THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (_continued_)
But though Materialism had to go, there was a time when it seemed to
many by no means unlikely that Agnosticism might have to be accepted as
its substitute. And if that had been so the case would have been
scarcely less desperate. We might have been left with a philosophy of
a kind, but we should have been deprived of any object which could
evoke within our hearts the trust and affection that are needed to
sustain a religion. However, as it proved, there was no great cause
for fear. Agnosticism was subjected in its turn to the ordeal of
criticism, and the result proved that it had not in it the substance
and force that could give it any permanent hold upon the best
intelligence of the age.
If Agnosticism could have been content to confine itself to positive
assertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it.
But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its
name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with
affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought
mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely
in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but
unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And
then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they
proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to assert that we can
know what it is _not_. This above all else, they said, it is not: it
is not personal. True, Herbert Spencer maintained that it is as far
raised above personality as personality is raised above
unconsciousness; but the stress was laid not upon the affirmation of
super-personality, but upon the denial and rejection of anything like
personality as we understand it.
The position was really untenable. Possibly, if we could detect no
more in Nature than power, we might be content, intellectually, to stop
at the affirmation of inscrutable force. But if there is also design,
then we are bound to go a step further. Bishop Harvey Goodwin
expressed this exactly when he said: "Purpose means person." No doubt
personality in the Creator must be something far higher and fuller than
personality in the creature. The German philosopher Lotze was speaking
the truth when he declared that "to all finite minds {48} there is
allotted but a pale copy" of personality; "the finiteness of the
finite," being "not a producing condition of personality," as has often
been maintained, "but a limit and hindrance of its development."
"Perfect personality," he said, "is in God alone."[1]
To most of us it may sound paradoxical to urge that the full Christian
doctrine of the Three Persons in the Godhead is really less difficult
intellectually than the doctrine that the Divine Being consists of an
isolated unit.
This was the contention of the Greek Fathers of the Church, whose acute
and subtle minds anticipated not a few of the objections which we have
had to encounter in our days. We cannot elaborate the statement
here,[2] but it is to the point to observe that the doctrine of the
Trinity in Unity removes from the Christian believer that which to
Spencer was one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the acceptance
of the idea of a Divine Personality; for it relieves him from the
necessity of imagining a subject without an object, since in the
Christian view the highest life in the universe is a social life, {49}
in which thought is for ever communicated with unbroken harmony of
feeling and will.
But the inadequacy of Agnosticism was to be seen not only on the
intellectual side. Its practical effects were necessarily determined
by its negations. Since we could know nothing of the ultimate power,
it was plainly our wisdom to turn our attention elsewhere. It followed
that, if morality was to be upheld, it must be based upon other than
the familiar sanctions. For awhile it was enthusiastically promised
that this could and should be done. But the event proved otherwise.
Towards the end of his life, Herbert Spencer was constrained to admit
this. "Now that ... I have succeeded in completing the second volume
of _The Principles of Ethics_ ... my satisfaction is somewhat dashed by
the thought that these new parts fall short of expectation. The
doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent that I
had hoped."[3]
And this moral failure of the system pointed yet deeper to its
essential weakness. It deliberately ignored the profoundest needs and
capacities of our nature. The need is the need for God, and for One
who, though greatly above us, is yet within our reach, and ready to
give us His friendship. "Thou {50} hast made us for Thyself, and our
heart is restless until it rests in Thee." That cry of St. Augustine
has found its echo in unnumbered souls, and our humanity will never be
satisfied while it is offered no more than an impalpable abstraction
for the contentment of its craving.
Allusion has been made to the fact that Romanes in his latter days was
led to abandon the negative attitude which he had taken in his earlier
life. The story of the change is to be found as told by himself in the
volume of _Life and Letters_ edited by his widow, and in the _Notes_
which he left behind him. These he had written in preparation for a
book which was to have been entitled: _A Candid Examination of
Religion_.[4] It is evident that no consideration weighed more with
him than this witness of the deeper needs of the soul. We have seen
with what sorrow he had accepted as a young man the conclusions to
which he had found himself driven when Theism seemed no longer a
possible belief. After his change he admitted that he had failed to
recognise an important element in his treatment of the problem. "When
I wrote the preceding treatise I {51} did not sufficiently appreciate
the immense importance of _human_ nature in any enquiry touching
Theism. But since then I have seriously studied anthropology
(including the science of comparative religions), psychology, and
metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing that human nature is the
most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the
theory of Theism."[5]
The outcome of his study was to convince him of two things. The first
was that, "if the religious instincts of the human race point to no
reality as their object, they are out of analogy with all other
instinctive endowments. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom we never meet
with such a thing as an instinct pointing aimlessly."[6] And this
first conviction was only the preparation for a second. Speaking again
of his _Candid Examination of Theism_, he says: "In that treatise I
have since come to see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the
basal argument for my negative conclusion ... Reason is not the only
attribute of man, nor is it the only faculty which he habitually
employs for the ascertainment of truth. Moral and spiritual faculties
are of no less importance in their respective spheres, even of everyday
life; faith, trust, taste, etc., are {52} as needful in ascertaining
truth as to character, beauty, etc., as is reason."[7]
He put the same thing with even more of the note of personal experience
when he wrote to Dean Paget of Christ Church within three months of his
death: "Strangely enough for my time of life, I have begun to discover
the truth of what you once wrote about logical processes not being the
only means of research in regions transcendental."[8] In all this he
was following, as he knew, in the steps of Pascal, who had devoted the
whole of the first part of his treatise to the argument from the
condition of man's nature without God, and then had appealed to that
nature for its positive testimony to the reality of the spiritual.
"The heart has its reasons that the reason does not know."
Agnosticism appeared dressed in the garb of an exceeding reverence,
but, on closer acquaintance, it became evident that its acceptance
would mean the cheapening of life by banishing from it the Divine
personality, and robbing the human of the qualities that give it its
greatest worth. Happily the disaster has been averted, and there are
not many now who would seriously undertake its defence.
[1] _Microcosmus_ (E.T.), II., p. 688.
[2] Those who may desire to see the matter clearly and ably handled
would do well to read the Essay on "The Being of God," in _Lux Mundi_,
by Aubrey Moore.
[3] Preface, Vol. II. (1893).
[4] These notes were sent by Mr. Romanes' desire after his death, in
1894, to Bishop Gore, and have been published by him in a sixpenny
volume under the title of _Thoughts on Religion_.
[5] P. 154.
[6] P. 82.
[7] Pp. 111, f.
[8] Life and Letters, p. 375.
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