must stand outside of them altogether and, for the present at least,
decide that, since they corroborate incompatible theological doctrines,
they neutralize one another and leave no fixed result. If we follow any
one of them, or if we follow philosophical theory and embrace monistic
pantheism on non‐mystical grounds, we do so in the exercise of our
individual freedom, and build out our religion in the way most congruous
with our personal susceptibilities. Among these susceptibilities
intellectual ones play a decisive part. Although the religious question is
primarily a question of life, of living or not living in the higher union
which opens itself to us as a gift, yet the spiritual excitement in which
the gift appears a real one will often fail to be aroused in an individual
until certain particular intellectual beliefs or ideas which, as we say,
come home to him, are touched.(356) These ideas will thus be essential to
that individual’s religion;—which is as much as to say that over‐beliefs
in various directions are absolutely indispensable, and that we should
treat them with tenderness and tolerance so long as they are not
intolerant themselves. As I have elsewhere written, the most interesting
and valuable things about a man are usually his over‐beliefs.
Disregarding the over‐beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common
and generic, we have in _the fact that the conscious person is continuous
with a wider self through which saving experiences come_,(357) a positive
content of religious experience which, it seems to me, _is literally and
objectively true as far as it goes_. If I now proceed to state my own
hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality,
I shall be offering my own over‐belief—though I know it will appear a
sorry under‐belief to some of you—for which I can only bespeak the same
indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether
other dimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable”
world. Name it the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever
you choose. So far as our ideal impulses originate in this region (and
most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way
for which we cannot articulately account), we belong to it in a more
intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we
belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet the
unseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in
this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite
personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way
of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change.(358)
But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a
reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling
the unseen or mystical world unreal.
God is the natural appellation, for us Christians at least, for the
supreme reality, so I will call this higher part of the universe by the
name of God.(359) We and God have business with each other; and in opening
ourselves to his influence our deepest destiny is fulfilled. The universe,
at those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn
genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion as each one of us
fulfills or evades God’s demands. As far as this goes I probably have you
with me, for I only translate into schematic language what I may call the
instinctive belief of mankind: God is real since he produces real effects.
The real effects in question, so far as I have as yet admitted them, are
exerted on the personal centres of energy of the various subjects, but the
spontaneous faith of most of the subjects is that they embrace a wider
sphere than this. Most religious men believe (or “know,” if they be
mystical) that not only they themselves, but the whole universe of beings
to whom the God is present, are secure in his parental hands. There is a
sense, a dimension, they are sure, in which we are _all_ saved, in spite
of the gates of hell and all adverse terrestrial appearances. God’s
existence is the guarantee of an ideal order that shall be permanently
preserved. This world may indeed, as science assures us, some day burn up
or freeze; but if it is part of his order, the old ideals are sure to be
brought elsewhere to fruition, so that where God is, tragedy is only
provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution are not the
absolutely final things. Only when this farther step of faith concerning
God is taken, and remote objective consequences are predicted, does
religion, as it seems to me, get wholly free from the first immediate
subjective experience, and bring a _real hypothesis_ into play. A good
hypothesis in science must have other properties than those of the
phenomenon it is immediately invoked to explain, otherwise it is not
prolific enough. God, meaning only what enters into the religious man’s
experience of union, falls short of being an hypothesis of this more
useful order. He needs to enter into wider cosmic relations in order to
justify the subject’s absolute confidence and peace.
That the God with whom, starting from the hither side of our own extra‐
marginal self, we come at its remoter margin into commerce should be the
absolute world‐ruler, is of course a very considerable over‐belief. Over‐
belief as it is, though, it is an article of almost every one’s religion.
Most of us pretend in some way to prop it upon our philosophy, but the
philosophy itself is really propped upon this faith. What is this but to
say that Religion, in her fullest exercise of function, is not a mere
illumination of facts already elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like
love, which views things in a rosier light. It is indeed that, as we have
seen abundantly. But it is something more, namely, a postulator of new
_facts_ as well. The world interpreted religiously is not the
materialistic world over again, with an altered expression; it must have,
over and above the altered expression, _a natural constitution_ different
at some point from that which a materialistic world would have. It must be
such that different events can be expected in it, different conduct must
be required.
This thoroughly “pragmatic” view of religion has usually been taken as a
matter of course by common men. They have interpolated divine miracles
into the field of nature, they have built a heaven out beyond the grave.
It is only transcendentalist metaphysicians who think that, without adding
any concrete details to Nature, or subtracting any, but by simply calling
it the expression of absolute spirit, you make it more divine just as it
stands.
I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It
gives it body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must
claim, some characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the more
characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of
energy in the faith‐state and the prayer‐state, I know not. But the over‐
belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist.
