Chapter XII. The World And God.The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not“divine”! The formula“natura sive deus”is a monstrous misuse of the word“deus,”if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. God is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask“Why?”God is the immeasurable fulness of Being, nature is indeed diverse in the manifoldness of her productions, but she is nevertheless limited, and her possibilities are restricted within narrow limits. God is the unrestrained, and everlasting omnipotence itself, and the perfect wisdom; nature is indeed mighty enough in the attainment of her ends, but how often is she obstructed, how often does she fail to reach them, and how seldom does she do so perfectly and without mistakes? She shows wisdom, indeed, cunning in her products, subtlety and daintiness, taste and beauty, all these often in an overwhelming degree, yet just as often she brings forth what[pg 361]is meaningless, contradictory and mutually hurtful, traverses her own lines, and bewilders us by the brutality, the thoughtlessness, and purposelessness, the crookedness, incompleteness, and distortedness of her operations. And what is true of the world of external nature is true in a far greater degree of the world of history. Nature is not a god, but a demigod, says Aristotle. And on this, Pantheism with its creed,“natura sive deus,”makes shipwreck. The words of thiscredoare either a mere tautology, and“deus”is misused as a new name for nature; or they are false. It is not possible to transfer to nature and the world all the great ideas and feelings which the religious mind cherishes under the name of“God.”On the other hand, nature is really, as Aristotle said, δαιμονία, that is, strange, mysterious, and marvellous, indicating God, and pointing, all naturalism and superficial consideration notwithstanding, as we have seen, to something outside of and beyond itself. Religion demands no more than this. It does not insist upon finding a solution for all the riddles of theoretical world-lore. It is not distressed because the course of nature often seems to our eyes confused, and to our judgment contradictory and unintelligible at a hundred places and in a hundred respects. On the contrary, that this is the case is to religion in another aspect a strong stimulus and corroboration.“The world is an odd fellow; may God soon make an end of it,”said Luther, and thus gave a crude but truly religious[pg 362]parallel to the words of Aristotle, ἡ γἀρ φύσις δαιμονία ἀλλ᾽ οὐ θεία, (Aristot.“De Divin. in Somn.,”c. ii.). It is part of the very essence of religion, as we have seen, to read in the pages of nature, insufficiency, illusion, and perplexities, and to be made thereby impatient and desirous of penetrating to the true nature of things. Religion does not claim to be directly deducible out of a consideration of nature; it demands only the right and freedom to interpret the world in its own way. And for this it is sufficient that this world affords those hints and suggestions for its convictions that we have seen it does afford. To form clear ideas in regard to the actual relations of the infinite to the finite, and of God to the world, and of what religion calls creation, preservation, and eternal providence, self-revelation in the world and in history, is hardly the task of religion at all, but rather pertains to our general speculative instinct, which can only satisfy itself with the help of imagination. Attempts of this kind have often been made. They are by no means valueless, for even if no real knowledge can be gained by this method, we may perhaps get an analogue of it which will help us to understand existence and phenomena, and to define our position, as well as to give at least provisional answers to many pressing questions (such, for instance, as the problem of theodicy).If we study the world unprejudiced by the naturalistic interpretation, or having shaken ourselves free from it, we are most powerfully impressed by one fundamental[pg 363]phenomenon in all existence: it is the fact of evolution. It challenges attention and interpretation, and analogies quickly reveal themselves which give something of the same trend to all such interpretations. From stage to stage existence advances onwards, from the world of large masses subject only to the laws of mechanics, to the delicately complex play of the forces of development in growth and other vital processes. The nature of the forces is revealed in ever higher expression, and at the same time in ever more closely connected series of stages. Even between the inorganic and the organic there is an intermediate stage—crystal formation—which is no longer entirely of the one, yet not of the other. And in the organic world evolution reveals itself most clearly of all; from the crudest and simplest it presses onwards to the most delicate and complex. In the corporeal as in the psychical, in the whole as in each of its parts, there are ever higher stages, sometimes far apart, sometimes close together. However we picture to ourselves the way in which evolution accomplishes itself in time, we can scarcely describe it without using such expressions as“nature advances upwards step by step,”“it presses and strives upwards and unfolds itself stage by stage.”And it is with us as it was with Plato; we inform the world with a soul, with a desire and endeavour which continually expresses itself in higher and higher forms. And it is with us also as with Fichte; we speak of the will which, unconscious of itself, pours itself forth in[pg 364]unconscious and lifeless nature, and then on this foundation strives forward, expressing its activity in ever higher developments, breaking forth in life, sensation, and desire, and finally coming to itself in conscious existence and will. The whole world seems to us a being which wills to become, presses restlessly forward, and passes from the potential to the actual, realising itself. And the height of its self-realisation is conscious, willing life.This outlook is lofty and significant, it supplies a guiding clue by which the facts of life and nature can be arranged. The religious outlook, too, when it wishes to indulge in speculation, can make use of this guiding thread. It will then say: God established the world as“a will to existence, to consciousness, to spirit.”He established it, not as complete, but as becoming. He does not build it as a house, but plants it, like a flower, in the seed, that it may grow, that it may struggle upwards stage by stage to fuller existence, aspiring with toil and endeavour towards the height where, in the image of the Creator, as a free and reasonable spirit capable of personality, it may realise the aim of its being. Thus the world isofGod, that is, its rudiments came from God, and it istoGod, in the purpose of likeness to God. And it is imbued with the breath of Godhead which moves in it and impels it onwards, with the logos of the everlasting Zeus of whom Cleanthes sings, with the spirit of Jehovah whom Isaiah and the Psalmist praise, and[pg 365]whom the poet of the Creation figuratively paints; the divine breath is in everything that lives, from grass to flower, from animal to man. But it is implanted as becoming. And in regard to this, religion can say of the whole world what it says of man. For man, too, is not given as a finished product, either as regards the genus or the individual, but as a rudiment, with his destiny to work out, in historical becoming, by realising what is inherent in him. We call this freedom. And an adumbration of such freedom, which is the aim of self-realisation, would help us to penetrate deeply into the nature of things. Many riddles and apparent contradictions could be fitted in with this view of things: the unity of the world, and yet the gradations; the relationship of all living creatures, the unity of all psychical life, and yet the uniqueness of the rational spirit; causal concatenation, yet guidance by means of the highest ideas and purposes; the tentativeness, illogicalness, and ineffectiveness of nature, unconsciously pressing forward along uncertain paths, yet the directness and purposefulness of the main lines of evolution in general. This God-awakened will to be lies at the roots of the mysteries of development in all living creatures, of the unconscious purposiveness of instinctive action, of the gradually ascending development of psychical life and its organ. Operating in crystals and plants purely as a formative impulse and“entelechy,”it awakes in the bodies of animals more and more as“soul.”Then it awakes fully in man, and in him, in[pg 366]an entirely new phase of real free development, it builds itself up to spirit. It resembles a stream whose waves flow casually and transiently in animal consciousness, and are soon withdrawn again, to break forth anew at another place, in the personal spirit, where they attain to permanent indissoluble form, since they have now at last attained to self-realisation, and fulfilled the purpose of all cosmic existence, the reflecting of the eternal personality in the creature. But it is only in human history that what was prepared for in natural evolution is completed.The riddle of theodicy thus becomes easier, for what surrounds us in nature and history has not come direct from the hand of eternal wisdom, but is in the first place the product of the developing, striving world, which only gradually and after many mistakes and failures works out what is inherent in it as eternal idea and aim. We see and blame its mistakes, for instance in our own human structure. We see the deficiencies in the historical course of things. But when we find fault we do not see that evolution and self-realisation and freedom are more worthy of praise than ready-made existence incapable of independent action.This principle of development, wherever it is regarded as“world-soul”or as“will”or as the“unconscious,”is frequently, through pantheism and the doctrine of immanence, made equivalent with the object of religion, with God. This is an impossible undertaking. We cannot worship what only reaches its full development[pg 367]in ourselves. But that wecanworship, and that it is only in the feeling of complete dependence that the full depth of what is developing within us to conscious life reveals itself, proves better than anything else that God is above all“World-will.”It was more than allegory when Plato in Timæus set the“eternal