elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness,
and to distinguish between that which is true and false in
religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which
enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be
_true_. It must be seen as having in its own nature a _right_ to
dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which
feeling must be judged.(287) In estimating the religious character
of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is, not how
they feel, but what they think and believe—not whether their
religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less
vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the _conceptions_ of God
and divine things by which these emotions are called forth.
Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the _content_ or
intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its
character and worth are to be determined.”(288)
Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives more
emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.(289) Theology, he
says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he
says, what it is not—not “physical evidences” for God, not “natural
religion,” for these are but vague subjective interpretations:—
“If,” he continues, “the Supreme Being is powerful or skillful,
just so far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows
skill, if his moral law is to be ascertained simply by the
physical processes of the animal frame, or his will gathered from
the immediate issues of human affairs, if his Essence is just as
high and deep and broad as the universe and no more; if this be
the fact, then will I confess that there is no specific science
about God, that theology is but a name, and a protest in its
behalf an hypocrisy. Then, pious as it is to think of Him, while
the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still
such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought, or an
ornament of language, a certain view taken of Nature which one man
has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which
others see to be admirable and ingenious, and which all would be
the better for adopting. It is but the theology of Nature, just as
we talk of the _philosophy_ or the _romance_ of history, or the
_poetry_ of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or
the humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or
the caprice of the individual, or the fashion of the day, or the
consent of the world, recognizes in any set of objects which are
subjected to its contemplation. I do not see much difference
between avowing that there is no God, and implying that nothing
definite can be known for certain about Him.”
What I mean by Theology, continues Newman, is none of these
things: “I simply mean the _Science of God_, or the truths we know
about God, put into a system, just as we have a science of the
stars and call it astronomy, or of the crust of the earth and call
it geology.”
In both these extracts we have the issue clearly set before us: Feeling
valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally.
The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason
must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, wherein
would its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even
as sentiment and mysticism form them, how would it fulfill its programme
of freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly
definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion
on universal reason simplifies my procedure to‐day. I need not discredit
philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I
show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be
“objectively” convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not
banish differences; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I
believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of
divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or
in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our
passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds
arguments for our conviction, for indeed it _has_ to find them. It
amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and
plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it; it cannot now secure it.(290)
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Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older
systematic theology. You find them in both Protestant and Catholic
manuals, best of all in the innumerable text‐books published since Pope
Leo’s Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I glance first at
the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God’s existence,
after that at those by which it establishes his nature.(291)
The arguments for God’s existence have stood for hundreds of years with
the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally
discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and
surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God
already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are
atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The
“cosmological” one, so‐called, reasons from the contingence of the world
to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself
contains. The “argument from design” reasons, from the fact that Nature’s
laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other,
that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The “moral argument”
is that the moral law presupposes a lawgiver. The “argument _ex consensu
gentium_” is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in
the rational nature of man, and should therefore carry authority with it.
As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The bare
fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or
to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as
religion’s all‐sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would
be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed
too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of
theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have
revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate
escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent
adaptations which we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from
the one who figured in the earlier versions of the argument.(292)
The fact is that these arguments do but follow the combined suggestions of
the facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only
corroborate our pre‐existent partialities.
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If philosophy can do so little to establish God’s existence, how stands it
with her efforts to define his attributes? It is worth while to look at
the attempts of systematic theology in this direction.
Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he
differs from all his creatures in possessing existence _a se_.
From this “a‐se‐ity” on God’s part, theology deduces by mere logic
most of his other perfections. For instance, he must be both
_necessary_ and _absolute_, cannot not be, and cannot in any way
be determined by anything else. This makes Him absolutely
unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within; for
limitation is non‐being; and God is being itself. This
unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is
_One_, and _Only_, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer.
He is _Spiritual_, for were He composed of physical parts, some
other power would have to combine them into the total, and his
aseity would thus be contradicted. He is therefore both simple and
non‐physical in nature. He is _simple metaphysically_ also, that
is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as
they are in finite substances which share their formal natures
with one another, and are individual only in their material
aspect. Since God is one and only, his _essentia_ and his _esse_
must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all
those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things,
between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being
and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true,
of God’s powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations
are only “virtual,” and made from the human point of view. In God
all these points of view fall into an absolute identity of being.
This absence of all potentiality in God obliges Him to be
_immutable_. He is actuality, through and through. Were there
anything potential about Him, He would either lose or gain by its
actualization, and either loss or gain would contradict his
perfection. He cannot, therefore, change. Furthermore, He is
_immense_, _boundless_; for could He be outlined in space, He
would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility.
