of Apperception. By this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that
the consciousness “I think them” must (potentially or actually) accompany
all our objects. Former skeptics had said as much, but the “I” in question
had remained for them identified with the personal individual. Kant
abstracted and depersonalized it, and made it the most universal of all
his categories, although for Kant himself the Transcendental Ego had no
theological implications.
It was reserved for his successors to convert Kant’s notion of
_Bewusstsein überhaupt_, or abstract consciousness, into an infinite
concrete self‐consciousness which is the soul of the world, and in which
our sundry personal self‐consciousnesses have their being. It would lead
me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation
was in point of fact effected. Suffice it to say that in the Hegelian
school, which to‐day so deeply influences both British and American
thinking, two principles have borne the brunt of the operation.
The first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never
gives us more than a post‐mortem dissection of _disjecta membra_, and that
the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that
every object which our thought may propose to itself involves the notion
of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one.
The second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already
virtually to be beyond it. The mere asking of a question or expression of
a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already
imminent; the finite, realized as such, is already the infinite _in
posse_.
Applying these principles, we seem to get a propulsive force into our
logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self‐identity in each
thing never attains to. The objects of our thought now _act_ within our
thought, act as objects act when given in experience. They change and
develop. They introduce something other than themselves along with them;
and this other, at first only ideal or potential, presently proves itself
also to be actual. It supersedes the thing at first supposed, and both
verifies and corrects it, in developing the fullness of its meaning.
The program is excellent; the universe _is_ a place where things are
followed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and a logic
which gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth far
better than the traditional school‐logic, which never gets of its own
accord from anything to anything else, and registers only predictions and
subsumptions, or static resemblances and differences. Nothing could be
more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic.
Let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish
transcendentalist whom I have already named.
“How are we to conceive,” Principal Caird writes, “of the reality
in which all intelligence rests?” He replies: “Two things may
without difficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an
absolute Spirit, and conversely that it is only in communion with
this absolute Spirit or Intelligence that the finite Spirit can
realize itself. It is absolute; for the faintest movement of human
intelligence would be arrested, if it did not presuppose the
absolute reality of intelligence, of thought itself. Doubt or
denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it. When I
pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed, to be
relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or to
the thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of
all individual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them
away. But that which I cannot think away is thought or self‐
consciousness itself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in
other words, an Absolute Thought or Self‐Consciousness.”
Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kant did not
make: he converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a
condition of “truth” being anywhere possible, into an omnipresent
universal consciousness, which he identifies with God in his concreteness.
He next proceeds to use the principle that to acknowledge your limits is
in essence to be beyond them; and makes the transition to the religious
experience of individuals in the following words:—
“If [Man] were only a creature of transient sensations and
impulses, of an ever coming and going succession of intuitions,
fancies, feelings, then nothing could ever have for him the
character of objective truth or reality. But it is the prerogative
of man’s spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a
thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own. As a
thinking, self‐conscious being, indeed, he may be said, by his
very nature, to live in the atmosphere of the Universal Life. As a
thinking being, it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my
consciousness every movement of self‐assertion, every notion and
opinion that is merely mine, every desire that belongs to me as
this particular Self, and to become the pure medium of a thought
that is universal—in one word, to live no more my own life, but
let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the Infinite and
Eternal life of spirit. And yet it is just in this renunciation of
self that I truly gain myself, or realize the highest
possibilities of my own nature. For whilst in one sense we give up
self to live the universal and absolute life of reason, yet that
to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our truer self.
The life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us.”
Nevertheless, Principal Caird goes on to say, so far as we are able
outwardly to realize this doctrine, the balm it offers remains incomplete.
Whatever we may be _in posse_, the very best of us _in actu_ falls very
short of being absolutely divine. Social morality, love, and self‐
sacrifice even, merge our Self only in some other finite self or selves.
They do not quite identify it with the Infinite. Man’s ideal destiny,
infinite in abstract logic, might thus seem in practice forever
unrealizable.
“Is there, then,” our author continues, “no solution of the
contradiction between the ideal and the actual? We answer, There
is such a solution, but in order to reach it we are carried beyond
the sphere of morality into that of religion. It may be said to be
the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with
morality, that it changes aspiration into fruition, anticipation
into realization; that instead of leaving man in the interminable
pursuit of a vanishing ideal, it makes him the actual partaker of
a divine or infinite life. Whether we view religion from the human
side or the divine—as the surrender of the soul to God, or as the
life of God in the soul—in either aspect it is of its very essence
that the Infinite has ceased to be a far‐off vision, and has
become a present reality. The very first pulsation of the
spiritual life, when we rightly apprehend its significance, is the
indication that the division between the Spirit and its object has
vanished, that the ideal has become real, that the finite has
reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of
the Infinite.
“Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the
future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth
in the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the
struggle. In that act which constitutes the beginning of the
religious life—call it faith, or trust, or self‐surrender, or by
whatever name you will—there is involved the identification of the
finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is true indeed
that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the
light of the foregoing idea, religious progress is not progress
_towards_, but _within_ the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the
vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become
possessed of infinite wealth, but it is the endeavor, by the
constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appropriate that
infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The
whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but
it is given implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on
the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not
really belong to him: they are excrescences which have no organic
relation to his true nature: they are already virtually, as they
will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and in the very process
of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress.
Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet] in
that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is
over, the victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an
infinite life which the spirit lives. Every pulse‐beat of its
[existence] is the expression and realization of the life of
God.”(297)
You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of the
religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented
preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture of those crises
of conversion of which we have been hearing; they utter what the mystic
felt but was unable to communicate; and the saint, in hearing them,
recognizes his own experience. It is indeed gratifying to find the content
of religion reported so unanimously. But when all is said and done, has
Principal Caird—and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of
thinking—transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of
the individual, and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason?
Has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from
a private faith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations
from obscurity and mystery?
I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has simply
reaffirmed the individual’s experiences in a more generalized vocabulary.
And again, I can be excused from proving technically that the
transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal, for I can
point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously
disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing. The whole of
Germany, one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation.
As for Scotland, I need only mention Professor Fraser’s and Professor
Pringle‐Pattison’s memorable criticisms, with which so many of you are
familiar.(298) Once more, I ask, if transcendental idealism were as
objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be, could it
possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive?
What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact of
experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and between it
and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If definite
perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet, surely
abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of.
Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, interpret them; but
they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality.
There is always a _plus_, a _thisness_, which feeling alone can answer
for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function, unable to
warrant faith’s veracity, and so I revert to the thesis which I announced
at the beginning of this lecture.
In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to
demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances
of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.
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It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this
negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she
_can_ do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for
criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology into
science of religions, she can make herself enormously useful.
The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels
in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions.
Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from
these definitions. Both from dogma and from worship she can remove
historic incrustations. By confronting the spontaneous religious
constructions with the results of natural science, philosophy can also
eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or
incongruous.
Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum of
conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as
_hypotheses_, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or
positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their
number, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps become
the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified
or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis,
distinguishing between what is innocent over‐belief and symbolism in the
expression of it, and what is to be literally taken. As a result, she can
offer mediation between different believers, and help to bring about
consensus of opinion. She can do this the more successfully, the better
she discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local
elements of the religious beliefs which she compares.
I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not
eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a
physical science. Even the personally non‐religious might accept its
conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of
optics—it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of
optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified
later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions
would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience,
and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its
critical reconstructions. It could never get away from concrete life, or
work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every
science confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that
its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth
and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation.
There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers
and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too
late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his
volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession
condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and
irrelevancy. His formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic
photographs seen outside the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion,
the vitality. In the religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas
are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience.
In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of
religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last
one, I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which
it is a witness.
LECTURE XIX. OTHER CHARACTERISTICS.
We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and
philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to the
individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the
world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the
empirical philosophy: the true is what works well, even though the
qualification “on the whole” may always have to be added. In this lecture
we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the
religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic
elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general
review and draw our independent conclusions.
The first point I will speak of is the part which the æsthetic life plays
in determining one’s choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago,
involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need
formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too
contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list
of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to
consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them(299) puts
us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral
service, he shows how high is their æsthetic value. It enriches our bare
piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it
enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes
and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our
devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may
sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like
Newman’s(300) grow as jealous of their credit as heathen priests are of
that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon their idols.
