In the present lecture I shall try to deal with some of the difficulties
which will probably have been arising in your minds in the course of the
last three; and in meeting them, to clear up to some extent various
points which have been left obscure.
(1) _Creation_. I have endeavoured to show that the world must be
thought of as ultimately an experience in the mind of God, parts of which
are progressively communicated to lesser minds such as ours. This
experience--both the complete experience which is in His own mind and
also the measure of it which is communicated to the lesser minds--must be
thought of as willed by God. At the same time I suggested as an
alternative view that, even if we think of things as having an existence
which is not simply in and for minds, the things must be caused to exist
by a rational Will. Now the world, as we know it, consists of a number
of changes taking place in time, changes which are undoubtedly
represented in thought as changes happening to, or {88} accidents of, a
permanent substance, whether (with the Idealist) we suppose that this
substance is merely the object of Mind's contemplation, or whether (with
the Realist) we think of it as having some sort of being independent of
Mind. But what of the first of these events--the beginning of the whole
series? Are we to think of the series of events in time as having a
beginning and possibly an end, or as being without beginning or end?
What in fact are we to make of the theological idea of Creation, often
further defined as Creation out of nothing? It is often suggested both
by Idealists and by Realists that the idea of a creation or absolute
beginning of the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me to be a
piece of unwarrantable _a priori_ dogmatism--quite as much so as the
closely connected idea that the Uniformity of Nature is an _a priori_
necessity of thought. No doubt the notion of an absolute beginning of
all things is unthinkable enough: if we think of God as creating the
world at a definite point of time, then we must suppose God Himself to
have existed before that creation. We cannot think of an event in time
without thinking of a time before it; and time cannot be thought of as
merely empty time. Events of some kind there must necessarily have been,
even though those events are thought of as merely subjective experiences
involving no relation to space. A beginning of existence is, {89}
indeed, unthinkable. But there is no difficulty in supposing that this
particular series of phenomena which constitutes our physical Universe
may have had a beginning in time. On the other hand there is no positive
evidence, for those who cannot regard the early chapters of Genesis as
representing on such a matter anything but a primitive legend edited by a
later Jewish thinker, that it had such a beginning. It is no doubt more
difficult to represent to ourselves a beginning of space; and the notion
of an empty space, eternally thought but not eternally filled up by any
series of phenomena of the space-occupying kind, represents a rather
difficult, though not (as it seems to me) an absolutely impossible
conception. The question, therefore, whether there was a beginning of
the series of events which constitute the history of our physical world
must (so far as I can see) be left an open one.
Of course if the argument of Lord Kelvin be accepted, if he is justified
in arguing on purely physical grounds that the present distribution of
energy in the Universe is such that it cannot have resulted from an
infinite series of previous physical changes, if Science can prove that
the series is a finite one, the conclusions of Science must be
accepted.[1] Metaphysic has nothing to say for or against such a view.
That is a question of Physics on which {90} of course I do not venture to
express any opinion whatever.
(2) _The time-series_. I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on the
validity of such arguments as Lord Kelvin's. But, however we decide this
question, there will still remain the further and harder question, 'Is
the series of all events or experiences, physical or psychical (not
merely the particular series which constitutes our physical Universe), to
be thought of as finite or infinite? On the one hand it involves a
contradiction to talk of a time-series which has a beginning: a time
which has no time before it is not time at all; any more than space with
an end to it would be space. On the other hand, we find equally, or
almost equally, unthinkable the hypothesis of an endless series of events
in time: a series of events, which no possible enumeration of its members
will make any smaller, presents itself to us as unthinkable, directly we
regard it as expressing the true nature of a positive reality, and not as
a mere result of mathematical abstraction. Here then we are presented
with an antinomy--an apparent contradiction in our thought--which we can
neither avoid nor overcome. It is one of the classical antinomies
recognized by the Kantian Philosophy--the only one, I may add, which
neither Kant himself nor any of his successors has done anything to
attenuate or to remove. {91} Kant's own attempted solution of it
involved the impossible supposition that the past has no existence at all
except in so far as it is thought by some finite mind in the present.
