the world appear more rational. Any hypothesis that does that will
always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes
the world appear irrational. Men are once for all so made that they
prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in. But rationality
has at least four dimensions, intellectual, aesthetical, moral, and
practical; and to find a world rational to the maximal degree _in all
these respects simultaneously_ is no easy matter. Intellectually, the
world of mechanical materialism is the most rational, for we subject
its events to mathematical calculation. But the mechanical world
is ugly, as arithmetic is ugly, and it is non-moral. Morally,
the theistic world is rational enough, but full of intellectual
frustrations. The practical world of affairs, in its turn, so
supremely rational to the politician, the military man, or the man of
conquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change the
type of it, is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments; so that
whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic
hypothesis, we are liable to find some other demand for rationality
unsatisfied by the same hypothesis. The rationality we gain in one
coin we thus pay for in another; and the problem accordingly seems at
first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which
will yield the largest _balance_ of rationality rather than one which
will yield perfect rationality of every description. In general, it
may be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose any
action in him that is easy, or any faculty which he is fond of
exercising, he will deem it rational in so far forth, be the faculty
that of computing, fighting, lecturing, classifying, framing schematic
tabulations, getting the better end of a bargain, patiently waiting
and enduring, preaching, joke-making, or what you like. Albeit the
absolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectively
perfect rationality, it is fair to its english advocates to say that
those who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriously
have usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certain
elements in it.
Probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the rationality
of the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is the
assurance that however disturbed the surface may be, at bottom all is
well with the cosmos--central peace abiding at the heart of endless
agitation. This conception is rational in many ways, beautiful
aesthetically, beautiful intellectually (could we only follow it into
detail), and beautiful morally, if the enjoyment of security can be
accounted moral. Practically it is less beautiful; for, as we saw in
our last lecture, in representing the deepest reality of the world as
static and without a history, it loosens the world's hold upon our
sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign. Nevertheless it does
give _peace_, and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded
by men that to the end of time there will be absolutists, men who
choose belief in a static eternal, rather than admit that the finite
world of change and striving, even with a God as one of the strivers,
is itself eternal. For such minds Professor Royce's words will always
be the truest: 'The very presence of ill in the temporal order is the
condition of the perfection of the eternal order.... We long for the
absolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs, and seeks
through our very temporal striving, the peace that is nowhere in time,
but only, and yet absolutely, in eternity. Were there no longing in
time there would be no peace in eternity.... God [_i.e._ the absolute]
who here in me aims at what I now temporally miss, not only possesses
in the eternal world the goal after which I strive, but comes to
possess it even through and because of my sorrow. Through this my
tribulation the absolute triumph then is won.... In the absolute I am
fulfilled. Yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcend
this sorrow.'[7] Royce is particularly felicitous in his ability to
cite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of this
absolute experience analogous. But it is hard to portray the absolute
at all without rising into what might be called the 'inspired' style
of language--I use the word not ironically, but prosaically and
descriptively, to designate the only literary form that goes with the
kind of emotion that the absolute arouses. One can follow the pathway
of reasoning soberly enough,[8] but the picture itself has to be
effulgent. This admirable faculty of transcending, whilst inwardly
preserving, every contrariety, is the absolute's characteristic form
of rationality. We are but syllables in the mouth of the Lord; if the
whole sentence is divine, each syllable is absolutely what it should
be, in spite of all appearances. In making up the balance for or
against absolutism, this emotional value weights heavily the credit
side of the account.
The trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive
detail of it, and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven
by the intellectualist arguments, it remains only a hypothetic
possibility.
On the debit side of the account the absolute, taken seriously, and
not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous
mood and take a moral holiday, introduces all those tremendous
irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism
escapes, but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of
monistic theism or pantheism. It introduces a speculative 'problem
of evil' namely, and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the
absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as
darken the day for our human imaginations. If they were forced on it
by something alien, and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to
keep hold of them, we could understand its feeling of triumph, though
we, so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome, could
acquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation, and would never
just have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable. But the
absolute is represented as a being without environment, upon which
nothing alien can be forced, and which has spontaneously chosen from
within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a
spectacle with less evil in it.[9] Its perfection is represented as
the source of things, and yet the first effect of that perfection is
the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience. In whatever
sense the word 'rationality' may be taken, it is vain to contend that
the impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representing
things is altogether rational. Theologians have felt its irrationality
acutely, and the 'fall,' the predestination, and the election which
the situation involves have given them more trouble than anything else
in their attempt to pantheize Christianity. The whole business remains
a puzzle, both intellectually and morally.
