SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS
AND RELIGION
§ 1. If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow make provision
for the gratification of our ethical, religious, and æsthetic
interests. § 2. But we cannot assume that ethical and religious
postulates are necessarily _true_ in the forms in which our
practical interests lead us to make them. § 3. Thus, while morality
would become impossible unless on the whole there is coincidence
between virtue and happiness, and unless social progress is a
genuine fact, “perfect virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite
progress” are logically self-contradictory concepts. § 4. But this
does not impair the practical usefulness of our ethical ideals. § 5.
In religion we conceive of the ideal of perfection as already
existing in individual form. Hence ultimately no part of the
temporal order can be an adequate object of religious devotion. § 6.
This leads to the _Problem of Evil_. “God” cannot be a finite being
within the Absolute, because, if so, God must contain evil and
imperfection as part of His nature, and is thus _not_ the already
existing realisation of the ideal. § 7. This difficulty disappears
when we identify “God” with the Absolute, because in the Absolute
evil can be seen to be mere illusory appearance. It may, however, be
true that religious feeling, to be practically efficient, may need
to imagine its object in an ultimately incorrect anthropomorphic
form. § 8. The existence, within the Absolute, of finite “divine”
personalities, can neither be affirmed nor denied on grounds of
general Metaphysics. § 9. Proofs of the “being of God.” The
principle of the “ontological” and “cosmological” proofs can be
defended against the criticism of Hume and Kant only if we identify
God with the Absolute. The “physicotheological proof” could only
establish the reality of finite superhuman intelligences, and its
force depends purely upon empirical considerations of evidence.
§ 1. The metaphysician is perhaps at times too ready to treat experience
as though it were constituted solely by intellectual interests; as
though our one concern in dealing with its deliverances, as they come to
us, were to construct out of them a system of knowledge satisfactory to
our demand for coherent thinking. This is, of course, a one-sided, and
therefore, from the standpoint of Metaphysics itself, an imperfect
expression of the nature of our attitude as intelligences towards the
world of our experience. Our moral, religious, and artistic, no less
than our logical, ideals represent typical forms of our general interest
as intelligent beings in bringing harmony and order into the apparently
discordant material of experience. Hence no study of metaphysical
principles, however elementary, would be complete without some
discussion of the light thrown by these various ideals upon the ultimate
structure of the system of Reality in which we and our manifold
interests form a part. If it is the fundamental principle of a sound
philosophy that all existence forms a harmonious unity, then, if we can
discover what are the essential and permanent features in the demands
made by art, morality, and religion upon the world, we may be sure that
these demands are somehow met and made good in the scheme of things.
For a world which met our ethical, religious, and aesthetic demands upon
life with a _mere_ negative would inevitably contain aspects of violent
and irreconcilable discord, and would thus be no true world or
systematic unity at all. In what follows I propose to discuss the double
question, What appears to be the “irreducible minimum” of the demands
which morality and religion make of the world, and how far the general
conception of existence defended in our earlier chapters provides for
their liquidation. The consideration of our aesthetic ideals and their
metaphysical significance I propose to decline, on the ground both of
its inferior practical interest for mankind at large, and of the very
special and thorough training in the psychological analysis of æsthetic
feeling which is, in my own judgment at least, essential for the
satisfactory treatment of the question.
§ 2. In dealing with the subject thus marked out, it will be necessary
to begin with a word, partly of caution, partly of recapitulation of
previous results, as to the attitude towards the practical ideals of
morality and religion imposed upon the metaphysician by the special
character of his interests as a metaphysician. It will thus be apparent
why I have spoken in the last paragraph of an “irreducible _minimum_” of
ethical and religious postulation. There is a marked tendency among
recent writers on philosophical topics, encouraged more specially by
Professor James and his followers, to urge that any and every ideal
which we think valuable for the purposes of morality and religion has no
less claim to be accepted in Metaphysics as of value for our conception
of Reality than the fundamental principles of logical thought
themselves. Logical thinking, it is contended, is after all only one of
the functions of our nature, by the side of others such as moral
endeavour towards the harmonising of practice with an ideal of the right
or the good, aesthetic creation of the beautiful, and religious
co-operation with a “power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.”
Why, then, should the metaphysician assume that the universe is more
specially bound to satisfy the demands of the logical intellect than
those of the “practical reason” of morality and religion or the
“creative reason” of art? Must we not say that the demand of the
logician that the world shall be intelligible stands precisely on the
same footing as the moralist’s demand that it shall be righteous, or the
artist’s that it shall be beautiful, and that all three are no more than
“postulates” which we make, in the last resort, simply because it
satisfies our deepest feelings to make them? Must we not, in fact, say
alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art,
“Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are
made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to
advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk, no
one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates of
the others”?
The doctrine I have attempted to summarise thus briefly, I believe to be
partly irrelevant in Metaphysics, partly mistaken, and therefore, so far
as mistaken, mischievous. I pass lightly over the curious mental
reservation suggested by the claim to believe as you list “at your own
risk.” As George Eliot has reminded us in _Adam Bede_, it is a
fundamental fact of our position as members of a social order, that
nothing in the world can be done exclusively at the risk of the doer.
Your beliefs, so far as they receive expression at all, like all the
rest of your conduct, inevitably affect the lives of others as well as
your own, and hence it is useless to urge in extenuation of a false and
mischievous belief to which expression has been given—and a belief which
gets no kind of expression is no genuine belief at all—that it was
entertained at your “personal risk.” That no man liveth to himself is
just as true of the metaphysician as of any other man, and he has no
more claim than another to disregard the truth in practice.
To pass to a more important point. It is no doubt true that the
attainment of satisfaction for our intellectual need for a coherent way
of thinking about existence is only one of a number of human interests.
And thus we may readily grant that morality, religion, and art have a
right to existence no less than Logic. Further, the question whether any
one of the four has a _better_ right to existence than the others seems
to be really unmeaning. There seems to be no sense in asking whether any
typical and essential human aspiration has a superior claim to
recognition and fulfilment rather than another. But it does not seem to
follow that _for all purposes_ our divergent interests and attitudes are
of equal value, and that therefore they may not legitimately be used as
bases for mutual criticism. In particular, it does not seem to follow
that because Logic and morality, say, have an equal right to exist,
there must be an equal amount of _truth_ in the principles of Logic and
the postulates of Ethics. Truth, after all, is perhaps not the “one
thing needful” for human life, and it is not self-evident even that
truth is the supreme interest of morality and religion.
On the face of things, indeed, it seems not to be so. _Primâ facie_, it
looks as if the logician’s ideal of truth and the moralist’s ideal of
goodness were, in part at any rate, divergent. For it is by no means
clear that the widest possible diffusion of true thinking and the
general attainment of the highest standard of moral goodness must
necessarily go together. It may even be conducive to the moral goodness
of a community that many members of it should not think on certain
topics at all, or even should think erroneously about them.[211] And the
ideals of goodness and beauty, we may remind ourselves, seem to be
similarly divergent. It is by no means self-evident, and might even be
said to be, so far as history enables us to judge, probably untrue, that
the society in which the appreciation of beauty is most highly developed
is also the society with the highest standard of goodness.