The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our
present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that
exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a
meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences
and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at
certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my
poor measure to this over‐belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and
true. I _can_, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s
attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and of
scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear
that inward monitor of which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the
word “bosh!” Humbug is humbug, even though it bear the scientific name,
and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively,
invincibly urges me beyond the narrow “scientific” bounds. Assuredly, the
real world is of a different temperament,—more intricately built than
physical science allows. So my objective and my subjective conscience both
hold me to the over‐belief which I express. Who knows whether the
faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over‐beliefs may
not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own
greater tasks?
POSTSCRIPT.
In writing my concluding lecture I had to aim so much at simplification
that I fear that my general philosophic position received so scant a
statement as hardly to be intelligible to some of my readers. I therefore
add this epilogue, which must also be so brief as possibly to remedy but
little the defect. In a later work I may be enabled to state my position
more amply and consequently more clearly.
Originality cannot be expected in a field like this, where all the
attitudes and tempers that are possible have been exhibited in literature
long ago, and where any new writer can immediately be classed under a
familiar head. If one should make a division of all thinkers into
naturalists and supernaturalists, I should undoubtedly have to go, along
with most philosophers, into the supernaturalist branch. But there is a
crasser and a more refined supernaturalism, and it is to the refined
division that most philosophers at the present day belong. If not regular
transcendental idealists, they at least obey the Kantian direction enough
to bar out ideal entities from interfering causally in the course of
phenomenal events. Refined supernaturalism is universalistic
supernaturalism; for the “crasser” variety “piecemeal” supernaturalism
would perhaps be the better name. It went with that older theology which
to‐day is supposed to reign only among uneducated people, or to be found
among the few belated professors of the dualisms which Kant is thought to
have displaced. It admits miracles and providential leadings, and finds no
intellectual difficulty in mixing the ideal and the real worlds together
by interpolating influences from the ideal region among the forces that
causally determine the real world’s details. In this the refined
supernaturalists think that it muddles disparate dimensions of existence.
For them the world of the ideal has no efficient causality, and never
bursts into the world of phenomena at particular points. The ideal world,
for them, is not a world of facts, but only of the meaning of facts; it is
a point of view for judging facts. It appertains to a different “‐ology,”
and inhabits a different dimension of being altogether from that in which
existential propositions obtain. It cannot get down upon the flat level of
experience and interpolate itself piecemeal between distinct portions of
nature, as those who believe, for example, in divine aid coming in
response to prayer, are bound to think it must.
Notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or
scholastic theism, I suppose that my belief that in communion with the
Ideal new force comes into the world, and new departures are made here
below, subjects me to being classed among the supernaturalists of the
piecemeal or crasser type. Universalistic supernaturalism surrenders, it
seems to me, too easily to naturalism. It takes the facts of physical
science at their face‐value, and leaves the laws of life just as
naturalism finds them, with no hope of remedy, in case their fruits are
bad. It confines itself to sentiments about life as a whole, sentiments
which may be admiring and adoring, but which need not be so, as the
existence of systematic pessimism proves. In this universalistic way of
taking the ideal world, the essence of practical religion seems to me to
evaporate. Both instinctively and for logical reasons, I find it hard to
believe that principles can exist which make no difference in facts.(360)
But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question
of God’s existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars
which that existence may be expected to entail. That no concrete
particular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a
God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the
thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to
cling. It is only with experience _en bloc_, it says, that the Absolute
maintains relations. It condescends to no transactions of detail.
I am ignorant of Buddhism and speak under correction, and merely in order
the better to describe my general point of view; but as I apprehend the
Buddhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that. All
supernaturalists admit that facts are under the judgment of higher law;
but for Buddhism as I interpret it, and for religion generally so far as
it remains unweakened by transcendentalistic metaphysics, the word
“judgment” here means no such bare academic verdict or platonic
appreciation as it means in Vedantic or modern absolutist systems; it
carries, on the contrary, _execution_ with it, is _in __ rebus_ as well as
_post rem_, and operates “causally” as partial factor in the total fact.
The universe becomes a gnosticism(361) pure and simple on any other terms.
But this view that judgment and execution go together is that of the
crasser supernaturalist way of thinking, so the present volume must on the
whole be classed with the other expressions of that creed.
I state the matter thus bluntly, because the current of thought in
academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his
back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and
locked. In spite of its being so shocking to the reigning intellectual
tastes, I believe that a candid consideration of piecemeal supernaturalism
and a complete discussion of all its metaphysical bearings will show it to
be the hypothesis by which the largest number of legitimate requirements
are met. That of course would be a program for other books than this; what
I now say sufficiently indicates to the philosophic reader the place where
I belong.