father and creator of the world”above all soul and psyche. And it was religion that broke through when Fichte in his little book,“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”set being before becoming, and God above the creatures struggling towards self-realisation. Religion knows in advance that this is so. And calm reflection confirms it. All that we have already learnt of the dependence, conditionedness, and contingent nature of the world is equally true of a world“evolving itself”out of its potentiality, of a will to existence, and of an unconscious realising itself. No flower can grow and develop without being first implicit in the seed. Nothing can attain to“actuality,”to realisation, that was not potentially implied in the beginning. But who originated the seed of the world-flower? Who enclosed within it the“tendencies,”the“rudiments”which realise themselves in evolution? Invariably“the actual is before the potential”and Being before Becoming. A world could only become if it were called to become by an everlasting Being. God planting the world-flower that it might radiate forth in its blossoms His own image and likeness, is an allegory which may well symbolise for religion the relation between God and the[pg 368]world. And thus it is possible to draw the outline of a religious outlook on the world, into which the results of world-lore could well be fitted. This frame was constructed by Plato on the basis of a religious study of things, and after Plato it was first definitely outlined in Fichte's too much forgotten but unforgettable books“Bestimmung des Menschen”and“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”and it is thus a new creation of the great German idealism and its mighty faith. And it is not easy to see why it should be abandoned, why we should give it up in favour of an irreligious, semi-naturalistic outlook on the world.One thing, however, must be kept constantly in mind: even such an interpretation of the world as this is poetry, not knowledge. There is a poetry of the will to live, of the unconscious, which is struggling towards existence, but there is no philosophy. There are only analogies and hints of what goes on at the foundations of the world. In particular, the unconscious creative impulse in all living organisms, this“will”towards form, its relationship with instinct and the relationship of instinct to conscious psyche, afford us a step-ladder of illustrations, and an illustration of the step-ladder of the“will towards existence,”which invite us to overstep the bounds of our knowledge, and indulge in our imagination. We can say nothing of pre-conscious consciousness and will, we can at best only make guesses about them. We cannot think definitely of a general world-will, which wills and[pg 369]aspires in individual beings; we cannot picture to ourselves the emergence of the individual“souls”of animals and man from a universal psyche. Imagination plays a larger part here than clear thinking. And for our present purpose it must be clearly borne in mind that religion does not require any speculative construction of theories of the world. But“you shall know that it is your imagination which creates the world for you.”108And if a speculative construction be desired, it will always be most easily attained along these lines, and will in this way come nearest to our modern knowledge of nature. We must remember, too, that the objections which may be urged against this form of speculation are equally applicable against any other. For the origin of the individual psyche, the graduated series of its forms, the development of one after the other, and of that of the child from that of its parents, are riddles which cannot be solved by any speculative thinking. Monadology, theories of the pre-existence of the soul, creationism, or the current traducianism—which to-day, with its partly or wholly materialistic basis, is just as naïve as the older—all reveal equal darkness. But the speculation we have hinted at, if it gives no explanation, at least supplies a framework for many questions which attract us, and do so even from the point of view of religion: for instance the collective, diffuse, and almost divisible nature of consciousness in the lower stages, its increasing and ever more strict centralisation, the natural[pg 370]relationship of the psychical in man to the psychical in general, and yet its incommensurability and superiority to all the world.But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative illustrations of the relation of God to the world, which can at best be only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in the world God is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the reason and cause of all being. For this it has names like creation, providence, self-revelation of God in the world, and it lives by the mysteries which are indicated under these names. The mysteries themselves it recognises in vague or naïve forms of conception long before it attempts any definite formulation. If dogmatics begin with the latter, some form or other of the stiff and wooden doctrines ofconcursus, ofinfluxus ordinariusandextraordinariususually develops with many other subtleties, which are nothing more than attempts to formulate the divine influence in finite terms, and to think of it as a force along with other forces. Two series of causes are usually distinguished; the system of causes and effects within the world, according to which everything natural takes place, the“causæ secundariæ”; and in addition to these the divine causality co-operating and influencing the others, ordering them with gentle and delicate pressure, and guiding them towards their true[pg 371]end, and which may also reveal itself as“extraordinaria”in miracles and signs. This double operation is regarded as giving rise to all phenomena, and in it consists guidance, dispensation, providence, and natural revelation.This kind of conception is extremely primitive, and is unfavourable to religion itself, for in it mystery is done away with and arranged according to rubric, and everything has become quite“simple.”Moreover, this doctrine has a necessary tendency to turn into the dreaded“Deism.”According to the deistic view, God made the world in the beginning, and set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther assistance was given, and everything went on of itself. This theory is incredibly profane, and strikes God out of the world, and nature, and history at a single stroke, substituting for Him the course of a well-arranged system of clockwork. But the former theory is a very unsatisfactory and doubtful makeshift as compared with that of deism, for it is impossible to see why, if God arranged thesecausæ secundariæ, He should have made them so weak and ineffective that they need all these ingeniousconcursus,influxus,determinationes,gubernationes, and the like. Both theories are crude fabrications of the dogmatists, and they have nothing left in them of the piety they were intended to protect, nor do they become any better in this respect, however many attempts are made to define them. Religion possesses, without the aid of any stilted and artificial theories, all the things[pg 372]we have named above, and especially and most directly the last of them, namely, the experience of the revelation and communication of the Divine in the great developments and movements of spiritual and religious history. And it finds its corroboration and justification and freedom not by way of dogmatics but of criticism. It is impossible to distinguish artificially two sets of causes, and to give to the world what is alleged to be of the world, and to God what is alleged to be of God. But it is permissible to point to the insufficiency of our causal study in general, and to the limits of our knowledge. Even when we have established it as a fact that all phenomena are linked together in a chain of causes we are still far from having discovered how things actually come to pass. Every qualitative effect and change is entirely hidden from us as far as the cause of its coming about and its real and inner nature are concerned. Every effect which in kind or quantity goes beyond its cause (and we cannot make anything of the domain of living forms, of the psychical and of history without these), shows us that we are still only at the surface. Indeed, even mechanical action, often alleged to be entirely intelligible, such as the transference or transformation of energy, is, as we have seen, a complete riddle. In addition, all causality runs its course in time, and therefore partakes of all the defects and limitations of our views of time. And finally we are guided by the Kantian antinomy regarding the conditions of what is[pg 373]“given.”It destroys the charm of the“purely causal”point of view by showing that this in itself cannot be made complete and is therefore contradictory. Moreover, in the phenomena of life, and in the fact that consciousness and will control our corporeal processes, and yet can hardly be thought of as a cause“co-operating”with other causes, we found an analogy, if a weak and obscure one, of the relation that a divine teleology and governing of the world may bear to mundane phenomena. Thus mystery remains in all its strength and is not replaced by the surrogate of a too simple and shallow dogmatic theory. In confessing mystery and resting content with it we are justified by reflection on the nature and antinomy of our knowledge.All this is true also of what religion means by creation. In the feeling of complete humility, in its experience of absolute dependence and conditionedness, the creature becomes conscious of itself as a creature, and experiences with full clearness what it means to be a“creature”and“created.”The dogmatic theory is here again only a surrogate of mystery. And again critical self-reflection proves a better guide than any theory of creation, which is quite in its place as a means of expression in religious discourse and poetry, but is quite insufficient as true knowledge. That we must but cannot think of this world either as beginning or as not-beginning is the analogue in knowledge of what religion experiences in mystery; and that this contingent and[pg 374]conditioned world is founded in everlasting, necessary, true Being, is the analogue of what religion possesses and knows through devout feeling, more directly and clearly than by any thinking, of the relations of God to the world.
