills
Gliding apace, with shadows in their train,
Might, with small help from fancy, be transformed
Into fleet Oreads sporting visibly.
The Zephyrs fanning, as they passed, their wings,
Lacked not, for love, fair objects whom they wooed
With gentle whisper. Withered boughs grotesque,
Stripped of their leaves and twigs by hoary age,
From depth of shaggy covert peeping forth
In the low vale, or on steep mountain side;
And, sometimes, intermixed with stirring horns
Of the live deer, or goat's depending beard,--
These were the lurking Satyrs, a wild brood
Of gamesome Deities; or Pan himself,
The simple shepherd's awe-inspiring God![3]
Growing experience of the unity of Nature, of the interdependence of all
the various forces and departments of Nature, have made such a view of it
impossible to civilized and educated man. Primitive man was quite right
in arguing that, where he saw motion, there must be consciousness like
his own. But we have been led by Science to believe that whatever is the
cause of any one phenomenon (at least in inanimate nature), must be the
cause of all. The interconnexion, the regularity, the order observable
in phenomena are too great to be the result of chance or of the
undesigned concurrence of a number of {44} independent agencies: and
perhaps we may go on further to argue that this one cause must be the
ultimate cause even of those events which are directly and immediately
caused by our own wills. But that is a question which I will put aside
for the present. At least for the events of physical nature there must
be one Cause. And if the only sort of cause we know is a conscious and
rational being, then we have another most powerful reason for believing
that the ultimate reality, from which all other reality is derived, is
Mind--a single conscious Mind which we may now further describe as not
only Thought or Intelligence but also Will.[4]
Let me add this additional consideration in support of the conclusion
that the world is not merely thought by God but is also willed by God.
When we talk about thought without will, we are talking about something
that we know absolutely nothing about. In all the consciousness that we
know of, in every moment of our own immediate waking experience, we find
thought, feeling, willing. Even in the consciousness of animals there
appears to be something analogous to these three sides or aspects of
consciousness: but at all events in developed human consciousness we know
of no such thing as thinking without willing. All thought involves
attention, and to attend is to will. If, therefore, on the grounds {45}
suggested by the Hegelian or other post-Kantian Idealists, we have been
led to think that the ultimate Reality is Mind or Spirit, we should
naturally conclude by analogy that it must be Will as well as Thought
and--I may add, though it hardly belongs to the present argument to
insist upon that--Feeling. On the other hand if, with men like
Schopenhauer and Edouard von Hartmann,[5] we are conducted by the
appearances of design in Nature to the idea that Nature is striving after
something, that the ultimate Reality is Will, we must supplement that
line of argument by inferring from the analogy of our own Consciousness
that Will without Reason is an unintelligible and meaningless
abstraction, and that (as indeed even Hartmann saw) Schopenhauer's Will
without Reason was as impossible an abstraction as the apparently
will-less universal Thinker of the Hegelian:[6] while against
Schopenhauer and his more reasonable successor, Hartmann, I should insist
that an unconscious Will is as unintelligible a contradiction as an
unconscious Reason. Schopenhauer and Hegel seem to have seen, each of
them, exactly {46} half of the truth: God is not Will without Reason or
Reason without Will, but both Reason and Will.
And here I must try to meet an inevitable objection. I do not say that
these three activities of the human intellect stand in God side by side
with the same distinctness and (if I may say so) irreducibility that they
do in us. What feeling is for a Being who has no material organism, we
can form no distinct conception. Our thought with its clumsy processes
of inference from the known to the unknown must be very unlike what
thought is in a Being to whom nothing is unknown. All our thought too
involves generalization, and in universal concepts (as Mr. Bradley has
shown us) much that was present in the living experience of actual
perception is necessarily left out. Thought is but a sort of
reproduction--and a very imperfect reproduction--of actual, living,
sensible experience. We cannot suppose, then, that in God there is the
same distinction between actual present experience and the universal
concepts employed in thinking which there is in us. And so, again,
willing must be a very different thing in a being who wills or creates
the objects of his own thought from what it is in beings who can only
achieve their ends by distinguishing in the sharpest possible manner
between the indefinite multiplicity of things which they know but do not
cause and the tiny fragment {47} of the Universe which by means of this
knowledge they can control. Nevertheless, though all our thoughts of God
must be inadequate, it is by thinking of Him as Thought, Will and
Feeling--emancipated from those limitations which are obviously due to
human conditions and are inapplicable to a Universal Mind--that we shall
attain to the truest knowledge of God which lies within our capacity. Do
you find a difficulty in the idea of partial and inadequate knowledge?