If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God’s
existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no
hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of “prayerful communion,”
especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region
take part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this
phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in
another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our
centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable
in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our
every‐day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are
intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness
of the “subliminal” door, we have the elements of a theory to which the
phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the
importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so
naturally suggest. At these places at least, I say, it would seem as
though transmundane energies, God, if you will, produced immediate effects
within the natural world to which the rest of our experience belongs.
The difference in natural “fact” which most of us would assign as the
first difference which the existence of a God ought to make would, I
imagine, be personal immortality. Religion, in fact, for the great
majority of our own race _means_ immortality, and nothing else. God is the
producer of immortality; and whoever has doubts of immortality is written
down as an atheist without farther trial. I have said nothing in my
lectures about immortality or the belief therein, for to me it seems a
secondary point. If our ideals are only cared for in “eternity,” I do not
see why we might not be willing to resign their care to other hands than
ours. Yet I sympathize with the urgent impulse to be present ourselves,
and in the conflict of impulses, both of them so vague yet both of them
noble, I know not how to decide. It seems to me that it is eminently a
case for facts to testify. Facts, I think, are yet lacking to prove
“spirit‐return,” though I have the highest respect for the patient labors
of Messrs. Myers, Hodgson, and Hyslop, and am somewhat impressed by their
favorable conclusions. I consequently leave the matter open, with this
brief word to save the reader from a possible perplexity as to why
immortality got no mention in the body of this book.
The ideal power with which we feel ourselves in connection, the “God” of
ordinary men, is, both by ordinary men and by philosophers, endowed with
certain of those metaphysical attributes which in the lecture on
philosophy I treated with such disrespect. He is assumed as a matter of
course to be “one and only” and to be “infinite”; and the notion of many
finite gods is one which hardly any one thinks it worth while to consider,
and still less to uphold. Nevertheless, in the interests of intellectual
clearness, I feel bound to say that religious experience, as we have
studied it, cannot be cited as unequivocally supporting the infinitist
belief. The only thing that it unequivocally testifies to is that we can
experience union with _something_ larger than ourselves and in that union
find our greatest peace. Philosophy, with its passion for unity, and
mysticism with its monoideistic bent, both “pass to the limit” and
identify the something with a unique God who is the all‐inclusive soul of
the world. Popular opinion, respectful to their authority, follows the
example which they set.
Meanwhile the practical needs and experiences of religion seem to me
sufficiently met by the belief that beyond each man and in a fashion
continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him
and to his ideals. All that the facts require is that the power should be
both other and larger than our conscious selves. Anything larger will do,
if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be
infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably even be only a
larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but
the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a
collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no
absolute unity realized in it at all.(362) Thus would a sort of polytheism
return upon us—a polytheism which I do not on this occasion defend, for my
only aim at present is to keep the testimony of religious experience
clearly within its proper bounds. [Compare p. 132 above.]
Upholders of the monistic view will say to such a polytheism (which, by
the way, has always been the real religion of common people, and is so
still to‐day) that unless there be one all‐inclusive God, our guarantee of
security is left imperfect. In the Absolute, and in the Absolute only,
_all_ is saved. If there be different gods, each caring for his part, some
portion of some of us might not be covered with divine protection, and our
religious consolation would thus fail to be complete. It goes back to what
was said on pages 131‐133, about the possibility of there being portions
of the universe that may irretrievably be lost. Common sense is less
sweeping in its demands than philosophy or mysticism have been wont to be,
and can suffer the notion of this world being partly saved and partly
lost. The ordinary moralistic state of mind makes the salvation of the
world conditional upon the success with which each unit does its part.
Partial and conditional salvation is in fact a most familiar notion when
taken in the abstract, the only difficulty being to determine the details.
Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved
remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that
their cause will prevail—all of us are willing, whenever our activity‐
excitement rises sufficiently high. I think, in fact, that a final
philosophy of religion will have to consider the pluralistic hypothesis
more seriously than it has hitherto been willing to consider it. For
practical life at any rate, the _chance_ of salvation is enough. No fact
in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a
chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney
says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of
which the keynote is hope.(363) But all these statements are
unsatisfactory from their brevity, and I can only say that I hope to
return to the same questions in another book.
INDEX.
Absolute, oneness with the, 419.
Abstractness of religious objects, 53.
ACHILLES, 86.
ACKERMANN, MADAME, 63.
Adaptation to environment, of things, 438;
of saints, 374‐377.
Æsthetic elements in religions, 460.
Alacoque, 310, 344, 413.
Alcohol, 387.
AL‐GHAZZALI, 402.
ALI, 341.
ALLEINE, 228.
ALLINE, 159, 217.
Alternations of personality, 193.
ALVAREZ DE PAZ, 116.
AMIEL, 394.
Anæsthesia, 288.
Anæsthetic revelation, 387‐393.
ANGELUS SILESIUS, 417.
Anger, 181, 264.
“Anhedonia,” 145.
Aristocratic type, 371.