Chapter XII. The World And God.The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not“divine”! The formula“natura sive deus”is a monstrous misuse of the word“deus,”if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. God is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask“Why?”God is the immeasurable fulness of Being, nature is indeed diverse in the manifoldness of her productions, but she is nevertheless limited, and her possibilities are restricted within narrow limits. God is the unrestrained, and everlasting omnipotence itself, and the perfect wisdom; nature is indeed mighty enough in the attainment of her ends, but how often is she obstructed, how often does she fail to reach them, and how seldom does she do so perfectly and without mistakes? She shows wisdom, indeed, cunning in her products, subtlety and daintiness, taste and beauty, all these often in an overwhelming degree, yet just as often she brings forth what[pg 361]is meaningless, contradictory and mutually hurtful, traverses her own lines, and bewilders us by the brutality, the thoughtlessness, and purposelessness, the crookedness, incompleteness, and distortedness of her operations. And what is true of the world of external nature is true in a far greater degree of the world of history. Nature is not a god, but a demigod, says Aristotle. And on this, Pantheism with its creed,“natura sive deus,”makes shipwreck. The words of thiscredoare either a mere tautology, and“deus”is misused as a new name for nature; or they are false. It is not possible to transfer to nature and the world all the great ideas and feelings which the religious mind cherishes under the name of“God.”On the other hand, nature is really, as Aristotle said, δαιμονία, that is, strange, mysterious, and marvellous, indicating God, and pointing, all naturalism and superficial consideration notwithstanding, as we have seen, to something outside of and beyond itself. Religion demands no more than this. It does not insist upon finding a solution for all the riddles of theoretical world-lore. It is not distressed because the course of nature often seems to our eyes confused, and to our judgment contradictory and unintelligible at a hundred places and in a hundred respects. On the contrary, that this is the case is to religion in another aspect a strong stimulus and corroboration.“The world is an odd fellow; may God soon make an end of it,”said Luther, and thus gave a crude but truly religious[pg 362]parallel to the words of Aristotle, ἡ γἀρ φύσις δαιμονία ἀλλ᾽ οὐ θεία, (Aristot.“De Divin. in Somn.,”c. ii.). It is part of the very essence of religion, as we have seen, to read in the pages of nature, insufficiency, illusion, and perplexities, and to be made thereby impatient and desirous of penetrating to the true nature of things. Religion does not claim to be directly deducible out of a consideration of nature; it demands only the right and freedom to interpret the world in its own way. And for this it is sufficient that this world affords those hints and suggestions for its convictions that we have seen it does afford. To form clear ideas in regard to the actual relations of the infinite to the finite, and of God to the world, and of what religion calls creation, preservation, and eternal providence, self-revelation in the world and in history, is hardly the task of religion at all, but rather pertains to our general speculative instinct, which can only satisfy itself with the help of imagination. Attempts of this kind have often been made. They are by no means valueless, for even if no real knowledge can be gained by this method, we may perhaps get an analogue of it which will help us to understand existence and phenomena, and to define our position, as well as to give at least provisional answers to many pressing questions (such, for instance, as the problem of theodicy).If we study the world unprejudiced by the naturalistic interpretation, or having shaken ourselves free from it, we are most powerfully impressed by one fundamental[pg 363]phenomenon in all existence: it is the fact of evolution. It challenges attention and interpretation, and analogies quickly reveal themselves which give something of the same trend to all such interpretations. From stage to stage existence advances onwards, from the world of large masses subject only to the laws of mechanics, to the delicately complex play of the forces of development in growth and other vital processes. The nature of the forces is revealed in ever higher expression, and at the same time in ever more closely connected series of stages. Even between the inorganic and the organic there is an intermediate stage—crystal formation—which is no longer entirely of the one, yet not of the other. And in the organic world evolution reveals itself most clearly of all; from the crudest and simplest it presses onwards to the most delicate and complex. In the corporeal as in the psychical, in the whole as in each of its parts, there are ever higher stages, sometimes far apart, sometimes close together. However we picture to ourselves the way in which evolution accomplishes itself in time, we can scarcely describe it without using such expressions as“nature advances upwards step by step,”“it presses and strives upwards and unfolds itself stage by stage.”And it is with us as it was with Plato; we inform the world with a soul, with a desire and endeavour which continually expresses itself in higher and higher forms. And it is with us also as with Fichte; we speak of the will which, unconscious of itself, pours itself forth in[pg 364]unconscious and lifeless nature, and then on this foundation strives forward, expressing its activity in ever higher developments, breaking forth in life, sensation, and desire, and finally coming to itself in conscious existence and will. The whole world seems to us a being which wills to become, presses restlessly forward, and passes from the potential to the actual, realising itself. And the height of its self-realisation is conscious, willing life.This outlook is lofty and significant, it supplies a guiding clue by which the facts of life and nature can be arranged. The religious outlook, too, when it wishes to indulge in speculation, can make use of this guiding thread. It will then say: God established the world as“a will to existence, to consciousness, to spirit.”He established it, not as complete, but as becoming. He does not build it as a house, but plants it, like a flower, in the seed, that it may grow, that it may struggle upwards stage by stage to fuller existence, aspiring with toil and endeavour towards the height where, in the image of the Creator, as a free and reasonable spirit capable of personality, it may realise the aim of its being. Thus the world isofGod, that is, its rudiments came from God, and it istoGod, in the purpose of likeness to God. And it is imbued with the breath of Godhead which moves in it and impels it onwards, with the logos of the everlasting Zeus of whom Cleanthes sings, with the spirit of Jehovah whom Isaiah and the Psalmist praise, and[pg 365]whom the poet of the Creation figuratively paints; the divine breath is in everything that lives, from grass to flower, from animal to man. But it is implanted as becoming. And in regard to this, religion can say of the whole world what it says of man. For man, too, is not given as a finished product, either as regards the genus or the individual, but as a rudiment, with his destiny to work out, in historical becoming, by realising what is inherent in him. We call this freedom. And an adumbration of such freedom, which is the aim of self-realisation, would help us to penetrate deeply into the nature of things. Many riddles and apparent contradictions could be fitted in with this view of things: the unity of the world, and yet the gradations; the relationship of all living creatures, the unity of all psychical life, and yet the uniqueness of the rational spirit; causal concatenation, yet guidance by means of the highest ideas and purposes; the tentativeness, illogicalness, and ineffectiveness of nature, unconsciously pressing forward along uncertain paths, yet the directness and purposefulness of the main lines of evolution in general. This God-awakened will to be lies at the roots of the mysteries of development in all living creatures, of the unconscious purposiveness of instinctive action, of the gradually ascending development of psychical life and its organ. Operating in crystals and plants purely as a formative impulse and“entelechy,”it awakes in the bodies of animals more and more as“soul.”Then it awakes fully in man, and in him, in[pg 366]an entirely new phase of real free development, it builds itself up to spirit. It resembles a stream whose waves flow casually and transiently in animal consciousness, and are soon withdrawn again, to break forth anew at another place, in the personal spirit, where they attain to permanent indissoluble form, since they have now at last attained to self-realisation, and fulfilled the purpose of all cosmic existence, the reflecting of the eternal personality in the creature. But it is only in human history that what was prepared for in natural evolution is completed.The riddle of theodicy thus becomes easier, for what surrounds us in nature and history has not come direct from the hand of eternal wisdom, but is in the first place the product of the developing, striving world, which only gradually and after many mistakes and failures works out what is inherent in it as eternal idea and aim. We see and blame its mistakes, for instance in our own human structure. We see the deficiencies in the historical course of things. But when we find fault we do not see that evolution and self-realisation and freedom are more worthy of praise than ready-made existence incapable of independent action.This principle of development, wherever it is regarded as“world-soul”or as“will”or as the“unconscious,”is frequently, through pantheism and the doctrine of immanence, made equivalent with the object of religion, with God. This is an impossible undertaking. We cannot worship what only reaches its full development[pg 367]in ourselves. But that wecanworship, and that it is only in the feeling of complete dependence that the full depth of what is developing within us to conscious life reveals itself, proves better than anything else that God is above all“World-will.”It was more than allegory when Plato in Timæus set the“eternal