The way out of this difficulty which is popular with post-Kantian
Idealists is to say that God is Himself out of time, and eternally sees
the whole series at once. But, in the first place, that does not get
over the difficulty: even if God does see the whole series at once, He
must see it either as limited or as endless, and the old antinomy breaks
out again when we attempt to think either alternative. And secondly,
when you treat a temporal series as one which is all really present
together--of course it may all be _known_ together as even we know the
past and the future--but when you try to think of God as contemplating
the whole series as really present altogether, the series is no longer a
time-series. You have turned it into some other kind of
series--practically (we may say) into a spacial series. You have cut the
knot, instead of unravelling it. I have no doubt that the existence of
this antinomy does point to the fact that there is some way of thinking
about time from which the difficulty disappears: but we are, so far as I
can see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers resent the idea of
an insoluble problem. By all means let them go on trying to solve it. I
can only say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility {92} of
any solution of the time-difficulty which I have so far seen. For the
present at least--I strongly suspect for ever--we must acquiesce on this
matter in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the absurdity of regarding
time as merely subjective; we can show that it belongs to the very
essence of the Universe we know; we can show that it is as 'objective' as
anything else within our knowledge. But how to reconcile this
objectivity with the difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no
Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious purposes it seems
enough to believe that each member of the time-series--no matter how many
such events there may be, no matter whether the series be endless or
not--is caused by God. The more reflecting Theologians have generally
admitted that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the same as
that of Creation. A God who can be represented as 'upholding all things
by the power of his word' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation
be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were any meaning in
that phrase) out of time altogether.[2]
{93}
(3) _The creation of spirits_. It may seem to some of you that I may
have so far left out, or too easily disposed of, an important link in our
argument. I have given reasons for thinking that the material world
cannot be explained without the assumption of a universal Consciousness
which both thinks and wills it. I have assumed rather than proved that
the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is partially reproduced,
are also caused to exist and kept in existence by the same divine Will.
But how, it may be said, do we know that those minds did not exist before
the birth of the organisms with which upon this planet they are
connected? The considerations which forbid our thinking of matter as
something capable of existing by itself do not apply to minds. A
consciousness, unlike a thing, exists 'for itself,' not merely 'for
another': a mind is not made what it is by being known or otherwise
experienced by another mind: its very being consists in being itself
conscious: it is what it is for itself. It is undoubtedly impossible
positively to disprove the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls.
Sometimes that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It {94} is supposed
that God is the supreme and incomparably the most powerful, but not the
only, self-existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis--sometimes
spoken of as Pluralism[3]--has many attractions: from the time of Origen
onwards the idea of Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the
explanation of evil by making it possible to regard the sufferings of our
present state as a disciplinary process for getting rid of an original or
a pre-natal sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying the
demands of the religious Consciousness, and may even form an element in
an essentially Christian theory of the Universe: but to my mind it is
opposed to all the obvious indications of experience. The connexion
between soul and body is such that the laws of the soul's development
obviously form part of the same system with the laws of physical nature.
If one part of that system is referred to the divine Will, so must the
whole of it be. The souls, when they have entered animal bodies, must be
supposed to be subject to a system of laws which is of one piece with the
system of physical laws. If the physical part of the world-order is
referred to the divine Will, the psychical part of it must be equally
referred to {95} that Will. The souls might, indeed, conceivably have an
independent and original nature of their own capable of offering
resistance to the divine intentions. But we see, to say the least, no
indications of a struggle going on between an outside divine Will and
independent beings not forming a part of the divine scheme. At all
events, the result of this struggle, if struggle there be, is (so far as
we can observe) a system, complete and orderly, within the psychical
sphere as much as within the purely physical sphere. And in particular
the body is exactly fitted to the soul that is to inhabit it. We never
find the intellect of a Shakespeare in connexion with the facial angle of
a negro; bodies which resemble the bodies of their parents are connected
with souls between which a similar resemblance can be traced. If the
souls existed before birth, we must suppose those souls to be kept
waiting in a limbo of some kind till a body is prepared suitable for
their reception. We must suppose that among the waiting souls, one is
from time to time selected to be the offspring of such and such a
matrimonial union, so as to present (as it were) a colourable appearance
of being really the fruit of that union. Further, before birth the souls
must be steeped in the waters of Lethe, or something of the kind, so as
to rid them of all memory of their previous experiences. Such a
conception seems to {96} me to belong to the region of Mythology rather
than of sober philosophical thought. I do not deny that Mythology may
sometimes be a means of pictorially or symbolically envisaging truths to
which Philosophy vaguely points but which it cannot express in clearly
apprehensible detail. But such a Mythology as this seems to be
intellectually unmotived and unhelpful. It is not wanted to explain the
facts: there is nothing in our experience to suggest it, and much which
is _prima facie_ opposed to it. It really removes no single difficulty:
for one difficulty which it presents some appearance of removing, it
creates a dozen greater ones. It is a hypothesis which we shall do well
to dismiss as otiose.