ARISTOTLE, 495.
Ars, le Curé d’, 302.
Asceticism, 273, 296‐310, 360‐365.
Aseity, God’s, 439, 445.
Atman, 400.
Attributes of God, 440;
their æsthetic use, 458.
AUGUSTINE, SAINT, 171, 361, 496.
AURELIUS, see MARCUS.
Automatic writing, 62, 478.
Automatisms, 234, 250, 478‐483.
BALDWIN, 347, 503.
BASHKIRTSEFF, 83.
BEECHER, 256.
BEHMEN, see BOEHME.
Belief, due to non‐rationalistic impulses, 73.
BESANT, MRS., 23, 168.
Bhagavad‐Gita, 361.
BLAVATSKY, MADAM, 421.
BLOOD, 389.
BLUMHARDT, 113.
BOEHME, 410, 417, 418.
BOOTH, 203.
BOUGAUD, 344.
BOURGET, 263.
BOURIGNON, 321.
BOWNE, 502.
BRAINERD, 212, 253.
BRAY, 249, 256, 290.
BROOKS, 512.
BROWNELL, 515.
BUCKE, 398.
Buddhism, 31, 34, 522.
Buddhist mysticism, 401.
BULLEN, 287.
BUNYAN, 157, 160.
BUTTERWORTH, 411.
CAIRD, EDWARD, 106.
CAIRD, J., on feeling in religion, 434;
on absolute self, 450;
he does not prove, but reaffirms, religion’s dicta, 453.
CALL, 289.
CARLYLE, 41, 300.
CARPENTER, 319.
Catharine, Saint, of Genoa, 289.
Catholicism and Protestantism compared, 114, 227, 336, 461.
Causality of God, 517, 522.
Cause, 502.
CENNICK, 301.
Centres of personal energy, 196, 267, 523.
Cerebration, unconscious, 207.
Chance, 526.
CHANNING, 300, 488.
CHAPMAN, 324.
Character, cause of its alterations, 193;
scheme of its differences of type, 197, 214.
Causes of its diversity, 261;
balance of, 340.
Charity, 274, 278, 310, 355.
Chastity, 310.
Chiefs of tribes, 371.
Christian Science, 106.
Christ’s atonement, 129, 245.
Churches, 335, 460.
CLARK, 389.
CLISSOLD, 481.
COE, 240.
Conduct, perfect, 355.
Confession, 462.
Consciousness, fields of, 231;
subliminal, 233.
Consistency, 296.
Conversion, to avarice, 178.
Conversion, Fletcher’s, 181;
Tolstoy’s, 184;
Bunyan’s, 186;
in general, Lectures IX and X, passim;
Bradley’s, 189;
compared with natural moral growth, 199;
Hadley’s, 201;
two types of, 205 ff.;
Brainerd’s, 212;
Alline’s, 217;
Oxford graduate’s, 221;
Ratisbonne’s, 223;
instantaneous, 227;
is it a natural phenomenon? 230;
subliminal action involved, in sudden cases, 236, 240;
fruits of, 237;
its momentousness, 239;
may be supernatural, 242;
its concomitants:
sense of higher control, 244,
happiness, 248,
automatisms, 250,
luminous phenomena, 251;
its degree of permanence, 256.
Cosmic consciousness, 398.
Counter‐conversion, 176.
Courage, 265, 287.
Crankiness, see Psychopathy.
CRICHTON‐BROWNE, 384, 386.
Criminal character, 263.
Criteria of value of spiritual affections, 18.
CRUMP, 239.
Cure of bad habits, 270.
DAUDET, 167.
Death, 139, 364.
DERHAM, 493.
Design, argument from, 438, 492 ff.
Devoutness, 340.
DIONYSIUS AREOPAGITICUS, 416.
Disease, 99, 113.
Disorder in contents of world, 438.
Divided Self, Lecture VIII, passim;
Cases of:
Saint Augustine, 172,
H. Alline, 173.
Divine, the, 31.
Dog, 281.
Dogmatism, 326, 333.
DOWIE, 113.
DRESSER, H. W., 96, 99, 289, 516.
Drink, 268.
Drummer, 476.
DRUMMOND, 262.
Drunkenness, 387, 403, 488.
“Dryness,” 204.
DUMAS, 279.
Dyes, on clothing, 294.
Earnestness, 264.
Ecclesiastical spirit, the, 335, 338.
ECKHART, 417.
EDDY, 106.
EDWARDS, JONATHAN, 20, 114, 200, 229, 238, 239, 248, 330.
EDWARDS, MRS. J., 276, 280.
Effects of religious states, 21.
Effeminacy, 365.
Ego of Apperception, 449.
ELLIS, HAVELOCK, 418.
ELWOOD, 292.
EMERSON, 32, 56, 167, 205, 239, 330.