Now, if truth and goodness are not simply identical, we cannot conclude
that the ultimate truth of a belief is proportionate to its moral
usefulness in promoting practical goodness. And therefore the
metaphysician, who takes ultimate truth as _his_ standard of worth,
would appear to be quite within his right in refusing to admit moral
usefulness as sufficient justification for a belief, just as the
moralist, from the point of view of his special standard of worth, may
rightly decline to take the aesthetic harmoniousness of a life as
sufficient evidence of its moral excellence. Until you have shown, what
the view I am here opposing appears tacitly to assume, that truth, moral
goodness, and beauty are one thing, you cannot rationally refuse the
metaphysician’s claim to criticise, and if necessary to condemn as not
finally true, the “postulates” of which Ethics is entitled to assent,
not that they are “true,” but that they are practically useful.
And, of course, the same liberty must be granted to Ethics itself. The
moralist, I would not only admit but insist, has a perfect right to
criticise, from his special standpoint, the doctrines of the
metaphysician. It may perfectly well be that certain “truths” are better
not generally known, in the interests of practical goodness, and the
moralist is fully justified in dwelling upon the fact. But when the
metaphysician asserts the truth of a proposition solely on the strength
of its value for the promotion of morality, he is deserting the
criterion of value which he is bound in his capacity of metaphysician to
respect. It is quite true that logic is not the only game at which it
interests mankind to play, and that no one need play this special game
unless he prefers it; but when you have once sat down to the game you
must play it according to its own rules, and not those of some other. If
you neglect this caution, you will most likely produce something which
is neither good Metaphysics nor sound Ethics. There is every reason for
Metaphysics to beware of a “will to believe” which in practice must mean
that licence to indulge in uncriticised assertion which Socrates in the
_Phædo_ calls by the appropriate name of “misology,” and identifies as
the psychological source of the worst forms of practical
“disillusionment with life.”[212]
It follows, if these reflections are sound, that we must not, as
metaphysicians, allow ourselves to assume the truth of any and every
conviction about the nature of the world which we find personally
inspiring and attractive, or even which we believe to have an
invigorating effect upon the moral practice of mankind in general. We
cannot, on _a priori_ grounds, dismiss the suggestion that it may make
for practical goodness that all of us to some extent, and many of us to
a very great extent, should be dwellers in the imperfectly illuminated
regions on the “mid way boundary of light and dark.”[213] On the other
hand, it would manifestly be incompatible with the presence of any
rational unity of structure in the experience-world that there should be
a final and absolute lack of harmony between that world, as it must be
conceived by true thinking, and as it must be if our ethical aspirations
are to be satisfied. Somehow and somewhere, if the world is a
teleological unity at all, these aspirations must be provided for and
made good by its real structure, though possibly not in the form in
which, with our present limited insight, we desire that they should be
met, and though, again, we may be unable ever to say precisely in _what_
form they are met. What is simply inconceivable in a rational world is
that our abiding aspirations should meet with blank defeat.
§ 3. What, then, appears to be the “indispensable minimum” of accord
between known truth and our “ethical postulates,” without which the
moral life itself would become irrational? On the whole, I think we may
say that morality cannot maintain itself except upon two
suppositions—(1) that in the main and on the whole the world is so
ordered that our moral struggle for fuller and stronger individuality of
life is successful; that by living the moral life our individual
character does become richer in coherent interest and more completely
unified; and (2) that the gain thus won by our private struggles does
not perish with our disappearance from this mortal scene, but is handed
on to the successors who replace us in the life of the social order to
which we belong. Speaking roughly, this means that unless morality is a
delusion, the moral life is, on the whole, the happy life, and that
there is such a thing as social progress. Now, both these conditions, I
would contend, are shown by the actual experience of mankind to be met
by the constitution of the real world. It was by the analysis of actual
social life, and not by an appeal to postulates of a transcendental
kind, that Plato and Aristotle showed that the good man is, in the main,
even in the present state of society, the “happy” man. And it is by a
similar analysis that the modern thinker must convince himself, if he
convinces himself at all, that human societies are progressive.
So far, then, no question of ultimate metaphysical issues seems to be
involved in the practical demand of the moral life. The case would, of
course, be different if we were with Kant to regard it as a necessary
demand of Ethics that the world shall be so constituted that, in the
end, and for every individual agent, happiness shall be exactly
proportioned to virtue. Still more so if we went on to assert that
morality is a delusion unless every individual is predestined, by the
nature of things, to the ultimate attainment of complete virtue and
complete happiness. Views of this kind would manifestly have to be
defended by an appeal to metaphysical principles which do not find their
complete justification in the empirically known structure of human
society. So too the demand that human society itself shall be
progressive beyond all limits, cannot be shown to be justified by what
is empirically known of the structure and the non-human environment of
our society. And if Ethics really does postulate either the complete
coincidence of virtue with happiness for the individual, or the infinite
progress of society, it is clearly committed to the postulation of very
far-reaching metaphysical doctrines.
Further, it must be frankly owned that these postulates, as they stand,
are inconsistent with the scheme of metaphysical doctrine expounded and
defended in the present work. For both moral goodness and moral progress
are bound up with finite individuality and its characteristic form of
existence, the time-process. Of “progress” this is manifest: all
progress is advance in time, and is advance from a relatively worse to a
relatively better. And with “virtue” it stands no otherwise. For to be
virtuous is not simply to _have_ an individuality which is at once
harmonious and rich in contents, but to _make_ such an individuality for
ourselves out of the raw material of disposition and environment. Only
in the progress towards fuller individuality are we moral agents, and,
just because we are finite, the complete attainment of an absolutely
harmonious individuality is for ever beyond us. Hence absolutely perfect
virtue—and consequently absolutely perfect happiness—are incompatible
with our nature as genuine but finite individuals. In all finite
individuality there is inevitably some aspect of imperfection and
consequently of sadness, though sin and sadness ought to fill, and can
be empirically seen to fill, an increasingly subordinate place in
proportion to the degree of individuality attained. The same reasoning
is equally applicable to the case of any finite society.
Nor does this seem any ground for regarding the constitution of the
universe as ethically unsatisfactory. To repeat the previously quoted
remark of Mr. Bradley, no one has a right to call the universe morally
unsatisfactory on the ground that it does not precisely apportion
happiness to virtue, unless he is prepared to show that more goodness
would be produced by making the correspondence exact, and to show this
is impossible. Still more absurd would it be to censure the universe
because neither _perfect_ virtue nor _perfect_ happiness is attainable.
For morality itself has no existence except as the creation of finite
individuals, and hence we cannot without absurdity censure the universe
on _moral_ grounds for containing finite individuals, and so providing
for the existence of morality.
§ 4. Would the case be altered if we had, or thought we had, grounds for
holding that the progress of human society has fixed and knowable bounds
set to it by the nature of things? If we could know, for instance, that
the physical environment of humanity is so constituted that human life
_must_ ultimately disappear from the earth? I cannot see that it would.
No doubt the widespread acceptance of a belief that the end of things
was at hand within a calculable period, might tend to lessen our moral
earnestness, and if the period were taken to be sufficiently short,
might lead to downright licence and wickedness. But so does a belief in
the approaching dissolution of any historic and wide-reaching social
order; and yet the fact that societies suffer dissolution is not
commonly regarded as reasonable ground for an indictment against the
universe. Nor is there any logical connection between such beliefs and
their consequences. We cannot say that because human society is
perishable, if it is perishable, its achievements must have been wasted
and therefore its progress useless. The result of our achievements
might, in some way unknown to us, survive our extinction as a race, even
as we can partly see that the results of the individual life are
preserved after our death.