(4) _Non-theistic Idealism_. Somewhat less unmotived, if we look upon it
from a merely intellectual point of view, is the theory of pre-existent
souls without a personal God. Many, if not most, of you probably possess
more or less acquaintance with the views of my friend, Dr. McTaggart. I
cannot here undertake a full exposition or criticism of one of the ablest
thinkers of our day--one of the very few English thinkers who is the
author of a truly original metaphysical system. I can only touch--and
that most inadequately--upon the particular side of it which directly
bears upon our present enquiry. Dr. McTaggart is an Idealist; he
recognizes the {97} impossibility of matter without mind. For him
nothing exists but spirits, but he does not recognize the necessity for
any one all-embracing or controlling Spirit: the only spirits in his
Universe are limited minds like those of men and animals. He differs,
then, from the Pluralist of the type just mentioned in getting rid of the
hypothesis of a personal God side by side with and yet controlling the
uncreated spirits. And he differs further from all Pluralists in not
treating the separate spirits as so many centres of consciousness quite
independent of, and possibly at war with, all the rest: the spirits form
part of an ordered system: the world is a unity, though that unity is not
the unity which belongs to self-consciousness. He recognizes, in the
traditional language of Philosophy, an Absolute, but this Absolute is not
a single spiritual Being but a Society: or, if it is to be called a
single spiritual Being, it is a Being which exists or manifests itself
only in a plurality of limited consciousnesses.
This scheme is, I admit, more reasonable than Pluralism. It does,
nominally at least, recognize the world as an ordered system. It gets
rid of the difficulty of accounting for the apparent order of the Cosmos
as the result of a struggle between independent wills. It is not, upon
its author's pre-suppositions, a gratuitous theory: for a mind which
accepts Idealism and rejects Theism it is the only {98} intelligible
alternative. But I must confess that it seems to me open to most of the
difficulties which I have endeavoured to point out in Pluralism, and to
some others. In the first place, there is one, to my mind, great and
insuperable difficulty about it. As an Idealist, Dr. McTaggart has to
admit that the whole physical world, in so far as it exists at all, must
exist in and for some consciousness. Now, not only is there, according
to him, no single mind in which the system can exist as a whole, but even
all the minds together do not apparently know the whole of it, or (so far
as our knowledge goes) ever will. The undiscovered and unknown part of
the Universe is then non-existent. And yet, be it noticed, the known
part of the world does not make a perfectly articulated or (if you like
the phrase) organic system without the unknown part. It is only on the
assumption of relations between what we know and what we don't know that
we can regard it as an orderly, intelligible system at all. Therefore,
if part of the system is non-existent, the whole system--the system as a
whole--must be treated as non-existent. The world is, we are told, a
system; and yet as a system it has (upon the hypothesis) no real
existence. The systematic whole does not exist in matter, for to Dr.
McTaggart matter is merely the experience of Mind. What sort of
existence, then, can an undiscovered planet possess till it is {99}
discovered? For Dr. McTaggart has not provided any mind or minds in and
for which it is to exist. At one time, indeed, Dr. McTaggart seemed
disposed to accept a suggestion of mine that, on his view, each soul must
be omniscient; and to admit that, while in its temporal aspect, each soul
is limited and fallible in its knowledge, it is at the same time
supertemporally omniscient. That is a conception difficult beyond all
the difficulties of the most arbitrary and self-contradicting of orthodox
patristic or scholastic speculations. But, as Dr. McTaggart does not now
seem disposed to insist upon that point, I will say no more about it
except that to my mind it is a theory which defies all intellectual
grasp. It can be stated; it cannot be thought.
Further, I would remind you, the theory is open to all the objections
which I urged against the Pre-existence theory in its pluralistic form.
I have suggested the difficulties involved in the facts of heredity--the
difficulty of understanding how souls whose real intellectual and moral
characteristics are uncaused and eternal should be assigned to parents so
far resembling them as to lead almost inevitably to the inference that
the characteristics of the children are to some extent causally connected
with those of the parents.[4] Now the Pluralist can {100} at least urge
that for this purpose ingenious arrangements are contrived by God--by the
One Spirit whom he regards as incomparably the wisest and most powerful
in the Universe. Dr. McTaggart recognizes no intelligence capable of
grappling with such a problem or succession of problems. But this
particular matter of the assignment of souls to bodies is only a
particular application of a wider difficulty. Dr. McTaggart contends
that the Universe constitutes not merely a physical but a moral order.
He would not deny that the Universe means something; that the series of
events tends towards an end, an end which is also a good; that it has a
purpose and a final cause. And yet this purpose exists in no mind
whatever, and is due to no will whatever--except to the very small extent
to which the processes of physical nature can be consciously directed to
an end by the volitions of men and similarly limited intelligences. As a
whole, the Universe is purposed and willed by no single will or
combination of wills. I confess I do not understand the idea of a
purpose which operates, but is not the purpose of a Mind which is also a
Will. All the considerations upon which I dwelt to show the necessity of
such a Will to account for the Universe which we know, are so many
arguments against Dr. McTaggart's scheme. The events of Dr. McTaggart's
Universe are, upon the view of Causality which I {101} attempted to
defend in my second lecture, uncaused events.
Nevertheless, as a Philosopher, I am deeply grateful to Dr. McTaggart.
Not only does his scheme on its practical side seem to me preferable to
many systems which sound more orthodox--systems of vague pantheistic
Theism in which Morality is treated as mere 'appearance' and personal
Immortality deliberately rejected--but it has done much intellectually to
clear the air. Dr. McTaggart seems to me right in holding that, if God
or the Absolute is to include in itself all other spirits, and yet the
personality or self-consciousness of those spirits is not to be denied,
then this Absolute in which they are to be included cannot reasonably be
thought of as a conscious being, or invested with the other attributes
usually implied by the term God.
And this leads me to say a few words more in explanation of my own view
of the relation between God and human or other souls. To me, as I have
already intimated, it seems simply meaningless to speak of one
consciousness as included in another consciousness. The essence of a
consciousness is to be for itself: whether it be a thought, a feeling, or
an emotion, the essence of that consciousness is what it is for me.
Every moment of consciousness is unique. Another being may have a {102}
similar feeling: in that case there are two feelings, and not one.
Another mind may know what I feel, but the knowledge of another's agony
is (fortunately) a very different thing from the agony itself. It is
fashionable in some quarters to ridicule the idea of 'impenetrable'
souls. If 'impenetrable' means that another soul cannot know what goes
on in my soul, I do not assert that the soul is impenetrable. I believe
that God knows what occurs in my soul in an infinitely completer way than
that in which any human being can know it. Further, I believe that every
soul is kept in existence from moment to moment by a continuous act of
the divine Will, and so is altogether dependent upon that Will, and forms
part of one system with Him. On the other hand I believe that (through
the analogy of my own mind and the guidance of the moral consciousness) I
do know, imperfectly and inadequately, 'as in a mirror darkly,' what goes
on in God's Mind. But, if penetrability is to mean identity, the theory
that souls are penetrable seems to me mainly unintelligible. The
acceptance which it meets with in some quarters is due, I believe, wholly
to the influence of that most fertile source of philosophical
confusion--misapplied spacial metaphor.[5] It seems easy to talk about a
mind being {103} something in itself, and yet part of another mind,
because we are familiar with the idea of things in space forming part of
larger things in space--Chinese boxes, for instance, shut up in bigger
ones. Such a mode of thought is wholly inapplicable to minds which are
not in space at all. Space is in the mind: the mind is not in space. A
mind is not a thing which can be round or square: you can't say that the
intellect of Kant or of Lord Kelvin measures so many inches by so many:
equally impossible is it to talk about such an intellect being a part of
a more extensive intellect.
The theory of an all-inclusive Deity has recently been adopted and
popularized by Mr. Campbell,[6] who has done all that rhetorical skill
combined with genuine religious earnestness can do to present it in an
attractive and edifying dress. And yet the same Logic which leads to the
assertion that the Saint is part of God, leads also to the assertion that
Caesar Borgia and Napoleon Buonaparte and all the wicked Popes who have
ever been white-washed by episcopal or other historians are also parts of
God. How can I worship, how can I strive to be like, how can I be the
better for believing in or revering {104} a Being of whom Caesar Borgia
is a part as completely and entirely as St. Paul or our Lord himself?
Hindoo Theology is consistent in this matter. It worships the
destructive and the vicious aspects of Brahma as much as the kindly and
the moral ones: it does not pretend that God is revealed in the Moral
Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or one-sided way a God of Love. If
it be an 'ethical obsession' (as has been suggested) to object to treat
Immorality as no less a revelation of God than Morality, I must plead
guilty to such an obsession. And yet without such an 'obsession' I
confess I do not see what is left of Christianity. There is only one way
out of the difficulty. If we are all parts of God, we can only call God
good or perfect by maintaining that the deliverances of our moral
consciousness have no validity for God, and therefore can tell us nothing
about him. That has been done deliberately and explicitly by some
Philosophers:[7] the distinguished Theologians who echo the language of
this Philosophy have fortunately for their own religious life and
experience, but unfortunately for their philosophical consistency,
declined to follow in their steps. A God who is 'beyond good and evil,'
can be no fitting object of {105} worship to men who wish to become good,
just, merciful. If the cosmic process be indifferent to these ethical
considerations, we had better (with honest Agnostics like Professor
Huxley) make up our minds to defy it, whether it call itself God or not.