father and creator of the world”above all soul and psyche. And it was religion that broke through when Fichte in his little book,“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”set being before becoming, and God above the creatures struggling towards self-realisation. Religion knows in advance that this is so. And calm reflection confirms it. All that we have already learnt of the dependence, conditionedness, and contingent nature of the world is equally true of a world“evolving itself”out of its potentiality, of a will to existence, and of an unconscious realising itself. No flower can grow and develop without being first implicit in the seed. Nothing can attain to“actuality,”to realisation, that was not potentially implied in the beginning. But who originated the seed of the world-flower? Who enclosed within it the“tendencies,”the“rudiments”which realise themselves in evolution? Invariably“the actual is before the potential”and Being before Becoming. A world could only become if it were called to become by an everlasting Being. God planting the world-flower that it might radiate forth in its blossoms His own image and likeness, is an allegory which may well symbolise for religion the relation between God and the[pg 368]world. And thus it is possible to draw the outline of a religious outlook on the world, into which the results of world-lore could well be fitted. This frame was constructed by Plato on the basis of a religious study of things, and after Plato it was first definitely outlined in Fichte's too much forgotten but unforgettable books“Bestimmung des Menschen”and“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”and it is thus a new creation of the great German idealism and its mighty faith. And it is not easy to see why it should be abandoned, why we should give it up in favour of an irreligious, semi-naturalistic outlook on the world.One thing, however, must be kept constantly in mind: even such an interpretation of the world as this is poetry, not knowledge. There is a poetry of the will to live, of the unconscious, which is struggling towards existence, but there is no philosophy. There are only analogies and hints of what goes on at the foundations of the world. In particular, the unconscious creative impulse in all living organisms, this“will”towards form, its relationship with instinct and the relationship of instinct to conscious psyche, afford us a step-ladder of illustrations, and an illustration of the step-ladder of the“will towards existence,”which invite us to overstep the bounds of our knowledge, and indulge in our imagination. We can say nothing of pre-conscious consciousness and will, we can at best only make guesses about them. We cannot think definitely of a general world-will, which wills and[pg 369]aspires in individual beings; we cannot picture to ourselves the emergence of the individual“souls”of animals and man from a universal psyche. Imagination plays a larger part here than clear thinking. And for our present purpose it must be clearly borne in mind that religion does not require any speculative construction of theories of the world. But“you shall know that it is your imagination which creates the world for you.”108And if a speculative construction be desired, it will always be most easily attained along these lines, and will in this way come nearest to our modern knowledge of nature. We must remember, too, that the objections which may be urged against this form of speculation are equally applicable against any other. For the origin of the individual psyche, the graduated series of its forms, the development of one after the other, and of that of the child from that of its parents, are riddles which cannot be solved by any speculative thinking. Monadology, theories of the pre-existence of the soul, creationism, or the current traducianism—which to-day, with its partly or wholly materialistic basis, is just as naïve as the older—all reveal equal darkness. But the speculation we have hinted at, if it gives no explanation, at least supplies a framework for many questions which attract us, and do so even from the point of view of religion: for instance the collective, diffuse, and almost divisible nature of consciousness in the lower stages, its increasing and ever more strict centralisation, the natural[pg 370]relationship of the psychical in man to the psychical in general, and yet its incommensurability and superiority to all the world.But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative illustrations of the relation of God to the world, which can at best be only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in the world God is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the reason and cause of all being. For this it has names like creation, providence, self-revelation of God in the world, and it lives by the mysteries which are indicated under these names. The mysteries themselves it recognises in vague or naïve forms of conception long before it attempts any definite formulation. If dogmatics begin with the latter, some form or other of the stiff and wooden doctrines ofconcursus, ofinfluxus ordinariusandextraordinariususually develops with many other subtleties, which are nothing more than attempts to formulate the divine influence in finite terms, and to think of it as a force along with other forces. Two series of causes are usually distinguished; the system of causes and effects within the world, according to which everything natural takes place, the“causæ secundariæ”; and in addition to these the divine causality co-operating and influencing the others, ordering them with gentle and delicate pressure, and guiding them towards their true[pg 371]end, and which may also reveal itself as“extraordinaria”in miracles and signs. This double operation is regarded as giving rise to all phenomena, and in it consists guidance, dispensation, providence, and natural revelation.This kind of conception is extremely primitive, and is unfavourable to religion itself, for in it mystery is done away with and arranged according to rubric, and everything has become quite“simple.”Moreover, this doctrine has a necessary tendency to turn into the dreaded“Deism.”According to the deistic view, God made the world in the beginning, and set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther assistance was given, and everything went on of itself. This theory is incredibly profane, and strikes God out of the world, and nature, and history at a single stroke, substituting for Him the course of a well-arranged system of clockwork. But the former theory is a very unsatisfactory and doubtful makeshift as compared with that of deism, for it is impossible to see why, if God arranged thesecausæ secundariæ, He should have made them so weak and ineffective that they need all these ingeniousconcursus,influxus,determinationes,gubernationes, and the like. Both theories are crude fabrications of the dogmatists, and they have nothing left in them of the piety they were intended to protect, nor do they become any better in this respect, however many attempts are made to define them. Religion possesses, without the aid of any stilted and artificial theories, all the things[pg 372]we have named above, and especially and most directly the last of them, namely, the experience of the revelation and communication of the Divine in the great developments and movements of spiritual and religious history. And it finds its corroboration and justification and freedom not by way of dogmatics but of criticism. It is impossible to distinguish artificially two sets of causes, and to give to the world what is alleged to be of the world, and to God what is alleged to be of God. But it is permissible to point to the insufficiency of our causal study in general, and to the limits of our knowledge. Even when we have established it as a fact that all phenomena are linked together in a chain of causes we are still far from having discovered how things actually come to pass. Every qualitative effect and change is entirely hidden from us as far as the cause of its coming about and its real and inner nature are concerned. Every effect which in kind or quantity goes beyond its cause (and we cannot make anything of the domain of living forms, of the psychical and of history without these), shows us that we are still only at the surface. Indeed, even mechanical action, often alleged to be entirely intelligible, such as the transference or transformation of energy, is, as we have seen, a complete riddle. In addition, all causality runs its course in time, and therefore partakes of all the defects and limitations of our views of time. And finally we are guided by the Kantian antinomy regarding the conditions of what is[pg 373]“given.”It destroys the charm of the“purely causal”point of view by showing that this in itself cannot be made complete and is therefore contradictory. Moreover, in the phenomena of life, and in the fact that consciousness and will control our corporeal processes, and yet can hardly be thought of as a cause“co-operating”with other causes, we found an analogy, if a weak and obscure one, of the relation that a divine teleology and governing of the world may bear to mundane phenomena. Thus mystery remains in all its strength and is not replaced by the surrogate of a too simple and shallow dogmatic theory. In confessing mystery and resting content with it we are justified by reflection on the nature and antinomy of our knowledge.All this is true also of what religion means by creation. In the feeling of complete humility, in its experience of absolute dependence and conditionedness, the creature becomes conscious of itself as a creature, and experiences with full clearness what it means to be a“creature”and“created.”The dogmatic theory is here again only a surrogate of mystery. And again critical self-reflection proves a better guide than any theory of creation, which is quite in its place as a means of expression in religious discourse and poetry, but is quite insufficient as true knowledge. That we must but cannot think of this world either as beginning or as not-beginning is the analogue in knowledge of what religion experiences in mystery; and that this contingent and[pg 374]conditioned world is founded in everlasting, necessary, true Being, is the analogue of what religion possesses and knows through devout feeling, more directly and clearly than by any thinking, of the relations of God to the world.