And, in any case, it is beyond the power of Metaphysics to set any fixed
limits to the existence and progress of human society. As we have seen,
Metaphysics gives us no reason to deny, though it does not enable us to
affirm, that the social life begun under present conditions may be
continued under unknown conditions beyond the grave. And even the
disappearance of physical human life within a calculable period cannot
be shown to follow from any principle of Metaphysics. At most we can say
that _if_ certain assumed physical laws, especially that of the
dissipation of energy, are valid for all physical processes, and if
again, the psychical factor in living organisms is incapable of
reversing the “down-grade” tendency of energy to pass into forms
unavailable for work, then the human society we know must come to an end
within a calculable time. But whether the assumptions upon which this
conclusion is based are or are not true, Metaphysics by itself cannot
determine.
We are thus left in the following position. That on the whole the
virtuous life is also the happy life, and that there is genuine social
progress,[214] seem to be empirically known certainties. “Absolute
perfection” of the finite as finite, and “infinite progress” seem alike
excluded as metaphysical impossibilities. But no definite limits can be
set by Metaphysics to the possibilities of individual and social advance
towards greater virtue and greater happiness. As for the theories in
Physics which appear to threaten humanity with extinction within a
measurable time, their truth is, to say the least of it, not assured,
and we have, in our metaphysical conception of Reality as an individual
whole, the certainty that, whatever becomes of the human species,
nothing of all our aspirations and achievements can be finally lost to
the universe, though we may be quite unable to imagine the manner of
their preservation. And for the purposes of the moral struggle from a
worse to a better, this seems to be quite as much conformity to our
aspirations as we need ask of the world. For the suggestion that our
ideals are not worth living for unless _we_ enjoy the fruit of our
labours in the form we in particular should like, seems nothing better
than an appeal to the baser Egoism.
§ 5. When we consider the specially _religious_ attitude of mind, we
shall find that its demands upon the world go further than those of mere
Ethics, and are, in part, of a rather different character. It would be
impossible in a work like this to discuss at length the nature of the
religious attitude, but this much at least would probably be admitted as
beyond doubt. The religious attitude towards the world of experience is
distinguished from all others partly by the specific character of the
emotions in which it finds its expression, partly by the intellectual
beliefs to which those emotions give rise. Specifically religious
emotion, as we can detect it both in our own experience, if we happen to
possess the religious “temperament”,[215] and in the devotional
literature of the world, appears to be essentially a mingled condition
of exaltation and humility arising from an immediate sense of communion
and co-operation with a power greater and better than ourselves in which
our ideals of good find completer realisation than they ever obtain in
the empirically known time-order. In the various religious creeds of the
world we have a number of attempts to express the nature of such a power
and of our relation to it in more or less logically satisfactory
conceptual terms. But it is important to remember that, though a
theological belief when sincerely held may react powerfully upon
religious feeling, the beliefs are in the last resort based upon
immediate feeling, and not immediate feeling upon beliefs. In this
sense, at any rate, it is true that all genuine religious life implies
the practical influencing of feeling and action by convictions which go
beyond proved and known truth, and may therefore be said to be matters
of faith.
What the convictions to which we thus surrender the practical guidance
of life are, in any individual case, seems to be largely a question of
individual constitution and social tradition. Not only are the
convictions as to the nature of the higher power represented by the
great typical historical religions very various, but what we may call
the individual religion of different persons exhibits even greater
variety. There is hardly any important object of human interest which
may not acquire for some man the significance which belongs to the
completed realisation of his highest ideals. It is no more than the
truth to say that a mother, a mistress, a country, or a movement, social
or political, may be, as we often phrase it, a man’s “religion.”
Amid all this variety two general principles may be detected which are
of primary importance to the metaphysical critic of religious
experience. (1) It is essential to the religious experience that its
object should be accepted as the really existing embodiment of an ideal.
This is the point in which the religious attitude of mind differs most
strikingly from that of mere morality. In the ethical experience the
ideal is apprehended as something which does not yet exist, but has to
be brought into existence by human exertion. Hence for the purely
ethical attitude of mind the world has to be thought of as essentially
imperfect, essentially out of accord with what it ought to be in order
to correspond to our demands on it. Thus there is not for morality, as
we shall directly see there must be for religion, such a thing as the
“Problem of Evil.” That the world, as it comes to us in the temporal
order, contains imperfection and evil which must be done away with, is a
practical presupposition without which morality itself would have no
_raison d’être_.
But in religion the case is otherwise. It is only in so far as the
object of our adoration, whatever it may be, is taken to be the really
existing embodiment of our highest ideals, that it can produce, in our
spiritual communion with it, that combined emotion of exaltation and
abasement, that feeling of being at once ourselves already perfect so
far as our will is one in its contact with our ideal, and absolutely
condemned and “subject to wrath” so far as it is not, which
distinguishes the religious from all other states of mind. But all real
existence, as we saw in our Second Book, is essentially individual.
Hence it is of the essence of religion that it looks upon the ideal as
already existing _in individual form_. This is why devotion to an
abstract principle, such as nationality, socialism, democracy, humanity,
proves so much inferior as a permanent expression of religious life, to
devotion to a person, however imperfect.[216]
(2) It follows that mere appearance in the time-order cannot be the
ultimate object of religious devotion. For the time-order itself, as we
have seen, is essentially unfinished and incomplete, and no part of it,
therefore, can be perfectly individual. The completely individual, if it
exists at all, must have an existence which is not temporal. Hence no
part of the temporal order of events, as such, can be finally
satisfactory as an object of religious adoration. So far as it is
possible to succeed in worshipping anything which forms part of that
order, such as a man or a cause, this can only be done by regarding the
temporal facts as an imperfect appearance of a reality which, because
completely and perfectly individual, is in its true nature timeless. And
it further follows that, since all finite individuality is, as we have
already seen, only imperfectly individual, and because imperfect is
temporal, the only finally adequate object of religious devotion must be
the infinite individual or timeless Absolute itself.
That the great philosophical religions of the world have felt the force
of this, is shown in history by the way in which they have inevitably
tended to credit their various “gods” with omnipotence. Thus the god of
the Hebrew religion, as at first presented to us in its earlier records,
is represented as limited in power by the existence of other divine
beings, and temporally changeable and mutable. But in the later Old
Testament writings, the New Testament, and the subsequent constructions
of ecclesiastical theology, we see the gradual development from these
Hebrew beginnings of an idea of a God who is “all in all,” and limited
neither by the existence of other divine beings with opposing aims and
interests, nor by the inherent resistance of “matter,” to His purposes.
So the Zoroastrian religion, in which the limitation of the power of the
good being Ahura Mazda by the existence of a co-ordinate bad being,
Angro Mainyus, was originally a fundamental tenet, is said to have
become among the modern Parsis a pure monotheism.