But it is not so much on account of its consequences as on account of its
essential unmeaningness and intellectual unintelligibility that I would
invite you to reject this formula 'God is all.' Certainly, the Universe
is an ordered system: there is nothing in it that is not done by the Will
of God. And some parts of this Universe--the spiritual parts of it and
particularly the higher spirits--are not mere creations of God's will.
They have a resemblance of nature to Him. I do not object to your saying
that at bottom there is but one Substance in the Universe, if you will
only keep clear of the materialistic and spacial association of the word
Substance: but it is a Substance which reveals itself in many different
consciousnesses. The theory of an all-inclusive Consciousness is not
necessary to make possible the idea of close and intimate communion
between God and men, or of the revelation in and to Humanity of the
thought of God. On the contrary, it is the idea of Identity which
destroys the possibility of communion. Communion implies two minds: a
mind cannot have communion with itself or with part of itself. The two
may also in a {106} sense be one; of course all beings are ultimately
part of one Universe or Reality: but that Reality is not one
Consciousness. The Universe is a unity, but the unity is not of the kind
which constitutes a person or a self-consciousness. It is (as Dr.
McTaggart holds) the unity of a Society, but of a Society (as I have
attempted to argue) which emanates from, and is controlled by and guided
to a preconceived end by, a single rational Will.[8]
(5) _The intuitive theory of religious knowledge_. In other quarters
objection will probably be taken to my not having recognized the
possibility of an immediate knowledge of God, and left the idea of God to
be inferred by intellectual processes which, when fully thought out,
amount to a Metaphysic. It will be suggested that to make religious
belief dependent upon Reason is to make it impossible to any but trained
Philosophers or Theologians. Now there is no doubt a great
attractiveness in the theory which makes belief in God depend simply upon
the immediate affirmation of the individual's own consciousness. It
would be more difficult to argue against such a theory of immediate
knowledge or intuition if we found that the consciousness of all or most
individuals does actually reveal to them {107} the existence of God:
though after all the fact that a number of men draw the same inference
from given facts does not show that it is not an inference. You will
sometimes find Metaphysicians contending that nobody is really an
Atheist, since everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in contact
with an Other of which he is nevertheless a part. I do not deny that, if
you water down the idea of God to the notion of a vague 'something not
ourselves,' you may possibly make out that everybody is explicitly or
implicitly a believer in such a Deity.
I should prefer myself to say that, if that is all you mean by God, it
does not much matter whether we believe in Him or not. In the sense in
which God is understood by Christianity or Judaism or any other theistic
Religion it is unfortunately impossible to contend that everybody is a
Theist. And, if there is an immediate knowledge of God in every human
soul, this would be difficult to account for. Neither the cultivated nor
the uncultivated Chinaman has apparently any such belief. The ignorant
Chinaman believes in a sort of luck or destiny--possibly in a plurality
of limited but more or less mischievous spirits; the educated Chinaman,
we are told, is for the most part a pure Agnostic. And Chinamen are
believed to be one-fifth of the human race. The task of the Missionary
would be an easier one if he could {108} appeal to any such widely
diffused intuitions of God. The Missionary, from the days of St. Paul at
Athens down to the present, has to begin by arguing with his opponents in
favour of Theism, and then to go on to argue from Theism to Christianity.
I do not deny--on the contrary I strongly contend--that the rational
considerations which lead up to Monotheism are so manifold, and lie so
near at hand, that at a certain stage of mental development we find that
belief independently asserting itself with more or less fullness in
widely distant regions of time and space; while traces of it are found
almost everywhere--even among savages--side by side with other and
inconsistent beliefs. But even among theistic nations an immediate
knowledge of God is claimed by very few. If there is a tendency on the
part of the more strongly religious minds to claim it, it is explicitly
disclaimed by others--by most of the great Schoolmen, and in modern times
by profoundly religious minds such as Newman or Martineau. Its existence
is in fact denied by most of the great theological systems--Catholic,
Protestant, Anglican. Theologians always begin by arguing in favour of
the existence of God. And even among the religious minds without
philosophical training which do claim such immediate knowledge, their
creed is most often due (as is obvious to the outside observer) to the
influence of environment, of education, of social {109} tradition. For
the religious person who claims such knowledge of God does not generally
stop at the bare affirmation of God's existence: he goes on to claim an
immediate knowledge of all sorts of other things--ideas clearly derived
from the traditional teaching of his religious community. The Protestant
of a certain type will claim immediate consciousness of ideas about the
forgiveness of sins which are palpably due to the teaching of Luther or
St. Augustine, and to the influence of this or that preacher who has
transmitted those ideas to him or to his mother: while the Catholic,
though his training discourages such claims, will sometimes see visions
which convey to him an immediate assurance of the truth of the Immaculate
Conception. Even among Anglicans we find educated men who claim to know
by immediate intuition the truth of historical facts alleged to have
occurred in the first century, or dogmatic truths such as the complicated
niceties of the Athanasian Creed. These claims to immediate insight thus
refute themselves by the inconsistent character of the knowledge claimed.
