a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can
such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be
at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent.
Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but
Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers
as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do
indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience
and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist
upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct
Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of
Thought--constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality
with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the
amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual
Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that
contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for
mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent
structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in
the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]
Fourthly, both Space and Time are indeed essential constituents of all
our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at least in this life. Yet Time is
perhaps the more real, and assuredly the richer, constituent of the two.
But this rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time, Duration,
in which our experiences, although always more or less successive,
interpenetrate each other in various degrees and ways, and are thus more
or less simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually
exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our theoretical
thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time. Already, in 1886, Professor
James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of
intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an
intensive magnitude.'[35] And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his _Essai
sur les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience_, gave us exquisite
descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly
speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or
exterior to each other'.[36] Thus all our real soul life, in proportion
to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires
and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.
Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are closely
interrelated. The sensible perception of objects, however humble, is
always necessary for the beginning, and (in the long run) for the
persistence and growth, of the more spiritual apprehensions of man.
Hence Historical Persons and Happenings, Institutions, affording
Sensible Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each different
according to the different ranges and levels of life, can hardly fail to
be of importance for man's full awakening--even ethical and spiritual.
Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of
such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate
exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of
evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.
Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted
by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of
outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests,
indeed constituents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my
general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very
distinctly are all true'--these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth
Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full
and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such
sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be
sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from
those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful
philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our
thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete
thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy,
Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or
Science, of a special but true kind.
Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the
success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous
correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature.
The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this
rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without
a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in
God. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion
between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work,
Christoph Sigwart's _Logik_. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the
real _right_', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a
correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and
the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need
for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not
that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,'
as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies
the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this
Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no
desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is
truly thinkable.'[39]
And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an
artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human
experience. Assuredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of
anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all
higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing
manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's
appearances. We men are most assuredly realities forming part of a real
world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously
affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about
these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home
by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their
utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of
interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real
as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a _doctrinaire_
position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant
Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon
demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in
assuming that consciousness contains _nothing but_ limits and
conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and
conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw
material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which
thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]
II
Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed
amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the
Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the
most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the
Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite
briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics
found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the
question concerning the relations between Religion and Progress.
1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion into three long
periods; in each the points that specially concern us will greatly vary
in clearness, importance, and richness of content.
The first period, from the time of the founder Moses and the Jewish
exodus out of Egypt to the appearance of the first great prophet Elijah
(say 1300 B.C. to about 860 B.C.) is indeed but little known to us; yet
it gives us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the
recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious experiences and
convictions. True, the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to
1916 B.C.; or, according to others, in about 1650) anticipates many of
the laws of the _Book of the Covenant_ (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the
oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the Pentateuch; and,
again, this covenant appears to presuppose the Jewish settlement in
Canaan (say in 1250 B.C.) as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law
and the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly passed through a long,
deep, wide, and elaborate development, of which three chief stages, all
considerably subsequent to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been
established with substantial certainty and precision. The record of
directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly very small. Yet
it is assuredly a gross excess to deny the historical reality of Moses,
as even distinguished scholars such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade
have done. Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very
greatness and fixity of orientation of the development in the Law and in
the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive proof of the rich reality and
greatness of the Man of God, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think,
who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. With Gunkel
we can securely hold that Moses called God Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as
the national God of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is my
banner'--the divine leader of the Israelites in battle (Exod. xvii. 15);
and that Yahweh is for Moses a God of righteousness--of the right and
the law which he, Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai and published at
its foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of Yahweh, thus
proclaimed, yet the soul's attitude towards Him is already here, from
the first, a religion of the will: an absolute trust in God ('Yahweh
shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and
a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands--as when
Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all
who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side'
(Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship
of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5).
Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the
gods of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the
first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many); but
already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any
other god--certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient
Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain
(Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself
really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh,
Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the
Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces;
and all mythology is absent here--the vehement rejection of the
calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of
fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]
The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860
B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the
public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is
surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical
times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end
each possess distinctive characters.
The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the
Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For
Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of
equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy
Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but
like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen).
And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the noble
'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine
survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice,
and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of
justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still
recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now stood high above
Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be
found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative documents of the
Pentateuch--the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)--appear to have been
composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel
in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the
Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of
Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and
picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally--the
first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of
His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish
peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as
deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of
that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix).
There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself,
without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and
there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity,
when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to
the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria: that Yahweh would not
allow a single arrow to be shot against it, and would turn back the
Assyrian by the way by which he came--all which actually happens as thus
predicted (chap. xxxvii).
The middle of this rich second period is filled by a great
prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical priestly reform.
Jeremiah is called in 628 B.C., and dies obscurely in Egypt in about 585
B.C.; and the Deuteronomic Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is
solemnly proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the
leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah, 'the Constantine
of the Jewish Church,' in 628 B.C. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are
strikingly cognate in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D
contrasts remarkably in all this with the documents J and E. We thus
have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah
and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel
and a fiercely polemical husk--they both are full of the contrast
between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the one Holy Place,
Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen gods worshipped in so many places
by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall be my
covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will write my law
in their hearts: and they shall all know me, from the least to the
greatest: for I will remember their sin no more' (xxxi. 33, 34). And
Yahweh exclaims: 'My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken
me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out cisterns that can
hold no water.' 'Lift up thine eyes unto the high places ... thou hast
polluted the land with thy wickedness.' 'Wilt thou not from this time
cry unto me: My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?' (ii. 13, iii.
2, 4). And Deuteronomy teaches magnificently: 'This commandment which I
command you this day, is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off.