Grant that the spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by the
absolute is in the absolute's eyes perfect. Why would not the world be
more perfect by having the affair remain in just those terms, and
by not having any finite spectators to come in and add to what was
perfect already their innumerable imperfect manners of seeing the same
spectacle? Suppose the entire universe to consist of one superb copy
of a book, fit for the ideal reader. Is that universe improved or
deteriorated by having myriads of garbled and misprinted separate
leaves and chapters also created, giving false impressions of the book
to whoever looks at them? To say the least, the balance of rationality
is not obviously in favor of such added mutilations. So this question
becomes urgent: Why, the absolute's own total vision of things
being so rational, was it necessary to comminute it into all these
coexisting inferior fragmentary visions?
Leibnitz in his theodicy represents God as limited by an antecedent
reason in things which makes certain combinations logically
incompatible, certain goods impossible. He surveys in advance all the
universes he might create, and by an act of what Leibnitz calls his
antecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which the
evil, unhappily necessary anyhow, is at its minimum. It is the best of
all the worlds that are possible, therefore, but by no means the most
abstractly desirable world. Having made this mental choice, God next
proceeds to what Leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretory
will: he says '_Fiat_' and the world selected springs into objective
being, with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from its
imperfections without sharing in its creator's atoning vision.
Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of
Leibnitz's, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutist
conception. The world projected out of the creative mind by the
_fiat_, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of
being where the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divine
value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at,
then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not
richer for God's utterance of the _fiat_. He might much better have
remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme,
without following it up by a creative decree. The scheme _as such_ was
admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality.[10]
Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from the
perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted
itself into all our finite experiences?
It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of them
have confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from this
point of view. Mr. McTaggart, for example, writes: 'Does not our very
failure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it? ... In
so far as we do not see the perfection of the universe, we are not
perfect ourselves. And as we are parts of the universe, that cannot be
perfect.'[11]
And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty. Calling the hypothesis
of the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of truth,' he
calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all
things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in
its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a
self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,--he calls this
problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal _fons
et origo_, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he
concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form
of irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate
certainty'[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which
he says he has 'never doubted.' This candid confession of a fixed
attitude of faith in the absolute, which even one's own criticisms and
perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant. Not only
empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid
as this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy
is their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their
reasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.
I can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point that
_he_ at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities, but that
the nature of things logically requires the multitudinous erroneous
copies, and that therefore the universe cannot be the absolute's book
alone. For, he will ask, is not the absolute defined as the total
consciousness of everything that is? Must not its field of view
consist of parts? And what can the parts of a total consciousness be
unless they be fractional consciousnesses? Our finite minds _must_
therefore coexist with the absolute mind. We are its constituents, and
it cannot live without us.--But if any one of you feels tempted to
retort in this wise, let me remind you that you are frankly employing
pluralistic weapons, and thereby giving up the absolutist cause. The
notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being
depends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has _objects_,
not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own
several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional
to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its
definition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism
goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be
self-sufficing.[14]
My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of the
absolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performs
a most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, from
the intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational. The
_ideally_ perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the _parts
also are perfect_--if we can depend on logic for anything, we can
depend on it for that definition. The absolute is defined as the
ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, are
admittedly imperfect. Evidently the conception lacks internal
consistency, and yields us a problem rather than a solution. It
creates a speculative puzzle, the so-called mystery of evil and of
error, from which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free.
In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents are
practical, not speculative. Not why evil should exist at all, but how
we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need
there consider. 'God,' in the religious life of ordinary men, is the
name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal
tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to
co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy.
He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When
John Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up,
if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately
right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region
of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally
treated as a paradox: God, it was said, _could_ not be finite. I
believe that the only God worthy of the name _must_ be finite, and I
shall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute exist
in addition--and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational
features, still be left open--then the absolute is only the wider
cosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and which
in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious
hypothesis at all. 'Cosmic emotion' is the better name for the
reaction it may awaken.
Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute
gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of
itself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have
_almost_ nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed
over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but
that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a
relative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the
irrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality left
would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and
of this I hope to say a word more later.
I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will
add only two other counts to my indictment.