An attempt may be made to extract from all these immediate certainties a
residual element which is said to be common to all of them. The attempt
has been made by Professor James in that rather painful work, the
_Varieties of Religious Experience_. And the residuum turns out to be
something so vague that, if not {110} absolutely worthless, it is almost
incapable of being expressed in articulate language, and constitutes a
very precarious foundation for a working religious creed.
The truth is that the uneducated--or rather the unanalytical, perhaps I
ought to say the metaphysically untrained--human mind has a tendency to
regard as an immediate certainty any truth which it strongly believes and
regards as very important. Such minds do not know the psychological
causes which have led to their own belief, when they are due to
psychological causes: they have not analysed the processes of thought by
which they have been led to those beliefs which are really due to the
working of their own minds. Most uncultivated persons would probably be
very much surprised to hear that the existence of the friend with whose
body they are in physical contact is after all only an inference.[9] But
surely, in the man who has discovered that such is the case, the warmth
of friendship was never dimmed by the reflection that his knowledge of
his friend is not immediate but mediate. It is a mere prejudice to
suppose that mediate knowledge is in any {111} way less certain, less
intimate, less trustworthy or less satisfying than immediate knowledge.
If we claim for man the possibility of just such a knowledge of God as a
man may possess of his brother man, surely that is all that is wanted to
make possible the closest religious communion. It is from the existence
of my own self that I infer the existence of other selves, whom I observe
to behave in a manner resembling my own behaviour. It is by an only
slightly more difficult and complicated inference from my own
consciousness that I rise to that conception of a universal Consciousness
which supplies me with at once the simplest and the most natural
explanation both of my own existence and of the existence of the Nature
which I see around me.
(6) _Religion and Psychology_. I do not deny that the study of religious
history, by exhibiting the naturalness and universality of religious
ideas and religious emotions, may rationally create a pre-disposition to
find some measure of truth in every form of religious belief. But I
would venture to add a word of caution against the tendency fashionable
in many quarters to talk of basing religious belief upon Psychology. The
business of Psychology is to tell us what actually goes on in the human
mind. It cannot possibly tell us whether the beliefs which are found
there are true or false. An erroneous {112} belief is as much a
psychological fact as a true one. A theory which goes on, by inference
from what we observe in our own minds, to construct a theory of the
Universe necessarily involves a Metaphysic, conscious or unconscious. It
may be urged that the reality of religious experience is unaffected by
the question whether the beliefs associated with it are true or false.
That is the case, so long as the beliefs are supposed to be true by the
person in question. But, when once the spirit of enquiry is aroused, a
man cannot be--and I venture to think ought not to be--satisfied as to
the truth of his belief simply by being told that the beliefs are
actually there.
It may be contended, no doubt, that religious experience does not mean
merely a state of intellectual belief, but certain emotions, aspirations,
perhaps (to take one particular type of religious experience) a
consciousness of love met by answering love. To many who undergo such
experiences, they seem to carry with them an immediate assurance of the
existence of the Being with whom they feel themselves to be in communion.
That, on the intellectual presuppositions of the particular person, seems
to be the natural--it may be the only possible--way of explaining the
feeling. But even there the belief is not really immediate: it is an
inference from what is actually matter of experience. And it is,
unhappily, no less a matter of well-ascertained {113} psychological fact
that, when intellectual doubt is once aroused, such experiences no longer
carry with them this conviction of their own objective basis. The person
was really under the influence of an intellectual theory all along,
whether the theory was acquired by hereditary tradition, by the influence
of another's mind, or by personal thought and reflection. When the
intellectual theory alters, the same kind of experience is no longer
possible. I will not attempt to say how far it is desirable that persons
who are perfectly satisfied with a creed which they have never examined
should (as it were) pull up the roots of their own faith to see how deep
they go. I merely want to point out that the occurrence of certain
emotional experiences, though undoubtedly they may constitute part of the
data of a religious argument, cannot be held to constitute in and by
themselves sufficient evidence for the truth of the intellectual theory
connected with them in the mind of the person to whom they occur. They
do not always present themselves as sufficient evidence for their truth
even to the person experiencing them--still less can they do so to
others. Equally unreasonable is it to maintain, with a certain class of
religious philosophers, that the religious experience by itself is all we
want; and to assume that we may throw to the winds all the theological or
other beliefs which have actually been associated {114} with the various
types of religious experience, and yet continue to have those experiences
and find them no less valuable and no less satisfying. If there is one
thing which the study of religious Psychology testifies to, it is the
fact that the character of the religious experience (though there may be
certain common elements in it) varies very widely with the character of
the theoretical belief with which it is associated--a belief of which it
is sometimes the cause, sometimes the effect, but from which it is always
inseparable. The Buddhist's religious experiences are not possible to
those who hold the Christian's view of the Universe: the Christian's
religious experiences are not possible to one who holds the Buddhist
theory of the Universe. You cannot have an experience of communion with
a living Being when you disbelieve in the existence of such a Being. And
a man's theories of the Universe always at bottom imply a Metaphysic of
some kind--conscious or unconscious.