Chapter XII. The World And God.The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not“divine”! The formula“natura sive deus”is a monstrous misuse of the word“deus,”if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. God is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask“Why?”God is the immeasurable fulness of Being, nature is indeed diverse in the manifoldness of her productions, but she is nevertheless limited, and her possibilities are restricted within narrow limits. God is the unrestrained, and everlasting omnipotence itself, and the perfect wisdom; nature is indeed mighty enough in the attainment of her ends, but how often is she obstructed, how often does she fail to reach them, and how seldom does she do so perfectly and without mistakes? She shows wisdom, indeed, cunning in her products, subtlety and daintiness, taste and beauty, all these often in an overwhelming degree, yet just as often she brings forth what[pg 361]is meaningless, contradictory and mutually hurtful, traverses her own lines, and bewilders us by the brutality, the thoughtlessness, and purposelessness, the crookedness, incompleteness, and distortedness of her operations. And what is true of the world of external nature is true in a far greater degree of the world of history. Nature is not a god, but a demigod, says Aristotle. And on this, Pantheism with its creed,“natura sive deus,”makes shipwreck. The words of thiscredoare either a mere tautology, and“deus”is misused as a new name for nature; or they are false. It is not possible to transfer to nature and the world all the great ideas and feelings which the religious mind cherishes under the name of“God.”On the other hand, nature is really, as Aristotle said, δαιμονία, that is, strange, mysterious, and marvellous, indicating God, and pointing, all naturalism and superficial consideration notwithstanding, as we have seen, to something outside of and beyond itself. Religion demands no more than this. It does not insist upon finding a solution for all the riddles of theoretical world-lore. It is not distressed because the course of nature often seems to our eyes confused, and to our judgment contradictory and unintelligible at a hundred places and in a hundred respects. On the contrary, that this is the case is to religion in another aspect a strong stimulus and corroboration.“The world is an odd fellow; may God soon make an end of it,”said Luther, and thus gave a crude but truly religious[pg 362]parallel to the words of Aristotle, ἡ γἀρ φύσις δαιμονία ἀλλ᾽ οὐ θεία, (Aristot.“De Divin. in Somn.,”c. ii.). It is part of the very essence of religion, as we have seen, to read in the pages of nature, insufficiency, illusion, and perplexities, and to be made thereby impatient and desirous of penetrating to the true nature of things. Religion does not claim to be directly deducible out of a consideration of nature; it demands only the right and freedom to interpret the world in its own way. And for this it is sufficient that this world affords those hints and suggestions for its convictions that we have seen it does afford. To form clear ideas in regard to the actual relations of the infinite to the finite, and of God to the world, and of what religion calls creation, preservation, and eternal providence, self-revelation in the world and in history, is hardly the task of religion at all, but rather pertains to our general speculative instinct, which can only satisfy itself with the help of imagination. Attempts of this kind have often been made. They are by no means valueless, for even if no real knowledge can be gained by this method, we may perhaps get an analogue of it which will help us to understand existence and phenomena, and to define our position, as well as to give at least provisional answers to many pressing questions (such, for instance, as the problem of theodicy).If we study the world unprejudiced by the naturalistic interpretation, or having shaken ourselves free from it, we are most powerfully impressed by one fundamental[pg 363]phenomenon in all existence: it is the fact of evolution. It challenges attention and interpretation, and analogies quickly reveal themselves which give something of the same trend to all such interpretations. From stage to stage existence advances onwards, from the world of large masses subject only to the laws of mechanics, to the delicately complex play of the forces of development in growth and other vital processes. The nature of the forces is revealed in ever higher expression, and at the same time in ever more closely connected series of stages. Even between the inorganic and the organic there is an intermediate stage—crystal formation—which is no longer entirely of the one, yet not of the other. And in the organic world evolution reveals itself most clearly of all; from the crudest and simplest it presses onwards to the most delicate and complex. In the corporeal as in the psychical, in the whole as in each of its parts, there are ever higher stages, sometimes far apart, sometimes close together. However we picture to ourselves the way in which evolution accomplishes itself in time, we can scarcely describe it without using such expressions as“nature advances upwards step by step,”“it presses and strives upwards and unfolds itself stage by stage.”And it is with us as it was with Plato; we inform the world with a soul, with a desire and endeavour which continually expresses itself in higher and higher forms. And it is with us also as with Fichte; we speak of the will which, unconscious of itself, pours itself forth in[pg 364]unconscious and lifeless nature, and then on this foundation strives forward, expressing its activity in ever higher developments, breaking forth in life, sensation, and desire, and finally coming to itself in conscious existence and will. The whole world seems to us a being which wills to become, presses restlessly forward, and passes from the potential to the actual, realising itself. And the height of its self-realisation is conscious, willing life.This outlook is lofty and significant, it supplies a guiding clue by which the facts of life and nature can be arranged. The religious outlook, too, when it wishes to indulge in speculation, can make use of this guiding thread. It will then say: God established the world as“a will to existence, to consciousness, to spirit.”He established it, not as complete, but as becoming. He does not build it as a house, but plants it, like a flower, in the seed, that it may grow, that it may struggle upwards stage by stage to fuller existence, aspiring with toil and endeavour towards the height where, in the image of the Creator, as a free and reasonable spirit capable of personality, it may realise the aim of its being. Thus the world isofGod, that is, its rudiments came from God, and it istoGod, in the purpose of likeness to God. And it is imbued with the breath of Godhead which moves in it and impels it onwards, with the logos of the everlasting Zeus of whom Cleanthes sings, with the spirit of Jehovah whom Isaiah and the Psalmist praise, and[pg 365]whom the poet of the Creation figuratively paints; the divine breath is in everything that lives, from grass to flower, from animal to man. But it is implanted as becoming. And in regard to this, religion can say of the whole world what it says of man. For man, too, is not given as a finished product, either as regards the genus or the individual, but as a rudiment, with his destiny to work out, in historical becoming, by realising what is inherent in him. We call this freedom. And an adumbration of such freedom, which is the aim of self-realisation, would help us to penetrate deeply into the nature of things. Many riddles and apparent contradictions could be fitted in with this view of things: the unity of the world, and yet the gradations; the relationship of all living creatures, the unity of all psychical life, and yet the uniqueness of the rational spirit; causal concatenation, yet guidance by means of the highest ideas and purposes; the tentativeness, illogicalness, and ineffectiveness of nature, unconsciously pressing forward along uncertain paths, yet the directness and purposefulness of the main lines of evolution in general. This God-awakened will to be lies at the roots of the mysteries of development in all living creatures, of the unconscious purposiveness of instinctive action, of the gradually ascending development of psychical life and its organ. Operating in crystals and plants purely as a formative impulse and“entelechy,”it awakes in the bodies of animals more and more as“soul.”Then it awakes fully in man, and in him, in[pg 366]an entirely new phase of real free development, it builds itself up to spirit. It resembles a stream whose waves flow casually and transiently in animal consciousness, and are soon withdrawn again, to break forth anew at another place, in the personal spirit, where they attain to permanent indissoluble form, since they have now at last attained to self-realisation, and fulfilled the