He is therefore _omnipresent_, indivisibly there, at every point
of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of
time,—in other words _eternal_. For if He began in time, He would
need a prior cause, and that would contradict his aseity. If He
ended, it would contradict his necessity. If He went through any
succession, it would contradict his immutability.
He has _intelligence_ and _will_ and every other creature‐
perfection, for _we_ have them, and _effectus nequit superare
causam_. In Him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in
act, and their _object_, since God can be bounded by naught that
is external, can primarily be nothing else than God himself. He
knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills
himself with an infinite self‐pleasure.(293) Since He must of
logical necessity thus love and will himself, He cannot be called
“free” _ad intra_, with the freedom of contrarieties that
characterizes finite creatures. _Ad extra_, however, or with
respect to his creation, God is free. He cannot _need_ to create,
being perfect in being and in happiness already. He _wills_ to
create, then, by an absolute freedom.
Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and
freedom, God is a _person_; and a _living_ person also, for He is
both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this
distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely
_self‐sufficient_: his _self‐knowledge_ and _self‐love_ are both
of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions
to perfect them.
He is _omniscient_, for in knowing himself as Cause He knows all
creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is
_previsive_, for He is present to all time. Even our free acts are
known beforehand to Him, for otherwise his wisdom would admit of
successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his
immutability. He is _omnipotent_ for everything that does not
involve logical contradiction. He can make _being_—in other words
his power includes _creation_. If what He creates were made of his
own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that
substance is; but it is finite; so it must be non‐divine in
substance. If it were made of a substance, an eternally existing
matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to
which He simply gave its form, that would contradict God’s
definition as First Cause, and make Him a mere mover of something
caused already. The things he creates, then, He creates _ex
nihilo_, and gives them absolute being as so many finite
substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints upon
them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no
such thing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are
manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God and the
way in which our minds externally imitate them. We must attribute
them to Him only in a _terminative_ sense, as differing aspects,
from the finite point of view, of his unique essence.
God of course is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for He
is positive being’s fullness, and evil is negation. It is true
that He has created physical evil in places, but only as a means
of wider good, for _bonum totius præeminet bonum partis_. Moral
evil He cannot will, either as end or means, for that would
contradict his holiness. By creating free beings He _permits_ it
only, neither his justice nor his goodness obliging Him to prevent
the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift.
As regards God’s purpose in creating, primarily it can only have
been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to
others of his glory. From this it follows that the others must be
rational beings, capable in the first place of knowledge, love,
and honor, and in the second place of happiness, for the knowledge
and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one
may say that God’s secondary purpose in creating is _love_.
I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations
farther, into the mysteries of God’s Trinity, for example. What I have
given will serve as a specimen of the orthodox philosophical theology of
both Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God’s
list of perfections, continues the passage which I began to quote to you
by a couple of pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly
refrain from adding them, in spite of the inroad they would make upon our
time.(294) He first enumerates God’s attributes sonorously, then
celebrates his ownership of everything in earth and Heaven, and the
dependence of all that happens upon his permissive will. He gives us
scholastic philosophy “touched with emotion,” and every philosophy should
be touched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then,
dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman’s. It
will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually, if at this point
I make a short digression.
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What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The Continental
schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man’s
thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be
the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic
connection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has in
fact been that every difference must _make_ a difference, every
theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference, and that
the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining
what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other
being true. What is the particular truth in question _known as_? In what
facts does it result? What is its cash‐value in terms of particular
experience? This is the characteristic English way of taking up a
question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of
personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular
memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its
significance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness
of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of
intelligible meaning; and propositions touching such ideas may be
indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his “matter.” The cash‐
value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as,
all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore, is the
whole meaning of the term “matter”—any other pretended meaning is mere
wind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as
habitual antecedence, and as tendency on our part to look for something
definite to come. Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance
whatever, and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume.
Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, John Mill, and Professor
Bain, have followed more or less consistently the same method; and
Shadworth Hodgson has used the principle with full explicitness. When all
is said and done, it was English and Scotch writers, and not Kant, who
introduced “the critical method” into philosophy, the one method fitted to
make philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can
possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make
an appreciable difference to us in action? And what could it matter, if
all propositions were practically indifferent, which of them we should
agree to call true or which false?