It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest
say: Who shall go up for us to heaven or over the sea, and bring it unto
us? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart,
that thou mayest do it' (xxx. 11-14). And there are here exquisite
injunctions--to bring back stray cattle to their owners; to spare the
sitting bird, where eggs or fledglings are found; to leave over, at the
harvest, some of the grain, olives, grapes, for the stranger, the
orphan, the widow; and not to muzzle the ox when treading out the corn
(xxii. 1, 6, 7; xxiv. 19; xxv. 4). Yet the same Deuteronomy ordains: 'If
thine own brother, son, daughter, wife, or bosom friend entice thee
secretly, saying, let us go and serve other gods, thine hand shall be
first upon him to put him to death.' Also 'There shall not be found with
thee any consulter with a familiar spirit ... or a necromancer. Yahweh
thy God doth drive them out before thee.' And, finally, amongst the laws
of war, 'of the cities of these people (Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite,
Perizzite, Hivite, Jebusite) thou shalt save alive nothing that
breatheth, as Yahweh thy God hath commanded thee' (xii. 2-5; xiii. 6, 9;
xviii. 10-13; xx. 16, 17). Here we must remember that the immorality of
these Canaanitish tribes and cults was of the grossest, indeed largely
unnatural, kind; that it had copiously proved its terrible fascination
for their kinsmen, the Jews; that these ancient Easterns, e.g. the
Assyrians, were ruthlessly cruel at the storming of enemy cities; and
especially that the morality and spirituality, thus saved for humanity
from out of a putrid flood, was (in very deed) immensely precious. One
point here is particularly far-sighted--the severe watchfulness against
all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead, things in which the
environing world of the Jews' fellow Semites was steeped. The
Israelitish-Jewish prophetic movement did not first attain belief in a
Future Life, and then, through this, belief in God; but the belief in
God, strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very slowly, and
not until the danger of any infusion of those naturalisms had become
remote, led on the Jews to a realization of the soul's survival with a
consciousness at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book
of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of King Josiah's
rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.
The end of this most full second period is marked by the now rapid
predominance of a largely technical priestly legislation and a
corresponding conception of past history; by the inception of the
Synagogue and the religion of the Book; but also by writings the most
profound of any in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the
probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 B.C. Jerusalem is
destroyed and the majority of the Jews are taken captives to Babylon;
and in between (in 593) occurs the vocation of the prophet-priest
Ezekiel, and his book is practically complete by 573 B.C. Here the
prophecies as to the restoration are strangely detailed and
schematic--already somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet Ezekiel
reveals to us deathless truths--the responsibility of the individual
soul for its good and its evil, and God Himself as the Good Shepherd of
the lost and the sick (xviii. 20-32; xxxiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand
pictures of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel
(chap. xxxvii), and of the waters of healing and of life which flow
forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath the Temple, and by their
sweetness transform all sour waters and arid lands that they touch
(xlvii. 1-12). A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel
produced the third, last, and most extensive development of the
Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history--in about 560 B.C., the
Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii-xxvi); and in about 500 B.C., the
Priestly Code. As with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these
Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of
dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests.
The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts and the worship
of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the
Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest
effort and conflict, are here assumed as operative even back to
patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work
of Moses truly involved all this development; and even that Monotheism
(at least, for the times and peoples here concerned) required some such
rules as are assumed by P throughout.
And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with its splendid
sense of rational order pervasive of the Universe, the work of the
all-reasonable God--its single parts good, its totality very good; and
man and woman springing together from the Creator's will. But the writer
nowhere indicates that he means long periods by the 'days'; each
creation appears as effected in an instant, and these instants as
separated from each other by but twenty-four hours.
In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or a little later still,
lies probably the composition of three religious works full,
respectively, of exultant thanksgiving, of the noblest insight into the
fruitfulness of suffering, and of the deepest questionings issuing in
childlike trust in God. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in 550
B.C.) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters forty to fifty-five of
our Book of Isaiah--a paean of spiritual exultation over the Jews'
proximate deliverance from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 B.C.
Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and in 516 the
Second Temple is dedicated. Within this great Consolation stand (xlii.
1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9; lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the
Suffering Servant of Yahweh--the tenderest revelation of the Old
Testament--apparently written previously in the Exile, say in 570-560
B.C. The Old Law here reaches to the very feet of the New Law--to the
Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job,
in its chief constituents (chaps. i-xxxi, xxxviii-xlii), was probably
composed when Greek influences began--say in about 480 B.C., the year of
the battle of Thermopylae. The canonization of this daringly speculative
book indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and holiness
can remain to the apparently unjust distribution of man's earthly lot.
Our second period ends in 444 B.C., when the priest and scribe Ezra
solemnly proclaims, and receives the public subscription to, the Book of
the Law of Moses--the Priestly Code, brought by him from Babylon.
The Jewish last period, from Ezra's Proclamation 444 B.C. to the
completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra, about A.D. 95, is (upon the
whole) derivative. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities
of their own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance of
the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other
Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier
prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations as to
the how and the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given rise to
the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development and codifying of
the Mosaic law; the seventy years intermission of the Temple sacrifices
and symbolic acts had turned the worship, which had been so largely
visible, dramatic, social, into the praying, singing, reading, preaching
of extant texts, taken as direct and final rules for all thought and
action, and as incapable of additions or interpretations equal in value
to themselves. Yet thus priceless treasures of spiritual truth and light
were handed down to times again aglow with great--the greatest religious
gifts and growths; and indeed this literature itself introduced various
conceptions or images destined to form a largely fitting, and in the
circumstances attractive, garment for the profound further realities
brought by Christianity.