purpose of all cosmic existence, the reflecting of the eternal personality in the creature. But it is only in human history that what was prepared for in natural evolution is completed.The riddle of theodicy thus becomes easier, for what surrounds us in nature and history has not come direct from the hand of eternal wisdom, but is in the first place the product of the developing, striving world, which only gradually and after many mistakes and failures works out what is inherent in it as eternal idea and aim. We see and blame its mistakes, for instance in our own human structure. We see the deficiencies in the historical course of things. But when we find fault we do not see that evolution and self-realisation and freedom are more worthy of praise than ready-made existence incapable of independent action.This principle of development, wherever it is regarded as“world-soul”or as“will”or as the“unconscious,”is frequently, through pantheism and the doctrine of immanence, made equivalent with the object of religion, with God. This is an impossible undertaking. We cannot worship what only reaches its full development[pg 367]in ourselves. But that wecanworship, and that it is only in the feeling of complete dependence that the full depth of what is developing within us to conscious life reveals itself, proves better than anything else that God is above all“World-will.”It was more than allegory when Plato in Timæus set the“eternal father and creator of the world”above all soul and psyche. And it was religion that broke through when Fichte in his little book,“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”set being before becoming, and God above the creatures struggling towards self-realisation. Religion knows in advance that this is so. And calm reflection confirms it. All that we have already learnt of the dependence, conditionedness, and contingent nature of the world is equally true of a world“evolving itself”out of its potentiality, of a will to existence, and of an unconscious realising itself. No flower can grow and develop without being first implicit in the seed. Nothing can attain to“actuality,”to realisation, that was not potentially implied in the beginning. But who originated the seed of the world-flower? Who enclosed within it the“tendencies,”the“rudiments”which realise themselves in evolution? Invariably“the actual is before the potential”and Being before Becoming. A world could only become if it were called to become by an everlasting Being. God planting the world-flower that it might radiate forth in its blossoms His own image and likeness, is an allegory which may well symbolise for religion the relation between God and the[pg 368]world. And thus it is possible to draw the outline of a religious outlook on the world, into which the results of world-lore could well be fitted. This frame was constructed by Plato on the basis of a religious study of things, and after Plato it was first definitely outlined in Fichte's too much forgotten but unforgettable books“Bestimmung des Menschen”and“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”and it is thus a new creation of the great German idealism and its mighty faith. And it is not easy to see why it should be abandoned, why we should give it up in favour of an irreligious, semi-naturalistic outlook on the world.One thing, however, must be kept constantly in mind: even such an interpretation of the world as this is poetry, not knowledge. There is a poetry of the will to live, of the unconscious, which is struggling towards existence, but there is no philosophy. There are only analogies and hints of what goes on at the foundations of the world. In particular, the unconscious creative impulse in all living organisms, this“will”towards form, its relationship with instinct and the relationship of instinct to conscious psyche, afford us a step-ladder of illustrations, and an illustration of the step-ladder of the“will towards existence,”which invite us to overstep the bounds of our knowledge, and indulge in our imagination. We can say nothing of pre-conscious consciousness and will, we can at best only make guesses about them. We cannot think definitely of a general world-will, which wills and[pg 369]aspires in individual beings; we cannot picture to ourselves the emergence of the individual“souls”of animals and man from a universal psyche. Imagination plays a larger part here than clear thinking. And for our present purpose it must be clearly borne in mind that religion does not require any speculative construction of theories of the world. But“you shall know that it is your imagination which creates the world for you.”108And if a speculative construction be desired, it will always be most easily attained along these lines, and will in this way come nearest to our modern knowledge of nature. We must remember, too, that the objections which may be urged against this form of speculation are equally applicable against any other. For the origin of the individual psyche, the graduated series of its forms, the development of one after the other, and of that of the child from that of its parents, are riddles which cannot be solved by any speculative thinking. Monadology, theories of the pre-existence of the soul, creationism, or the current traducianism—which to-day, with its partly or wholly materialistic basis, is just as naïve as the older—all reveal equal darkness. But the speculation we have hinted at, if it gives no explanation, at least supplies a framework for many questions which attract us, and do so even from the point of view of religion: for instance the collective, diffuse, and almost divisible nature of consciousness in the lower stages, its increasing and ever more strict centralisation, the natural[pg 370]relationship of the psychical in man to the psychical in general, and yet its incommensurability and superiority to all the world.But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative illustrations of the relation of God to the world, which can at best be only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in the world God is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the reason and cause of all being. For this it has names like creation, providence, self-revelation of God in the world, and it lives by the mysteries which are indicated under these names. The mysteries themselves it recognises in vague or naïve forms of conception long before it attempts any definite formulation. If dogmatics begin with the latter, some form or other of the stiff and wooden doctrines ofconcursus, ofinfluxus ordinariusandextraordinariususually develops with many other subtleties, which are nothing more than attempts to formulate the divine influence in finite terms, and to think of it as a force along with other forces. Two series of causes are usually distinguished; the system of causes and effects within the world, according to which everything natural takes place, the“causæ secundariæ”; and in addition to these the divine causality co-operating and influencing the others, ordering them with gentle and delicate pressure, and guiding them towards their true[pg 371]end, and which may also reveal itself as“extraordinaria”in miracles and signs. This double operation is regarded as giving rise to all phenomena, and in it consists guidance, dispensation, providence, and natural revelation.This kind of conception is extremely primitive, and is unfavourable to religion itself, for in it mystery is done away with and arranged according to rubric, and everything has become quite“simple.”Moreover, this doctrine has a necessary tendency to turn into the dreaded“Deism.”According to the deistic view, God made the world in the beginning, and set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther assistance was given, and everything went on of itself. This theory is incredibly profane, and strikes God out of the world, and nature, and history at a single stroke, substituting for Him the course of a well-arranged system of clockwork. But the former theory is a very unsatisfactory and doubtful makeshift as compared with that of deism, for it is impossible to see why, if God arranged thesecausæ secundariæ, He should have made them so weak and ineffective that they need all these ingeniousconcursus,influxus,determinationes,gubernationes, and the like. Both theories are crude fabrications of the dogmatists, and they have nothing left in them of the piety they were intended to protect, nor do they become any better in this respect, however many attempts are made to define them. Religion possesses, without the aid of any stilted and artificial theories, all the things[pg 372]we have named above, and especially and most directly the last of them, namely, the experience of the revelation and communication of the Divine in the great developments and movements of spiritual and religious history. And it finds its corroboration and justification and freedom not by way of dogmatics but of criticism. It is impossible to distinguish artificially two sets of