_THE ULTIMATE EXPLANATION AND GROUND OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS_
The most important and fundamental inquiry as to the possible help
of theology to the social consciousness still remains: What is the
ultimate explanation and ground of the social consciousness? This
question includes two: (1) How can it be metaphysically that we do
influence one another? (2) What is required for the final positive
justification of the social consciousness as ethical? Theology's
answer to both questions is found in the being and character of God,
the creative and moral source of all.
I. HOW CAN IT BE, METAPHYSICALLY, THAT WE DO INFLUENCE ONE ANOTHER?
First, then, how can it be that we do influence one another? What is
the final explanation of the constant fact of our reciprocal action?
For in our final thinking we may not ignore this question.
1. _Not Due to the Physical Fact of Race-Connection._--It may be worth
while saying, first, that the physical fact of race-connection, if
that could be proved, would be no sufficient explanation. The race
may, or may not, be dependent upon a single pair, but in any case this
is not the essential connection. The race is one by virtue of its
essential likeness, however that comes about. Men might have sprung
out of the ground in absolute individual independence of one another,
and yet if there were such actual like-mindedness as now exists, the
race would be as truly one as it now is, and as capable of reciprocal
action, and its members under the same obligation to one another. No
ideal interest is at stake, then, in the question of the actual
physical unity of the race as descended from one pair.
One may say, of course, that the physical unity of the race would
naturally result, according to the laws apparently prevailing in the
animal world, in likeness. And this may, therefore, seem to him the
most natural proximate explanation. But, even so, it is well to know
that our entire _moral_ interest is in the essential likeness and
mutual influence of men, however brought about, and not in the
physical unity of men. Theology has no occasion to continue its
earlier excessive and quite fundamental emphasis upon this physical
unity. Moreover, such an explanation is necessarily but proximate.
Back of it lies the deeper question, Why just these laws, and modes of
procedure?
2. _We are not to Over-Emphasize the Principle of Heredity._--Nor can
theology, from any point of view, afford to over-emphasize the
principle of heredity if it wishes to keep human initiative at all. It
is a dangerous alliance which the old-school theology with its racial
sin in Adam has been so ready to make with the principle of heredity.
That principle, as they wish to use it, proves quite too much; and
careful thinkers, really awake to ideal interests, may well rejoice in
the comparative relief which science itself, through the probably
somewhat exaggerated protest of the Weismann or Neo-Darwinian school,
seems likely to afford from the incubus of a grossly exaggerated
heredity. The main interest for the ideal view lies right here. We can
see why this law of the "inheritance of acquired characteristics," in
Professor James' language, "_should not_ be verified in the human
race, and why, therefore, in looking for evidence on the subject, we
should confine ourselves exclusively to lower animals. In them fixed
habit is the essential and characteristic law of nervous action. The
brain grows to the exact modes in which it has been exercised, and the
inheritance of these modes--then called instincts--would have in it
nothing surprising. But in man the negation of all fixed modes is the
essential characteristic. He owes his whole preëminence as a reasoner,
his whole human quality of intellect, we may say, to the facility with
which a given mode of thought in him may suddenly be broken up into
elements, which re-combine anew. Only at the price of inheriting no
settled instinctive tendencies is he able to settle every novel case
by the fresh discovery by his reason of novel principles. He is, _par
excellence_, the educable animal."[18]
To over-emphasize the principle of heredity, then, is to strike at one
of the most fundamental distinctive human qualities, and so to
endanger every ideal interest. The growing like-mindedness of men and
their mutual influence are not forthwith to be ascribed to an
omnipotent principle of heredity.
3. _Not Due to a Mystical Solidarity._--Nor is the mutual influence of
men to be explained by any mystical solidarity of the race considered
as a _finite_ whole. It is a simple and reasonable scientific demand,
that we should not assume a mysterious, indefinable and incalculable
cause, where known and intelligible causes suffice to explain the
phenomena in question. Do we need, or can we intelligently use, a
mystical solidarity? The only solidarity of the race which we seem
really to need, or with which we seem able intelligently to deal, is
the actual like-mindedness and the actual personal relations
themselves--the reciprocal action of spirits--the only kind of
reciprocal action which we can finally fully conceive. Any other
finite solidarity than this, though it has often figured in theology,
seems to me only a name without significance. In any case, we need to
insist in theology, much more than we have, upon that unity of the
race which is due to the actual likeness of men and their actual
mutual personal influence. Such a unity we know and can understand,
and it is of the highest ethical and spiritual importance. But to make
much of the physical unity is to ground the spiritual in the physical;
and, on the other hand, to take refuge in a mystical solidarity--and
this is often felt to be a rather deep procedure--for whatever
theological purpose, is to hide in the fog of the obscure and
unintelligible.
4. _Grounded in the Immanence of God._--But back of all finite
phenomena, we may still ask for an ultimate explanation of the
possibility of any reciprocal action even between spirits. And it is,
perhaps, this ultimate explanation after which the idea of a mystical
solidarity of the race is blindly groping. Unless one chooses to
accept reciprocal action as a necessarily given fact in any universe
(and this position, I think with F. C. S. Schiller, may be reasonably
defended),[19] he must somewhere in his thinking ask for its final
explanation. And most of those, who try to think things through, feel
this pressure. And metaphysics, we do well to remember with Professor
James, "means only an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and
consistently."[20] As Lotze puts it: "How a cause begins to produce
its _immediate_ effect, how a condition is the foundation of its
direct result, it will never be possible to say; yet that cause and
effect _do_ thus act must be reckoned among those simple facts that
compose the reality which is the object of all our investigation. But
there is an intolerable contradiction in the assumption that, though
two beings may be wholly independent the one of the other, yet that
which takes place in one can be a cause of change in the other; things
that do not affect each other at all, cannot at the same time affect
each other in such a manner that the one is guided by the other."[21]
This question is fairly thrust upon us by the facts of the social
consciousness. How can it be that we do so influence one another? how
is our reciprocal action metaphysically possible? The answer of
theistic philosophy to this question is found in the being of God.
Upon the metaphysical side, theistic philosophy affirms that we can
ascribe independent existence in the highest sense only to God. All
else is absolutely dependent for its existence and maintenance upon
him. The kind of reality that we demand for man is not that he be
_outside_ of God, independent of him; this would not make man more,
but less. Every thorough-going theistic view must have this at least
in common with pantheism, that it recognizes everywhere a real
immanence of God. We are, because God wills in us. This metaphysical
relation of the finite to the infinite, to be sure, is not to be
conceived spatially or materially; nor, least of all, is it be so
conceived as to deny a real self-consciousness and a real moral
initiative to the finite spirit; but it does involve the absolute
dependence of all the finite upon the will of God. As to our _being_,
we root solely in God. And the unity and consistency of the being of
God are the actual ground of our possible reciprocal action. Only so
is that contradiction of which Lotze spoke avoided. We are not
independent of one another, because we are all alike dependent for our
very being upon God. And we are thus members one of another,
ultimately, only through him.
The further fact, that we are never fully able to trace causal
connections anywhere; that even in the clearest case no possible
analysis of one stage in the process enables us to prophesy,
independently of experience, the next stage, also compels us to admit
that the full cause is not really present in any of the finite
manifestations we can follow; that we have always to take account of
the "hidden efficacy of the Infinite everywhere at work," and so must
recognize once again the indubitable immanence of God, the absolute
dependence of the finite upon his will, and our reciprocal action as
possible only through him.[22]
Or, to put the same thing a little differently, any adequate theory of
causality seems to lead us up inevitably to purpose in God. As
Professor Bowne states it:[23] "The fundamental antithesis of purpose
and causation is incorrect. The true antithesis is that of mechanical
and volitional causality." And he intimates the probability that all
causality, even in the physical world, is ultimately volitional. "It
becomes a question," he says, "whether true causality can be found in
the phenomenal at all, and not rather in a power beyond the phenomenal
which incessantly posits and continues that order according to rule."
The unity and consistency of the immanent will of God, then, are the
ultimate metaphysical ground of all reciprocal action. The mutual
influence, that is, even of spirits, finds its final full explanation
only in God.
The social consciousness, therefore, so far as it is an expression of
the possibility and inevitableness of our mutual influence, is a
reflection of the immanence of the one God in the unity and
consistency of his life.
But this, after all, is not the most important element of the social
consciousness. So far as it is _ethical_ at all, it can have no final
explanation in the metaphysical, considered as mere matter of fact. We
are driven, therefore, to ask the second question involved in the
subject of the chapter.
II. WHAT IS REQUIRED FOR THE FINAL POSITIVE JUSTIFICATION OF THE
SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS AS ETHICAL?
1. _Must be Grounded in the Supporting Will of God._--It is not enough
that we should be able to think of the unity of One Life pervading
all, or even of One Will upholding all. If the social consciousness,
as distinctly ethical, is to have any final justification, it must be
able to believe that it is in league with the eternal and universal
forces; that the fundamental trend of the universe is its own trend;
in other words, that the deepest thing in the universe is an ethical
purpose conceivable only in a Person; that the ideals and purposes of
finite beings expressed in the social consciousness are in line with
God's own; that the loving holy purpose of the Infinite Will quickens
and sustains and surrounds our purposes.
Let us distinctly face the fact that, unless the social consciousness
can be so grounded in the very foundation of the universe, it must
remain an illogical and unjustifiable fragment in the world, without
real excuse for being. That is, if the social consciousness is not to
be an illusion, it must be, as Professor Nash contends, cosmical, and
not merely individual, and ethics must root in religion. This is the
very heart of his stimulating book, _Ethics and Revelation_,
expressed, for example, in such sentences as these: "Nothing save a
sense of deep and intimate connection with the solid core of things,
nothing save a settled and fervid conviction that the universe is on
the side of the will in its struggle for that whole-hearted devotion
for the welfare of the race, without which morality is an affair of
shreds and patches, can give to the will the force and edge suitable
to the difficult work it has to do. But this sense of kinship with
what is deepest and most abiding in the universe--what else is meant
by pure religion." And again: "We, as founders and builders of the
true society, find ourselves shut up to an impassioned faith in the
sincerity of the universe and the integrity of the fundamental being.
Our religion is a deep and wide synthesis of feeling, whereby that
personal will in us, which grounds society, comes into solemn league
and covenant with the fundamental being. Here is the focus-point of
the prophetic revelation. At this point, the deep in God answers to
the deep in Man.... All that He is He puts in pledge for the
perfecting of the society He has founded."[24]
Paulsen expresses only the same fundamental conviction, from the point
of view of the philosopher, and, at the same time, the heart of his
own solution of the relation between knowledge and faith, when he
says: "There is one item, at least, in which every man goes beyond
mere knowledge, beyond the registration of facts. That is his own life
and his future. His life has a meaning for him, and he directs it
toward something which does not yet exist, but which will exist by
virtue of his will. Thus a faith springs up by the side of his
knowledge. He believes in the realization of this, his life's aim, if
he is at all in earnest about it. Since, however, his aim is not an
isolated one, but is included in the historical life of a people, and
finally in that of humanity, he believes also in the future of his
people, in the victorious future of truth and righteousness and
goodness in humanity. Whoever devotes his life to a cause believes in
that cause, and this belief, be his creed what it may, has always
something of the form of a religion. Hence faith infers that an inner
connection exists between the real and the valuable within the domain
of history, and believes that in history something like an immanent
principle of reason or justice favors the right and the good, and
leads it to victory over all resisting forces." And Paulsen holds that
this implicit faith characterizes necessarily every philosophical
theory. "What the philosopher himself accepts as the highest good and
final goal he projects into the world as its good and goal, and then
believes that subsequent reflections also reveal it to him in the
world."[25]
We must be able, then, to believe that the best we know--our highest
ideals--are at home in the world, or give up all faith in the honesty
of the world, and all hope of philosophy, to say nothing of religion.
Ultimately, now, this means that nothing short of full Christian
conviction is needed to support the social consciousness. We need to
be able to believe that the spirit of the life and death of Christ is
at the very heart of the world. Nothing less will suffice. And this is
exactly the support which the Christian revelation offers to the
social consciousness.
2. _God's Sharing in Our Life._--But if the social consciousness is
only a true reflection of God's own desire and purpose, then in a
sense far deeper than the merely metaphysical, our life is the very
life of God. He shares in it. And no man can really see what that
means, and not find a new light falling on all the world, and himself
carried on to take up a new confession of faith in the solemn words of
another: "For the agony of the world's struggle is the very life of
God. Were he mere spectator, perhaps, he too would call life cruel.
But in the unity of our lives with his, our joy is his joy, our pain
is his." And from the vision of this self-giving life of God we turn
back to our own place of service, saying with Matheson: "If Thou art
love then Thy best gift must be sacrifice; in that light let me search
Thy world."[26]
We probably cannot better express this unity of our highest ethical
life with the life of God than by renewing our old faith that we are
children of a common Father, who have come, under God's own
leading--so far as a social consciousness is ours--voluntarily to
share in God's loving purpose in the creation and redemption of men.
We do not work alone; nay, we are co-workers with God.
3. _The Consequent Transfiguration of the Social Consciousness._--And
as soon as we have thus really and deeply come into the meaning of
Christ's thought of God as Father, and into his revelation in his life
and death as to what the spirit of that Fatherhood is, we turn back to
the elements of our social consciousness to find them all
transfigured.
Our _likeness_ is the likeness of common children of God reflecting
the image of the one Father, capable of character and of indefinite
progress into the highest.
Our _mutual influence_ roots in a real Fatherhood, both in source of
being and in the one purpose of love, alike creating and redemptively
working for all.
Our _sense of the value and sacredness of the person_ now for the
first time gets its full justification. Men are not only creatures
capable of joying and suffering, but children of God with a
preciousness to be interpreted only in the light of Christ, and with
the "power of the endless life" upon them. Concerning the value of the
person, it is worth stopping just here, to notice that it is
peculiarly true of the social consciousness, that it is not free to
ignore such considerations upon immortality as those which weighed
most with John Stuart Mill and Sully. Of the hope of immortality, Mill
says: "The beneficial influence of such a hope is far from trifling.
It makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feelings,
and gives greater strength as well as greater solemnity to all the
sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow-creatures, and by
mankind at large." And Sully adds: "I would only say that if men are
to abandon all hope of a future life, the loss, in point of cheering
and sustaining influence, will be a vast one, and one not to be made
good, so far as I can see, by any new idea of services to collective
humanity."[27]
Our _sense of obligation_ deepens with all this deepening of the value
of men, and our conscience becomes only a true response to God's own
life and character--in no mere figurative sense the voice of God in
us.
And our _love_ becomes simply entering a little way into God's own
love, a sharing more and more in his life.
And when one has once seen the social consciousness so transfigured in
the light of Christ's revelation, he must believe that then, for the
first time, he has seen the social consciousness at its highest, and
that it is impossible for him to go back to the lower ideal. If the
social consciousness is not an illusion, Christ's thought of God and
of the life with God ought to be true; and if the world is an honest
world, it is true. It is not only true that Christ has a social
teaching, but that the social consciousness absolutely requires
Christ's teaching for its own final justification. The Christian truth
_is_ so great that it alone can give the social consciousness its
fullest meaning, alone can enable it to understand itself, and alone
can give it adequate motive and power; for, in Keim's words, "to-day,
to-morrow, and forever we can know nothing better than that God is our
Father, and that the Father is the rest of our souls."[28]
[18] James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, pp. 367, 368.
[19] _The Philosophical Review_, May, 1896, p. 228.
[20] _Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 461.
[21] _Microcosmus_, Vol. II, p. 599.
[22] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 54, 84, 102.
[23] _Theory of Thought and Knowledge_, pp. 91, 111.
[24] _Ethics and Revelation_, pp. 50, 243, 244.
[25] _Introduction to Philosophy_, pp. 8, 9, 313.
[26] _Searchings in the Silence_, p. 46.
[27] Quoted by Orr, _The Christian View of God and the World_, pp.
160, 72.
[28] Quoted by Bruce, _The Kingdom of God_, p. 157.
THE INFLUENCE OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON THE CONCEPTION OF
RELIGION
INTRODUCTION
From the question of the support which Christian faith and doctrine
give to the social consciousness, we turn now to the second part of
our inquiry: How does this growing social consciousness, not by any
means always consciously religious, naturally react upon and affect
our conceptions of religion and of theological doctrines?
In this inquiry, we cannot always be sure historically of the exact
connection, and, for our present purpose, this is not of prime
importance. But we can see, for example, in this second division of
our theme, the relations of religion and the social consciousness, and
how religion must be conceived if the social consciousness is fully
warranted; and this is the main question.
If the definition of theology which has been suggested be adopted--the
thoughtful and unified expression of what religion means to us--then
it is obvious that any change in conception or emphasis in religion
will necessarily affect theological statement. Our inquiry as to the
influence of the social consciousness, therefore, naturally begins
with religion.
The discussions of this division, moreover, will really include all
that part of theological doctrine which has to do with the growth into
the life with God.
The natural influence of the social consciousness upon the conception
of religion may be, perhaps, summed up in four points, which form the
subjects of the four succeeding chapters: (1) The social consciousness
tends to draw religion away from the falsely mystical; (2) it tends to
emphasize the personal relation in religion, and so keeps the truly
mystical; (3) it tends to emphasize the ethical in religion; (4) it
tends to emphasize the concretely historically Christian in religion.