Sometimes the theory of a Religion which shall be purely psychological
springs from pure ignorance as to the meaning of the terms actually
employed by the general usage of philosophers. Those who talk in this
way mean by Psychology what, according to the ordinary philosophic usage,
is really Metaphysic. For Metaphysic is simply the science which deals
with the ultimate nature of the Universe. {115} At other times attempts
are made by people of more or less philosophical culture to justify their
theory. The most widely influential of such attempts is the one made by
M. Auguste Sabatier.[10] This attempt has at least this much in its
favour--that it is not so much to the ordinary experience of average men
and women that M. Sabatier appeals as to the exceptional experiences of
the great religious minds. He lays the chief stress upon those
exceptional moments of religious history when a new religious idea
entered into the mind of some prophet or teacher, _e.g._ the unity of
God, the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man. Here, just because
the idea was new, it cannot (he contends) be accounted for by education
or environment or any other of the psychological causes which obviously
determine the traditional beliefs of the great majority. These new
ideas, therefore, he assumes to be due to immediate revelation or
inspiration from God. Now it is obvious that, even if this inference
were well grounded, it assumes that we have somehow arrived independently
at a conception of God to which such inspirations can be referred. The
Psychology of the human mind cannot assume the existence of such a Being:
if we infer such a Being from our own mental experience, that is not
immediate but {116} mediate knowledge. It is a belief based on
inference, and a belief which is, properly speaking, metaphysical. The
idea of a Religion which is merely based upon Psychology and involves
nothing else is a delusion: all the great Religions of the world have
been, among other things, metaphysical systems. We have no means of
ascertaining their truth but Reason, whether it assume the form of a
rough common-sense or of elaborate reasoning which not only is Metaphysic
but knows itself to be so. Reason is then the organ of religious truth.
But then, let me remind you, Reason includes our moral Reason. That
really is a faculty of immediate knowledge; and it is a faculty which, in
a higher or lower state of development, is actually found in practically
all human beings. The one element of truth which I recognize in the
theory of an immediate knowledge of God is the truth that the most
important data upon which we base the inference which leads to the
knowledge of God are those supplied by the immediate judgements or
intuitions of the Moral Consciousness.
And here let me caution you against a very prevalent misunderstanding
about the word Reason. It is assumed very often that Reason means
nothing but inference. That is not what we mean when we refer moral
judgements to the Reason. We do not mean that we can prove that things
are right or {117} wrong: we mean precisely the opposite--that ultimate
moral truth is immediate, like the truth that two and two make four. It
might, of course, be contended that the same Reason which assures me that
goodness is worth having and that the whole is greater than the part,
assures us no less immediately of the existence of God. I can only say
that I am sure I have no such immediate knowledge, and that for the most
part that knowledge is never claimed by people who understand clearly the
difference between immediate knowledge and inference. The idea of God is
a complex conception, based, not upon this or that isolated judgement or
momentary experience, but upon the whole of our experience taken
together. It is a hypothesis suggested by, and necessary to, the
explanation of our experience as a whole. Some minds may lay most stress
upon the religious emotions themselves; others upon the experience of the
outer world, upon the appearances of design, or upon the metaphysical
argument which shows them the inconceivability of matter without mind;
others, again, may be most impressed by the impossibility of accounting
in any way for the immediate consciousness of duty and the conviction of
objective validity or authority which that consciousness carries with it.
But in any case the knowledge, when it is a reasonable belief and not
based merely upon authority, involves {118} inference--just like our
knowledge of our friend's existence. The fact that my friend is known to
me by experience does not prevent his communicating his mind to me. I
shall try to show you in my next lecture that to admit that our knowledge
of God is based upon inference is not incompatible with the belief that
God has spoken to man face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.