causes, and to give to the world what is alleged to be of the world, and to God what is alleged to be of God. But it is permissible to point to the insufficiency of our causal study in general, and to the limits of our knowledge. Even when we have established it as a fact that all phenomena are linked together in a chain of causes we are still far from having discovered how things actually come to pass. Every qualitative effect and change is entirely hidden from us as far as the cause of its coming about and its real and inner nature are concerned. Every effect which in kind or quantity goes beyond its cause (and we cannot make anything of the domain of living forms, of the psychical and of history without these), shows us that we are still only at the surface. Indeed, even mechanical action, often alleged to be entirely intelligible, such as the transference or transformation of energy, is, as we have seen, a complete riddle. In addition, all causality runs its course in time, and therefore partakes of all the defects and limitations of our views of time. And finally we are guided by the Kantian antinomy regarding the conditions of what is[pg 373]“given.”It destroys the charm of the“purely causal”point of view by showing that this in itself cannot be made complete and is therefore contradictory. Moreover, in the phenomena of life, and in the fact that consciousness and will control our corporeal processes, and yet can hardly be thought of as a cause“co-operating”with other causes, we found an analogy, if a weak and obscure one, of the relation that a divine teleology and governing of the world may bear to mundane phenomena. Thus mystery remains in all its strength and is not replaced by the surrogate of a too simple and shallow dogmatic theory. In confessing mystery and resting content with it we are justified by reflection on the nature and antinomy of our knowledge.All this is true also of what religion means by creation. In the feeling of complete humility, in its experience of absolute dependence and conditionedness, the creature becomes conscious of itself as a creature, and experiences with full clearness what it means to be a“creature”and“created.”The dogmatic theory is here again only a surrogate of mystery. And again critical self-reflection proves a better guide than any theory of creation, which is quite in its place as a means of expression in religious discourse and poetry, but is quite insufficient as true knowledge. That we must but cannot think of this world either as beginning or as not-beginning is the analogue in knowledge of what religion experiences in mystery; and that this contingent and[pg 374]conditioned world is founded in everlasting, necessary, true Being, is the analogue of what religion possesses and knows through devout feeling, more directly and clearly than by any thinking, of the relations of God to the world.
The world and nature are marvellous in their being, but they are not“divine”! The formula“natura sive deus”is a monstrous misuse of the word“deus,”if we are to use the words in the sense which history has given to them. God is the Absolute Being, perfect, wholly independent, resting in Himself, and necessary; nature is entirely contingent and dependent, and at every point of it we are impelled to ask“Why?”God is the immeasurable fulness of Being, nature is indeed diverse in the manifoldness of her productions, but she is nevertheless limited, and her possibilities are restricted within narrow limits. God is the unrestrained, and everlasting omnipotence itself, and the perfect wisdom; nature is indeed mighty enough in the attainment of her ends, but how often is she obstructed, how often does she fail to reach them, and how seldom does she do so perfectly and without mistakes? She shows wisdom, indeed, cunning in her products, subtlety and daintiness, taste and beauty, all these often in an overwhelming degree, yet just as often she brings forth what[pg 361]is meaningless, contradictory and mutually hurtful, traverses her own lines, and bewilders us by the brutality, the thoughtlessness, and purposelessness, the crookedness, incompleteness, and distortedness of her operations. And what is true of the world of external nature is true in a far greater degree of the world of history. Nature is not a god, but a demigod, says Aristotle. And on this, Pantheism with its creed,“natura sive deus,”makes shipwreck. The words of thiscredoare either a mere tautology, and“deus”is misused as a new name for nature; or they are false. It is not possible to transfer to nature and the world all the great ideas and feelings which the religious mind cherishes under the name of“God.”
On the other hand, nature is really, as Aristotle said, δαιμονία, that is, strange, mysterious, and marvellous, indicating God, and pointing, all naturalism and superficial consideration notwithstanding, as we have seen, to something outside of and beyond itself. Religion demands no more than this. It does not insist upon finding a solution for all the riddles of theoretical world-lore. It is not distressed because the course of nature often seems to our eyes confused, and to our judgment contradictory and unintelligible at a hundred places and in a hundred respects. On the contrary, that this is the case is to religion in another aspect a strong stimulus and corroboration.“The world is an odd fellow; may God soon make an end of it,”said Luther, and thus gave a crude but truly religious[pg 362]parallel to the words of Aristotle, ἡ γἀρ φύσις δαιμονία ἀλλ᾽ οὐ θεία, (Aristot.“De Divin. in Somn.,”c. ii.). It is part of the very essence of religion, as we have seen, to read in the pages of nature, insufficiency, illusion, and perplexities, and to be made thereby impatient and desirous of penetrating to the true nature of things. Religion does not claim to be directly deducible out of a consideration of nature; it demands only the right and freedom to interpret the world in its own way. And for this it is sufficient that this world affords those hints and suggestions for its convictions that we have seen it does afford. To form clear ideas in regard to the actual relations of the infinite to the finite, and of God to the world, and of what religion calls creation, preservation, and eternal providence, self-revelation in the world and in history, is hardly the task of religion at all, but rather pertains to our general speculative instinct, which can only satisfy itself with the help of imagination. Attempts of this kind have often been made. They are by no means valueless, for even if no real knowledge can be gained by this method, we may perhaps get an analogue of it which will help us to understand existence and phenomena, and to define our position, as well as to give at least provisional answers to many pressing questions (such, for instance, as the problem of theodicy).
If we study the world unprejudiced by the naturalistic interpretation, or having shaken ourselves free from it, we are most powerfully impressed by one fundamental[pg 363]phenomenon in all existence: it is the fact of evolution. It challenges attention and interpretation, and analogies quickly reveal themselves which give something of the same trend to all such interpretations. From stage to stage existence advances onwards, from the world of large masses subject only to the laws of mechanics, to the delicately complex play of the forces of development in growth and other vital processes. The nature of the forces is revealed in ever higher expression, and at the same time in ever more closely connected series of stages. Even between the inorganic and the organic there is an intermediate stage—crystal formation—which is no longer entirely of the one, yet not of the other. And in the organic world evolution reveals itself most clearly of all; from the crudest and simplest it presses onwards to the most delicate and complex. In the corporeal as in the psychical, in the whole as in each of its parts, there are ever higher stages, sometimes far apart, sometimes close together. However we picture to ourselves the way in which evolution accomplishes itself in time, we can scarcely describe it without using such expressions as“nature advances upwards step by step,”“it presses and strives upwards and unfolds itself stage by stage.”
And it is with us as it was with Plato; we inform the world with a soul, with a desire and endeavour which continually expresses itself in higher and higher forms. And it is with us also as with Fichte; we speak of the will which, unconscious of itself, pours itself forth in[pg 364]unconscious and lifeless nature, and then on this foundation strives forward, expressing its activity in ever higher developments, breaking forth in life, sensation, and desire, and finally coming to itself in conscious existence and will. The whole world seems to us a being which wills to become, presses restlessly forward, and passes from the potential to the actual, realising itself. And the height of its self-realisation is conscious, willing life.