§ 6. Now, it should be noted that this inevitable tendency of Religion
itself to identify its object with ultimate Reality, conceived in its
timeless perfection as a complete and infinite individual whole, leads
to the difficult metaphysical “problem of evil.” For if God is the same
thing as the Absolute, it would appear that evil itself must be, like
everything else, a manifestation of His nature. And if so, can we say
that God is strictly speaking “good,” or is the complete realisation of
our ideals? It is this difficulty about evil, more than anything else,
which has led many philosophers in both ancient and modern times to
distinguish between the Absolute and God, and to regard God as simply
one, though the highest and most perfect, among the finite individuals
contained in the Absolute.[217] In the following paragraphs I propose
not so much to offer a solution of this time-honoured puzzle, as to make
some suggestions which may help to put the issue at stake clearly before
the reader’s mind.
The doctrine of the finitude of God does not appear in any way to remove
the difficulty about evil; in fact, it renders it, if anything, more
acute. For evil must now appear in the universe in a double form. On the
one hand, it admittedly is taken to exist outside God, as a hostile
factor limiting His power of shaping the world to His purpose. But
again, as we have seen, every finite individual, because finite, falls
short of complete internal harmony of structure, and thus contains an
element of defect and evil within itself. Thus evil will be inherent in
the nature of a finite God, as well as in that of the existence supposed
to be outside Him. We have, in fact, one more illustration of the
principle that all limitation involves self-limitation from within. It
is only by forgetting this fundamental truth that we can conceive the
possibility of a being who is “perfectly good” and yet is less than the
Absolute.
And even when we overlook this, our difficulties are not removed. For a
“finite” God with a further reality outside and in some way opposed to
His own nature, even when illogically thought of as perfectly good, must
be at best only such another being as ourselves, though on a larger
scale. He, like us, must be simply a partly successful, partly
unsuccessful, actor in a universe of which the constitution and ultimate
upshot are either unknown or known not to satisfy our religious demand
for the complete individual reality of our ideal.[218] This is the view
which has in history been actually adopted by religions like those of
the Hellenes and the Norsemen, in which the gods are regarded as
ultimately subject to an inscrutable and unethical Fate. But a finite
being struggling, however successfully, against such an alien Fate is,
after all, a fit object only for moral respect and sympathy, not for
religious adoration. Such a being, however exalted, is still not that
complete and harmonious individual realisation of all human aspiration
for which Religion yearns, and is therefore not, in the full and true
sense, God.
If, then, a finite ethical individual, however exalted, cannot be an
adequate object of religious devotion, how does the case stand with the
infinite individual whole of Reality? Can we worship the Absolute?[219]
This is a question which needs some careful examination before we can
venture on a positive answer.
§ 7. The problem, let it be observed, is not strictly psychological.
Experience shows that individual men can derive religious support from
belief in the most varied and most defective conceptions of the nature
of the Deity. Beliefs which bring one man “peace in believing” might, if
seriously entertained, blight another man’s life; one man’s God may be
another’s devil. This is, however, not the point. The real question is,
whether the Absolute can be made into an object of religious worship, as
we have seen that finite individuals cannot, without a breach of logic.
Has it the character which, as we have seen, anything which is to
correspond to our ideal of “God” must logically possess?
At first sight it certainly would seem that it has. For, as we have
seen, the Absolute contains all finite existence, and contains it as a
perfectly harmonious system. And therefore all finite aspiration must
somehow be realised in the structure of the Absolute whole, though not
necessarily in the way in which we, as beings of limited knowledge and
goodness, actually wish it to be realised. The Absolute whole is thus,
as nothing else can be, the concrete individual reality in which our
ideals have actual existence. As all our ideals themselves are but so
many expressions of our place in the system and our relation to the rest
of it, so the system itself is their concrete harmonious embodiment.
It is true, as we have already seen, that our ideals may not be realised
in the whole just in the form in which we conceive them, but it must be
remembered that in so far as we set up our private judgment and wishes
as standards to which the whole is bound to conform on pain of
condemnation, we are adopting an attitude which is at once illogical and
irreligious. It is illogical, because it implies the assumption that
with fuller knowledge of the system of Reality as a whole we should
still desire the fulfilment of our aspirations in the special way which
at present recommends itself to our imperfect insight. It is
irreligious, because the demand that human desires shall be fulfilled in
our way and not in “God’s way” involves the setting up of human wisdom
against God’s, and is thus irreconcilable with genuine union of heart
and will with the divine order.[220]
What then becomes, from this point of view, of the problem of evil? How
can the presence of moral evil in the temporal order be reconciled with
the thought of the Absolute whole as the complete and harmonious
realisation of human ideals? I need not say that the _detailed_ solution
of the problem is out of the question. As beings whose insight is
necessarily limited by our own finitude, we cannot hope to see how in
detail everything that appears to us as evil might, with larger
knowledge, be known as an integral constituent of a whole which, as a
whole, is the realisation of human aspiration, and therefore free from
evil. But it is at least possible to make suggestions which may show
that the problem is a mere consequence of the inevitable defects of our
insight, and that it would disappear with fuller knowledge. It is not
hard to see that there are two main reasons why the structure of the
universe seems to finite insight partly evil. Our insight into the
nature and connection of our purposes themselves is never complete; we
are all, in part, ignorant of exactly what it is to which we aspire.
Hence our purposes in part appear to be met by existence with a negative
just because we are only imperfectly aware of what they mean and whither
they tend. There is no more familiar fact than this, that even within
the limits of our human life growing experience is constantly teaching
us how confused and defective our judgment at any moment as to what we
really want, can be. Largely, then, our ideals seem to be at variance
with actual existence, because we never fully know what they are.
Again, our knowledge of the effects of our acts is always imperfect in
the extreme. We seem to fail because we cannot see far enough to
understand fully what it is we have effected. And both these causes of
the apparent discrepancy between the real and the ideal may be traced to
a single root. Existence appears to be in part evil, because we cannot
take it in at once and as a whole in its individual structure. We have
to make acquaintance with it by piecemeal, and as a succession of
fragmentary events in the time-series. And imperfection, we have seen,
belongs to the time-series. Hence we can see that evil is at once a mere
appearance, and an appearance which is inevitable to the finite
experience conditioned by the temporal form. The so-called “problem” is
thus in principle insoluble only so long as we falsely think of the
time-order itself as a characteristic of the Absolute whole in its real
individuality.[221]
May we say, then, that the Absolute or whole is known in Metaphysics to
be “good”? The answer depends upon the precise meaning we attach to the
statement. In the sense that it is the really existing embodiment of the
ideals we are trying amid our ignorance and confusion to realise, we
clearly must say “yes.” But if we use the word “good” in a narrower
sense, to mean “_ethically_ good,” we can hardly say without
qualification that the whole is good. For “ethical goodness” belongs
essentially to the time-order, and means the process of the gradual
assertion of the ideal against apparent evil. To be morally good is to
have an ideal that is not realised in the events of the time-order as
they come to us in our finite experience, and to mould those events into
conformity with the ideal. The moral life is from first to last a
struggle, and where the struggle is absent it is misleading to speak of
morality. Hence it is better not to call the Absolute “moral.”
But we must remember that the Absolute is only not moral, because it is
something very much more than moral, only not ethical because there is
in it no divorce of ideal from actuality, as there is in the imperfect
experience of its finite members. Or, as we might say, it is something
more than “good” precisely because it is already good. In morality, let
it be remembered, we have, as in all the experience of finite beings, a
process which is throughout directed upon a result that, once attained,
would transcend the process itself. Morality would not be content with
anything less than the total abolition of the evil in the world; and
with the disappearance of evil, the struggle against it would itself
disappear in some higher form of experience. Similarly, knowledge is
constantly striving to exhaust the object of knowledge. So long as the
object is in any respect unknown, the task of knowing is incomplete; yet
if once we could so know any object that nothing further remained to be
known about it, there would be no aspect of not-self in the object which
could distinguish it from the subject by which it is known, and
knowledge itself would thus be done away. Thus we may see from the side
alike of cognition and of will how the whole life of the finite being
forms a constant endeavour to widen experience into the complete
apprehension of a content which, because infinite, could not be
apprehended without the disappearance of finitude itself. Thus does
experience witness to the truth of our fundamental doctrine, that the
finite individual repeats in itself, in an imperfect and inadequate
form, the structure of the infinite individual of which it is an
appearance.
I do not know whether it is necessary to say more than a word with
reference to the thoughtless objection so often urged against all
philosophical and religious doctrines which deny the ultimate reality of
evil, or, what is the same thing, the existence of an independent devil.
If existence is already perfect, it is said, why should we seek to make
it better at great trouble and inconvenience to ourselves by moral and
political endeavour? Ought we not rather to sit with folded hands
acquiescing lazily in “things as they are”? The doubt might even be
carried further than this. For to “take things as they are” is just as
much a course of self-chosen action as any other line of conduct, and it
might hence be argued that abstention and moral effort are alike out of
place and absurd in a world where everything is “perfect.”
The objection, of course, turns upon a mere confusion of existence as it
is in its individual reality, and existence as it appears to us in the
time-series. The argument for Quietism is based purely upon attributing
to the essentially imperfect and incomplete series of temporal events
the perfection which only belongs to the timeless whole. In that perfect
whole our moral ideals and moral effort, as finite beings belonging to
the temporal order, are of course included along with everything else,
and its perfection is therefore no ground for treating them as nugatory.
Our own moral struggle with the apparent evil of the time-series is
itself an integral part of the Reality which, in its complete individual
character, is already perfect, if we could but win to a point of view
from which to behold it as it is. As Plotinus expresses it, “our
striving is after good and our turning away is from evil, and thought
with a purpose is of good and evil, and this is a good.”[222]
If we may not say without qualification that the Absolute is good, and
certainly must not say that it is in the proper sense “ethical,” still
less may we say that the Absolute is “morally indifferent.” For the
Absolute is only not ethical because it is already all that ethical life
consists in striving to become. Hence the higher a finite being stands
in the ethical scale, as judged by the double criterion of the wealth of
its interests in the world and the degree of harmony between them, the
more adequately does its structure repeat that of the whole, and the
higher is its degree of reality. And this means that the good man’s
ideals are realised in the world-order with less of modification and
reconstruction than the bad man’s. In a sense, as Professor Royce
maintains, even the bad man’s confused and warring ideals get their
fulfilment, since he too is aiming, however blindly, at a complete
individuality as the goal of all his striving. But he is seeking it
where it is not to be found, in the gratification of desires which
cannot be allowed the supreme place in the direction of life without
leading to the distraction and mutilation of the self. As Plato puts it,
the bad man “does as he pleases,” and for that very reason never “does
what he wills.” Hence the place of the good man in the economy of the
universe is very different from that of the bad, and the world-order
itself is the very reverse of “indifferent” to the distinction between
them.[223]
My own conclusion, then, which I offer to the reader simply as my own,
is that anything less than the Absolute is an inadequate object of
religious devotion, and that the Absolute itself has the structure which
such an object requires. If it should be further suggested that at any
rate, when we come to actual experience, we find that we cannot
represent the object of our worship to ourselves in an individual form
of sufficient concreteness to stir effectual emotion and prompt to
genuine action without clothing it in imagination with anthropomorphic
qualities which metaphysical criticism proves inapplicable to the
infinite individual, I should be inclined to reply that I admit the
fact. And I do not think we need shrink from the conclusion that
practical religion involves a certain element of intellectual
contradiction. Thus, though God is not truly God until we deny the
existence of any independent “evil” by which His nature is limited, it
seems probable that the thought of ourselves as “fellow-workers with
God” would hardly lead to practical good works unless we also
inconsistently allowed ourselves to imagine God as struggling against a
hostile power and standing in need of our assistance. But this only
shows that the practical value of religion in guiding action is not
necessarily dependent upon its scientific truth.
§ 8. Of course, it would be quite open to us to hold that there may be,
within the Absolute, finite beings of superhuman power and goodness with
whom humanity is capable of co-operating for ethical ends. Only such
beings, if they exist, would not be God in the same sense in which the
Absolute may be called God. They might deserve and win our reverence and
our co-operation, but because themselves finite and therefore only
imperfectly real and individual, they could not logically take the place
which belongs only to the completely and perfectly individual
realisation of the ideal. That would still fall partly outside them in
the nature, as a whole, of the system which harmoniously includes both
ourselves and them. Thus such beings would be “gods” in the sense of
polytheism rather than God in that of monotheism.
Further, I can see no means of deciding _a priori_ that there could be
only one such being in the universe. Even supposing the series of finite
beings to be itself finite, it is not evident that it could contain only
one “best” member. And supposing it infinite, could there be a “best”
member at all?[224] Also it appears quite beyond the power of
Metaphysics to find either proof or disproof of the existence and agency
of such finite but exalted beings. We cannot say that our general
conception of Reality is such as to negative the suggestion, and yet
again that general conception gives us no positive evidence in favour of
taking it as true. It would certainly be the grossest presumption to
maintain that the Absolute can contain no higher types of finite
individuality than those presented by human society; on the other hand,
it would be equally presumptuous to assert that we have reasoned
knowledge of their existence and their direct social relation with
ourselves. Hence we must, I think, be content to say that the
hypothesis, so far as it seems to be suggested to any one of us by the
concrete facts of his own individual experience, is a matter for the
legitimate exercise of Faith.
§ 9. These reflections may naturally lead to some remarks, which shall
be made as brief as possible, about the so-called philosophical
“arguments for the existence of God,” which played a prominent part in
Metaphysics before their discrediting at the hands of Kant and
Hume.[225] Kant’s great achievement lies in having demonstrated that the
whole force of the “proofs” depends upon the famous ontological
argument, best known in modern Philosophy in the form adopted by
Descartes in the fifth _Meditation_. Descartes there argues thus:—By
“God” I mean a completely perfect being. Now, existence is a perfection,
and non-existence an imperfection. Hence I cannot think of a
non-existing perfect being without self-contradiction. Hence God,
because by hypothesis perfect, must exist, and is the _only_ being whose
existence logically follows from its definition.
Kant’s even more famous criticism of this famous inference turns upon
the principle which he had learned from his study of Hume, that logical
necessity is “subjective.” If I think of a logical subject as defined by
certain properties, he argues in effect, I am _necessitated_ to ascribe
to it all the predicates implied in that definition. That is, I must
affirm them or contradict myself. Hence, if “existence” is originally
included among the perfections by which the subject “God” is defined,
the proposition _God exists_ is certainly necessary, but is also
tautological, and amounts, in fact, to the mere assertion that “an
existing perfect being is an existing perfect being.” But if the
“existence” spoken of in the predicate is something not included in the
definition of the subject, then you cannot infer it from that
definition. Now “real existence” is not a predicate which can be
included in the definition of a concept. The predicates by which an
imaginary hundred dollars are defined are the same as those of a real
hundred dollars. It is not by the possession of a new predicate, but by
being actually given in a concrete experience, that the real coins
differ from the imaginary. Hence all propositions asserting real
existence are _synthetic_, (_i.e._ assert of their subject something
which is not contained in the concept of it), and the real existence of
God or any other object can never be deduced from its definition.[226]
This Kantian criticism has itself been subjected to much criticism,
principally at the hands of Hegel and those subsequent philosophers who
have been specially affected by the Hegelian influence. What appears to
be the general principle of the Hegelian criticism has been most clearly
expressed in English philosophy by Mr. Bradley,[227] upon whose
discussion the following remarks are chiefly founded.
In estimating the worth of the ontological proof, we must distinguish
between the general principle implied in it and the particular form in
which it presents that principle. It is manifest that Kant is perfectly
right when he contends that, taking existence to mean presence in the
space and time-order, you cannot reason from my possession of any idea
to the existence of a corresponding object. You cannot say whatever I
conceive must exist as I conceive it. But the principle of the
ontological proof is perhaps not necessarily condemned by its failure to
be thus universally applicable. The principle involved appears to be
simply this. The idea and the reality outside its own existence as a
fact in the time-order which it “means” or “stands for” are mutually
complementary aspects of a whole Reality which include them both. For
there is, on the one side, no “idea” so poor and untrue as not to have
some meaning or objective reference beyond its own present
existence.[228] And, on the other, what has no significance for any
subject of experience is nothing. Hence in its most general form the
ontological argument is simply a statement that reality and meaning for
a subject mutually imply one another. But it does not follow that all
thoughts are equally true and significant. In other words, though every
thought _means_ something beyond its own existence, different thoughts
may represent the structure of that which they mean with very different
grades of adequacy. That which my thought means may be far from being
real in the form in which I think it.
Now, we may surely say that the more internally harmonious and
systematic my thought is, the more adequately it represents the true
nature of that which it means. If thoroughly systematic coherent thought
may be mere misrepresentation, our whole criterion of scientific truth
is worthless. How freely we use this ontological argument in practice
will be readily seen by considering the way in which, _e.g._, in the
interpretation and reconstruction of historical facts, the internal
coherency of a systematic and comprehensive interpretation is taken as
itself the evidence of its truth.[229] Hence it may be argued that if
there is a systematic way of thinking about Reality which is absolutely
and entirely internally coherent, and from its own nature must remain
so, however the detailed content of our ideas should grow in complexity,
we may confidently say that such a scheme of thought faithfully
represents the Reality for which it stands, so far as any thought can
represent Reality. That is, while the thought would not _be_ the Reality
because it still remains thought, which _means_ something beyond its own
existence, it would require no modification of structure but only
supplementation in detail to make it the truth.
But if we have anywhere thought which is thus internally coherent, and
from its own nature must remain so, however knowledge may extend, we
have it surely in our metaphysical conception of the real as the
absolutely individual. Thus the ontological proof appears, in any sense
in which it is not fallacious, to amount merely to the principle that
significant thought gives us genuine knowledge; and therefore, since the
thoroughgoing individuality of structure of its object is presupposed in
all significant thought, Reality must be a perfect individual. That this
perfect individual must further be “God,” _i.e._ must have the special
character ascribed to it by beliefs based upon specifically religious
emotions, does not follow. How far the “God” of religion is a correct
conception of the metaphysical Absolute, we can only learn from the
analysis of typical expressions of the religious experience itself. And
it is obvious that if by “God” we mean anything less than the Absolute
whole, the ontological proof ceases to have any cogency. It is
impossible to show that the possibility of significant thought implies
the presence of a special finite being, not empirically known to us,
within the Absolute.
The “cosmological” proof, or “argument from the contingency of the
world,” unlike the ontological, has the appearance, at first sight, of
starting with given empirical fact. As summarised by Kant for purposes
of criticism, it runs thus:—“If anything at all exists, there must be
also an absolutely necessary being. Now, I exist myself; _ergo_, the
absolutely necessary being exists.” To make the proof quite complete, it
would be necessary to show that the being whose existence is affirmed in
the minor premisses, to wit, myself, is not itself the “absolutely
necessary being,” and the argument thus completed would become in
principle identical with the second of the “proofs” given by Descartes
in the third _Meditation_, where it is inferred that if I, a dependent
being, exist, there must be a God on whom I and all things depend.[230]
As Kant has pointed out, the whole force of this inference rests upon
the previous admission of the ontological argument. By itself the
cosmological proof only establishes the conclusion that if any dependent
existence is real, independent existence of some kind must be real also.
To convert this into a “proof of the existence of _God_” you must
further go on to identify the “independent existence” thus reached with
the “most real” or “most perfect” being of the ontological proof. For
otherwise it might be suggested, as is done by one of the speakers in
Hume’s dialogue, that the series of phenomenal events itself, taken as
an aggregate, is the “necessary existence” upon which the “contingent
existence” of each several event depends. “Did I show you the particular
causes of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter,
I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me what
was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in
explaining the cause of the parts.”
To avoid this objection, we must go on to maintain that only the “most
perfect being” can be an ultimately necessary being, and that its
“necessary existence” is a consequence of its character. This, as we
have seen, is the very assertion made in the ontological proof. Hence
our criticisms of the ontological proof will be equally applicable to
the cosmological. If we combine the two, restating them in accord with
our previous remodelling of the former, the argument will take the
following form. All propositions directly or indirectly refer to real
existence. Hence it would be self-contradictory to assert that nothing
exists. But existence itself is only conceivable as individual. Hence
the absolutely individual must be really existent. And this is identical
with the general principle of our own reasoning in Book II. of the
present work. Clearly, if valid, it is valid simply as an argument for a
metaphysical Absolute; it neither proves that Absolute itself to be what
we mean in religion by God, nor affords any ground for asserting the
existence of God as a finite individual within the Absolute.[231]
The _physico-theological_ argument, also known as the argument from
_design_, or the _teleological_ proof, differs from the preceding two in
being in its current forms honestly empirical. In the shape of an
inference from the apparent presence of order and a regard for human
good in the structure of nature to the existence of a wise and
benevolent being or beings as the author or authors of nature, it has
been the most popular of all theistic arguments both in the ancient
world, where, according to Xenophon, it was specially insisted upon by
Socrates, and in the modern defences of theological beliefs against
rationalistic criticism. It must, however, be observed that the
criticisms of Hume and Kant are absolutely fatal to the “argument from
design,” when it is put forward as a proof of the existence of a God of
_infinite_ goodness and wisdom. At best, as Kant says, the observed
order and harmony of Nature would enable us to infer a finite degree of
wisdom and goodness in its author. The assertion of the absolute
harmoniousness and goodness of Nature, which we require to justify the
inference to infinite wisdom and goodness in its author, goes far beyond
the limits of the empirically verifiable, and can itself only be upheld
by some form of the “ontological proof.” Hence the “argument from
design” could at best prove a God whose wisdom and goodness are, so far
as knowable, limited. As Hume forcibly puts the same point, if the
empirically known facts of the partial adaptation of Nature to human
purposes are valid, as they stand, to prove a wise and good
intelligence, are not the equally well-ascertained facts of the partial
want of adaptation equally valid to prove defective goodness or
defective wisdom?[232]
There is a deeper metaphysical reason for this difference between the
results of the physico-theological and of the other “proofs,” which may
be briefly pointed out. The whole conception of the order and systematic
unity of the world as due to preconceived “design” is only intelligible
if we suppose the author of that “design” to be finite, and subject,
like ourselves, to temporal mutability. For in the notion of design
itself are implied the severance of the mentally conceived ideal from
the actuality which waits to be brought into accord with it, and
consequently also the time-process, which we have already found to be
characteristic of all finitude. Hence the physico-theological proof, by
itself, can at best be used to establish the reality of finite “gods,”
not of “God,” because it works throughout with the categories of
finitude.
Upon the logical force of the argument, as thus limited by its initial
assumptions, only one observation need be made. What the reasoning
asserts is not merely that “Nature” is in reality a system exhibiting
individuality and purposive interest, or even “design,” but that it
reveals the particular design of assisting and fostering human progress.
Now, whether this is so or not would appear to be a question of
empirical fact only capable of determination by the methods applicable
to other problems of the same empirical kind. Probably the lines along
which it will have to be decided in the future are of the following
general kind. Evolutionary science seems clearly to have shown that in
the influences it knows, _e.g._, as “natural” and again as “sexual
selection,” we have processes which lead to beneficial results without
being, so far as we can see, in the least directed by the conscious
“design” of establishing those results.[233] We should have to ask,
then, whether there is actual ground for holding that such influences
are not of themselves sufficient to account for the development of human
civilisation, so far as it is due to factors belonging to the
“environment.” If they are so sufficient, the “physico-theological”
argument for benevolent super-human agency in moulding the course of
human development, becomes superfluous; if they are not, their failure
is, so far, good ground for the recognition of finite “designing”
intelligences of a non-human kind as forming a factor in our
environment. In either case the question appears to be one of empirical
fact, and to be incapable of determination in advance on general
metaphysical grounds.[234] Nor are we justified in assuming that “design
in nature,” supposing it to exist, must always be directed to securing
ends which are either intelligible to us, or, if intelligible,
“benevolent,” in the sense of furthering our own special human
interests. And here I must be content to leave the subject.
_Consult further_:—F. H. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, chaps. 25,
26; J. E. McTaggart, _Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_, chaps. 6, 8; J.
Royce, _The World and the Individual_, Second Series, lects. 9, 10.
-----
Footnote 211:
To take a couple of concrete illustrations. It may be—I do not say it
is—conducive to moral goodness that there should be a general
conviction that in the long run our individual happiness is strictly
proportionate to our degree of virtue. But there is no means whatever
of showing that this belief is true, and, as Mr. Bradley once
pertinently argued against Professor Sidgwick, no philosopher is
entitled to assert its truth on moral grounds unless he is prepared to
maintain that he could produce more goodness and less badness by such
an exact proportioning of happiness to merit than without it. Again,
most of us would probably admit that ordinary moral rules, such as
that against wilful lying, have exceptions. But we are not bound to
hold it conducive to moral goodness that every one should be aware of
this.
Footnote 212:
I have not taken into account the argument from origins, because it
does not appear relevant. That our intellectual interest in “truth” is
historically a derivative from an interest in the “useful,” “science”
an offshoot of the arts, is, as we have seen for ourselves, true
enough, but it does not follow that the truth which is the ideal of
the developed intellect is the same thing as the “useful” from which
it has arisen. We rejected the claims of the mechanical postulate to
be final truth, not because of their origin in the needs of industrial
science, but because, as tested by the standard of final
self-consistency, they were unsatisfactory to the intellect.
Footnote 213:
ἐν μεταιχμίῳ σκότου, to use the poet’s phrase.
Footnote 214:
Not, of course, _pure_ progress. It does not require profound insight
to discover that moral progress, like everything else, has its price,
and that all “progressive evolution” implies “degeneration” as one of
its aspects. But the moral progress of society will be genuine if, on
the whole, our gain is—from the moralist’s special standpoint—more
than our loss. We have no reason to despair of our kind if the
impartial historian, comparing the facts—not the self-complacent
fictions of popular optimism—about our current social life with the
facts—not the fancies of Apologetics—about social life, say, in the
first century of the Roman Empire, can pronounce that there has been
advance on the whole.
Footnote 215:
The “religious” temperament is apparently shown by experience to be,
in its intenser manifestations, quite as much an idiosyncrasy of
congenital endowment as the “æsthetic.” There are persons, not
otherwise mentally defective, who seem to be almost devoid of it, just
as there are others who have little or no sense of humour or feeling
for beauty. As many of these persons are ethically excellent, some of
them exceptionally so, and as again the religious temperament is often
found strongly developed in persons of quite inferior ethical
development, there seems to be no _direct_ connection between
religious sensibility and moral excellence, though, of course,
religious feeling is the most powerful of moral influences when it is
conjoined in the same person with ethical fervour. For a masterly
description of some typical forms of religious feeling and belief the
reader should consult Professor James’s _Varieties of Religious
Experience_. He will find my own views as to the philosophical
interpretation of religion, if he cares to know them, in the final
chapter of my _Problem of Conduct_.
Footnote 216:
So Hegel insisted that the fundamental significance of the Christian
religion lies neither in the historical career nor in the moral
teaching of Jesus (which indeed contained little that had not already
been uttered in the form of precept or principle), but in the
recognition by the Christian community of the union of God and Man as
a fact already realised in individual form in the person of Christ.
See Dr. McTaggart’s essay on “Hegelianism and Christianity” in
_Studies in Hegelian Cosmology_.
Footnote 217:
So Plato suggested in the second book of the _Republic_, that God is
not the cause of all that happens to us, but only of the good things
that befall us. Perhaps, however, Plato is here consciously adapting
his expression to current theological doctrine of which he did not
fully approve. For a modern defence of the same conception of a finite
God, see Dr. Rashdall’s essay in _Personal Idealism_. Other reasons
which have often led to the same view, such as the desire to think of
God as a mutable being like ourselves, capable of being influenced in
His attitude toward us by our attitude towards Him, seem to rest too
much upon idiosyncrasies of private feeling to be of serious
philosophical weight. If private feeling is to count at all, one does
not see why that of those who would feel outraged by such a conception
of a finite changeable God should not be allowed an equal significance
with that of their opponents. It is a palpable mistake to treat
private feeling, whatever its worth may be, as all on one side in this
matter.
Footnote 218:
For if we once suppose that we know the universe, in which “God” is
only one finite being among others, to be so constituted as to
correspond to this demand, it will be the whole of which “God” is one
factor, and not “God” by Himself, which will become the supreme object
of religious emotion. Thus we may say, until God is thought of as the
individual whole, He is not fully God.