First, then, let me remind you that _the absolute is useless for
deductive purposes_. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but
it is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the
phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name
beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever the
details of experience may prove to be, _after the fact of them_
the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. _That_, whatever it may be,
will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute
was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.
Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as the
all-knower. Thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame
an almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to the
enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem
obliged to carry. One of the many _reductiones ad absurdum_ of
pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as
follows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles
facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean
many knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact,
which in turn requires _its_ knower, so the one absolute knower has
eventually to be brought in. _All_ facts lead to him. If it be a fact
that this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, not
a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not
a thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be articulately
aware of all these negations. Along with what everything is it must
also be conscious of everything which it is not. This infinite
atmosphere of explicit negativity--observe that it has to be
explicit--around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as
to make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore,
if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have
already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The
rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the
more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such
an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.[15]
I will spare you further objections. The sum of it all is that the
absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves
features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker
to whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' (to use Mr.
Joachim's words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an
emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its
defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal
grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile
the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: _reality MAY
exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of
eaches, just as it seems to_--this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis.
_Prima facie_ there is this in favor of the eaches, that they are at
any rate real enough to have made themselves at least _appear_ to
every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to
only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates
of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is
infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to
assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course
we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute,
and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the
details of the finite and the immediately given.
If these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you, or even
sacrilegious, I am sorry. Perhaps the impression may be mitigated by
what I have to say in later lectures.
LECTURE IV
CONCERNING FECHNER
The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands.
The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portraits which its best
court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme;
and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with _it_ all is
well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise
to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It
introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain
poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should
have heard.
But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude
that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness
than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher
presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship,
to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with
incorrigibly social and imaginative minds?
Such a negative conclusion would, I believe, be desperately hasty,
a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath. Logically it is
possible to believe in superhuman beings without identifying them with
the absolute at all. The treaty of offensive and defensive alliance
which certain groups of the Christian clergy have recently made with
our transcendentalist philosophers seems to me to be based on a
well-meaning but baleful mistake. Neither the Jehovah of the old
testament nor the heavenly father of the new has anything in common
with the absolute except that they are all three greater than man;
and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods of
Abraham, of David, and of Jesus, after first developing into each
other, were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflective
and modern minds, I reply that although in certain specifically
philosophical minds this may have been the case, in minds more
properly to be termed religious the development has followed quite
another path. The whole history of evangelical Christianity is there
to prove it. I propose in these lectures to plead for that other line
of development. To set the doctrine of the absolute in its proper
framework, so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude all
alternative possibilities of higher thought--as it seems to do for
many students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintance
with philosophy--I will contrast it with a system which, abstractly
considered, seems at first to have much in common with absolutism, but
which, when taken concretely and temperamentally, really stands at the
opposite pole. I refer to the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, a
writer but little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am
persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on.
It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his fertility of detail,
which fills me with an admiration which I should like to make this
audience share. Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the
past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except
one. Had she been born in the Ionian Archipelago some three thousand
years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure
of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper. The
world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely,
and the Thin. No one can deny the truth of this analysis, as far as it
goes (though in the light of our contemporary knowledge of nature it
has itself a rather 'thin' sound), and it is nowhere truer than in
that part of the world called philosophy. I am sure, for example, that
many of you, listening to what poor account I have been able to
give of transcendental idealism, have received an impression of its
arguments being strangely thin, and of the terms it leaves us with
being shiveringly thin wrappings for so thick and burly a world as
this. Some of you of course will charge the thinness to my exposition;
but thin as that has been, I believe the doctrines reported on to have
been thinner. From Green to Haldane the absolute proposed to us to
straighten out the confusions of the thicket of experience in which
our life is passed remains a pure abstraction which hardly any one
tries to make a whit concreter. If we open Green, we get nothing but
the transcendental ego of apperception (Kant's name for the fact that
to be counted in experience a thing has to be witnessed), blown up
into a sort of timeless soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole
universe. Nature, Green keeps insisting, consists only in
relations, and these imply the action of a mind that is eternal;
a self-distinguishing consciousness which itself escapes from the
relations by which it determines other things. Present to whatever is
in succession, it is not in succession itself. If we take the Cairds,
they tell us little more of the principle of the universe--it is
always a return into the identity of the self from the difference of
its objects. It separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of
them in their separation from one another, while at the same time it
binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness.