MAN IN RELATION TO GOD
+What is man?+--So far we have seen that the universe, including
ourselves, is one instrument or vehicle of the self-expression of God.
God is All; He is the universe and infinitely more, but it is only as
we read Him in the universe that we can know anything about Him. We
have seen, too, that it is by means of the universe and His
self-limitation therein that He expresses Himself to Himself. Now what
is our relation to this process? What are we to think about ourselves?
Who or what are we?
A witty Frenchman once sardonically remarked, "In the beginning God
created man in His own image, and man has ever since been returning the
compliment by creating God in his." But what else can we do? It
follows from what has already been said that we know nothing and can
know nothing of God except as we read Him in the universe, and we can
only interpret the universe in terms of our own consciousness. In
other words, man is a microcosm of the universe. What the universe may
be in reality we do not know,--though I am not so sure as some people
seem to be that appearance and reality do not correspond,--we can only
know it in so far as it produces sense images on our brain and enters
into our individual consciousness. The limits of my subject forbid
that I should enter into a discussion of philosophic idealism, but I
think I ought to confess at once that I can only think of existence in
terms of consciousness: nothing exists except in and for mind. The
mind that thinks the universe must be immeasurably greater than my own,
but in so far as I too am able to think the universe, mine is one with
it. All thinking starts with a paradox, even the famous saying of
Descartes, "I think, therefore I am"; and my paradox seems at least as
reasonable as any other, and has fewer difficulties to encounter than
most. I start then with the assumption that the universe is God's
thought about Himself, and that in so far as I am able to think it
along with Him, "I and my Father (even metaphysically speaking) are
one." It cannot be demonstrated beyond dispute that any two human
beings think the same universe. Strictly speaking, it is certain that
they do not in every detail. But the common dominator of our
experience, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, is the assumption that
in the main the universe is pretty much the same for one man as it is
for another. When I speak of the rolling sea, my neighbour does not
understand me to mean the waving trees, but I cannot prove that he does
not. If he is consistent in seeing water as trees and trees as water,
his mind must be constituted differently from mine and yet I may never
know it. So, by an almost unperceived act of faith, we have to take
for granted that our separate individualities meet and become one to
some extent in our common experience of this great universe, which is
at that same time the expression of God. The real universe must be
infinitely greater and more complex than the one which is apparent to
our physical senses. This becomes probable, even on material grounds,
the moment we begin to examine into the nature of sense perception.
The ear is constituted to hear just so many sounds; beyond that limit
at either end of the scale we can hear nothing, but that does not prove
that there are no more sounds to hear. Similarly the eye can
distinguish five or seven primary colours and their various
combinations; beyond that limit we are colour-blind. But suppose we
were endowed to hear and see sounds and colours a million times greater
in number than those of which we have at present any cognizance! What
kind of a universe would it be then? But that universe exists now; it
is around and within us; it is God's thought about Himself, infinite
and eternal. It is only finite to a finite mind, and it is more than
probable that spiritual beings exist with a range of consciousness far
greater than our own, to whom the universe of which we form a part must
seem far more beautiful and fuller of meaning than it seems to us.
Imagine a man who could only see grey hues and could only hear the note
A on the keyboard. His experience would be quite as real as ours, and
indeed the same up to a point, but how little he would know of the
world as we know it. The glory of the sunset sky would be hidden from
him; for him the melting power of the human voice, or of a grand
cathedral organ, would not exist. So, no doubt, it is in a different
degree with us all. The so-called material world is our consciousness
of reality exercising itself along a strictly limited plane. We can
know just as much as we are constituted to know, and no more. But it
is all a question of consciousness. The larger and fuller a
consciousness becomes, the more it can grasp and hold of the
consciousness of God, the fundamental reality of our being as of
everything else.
+The subconscious mind.+--Of late years the comparatively new science
of psychology has begun to throw an amount of valuable light upon the
mystery of human personality. As the result of numerous experiments
and investigations into the normal and abnormal working of the human
mind, psychologists have discovered that a great deal of our ordinary
mental action goes on without our being aware of it. This unconscious
cerebration, as it is called, can hardly be seriously disputed, for
every new addition to our psychological knowledge goes to confirm it.
Hence we are hearing a great deal about the subconscious mind, or
subliminal consciousness as some prefer to call it. Now that our
attention has been directed to it, we are coming to see, as is usual
with every new discovery, that after a fashion we knew it all along.
The subconscious mind seems to be the seat of inspiration and
intuition. Genius, according to the late F. W. H. Myers, is "an
up-rush of subliminal faculty." We have all heard of the distinguished
lady novelist who declares that when she has chosen her theme she is in
the habit of committing it to her subconscious mind and letting it
alone for a while. She is not aware of any mental process which goes
on, but sooner or later she finds that the theme is ripe for treatment;
she knows what she thinks about it, and the work of stating it can
profitably begin. Poets, preachers, and musicians can bear testimony
of a somewhat similar kind. The thoughts which are most valuable are
those which come unbidden, rising to the surface of consciousness from
unknown depths. The best scientific discoveries are made in much the
same way; the investigator has an intuition and forthwith sets to work
to justify it. Reason, by which we ordinarily mean the conscious
exercise of the mental faculties, plods along as if on four feet;
intuition soars on wings. Truly astonishing things are frequently done
by the subconscious mind superseding and controlling the conscious mind
in exceptional states of emotion, especially in the case of people who
are not quite normal; but there is no one, however stolid and
commonplace, who does not owe far more to his subliminal consciousness
than he does to what he calls his reason; indeed reason has
comparatively little to do with the way in which people ordinarily
conduct themselves, although we may like to think otherwise.
Now what is this subconscious mind whose importance is so great and of
whose nature we know so little? That is a question upon which
psychology has not yet pronounced, but there are not a few who regard
it as the real personality. Evidently it is not only deeper but larger
than the surface mind which we call reason. Our discovery of its
existence has taught us that our ordinary consciousness is but a tiny
corner of our personality. It has been well described as an
illuminated disc on a vast ocean of being; it is like an island in the
Pacific which is really the summit of a mountain whose base is miles
below the surface. Summit and base are one, and yet no one realises
when standing on the little island that he is perched at the very top
of a mountain peak. So it is with our everyday consciousness of
ourselves; we find it rather difficult to realise that this
consciousness is not all there is of us. And yet, when we come to
examine into the facts, the conclusion seems irresistible, that of our
truer, deeper being we are quite unconscious.
+The higher self.+--Several important inferences follow from this
position. The first is that our surface consciousness is somewhat
illusory and does not possess the sharpness and definiteness of outline
which we are accustomed to take for granted when thinking of ourselves.
To ordinary common sense nothing seems more obvious than that we know
most that is to be known about our friend John Smith, with whom we used
to go to school and who has since developed into a stolid British man
of business with few ideas and a tendency toward conservatism. John is
a stalwart, honest, commonplace kind of person, of whom brilliant
things were never prophesied and who has never been guilty of any. His
wife and children go to church on Sundays. John seldom goes himself
because it bores him, but he likes to know that religion is being
attended to, and he does not want to hear that his clergyman is
attempting any daring flights. He has a good-natured contempt for
clergymen in general because he feels somehow that, like women, they
have to be treated with half-fictitious reverence, but that they do not
count for much in the ordinary affairs of life; they are a sort of
third sex. But, according to the newer psychology, this matter-of-fact
Englishman is not what he seems even to himself. His true being is
vastly greater than he knows, and vastly greater than the world will
ever know. It belongs not to the material plane of existence but to
the plane of eternal reality. This larger self is in all probability a
perfect and eternal spiritual being integral to the being of God. His
surface self, his Philistine self, is the incarnation of some portion
of that true eternal self which is one with God. The dividing line
between the surface self and the other self is not the definite
demarcation it appears to be. To the higher self it does not exist.
To us it must seem that to all intents and purposes the two selves in a
man are two separate beings, but that is not so; they are one, although
the lower, owing to its limitations, cannot realise the fact. If my
readers want to know whether I think that the higher self is conscious
of the lower, I can only answer, Yes, I do, but I cannot prove it;
probabilities point that way. What I want to insist upon here is that
we are greater than we seem, that we have a higher self, and that our
limited consciousness does not involve a separate individuality.
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.
The great poets are the best theologians after all, for they see the
farthest. The true being is consciousness; the universe, visible and
invisible, is consciousness. The higher self of the individual man
infolds more of the consciousness of God than the lower, but lower and
higher are the same thing. This may be a difficult thought to grasp,
but the time is rapidly approaching when it will be more generally
accepted than it is now.
+The unity of humanity.+--Another inference from the theory of the
subconscious mind is that of the fundamental unity of the whole human
race. Indeed all life is fundamentally one, but there is a kinship of
man with man which precedes that of man with any other order of being.
Here again the spiritual truth cuts across what seem to be the dictates
of common sense. Common sense assumes that I and Thou are eternally
distinct, and that by no possibility can the territories of our
respective beings ever become one. But even now, and on mere everyday
grounds, we are finding reason to think otherwise. You are about to
make an observation at table and some member of your family makes it
before you; you are thinking of a certain tune and someone begins to
hum it; you have a certain purpose in mind and, lo, the same thought
finds expression in someone else, despite all probabilities. Oh, you
may remark, This is only thought transference. Precisely, but what are
you except your thought? All being, remember, is conscious of being.
The infinite consciousness sees itself as a whole; the finite
consciousness sees the same whole in part. Ultimately your being and
mine are one and we shall come to know it. Individuality only has
meaning in relation to the whole, and individual consciousness can only
be fulfilled by expanding until it embraces the whole. Nothing that
exists in your consciousness now and constitutes your self-knowledge
will ever be obliterated or ever can be, but in a higher state of
existence you will realise it to be a part of the universal stock. I
shall not cease to be I, nor you to be you; but there must be a region
of experience where we shall find that you and I are one.
+The Self is God.+--A third inference, already hinted at and presumed
in all that has gone before, is that the highest of all selves, the
ultimate Self of the universe, is God. The New Testament speaks of man
as body, soul, and spirit. The body is the thought-form through which
the individuality finds expression on our present limited plane; the
soul is a man's consciousness of himself as apart from all the rest of
existence and even from God--it is the bay seeing itself as the bay and
not as the ocean; the spirit is the true being thus limited and
expressed--it is the deathless divine within us. The soul therefore is
what we make it; the spirit we can neither make nor mar, for it is at
once our being and God's. What we are here to do is to grow the soul,
that is to manifest the true nature of the spirit, to build up that
self-realisation which is God's objective with the universe as a whole
and with every self-conscious unit in particular.
Where, then, someone will say, is the dividing line between our being
and God's? There is no dividing line except from our side. The ocean
of consciousness knows that the bay has never been separate from
itself, although the bay is only conscious of the ocean on the outer
side of its own being. But, the reader may protest, This is Pantheism.
No, it is not. Pantheism is a technical term in philosophic parlance
and means something quite different from this. It stands for a
Fate-God, a God imprisoned in His universe, a God who cannot help
Himself and does not even know what He is about, a blind force which
here breaks out into a rock and there into Ruskin and is equally
indifferent to either. But that is not my God. My God is my deeper
Self and yours too; He is the Self of the universe and knows all about
it. He is never baffled and cannot be baffled; the whole cosmic
process is one long incarnation and uprising of the being of God from
itself to itself. With Tennyson you can call this doctrine the Higher
Pantheism if you like, but it is the very antithesis of the Pantheism
which has played such a part in the history of thought.
+Its relation to free will.+--But then, another will remonstrate, it
does away with the freedom of the will. Well, here is a slippery
subject sure enough, and one upon which more nonsense has been talked
probably than any other within the range of philosophical or
theological discussion. Have I anything new to say about it? Probably
not, but I think I can focus the issue and show what we must recognise
in order to have a rational grasp of the subject. Thinkers have talked
too much in the past about the separate faculties of human nature as
though they could be divided into Reason, Feeling, Action, and so on.
But they are beginning to talk differently now. They are coming to see
that a human being cannot be cut up like that. The Reason is the whole
man thinking, judging, comparing. Feeling accompanies Reason and is
never found apart from it, for reason implies consciousness, and
without consciousness nothing that can properly be called Feeling
exists. The will is simply the whole man acting.
Now I will frankly confess that in strict logic I can find no place for
the freedom of the will. I will defy anyone to do so if he knows much
about the laws of thought. But, as the late Mr. Lecky said in his "Map
of Life," and Mr. Mallock has since pointed out in "The Reconstruction
of Belief," we are compelled to overleap logic when considering this
matter. No argument will convince us that we have not some power of
individual self-direction and self-control. The most thoroughgoing
determinist that ever lived forgets his determinism even while he
argues about it. It must be amusing even to himself to see how he
enjoys scoring off his opponent, thus taking for granted in the heat of
controversy the very freedom he sets out to deny. The assumption at
the bottom of every vigorous argument is that the other party might
have held other views, and ought to have held other views than those
assailed. The position of the determinist in effect is this: You must
believe you have no freedom to choose anything, otherwise you are to
blame for choosing wrongly. Of course the consistent determinist would
evade this _reductio ad absurdum_ by saying that he is as much
necessitated in blaming his opponent for holding wrong views as the
opponent is for refusing to give them up. He might also tell me that I
am arguing for free will in an obscurantist fashion by admitting at the
outset that in strict logic I can find no place for it. But I am not
arguing for free will at all. I am simply showing that by the very
constitution of our minds we cannot avoid taking some measure of free
will for granted. Even the determinist who scouts this view and calls
it absurd is by his own action a convincing demonstration of its truth.
+Only the Infinite has perfect freedom.+--But this contention is
something more than mere logic chopping. It points to a truth too high
for a finite mind to grasp, namely, that whatever our moral freedom may
be, it must consist with the all-directing universal will. There is no
such thing as perfect freedom in a finite being. Perfect freedom
belongs only to infinity; finiteness implies limitations. Popular
theology usually assumes, or appears to assume, that every individual
is a perfectly free agent able at all times to distinguish and to
choose between the higher and the lower, and as liable to choose the
one as the other. There is another kind of theologising, of course,
which speaks of the weakened or corrupted will due to our fallen
nature, that I must let alone for the present. What I want to point
out is that there is not, and never has been, an act of the will in
which a man, without bias in either direction, has deliberately chosen
evil in the presence of good. Under such circumstances no being in his
sober senses would ever choose evil; enlightened self-interest alone
would forbid the possibility of such a choice. Freedom of the will in
this sense has never existed. The truth is that we should not be
conscious of the possession of a will but for the conflict between
desire and duty, or the necessity of choosing between one impulse and
another. After all, the moral choices of life are but few in number.
The things we go on doing day by day are the things that for the most
part we know we must do, and we scarcely reflect upon the matter. When
some question emerges which demands a moral choice we know it at once
by the fact that we have to take our limitations into account.
Something has to be overcome if the higher is chosen, and, without that
overcoming, there is no real assertion of the will. It is no heroism
in me to avoid getting drunk, but it may mean a tremendous assertion of
the moral reserves in some poor fellow who knows the power of the drink
craving. The same observation holds good of all human life. My weak
points are not my neighbour's, and his are not mine. Neither of us is
in a position to estimate the other's strength of will, but we both
know that in our own case an absolutely unfettered moral choice has
never been made. But for our limitations and imperfections we should
know nothing whatever of the choice between right and wrong. Free
will, in the sense of unlimited freedom of choice, does not exist. The
only freedom we possess is like that of a bird in a cage; we can choose
between the higher and the lower standing ground, a choice called for
by the very fact that we are in prison, but we cannot choose where the
cage shall go.
No doubt these considerations will meet with the disapproval of some
people who think themselves orthodox. They will object to being told
that every man has a higher self than that of which he is immediately
conscious; that fundamentally the individual is one with the whole race
and with God; that no one possesses absolute free will. To them it may
seem an absurdity to maintain these positions. But if they say so,
they will convict themselves of absurdity, for, with the exception of
the last, Christian doctrine already affirms them all of Jesus.
According to the received theology, Jesus was God, and yet He did not
possess the all-controlling consciousness of the universe. He was also
man, and yet He was before all ages. All creation proceeds from and
centres in Him, and yet He was able to limit Himself in such a degree
as to be ignorant of much that was going on in His own universe. If
so-called orthodoxy finds it no difficulty to assert these things as
being true of Jesus, it will not find it easy to show good reason why
the same should not be true of all humanity. For the moment I neither
assert nor deny the uniqueness of Jesus. All I am concerned to show is
that if it is not intellectually _impossible_ to affirm certain things
about the consciousness of Jesus and the limitation of His true being
in His earthly life, it is not impossible to affirm them of mankind.
Some of my critics have contended that this view of the relationship of
man to God hails not from Palestine but from Oxford and is an outcome
of the philosophy of T. H. Green. But I think it can be shown that its
pedigree is considerably longer than that. Whether it hails from
Palestine or not, it is explicitly stated in the fourth gospel: "He
that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew
us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the
Father in me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself:
but the Father that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works. Believe me
that I am in the Father, and the Father in me." Those who object to my
statement of the fundamental identity of God and man will have to
explain away such passages as this, and there are plenty of them. But,
it may be urged, this is meant to apply only to Jesus. That I do not
believe; I think the exceedingly able writer of the fourth gospel knew
better; but for the moment I will not contest the point. Granted that
it does apply only to Jesus, what then? The very things which the
critics declare to be impossible of personality in general in relation
to God, they are affirming already of at least one personality, that of
Jesus. If Jesus was God and yet prayed to God, if His consciousness
was finite and yet one with the infinite, it is clear that in this one
instance the seemingly impossible was not impossible. Those who insist
upon the fundamental distinction between human personality and the
being of God are thus on the horns of a dilemma. Present-day orthodoxy
cannot consistently attack this position. The only telling criticism
that can be directed against it is that which proceeds from the side of
scientific monism. A thoroughgoing monist might reasonably contend
that up to a certain point I have been arguing for a monistic view of
the universe, in company with practically the whole scientific world,
and have then given the case away by admitting a certain amount of
individual freedom. I confess it looks like it; I have had to face the
antinomy. I see that there is no escape from the assertion of the
fundamental unity of all existence, and yet by the very constitution of
the human mind we are compelled to take for granted a certain amount of
individual initiative and self-direction. I think of the human will
much as I do about the mariner's compass. It is well known that the
needle does not always point steadily and consistently to the pole; its
tiny aberrations have to be taken into account. But these are no real
hindrance to the sailing of the ship, and the compass itself cannot run
away.
Again, some of my friends have been pointing out that, while the New
Theology regards all mankind as "Being of one substance with the
Father," our consciousness of that being is our own. I freely admit
this while maintaining that there is no substance but consciousness.
What other kind of substance can there be? Therefore I hold that when
our finite consciousness ceases to be finite there will be no
distinction whatever between ours and God's. The distinction between
finite and infinite is not eternal. The being of God is a complex
unity, containing within itself and harmonising every form of
self-consciousness that can possibly exist. No one need be afraid that
in believing this he is assenting to the final obliteration of his own
personality; if such obliteration were possible, our present
personality could possess no permanent value even for God. No form of
self-consciousness can ever perish. It completes itself in becoming
infinite, but it cannot be destroyed.