Just think, then, of our knowledge of other people's characters--of what
goes on in other people's minds. It is only by the analogy of our own
immediate experience that we can come to know anything at all of what
goes on in other people's minds. And, after all, such insight into other
people's thoughts, emotions, motives, intentions, characters, remains
very imperfect. The difficulty is greatest when the mind which we seek
to penetrate is far above our own. How little most of us know what it
would feel like to be a Shakespeare, a Mozart, or a Plato! And yet it
would be absurd to talk as if our knowledge of our fellows was no
knowledge at all. It is sufficient not merely to guide our own thoughts
and actions, but to make possible sympathy, friendship, love. Is it not
so with our knowledge of God? The Gnosticism which forgets the immensity
of the difference between the Divine Mind and the human is not less
unreasonable--not {48} less opposed to the principles on which we conduct
our thinking in every other department of life--than the Agnosticism
which rejects probabilities because we cannot have immediate certainties,
and insists on knowing nothing because we cannot know everything.
The argument which infers that God is Will from the analogy of our own
consciousness is one which is in itself independent of Idealism. It has
been used by many philosophers who are Realists, such as Reid or Dr.
Martineau, as well as by Idealists like Berkeley, or Pfleiderer, or
Lotze. It does not necessarily presuppose Idealism; but it does, to my
mind, fit in infinitely better with the idealistic mode of thought than
with the realistic. If you hold that there is no difficulty in supposing
dead, inert matter to exist without any mind to think it or know it, but
that only a Mind can be supposed to cause change or motion, you are
assuming a hard and fast distinction between matter and force which the
whole trend of modern Science is tending to break down. It seems to
imply the old Greek conception of an inert, passive, characterless _hule_
which can only be acted upon from without. The modern Physicist, I
imagine, knows nothing of an inert matter which can neither attract nor
repel, even if he does not definitely embark on the more speculative
theory which actually defines the atom or the electron {49} as a centre
of force. Activity belongs to the very essence of matter as understood
by modern Science. If matter can exist without mind, there is (from the
scientific point of view) some difficulty in contending that it cannot
likewise move or act without being influenced by an extraneous Mind. If,
on the other hand, with the Idealist we treat the notion of matter
without mind as an unintelligible abstraction, that line of thought would
prepare us to see in force nothing but a mode of mental action. The
Idealist who has already identified matter with the object of thought
will find no difficulty in going on to see in force simply the activity
or expression or object of Will. And if he learns from the Physicist
that we cannot in the last resort--from the physical point of
view--distinguish matter from force, that will fit in very well with the
metaphysical position which regards thought and will as simply two
inseparable aspects of the life of mind.
And now I will return once more for a moment to the idealistic argument.
I have no doubt that many of you will have felt a difficulty in accepting
the position that the world with which we come in contact is merely a
state of our own or anybody else's consciousness. It is so obvious that
in our experience we are in contact with a world which we do not create;
which is what it is whether we like it or not; which opposes itself at
every turn to our desires and {50} inclinations. You may have been
convinced that we know nothing of any external world except the effects
which it produces upon consciousness. But, you will say to yourselves,
there must have been something to cause these effects. You are perfectly
right in so thinking. Certainly in our experience of the world we are in
contact with a Reality which is not any state of our own mind, a Reality
which we do not create but simply discover, a Reality from which are
derived the sensations which we cannot help feeling, and the objects
which we cannot help thinking. So far you are quite right. But very
often, when the Realist insists that there must be something to cause in
my mind this appearance, which I call my consciousness of a table, he
assumes all the while that this something--the real table, the table in
itself--is _there_, inside or behind the phenomenal table that I actually
see and feel; out there, in space. But if we were right in our analysis
of space, if we were right in arguing that space is made up of
intellectual relations[7] and that {51} intellectual relations can have
no being and no meaning except in and for a mind which apprehends them,
then it is obvious that you must not think of this Reality which is the
cause of our experience of external objects, as being _there_, as
occupying space, as being 'external.' If space be a form of our thought,
or (in Kantian language) a form of our sensibility, then the Reality
which is to have an existence in itself, cannot be in space. A reality
which is not in space can no longer be thought of as matter: whatever
else matter (as commonly conceived) means, it is certainly something
which occupies space. Now we know of no kind of existence which is not
in space except Mind. On the idealistic view to which I have been
endeavouring to lead you, we are, indeed, justified in saying that there
is a Reality which is the underlying cause or ground of our experiences,
but that that Reality is one which we may describe as Thought no less
than as Will.
It may interest some of you to know how near one who is often considered
the typical representative of naturalistic, if not materialistic, modes
of thought, ultimately came to accepting this identification. Let me
read to you a passage from one of Mr. Spencer's later works--the third
volume of his _Sociology_:--
'This transfiguration, which the inquiries of physicists continually
increase, is aided by that other {52} transfiguration resulting from
metaphysical inquiries. Subjective analysis compels us to admit that our
scientific interpretations of the phenomena which objects present, are
expressed in terms of our own variously-combined sensations and
ideas--are expressed, that is, in elements belonging to consciousness,
which are but symbols of the something beyond consciousness. Though
analysis afterwards reinstates our primitive beliefs, to the extent of
showing that behind every group of phenomenal manifestations there is
always a _nexus_, which is the reality that remains fixed amid
appearances which are variable;[1] yet we are shown that this _nexus_ of
reality is for ever inaccessible to consciousness. And when, once more,
we remember that the activities constituting consciousness, being
rigorously bounded, cannot bring in among themselves the activities
beyond the bounds, which therefore seem unconscious, though production of
either by the other seems to imply that they are of the same essential
nature; this necessity we are under to think of the external energy in
terms of the internal energy, gives rather a spiritualistic than a
materialistic aspect to the Universe: further thought, however, obliging
us to recognize the truth that a conception given in phenomenal
manifestations of this ultimate energy can in no wise show us what it
is.'[8]
Now, I think this is one of the passages which would justify Mr.