An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders
Peirce, has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the
particulars of its application the principle by which these men were
instinctively guided, and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to
it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of _pragmatism_, and he defends
it somewhat as follows:(295)—
Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of
belief, or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has
found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely
begin. Beliefs, in short, are rules for action; and the whole function of
thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were
any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought’s practical
consequences, then that part would be no proper element of the thought’s
significance. To develop a thought’s meaning we need therefore only
determine what conduct it is fitted to produce; that conduct is for us its
sole significance; and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought‐
distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in
anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect
clearness in our thoughts of an object, we need then only consider what
sensations, immediate or remote, we are conceivably to expect from it, and
what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Our
conception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our
conception of the object, so far as that conception has positive
significance at all.
This is the principle of Peirce, the principle of pragmatism. Such a
principle will help us on this occasion to decide, among the various
attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God’s perfections,
whether some be not far less significant than others.
If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God’s metaphysical
attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral
attributes, I think that, even were we forced by a coercive logic to
believe them, we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all
intelligible significance. Take God’s aseity, for example; or his
necessariness; his immateriality; his “simplicity” or superiority to the
kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings, his
indivisibility, and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity,
substance and accident, potentiality and actuality, and the rest; his
repudiation of inclusion in a genus; his actualized infinity; his
“personality,” apart from the moral qualities which it may comport; his
relations to evil being permissive and not positive; his self‐sufficiency,
self‐love, and absolute felicity in himself:—candidly speaking, how do
such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if
they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct, what
vital difference can it possibly make to a man’s religion whether they be
true or false?
For my own part, although I dislike to say aught that may grate upon
tender associations, I must frankly confess that even though these
attributes were faultlessly deduced, I cannot conceive of its being of the
smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be
true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the
better to God’s simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior,
to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of
the century just past, Mayne Reid was the great writer of books of out‐of‐
door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field‐observers
of living animals’ habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the
“closet‐naturalists,” as he called them, the collectors and classifiers,
and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy, I used to think
that a closet‐naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun.
But surely the systematic theologians are the closet‐naturalists of the
deity, even in Captain Mayne Reid’s sense. What is their deduction of
metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic
dictionary‐adjectives, aloof from morals, aloof from human needs,
something that might be worked out from the mere word “God” by one of
those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has
contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood. They have the trail of
the serpent over them. One feels that in the theologians’ hands, they are
only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms;
verbality has stepped into the place of vision, professionalism into that
of life. Instead of bread we have a stone; instead of a fish, a serpent.
Did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our
knowledge of the deity, schools of theology might indeed continue to
flourish, but religion, vital religion, would have taken its flight from
this world. What keeps religion going is something else than abstract
definitions and systems of concatenated adjectives, and something
different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these
things are after‐effects, secondary accretions upon those phenomena of
vital conversation with the unseen divine, of which I have shown you so
many instances, renewing themselves _in sæcula sæculorum_ in the lives of
humble private men.
So much for the metaphysical attributes of God! From the point of view of
practical religion, the metaphysical monster which they offer to our
worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind.
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What shall we now say of the attributes called moral? Pragmatically, they
stand on an entirely different footing. They positively determine fear and
hope and expectation, and are foundations for the saintly life. It needs
but a glance at them to show how great is their significance.
God’s holiness, for example: being holy, God can will nothing but the
good. Being omnipotent, he can secure its triumph. Being omniscient, he
can see us in the dark. Being just, he can punish us for what he sees.
Being loving, he can pardon too. Being unalterable, we can count on him
securely. These qualities enter into connection with our life, it is
highly important that we should be informed concerning them. That God’s
purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an
attribute which has definite relations to our practical life. Among other
things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian
countries. If dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a
God with characters like these exists, she may well claim to give a solid
basis to religious sentiment. But verily, how stands it with her
arguments?
It stands with them as ill as with the arguments for his existence. Not
only do post‐Kantian idealists reject them root and branch, but it is a
plain historic fact that they never have converted any one who has found
in the moral complexion of the world, as he experienced it, reasons for
doubting that a good God can have framed it. To prove God’s goodness by
the scholastic argument that there is no non‐being in his essence would
sound to such a witness simply silly.
No! the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and
definitively. Ratiocination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to
the deity: “I will lay mine hand upon my mouth; I have heard of Thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth Thee.” An intellect
perplexed and baffled, yet a trustful sense of presence—such is the
situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts, but
who remains religious still.(296)
We must therefore, I think, bid a definitive good‐by to dogmatic theology.
In all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant. Modern idealism,
I repeat, has said good‐by to this theology forever. Can modern idealism
give faith a better warrant, or must she still rely on her poor self for
witness?
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