Among the buildings‐out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges
in, the æsthetic motive must never be forgotten. I promised to say nothing
of ecclesiastical systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to
put in a word at this point on the way in which their satisfaction of
certain æsthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature. Although
some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for
others _richness_ is the supreme imaginative requirement.(301) When one’s
mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve
the purpose. The inner need is rather of something institutional and
complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with
authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for
adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the last resort from the
Godhead who is the fountain and culmination of the system. One feels then
as if in presence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architecture;
one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal; one gets the honorific
vibration coming from every quarter. Compared with such a noble
complexity, in which ascending and descending movements seem in no way to
jar upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is
insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place,
how flat does evangelical Protestantism appear, how bare the atmosphere of
those isolated religious lives whose boast it is that “man in the bush
with God may meet.”(302) What a pulverization and leveling of what a
gloriously piled‐up structure! To an imagination used to the perspectives
of dignity and glory, the naked gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse
for a palace.
It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient
empires. How many emotions must be frustrated of their object, when one
gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the
gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, and puts up
with a president in a black coat who shakes hands with you, and comes, it
may be, from a “home” upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting‐room and a
Bible on its centre‐table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination!
The strength of these æsthetic sentiments makes it rigorously impossible,
it seems to me, that Protestantism, however superior in spiritual
profundity it may be to Catholicism, should at the present day succeed in
making many converts from the more venerable ecclesiasticism. The latter
offers a so much richer pasturage and shade to the fancy, has so many
cells with so many different kinds of honey, is so indulgent in its
multiform appeals to human nature, that Protestantism will always show to
Catholic eyes the almshouse physiognomy. The bitter negativity of it is to
the Catholic mind incomprehensible. To intellectual Catholics many of the
antiquated beliefs and practices to which the Church gives countenance
are, if taken literally, as childish as they are to Protestants. But they
are childish in the pleasing sense of “childlike”—innocent and amiable,
and worthy to be smiled on in consideration of the undeveloped condition
of the dear people’s intellects. To the Protestant, on the contrary, they
are childish in the sense of being idiotic falsehoods. He must stamp out
their delicate and lovable redundancy, leaving the Catholic to shudder at
his literalness. He appears to the latter as morose as if he were some
hard‐eyed, numb, monotonous kind of reptile. The two will never understand
each other—their centres of emotional energy are too different. Rigorous
truth and human nature’s intricacies are always in need of a mutual
interpreter.(303) So much for the æsthetic diversities in the religious
consciousness.
In most books on religion, three things are represented as its most
essential elements. These are Sacrifice, Confession, and Prayer. I must
say a word in turn of each of these elements, though briefly. First of
Sacrifice.
Sacrifices to gods are omnipresent in primeval worship; but, as cults have
grown refined, burnt offerings and the blood of he‐goats have been
superseded by sacrifices more spiritual in their nature. Judaism, Islam,
and Buddhism get along without ritual sacrifice; so does Christianity,
save in so far as the notion is preserved in transfigured form in the
mystery of Christ’s atonement. These religions substitute offerings of the
heart, renunciations of the inner self, for all those vain oblations. In
the ascetic practices which Islam, Buddhism, and the older Christianity
encourage we see how indestructible is the idea that sacrifice of some
sort is a religious exercise. In lecturing on asceticism I spoke of its
significance as symbolic of the sacrifices which life, whenever it is
taken strenuously, calls for.(304) But, as I said my say about those, and
as these lectures expressly avoid earlier religious usages and questions
of derivation, I will pass from the subject of Sacrifice altogether and
turn to that of Confession.
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In regard to Confession I will also be most brief, saying my word about it
psychologically, not historically. Not nearly as widespread as sacrifice,
it corresponds to a more inward and moral stage of sentiment. It is part
of the general system of purgation and cleansing which one feels one’s
self in need of, in order to be in right relations to one’s deity. For him
who confesses, shams are over and realities have begun; he has
exteriorized his rottenness. If he has not actually got rid of it, he at
least no longer smears it over with a hypocritical show of virtue—he lives
at least upon a basis of veracity. The complete decay of the practice of
confession in Anglo‐Saxon communities is a little hard to account for.
Reaction against popery is of course the historic explanation, for in
popery confession went with penances and absolution, and other
inadmissible practices. But on the side of the sinner himself it seems as
if the need ought to have been too great to accept so summary a refusal of
its satisfaction. One would think that in more men the shell of secrecy
would have had to open, the pent‐in abscess to burst and gain relief, even
though the ear that heard the confession were unworthy. The Catholic
church, for obvious utilitarian reasons, has substituted auricular
confession to one priest for the more radical act of public confession. We
English‐speaking Protestants, in the general self‐reliance and
unsociability of our nature, seem to find it enough if we take God alone
into our confidence.(305)
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