Bradley's well-known epigram, that Mr. Herbert Spencer has told us more
about the Unknowable than the rashest of theologians has ever ventured to
tell us about God.
{53}
Even Kant, who is largely responsible for the mistakes about Causality
against which this lecture has been a protest--I mean the tendency to
resolve it into necessary connexion--did in the end come to admit that in
the large resort we come into contact with Causality only in our own
Wills. I owe the reference to Professor Ward, and will quote the
paragraph in which he introduces it:--
'Presentation, Feeling, Conation, are ever one inseparable whole, and
advance continuously to higher and higher forms. But for the fact that
psychology was in the first instance studied, not for its own sake, but
in subservience to speculation, this cardinal importance of activity
would not have been so long overlooked. We should not have heard so much
of passive sensations and so little of active movements. It is
especially interesting to find that even Kant at length--in his latest
work, the posthumous treatise on the _Connexion of Physics and
Metaphysics_, only recently discovered and published--came to see the
fundamental character of voluntary movement. I will venture to quote one
sentence: "We should not recognise the moving forces of matter, not even
through experience, if we were not conscious of our own activity in
ourselves exerting acts of repulsion, approximation, etc." But to Maine
de Biran, often called the French Kant, to Schopenhauer, and, finally, to
our own British psychologists, Brown, Hamilton, Bain, Spencer, is
especially due the merit of seeing the paramount importance of the active
side of experience. To this then primarily, and not to any merely {54}
intellectual function, we may safely refer the category of causality.'[9]
I may add that Professor Ward's _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, from which
I have quoted, constitutes the most brilliant and important modern
defence of the doctrine which I have endeavoured very inadequately to set
before you in this lecture.
It is a remarkable fact that the typical exponent of popular so-called
'scientific' Agnosticism, and the founder of that higher metaphysical
Agnosticism which has played so large a part in the history of modern
Philosophy, should before their deaths have both made confessions which
really amount to an abjuration of all Agnosticism. If the ultimate
Reality is to be thought of as a rational Will, analogous to the will
which each of us is conscious of himself having or being, he is no longer
the Unknown or the Unknowable, but the God of Religion, who has revealed
Himself in the consciousness of man, 'made in the image of God.' What
more about Himself we may also hold to be revealed in the human spirit, I
hope to consider in our next lecture. But, meanwhile, a word may be
uttered in answer to the question which may very probably be asked--Is
God a Person? A complete answer to the question would involve elaborate
discussions, but for our present purpose the question may be answered
very {55} briefly. If we are justified in thinking of God after the
analogy of a human soul--if we are justified in thinking of Him as a
self-conscious Being who thinks, feels, and wills, and who is, moreover
(if I may a little anticipate the subject of our next lecture) in
relation with, capable of loving and being loved by other such
beings--then it seems most natural to speak of God's existence as
personal. For to be a self-conscious being--conscious of itself and
other beings, thinking, willing, feeling, loving--is what we mean by
being a person. If any one prefers to speak of God as 'super-personal,'
there is no great objection to so doing, provided that phrase is not made
(as it often is) an excuse for really thinking of God after the analogy
of some kind of existence lower than that of persons--as a force, an
unconscious substance, or merely a name for the totality of things. But
for myself, I prefer to say that our own self-consciousness gives us only
an ideal of the highest type of existence which it nevertheless very
imperfectly satisfies, and therefore I would rather think God is a Person
in a far truer, higher, more complete sense than that in which any human
being can be a person. God alone fully realizes the ideal of
Personality. The essence of Personality is something positive: it
signifies to us the highest kind of being within our knowledge--not (as
is too often supposed) the mere limitations {56} and restraints which
characterize human conscious life as we know it in ourselves. If we are
justified in thinking of God after the analogy of the highest existence
within our knowledge, we had better call Him a Person. The word is no
doubt inadequate to the reality, as is all the language that we can
employ about God; but it is at least more adequate than the terms
employed by those who scruple to speak of God as a Person. It is at
least more adequate and more intelligent than to speak of Him as a force,
a substance, a 'something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.'
_Things_ do not 'make for righteousness'; and in using the term Person we
shall at least make it clear that we do not think of Him as a 'thing,' or
a collection of things, or a vague substratum of things, or even a mere
totality of minds like our own.[10]