At this point it may perhaps be well, for the sake of clearness, to
summarize the position to which I have tried to lead you. I have tried
to show that the material Universe cannot reasonably be thought of as
having any existence outside, or independently of, Mind. It certainly
does not exist merely in any or all of the human and similar minds whose
knowledge is fleeting, and which have, there is every reason to believe,
a beginning in time. We are bound then to infer the existence of a
single Mind or Consciousness, which must be thought of as containing all
the elements of our own Consciousness--Reason or Thought, Feeling, and
Will--though no doubt in Him those elements or aspects of Consciousness
are combined in a manner of which our own minds can give us but a very
faint and analogical idea. The world must be thought of as ultimately
the thought or experience of this Mind, which we call God. And this Mind
must be thought {119} of as not only a Thinker, but also as a Cause or a
Will. Our own and all other minds, no less than the events of the
material Universe, owe their beginning and continuance to this divine
Will: in them the thought or experience of the divine Mind is reproduced
in various degrees; and to all of them is communicated some portion of
that causality or activity of which God is the ultimate source, so that
their acts must be regarded as due mediately to them, ultimately to God.
But, though these minds are wholly dependent upon and in intimate
connexion with the divine Mind, they cannot be regarded as _parts_ of the
divine Consciousness. Reality consists of God and all the minds that He
wills to exist, together with the world of Nature which exists in and for
those minds. Reality is the system or society of spirits and their
experience. The character and ultimate purpose of the divine Mind is
revealed to us, however inadequately or imperfectly, in the moral
consciousness; and the moral ideal which is thus communicated to us makes
it reasonable for us to expect, for at least the higher of the dependent
or created minds, a continuance, of their individual existence, after
physical death. Pain, sin, and other evils must be regarded as necessary
incidents in the process by which the divine Will is bringing about the
greatest attainable good of all conscious beings. The question whether
our material Universe, {120} considered as the object of Mind, has a
beginning and will have an end, is one which we have no data for
deciding. Time-distinctions, I think, must be regarded as
objective--that is to say, as forming part of the nature and constitution
of the real world; but the antinomy involved either in supposing an
endless succession or a beginning and end of the time-series is one which
our intellectual faculties are, or at least have so far proved, incapable
of solving. The element of inadequacy and uncertainty which the
admission of this antinomy introduces into our theory of the Universe is
an emphatic reminder to us of the inadequate and imperfect character of
all our knowledge. The knowledge, however, that we possess, though
inadequate knowledge, is real knowledge--not a sham knowledge of merely
relative or human validity; and is sufficient not only for the guidance
of life but even for the partial, though not the complete, satisfaction
of one of the noblest impulses of the human mind--the disinterested
passion for truth. 'Now we see in a mirror darkly'; but still we see.
The view of the Universe which I have endeavoured very inadequately to
set before you is a form of Idealism. Inasmuch as it recognizes the
existence--though not the separate and independent existence--of many
persons; inasmuch as it regards both God and man as persons, without
attempting {121} to merge the existence of either in one all-including,
comprehensive consciousness, it may further be described as a form of
'personal Idealism.' But, if any one finds it easier to think of
material Nature as having an existence which, though dependent upon and
willed by the divine Mind, is not simply an existence in and for mind,
such a view of the Universe will serve equally well as a basis of
Religion. For religious purposes it makes no difference whether we think
of Nature as existing in the Mind of God, or as simply created or brought
into and kept in existence by that Mind. When you have subtracted from
the theistic case every argument that depends for its force upon the
theory that the idea of matter without Mind is an unthinkable absurdity,
enough will remain to show the unreasonableness of supposing that in
point of fact matter ever has existed without being caused and controlled
by Mind. The argument for Idealism may, I hope, have at all events
exhibited incidentally the groundlessness and improbability of
materialistic and naturalistic assumptions, and left the way clear for
the establishment of Theism by the arguments which rest upon the
discovery that Causality implies volition; upon the appearances of
intelligence in organic life; upon the existence of the moral
consciousness; and more generally upon the enormous probability that the
ultimate Source of Reality should resemble rather {122} the highest than
the lowest kind of existence of which we have experience. That Reality
as a whole may be most reasonably interpreted by Reality at its highest
is after all the sum and substance of all theistic arguments. If anybody
finds it easier to think of matter as uncreated but as always guided and
controlled by Mind, I do not think there will be any religious objection
to such a position; though it is, as it seems to me, intellectually a
less unassailable position than is afforded by an Idealism of the type
which I have most inadequately sketched.
Mr. Bradley in a cynical moment has defined Metaphysics as the 'finding
of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.' I do not for myself
accept that definition, which Mr. Bradley himself would not of course
regard as expressing the whole truth of the matter. But, though I am
firmly convinced that it is possible to find good reasons for the
religious beliefs and hopes which have in fact inspired the noblest
lives, I still feel that the greatest service which even a little
acquaintance with Philosophy may render to many who have not the time for
any profounder study of it, will be to give them greater boldness and
confidence in accepting a view of the Universe which satisfies the
instinctive or unanalysed demands of their moral, intellectual, and
spiritual nature.
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