Footnote 219:
It should be scarcely necessary to point out that the Absolute, if it
can be worshipped at all, can be worshipped only as conceived as fully
individual. When it is falsely thought of as a “collection” or
“aggregate” or “totality” of independent things, it is no more divine
than any other collection. This is the fatal objection to vulgar
“Pantheism.” How far any of the serious thinkers who are popularly
charged with “Pantheism” have countenanced this view of the Absolute
as a mere collection, is another matter.
Footnote 220:
I am afraid that this essentially irreligious feeling has a great deal
to do with the complaints sometimes urged against the Absolute as a
poor substitute for a “living God.” Partly these complaints spring, no
doubt, from the mistaken notion that the Absolute is not a concrete
individual but a mere “collective concept.” But they seem also to be
motived by a suspicion that a finite Deity might be more amenable than
the Absolute to our wish to have our ideals gratified in our own
fashion. And so far as this is the motive of them, such complaints are
essentially impious.
Footnote 221:
The reader will naturally think of the famous Socratic paradox, that
“wrong doing is error,” “vice is ignorance.” If we interpret this to
mean that the fundamental advantage of the good man over the bad lies
in his truer insight into what he seriously wants, it seems to be
true.
Footnote 222:
_Enneads_, I. 8, 15 (quoted and translated in Whittaker, the
_Neoplatonists_, p. 83). Plotinus had just previously made the correct
observation that to deny the existence of evil in any and every sense
means to deny the existence of good. (κακόν γε εἴ τις λέγοι τὸ παράπαν
ἐν τοῖς οὖσι μὴ εἶναι, ἀνάγκη αὐτῷ καὶ τὸ ἀφαθὸν ἀναιρεῖν καὶ μηδὲ
ὀπεκτὸν μηδὲν εἶναι.) We might thus say, if good is to be at all, evil
must have some kind of relative or phenomenal existence as its
antecedent condition. But, as thus serving as a condition for the
realisation of good, evil is itself, from a more universal point of
view, good, and therefore its existence _as_ evil only apparent. On
the whole question of the position of evil in the world-order, see the
admirable essay on “Sin” in Dr. McTaggart’s _Studies in Hegelian
Cosmology_.
Footnote 223:
When it is said that the Absolute, if it exists, must be morally
indifferent, there is often a conscious or unconscious confusion of
thought. The Absolute must certainly be “indifferent” in the sense
that it does not feel the internal discord of hatred and animosity
against any of its constituents. Deus, as Spinoza says, neminem potest
odio habere. For the Absolute is not one of the two combatants; it is
at once both combatants and the field of combat. But to infer that the
Absolute, because devoid of the feelings of hatred and private
partisanship, must be indifferent in the sense that our goodness and
badness make no difference to our place in it, is a fallacy of
equivocation for which unconsciousness and _bona fides_ are scarcely
sufficient excuse.
Footnote 224:
Thus I do not understand why, apart from respect for the traditions of
Christianity, Dr. Rashdall should hold that God, in his sense of the
word, is one and not many. His argument appears to me to identify God
with the Absolute, where it is required to maintain God’s unity, and
to distinguish them as soon as it becomes a question of proving God’s
“Personality” (see his essay in _Personal Idealism_). Professor James
appears more logical in his obvious readiness to reckon with
polytheism as a possible consequence of his denial of God’s infinity
(_Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 524 ff.).
Footnote 225:
Kant’s famous onslaught will be found in the _Kritik der Reinen
Vernunft_, Transcendental Dialectic, bk. ii. div. 3 (“The Ideal of
Pure Reason”), §§ 3-7. Hume’s criticisms are contained in his
posthumous _Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_.
Footnote 226:
Kant’s criticism had been in part anticipated on the first circulation
of the _Meditations_ by both Mersenne and Gassendi. See particularly
Gassendi’s strictures on Descartes’ confusion of existence with
properties in the “Fifth Objections,” with Descartes’ unsatisfactory
reply. Leibnitz repeated the same objection, and proposed to amend the
Cartesian proof by a formal demonstration that God’s existence is
_possible_, _i.e._ does not imply a formal contradiction. He then
argues—If God’s existence is possible, He exists (by the Cartesian
proof). But God’s existence is possible, therefore God exists. See,
_e.g._, Leibnitz, Works, ed. Erdmann, p. 177; and Latta, _Monadology
of Leibniz_, p. 274. Hume’s comments are even more akin to Kant’s.
“Whatever we conceive as existent we can also conceive as
non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence
implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being whose
existence is demonstrable.” (_Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_,
part 9.)
Footnote 227:
_Appearance and Reality_, chap. 24.
Footnote 228:
No thought can be merely and absolutely false, any more than any act
can be merely and without qualification bad. Though _words_ may be
entirely meaningless, thoughts cannot be.
Footnote 229:
The appeal to experiment is no objection to the principle. For in
making the experiment we do not, of course, get out of the circle of
our thoughts, and the experiment only affords a criterion of truth in
so far as it leaves us with a new thought which can only be brought
into systematic harmony with our old ideas in one determinate way.
Except as interpreted by thought, the experiment has no bearing on our
knowledge.
Footnote 230:
This was also a favourite argument with Leibnitz, as Kant notes. For
an acute examination of Leibnitz’s use of it and the other “proofs,”
see B. Russell’s _Philosophy of Leibniz_ chap. 15. For Hume’s
objections to it, see the already quoted part 9 of the _Dialogue
concerning Natural Religion_. The other “proof” of the _Third
Meditation_, namely, that my possession of an idea of God, which I
could not have derived from empirical sources, proves the reality of
the idea’s object, is only a special form of the ontological argument
from idea to existence.
Footnote 231:
As thus remodelled, the double ontologico-cosmological argument might
be attacked on two grounds—(1) That it only proves, once more, that
_if_ we admit that all propositions are concerned with real existence,
either directly or remotely, we must admit the existence of the
Absolute, but does not demonstrate that all propositions _are_ so
concerned. (2) That in saying that existence is only _conceivable_ as
individual we fall back into the Cartesian misconception of existence
as a predicate. I should reply, (1) that the validity of the premiss
in question cannot be denied without being confirmed in the act of
denial. _I.e._ unless the suggested proposition that “some
propositions at least have no reference to a reality beyond their own
presence as psychical facts in my mind,” itself has the very objective
reference in question, it has no meaning, and is therefore no genuine
proposition; (2) that we must distinguish between the _what_ and the
_that_ of existence. The “that” of existence is not conceivable at
all, but our position is that this inconceivable _that_ is only
logically, not really, separable from a _what_, and that it is
precisely this inseparability of the _that_ and the _what_ which we
mean by “individuality.”
Footnote 232:
_Dialogues concerning Natural Religion_, part 11.
Footnote 233:
This is quite consistent with our own view, that all real processes
are teleological in the sense of being marked by subjective interest.
For (_a_) not by any means all teleological process is actual “design”
or “volition” (impulse, organic craving, habit, etc., are all cases in
point); and (_b_) actual volition need not always be volition for the
result it actually produces. Sexual selection in man would be an
instance of a process which may take the form of actual volition, but
in that case is rarely, if ever, volition for that improvement of the
stock which _de facto_ issues from it.
Footnote 234:
Cf. Bradley, _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 200, 496-497 (1st ed.).
Professor Flint’s attempted reply to the Humian and Kantian criticism
of the theistic “proofs” (_Agnosticism_, chap. 4) has not induced me
to modify any of the opinions expressed in this chapter.
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