This outlook is lofty and significant, it supplies a guiding clue by which the facts of life and nature can be arranged. The religious outlook, too, when it wishes to indulge in speculation, can make use of this guiding thread. It will then say: God established the world as“a will to existence, to consciousness, to spirit.”He established it, not as complete, but as becoming. He does not build it as a house, but plants it, like a flower, in the seed, that it may grow, that it may struggle upwards stage by stage to fuller existence, aspiring with toil and endeavour towards the height where, in the image of the Creator, as a free and reasonable spirit capable of personality, it may realise the aim of its being. Thus the world isofGod, that is, its rudiments came from God, and it istoGod, in the purpose of likeness to God. And it is imbued with the breath of Godhead which moves in it and impels it onwards, with the logos of the everlasting Zeus of whom Cleanthes sings, with the spirit of Jehovah whom Isaiah and the Psalmist praise, and[pg 365]whom the poet of the Creation figuratively paints; the divine breath is in everything that lives, from grass to flower, from animal to man. But it is implanted as becoming. And in regard to this, religion can say of the whole world what it says of man. For man, too, is not given as a finished product, either as regards the genus or the individual, but as a rudiment, with his destiny to work out, in historical becoming, by realising what is inherent in him. We call this freedom. And an adumbration of such freedom, which is the aim of self-realisation, would help us to penetrate deeply into the nature of things. Many riddles and apparent contradictions could be fitted in with this view of things: the unity of the world, and yet the gradations; the relationship of all living creatures, the unity of all psychical life, and yet the uniqueness of the rational spirit; causal concatenation, yet guidance by means of the highest ideas and purposes; the tentativeness, illogicalness, and ineffectiveness of nature, unconsciously pressing forward along uncertain paths, yet the directness and purposefulness of the main lines of evolution in general. This God-awakened will to be lies at the roots of the mysteries of development in all living creatures, of the unconscious purposiveness of instinctive action, of the gradually ascending development of psychical life and its organ. Operating in crystals and plants purely as a formative impulse and“entelechy,”it awakes in the bodies of animals more and more as“soul.”Then it awakes fully in man, and in him, in[pg 366]an entirely new phase of real free development, it builds itself up to spirit. It resembles a stream whose waves flow casually and transiently in animal consciousness, and are soon withdrawn again, to break forth anew at another place, in the personal spirit, where they attain to permanent indissoluble form, since they have now at last attained to self-realisation, and fulfilled the purpose of all cosmic existence, the reflecting of the eternal personality in the creature. But it is only in human history that what was prepared for in natural evolution is completed.
The riddle of theodicy thus becomes easier, for what surrounds us in nature and history has not come direct from the hand of eternal wisdom, but is in the first place the product of the developing, striving world, which only gradually and after many mistakes and failures works out what is inherent in it as eternal idea and aim. We see and blame its mistakes, for instance in our own human structure. We see the deficiencies in the historical course of things. But when we find fault we do not see that evolution and self-realisation and freedom are more worthy of praise than ready-made existence incapable of independent action.
This principle of development, wherever it is regarded as“world-soul”or as“will”or as the“unconscious,”is frequently, through pantheism and the doctrine of immanence, made equivalent with the object of religion, with God. This is an impossible undertaking. We cannot worship what only reaches its full development[pg 367]in ourselves. But that wecanworship, and that it is only in the feeling of complete dependence that the full depth of what is developing within us to conscious life reveals itself, proves better than anything else that God is above all“World-will.”It was more than allegory when Plato in Timæus set the“eternal father and creator of the world”above all soul and psyche. And it was religion that broke through when Fichte in his little book,“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”set being before becoming, and God above the creatures struggling towards self-realisation. Religion knows in advance that this is so. And calm reflection confirms it. All that we have already learnt of the dependence, conditionedness, and contingent nature of the world is equally true of a world“evolving itself”out of its potentiality, of a will to existence, and of an unconscious realising itself. No flower can grow and develop without being first implicit in the seed. Nothing can attain to“actuality,”to realisation, that was not potentially implied in the beginning. But who originated the seed of the world-flower? Who enclosed within it the“tendencies,”the“rudiments”which realise themselves in evolution? Invariably“the actual is before the potential”and Being before Becoming. A world could only become if it were called to become by an everlasting Being. God planting the world-flower that it might radiate forth in its blossoms His own image and likeness, is an allegory which may well symbolise for religion the relation between God and the[pg 368]world. And thus it is possible to draw the outline of a religious outlook on the world, into which the results of world-lore could well be fitted. This frame was constructed by Plato on the basis of a religious study of things, and after Plato it was first definitely outlined in Fichte's too much forgotten but unforgettable books“Bestimmung des Menschen”and“Anweisung zum seeligen Leben,”and it is thus a new creation of the great German idealism and its mighty faith. And it is not easy to see why it should be abandoned, why we should give it up in favour of an irreligious, semi-naturalistic outlook on the world.
One thing, however, must be kept constantly in mind: even such an interpretation of the world as this is poetry, not knowledge. There is a poetry of the will to live, of the unconscious, which is struggling towards existence, but there is no philosophy. There are only analogies and hints of what goes on at the foundations of the world. In particular, the unconscious creative impulse in all living organisms, this“will”towards form, its relationship with instinct and the relationship of instinct to conscious psyche, afford us a step-ladder of illustrations, and an illustration of the step-ladder of the“will towards existence,”which invite us to overstep the bounds of our knowledge, and indulge in our imagination. We can say nothing of pre-conscious consciousness and will, we can at best only make guesses about them. We cannot think definitely of a general world-will, which wills and[pg 369]aspires in individual beings; we cannot picture to ourselves the emergence of the individual“souls”of animals and man from a universal psyche. Imagination plays a larger part here than clear thinking. And for our present purpose it must be clearly borne in mind that religion does not require any speculative construction of theories of the world. But“you shall know that it is your imagination which creates the world for you.”108And if a speculative construction be desired, it will always be most easily attained along these lines, and will in this way come nearest to our modern knowledge of nature. We must remember, too, that the objections which may be urged against this form of speculation are equally applicable against any other. For the origin of the individual psyche, the graduated series of its forms, the development of one after the other, and of that of the child from that of its parents, are riddles which cannot be solved by any speculative thinking. Monadology, theories of the pre-existence of the soul, creationism, or the current traducianism—which to-day, with its partly or wholly materialistic basis, is just as naïve as the older—all reveal equal darkness. But the speculation we have hinted at, if it gives no explanation, at least supplies a framework for many questions which attract us, and do so even from the point of view of religion: for instance the collective, diffuse, and almost divisible nature of consciousness in the lower stages, its increasing and ever more strict centralisation, the natural[pg 370]relationship of the psychical in man to the psychical in general, and yet its incommensurability and superiority to all the world.
But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative illustrations of the relation of God to the world, which can at best be only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in the world God is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the reason and cause of all being. For this it has names like creation, providence, self-revelation of God in the world, and it lives by the mysteries which are indicated under these names. The mysteries themselves it recognises in vague or naïve forms of conception long before it attempts any definite formulation. If dogmatics begin with the latter, some form or other of the stiff and wooden doctrines ofconcursus, ofinfluxus ordinariusandextraordinariususually develops with many other subtleties, which are nothing more than attempts to formulate the divine influence in finite terms, and to think of it as a force along with other forces. Two series of causes are usually distinguished; the system of causes and effects within the world, according to which everything natural takes place, the“causæ secundariæ”; and in addition to these the divine causality co-operating and influencing the others, ordering them with gentle and delicate pressure, and guiding them towards their true[pg 371]end, and which may also reveal itself as“extraordinaria”in miracles and signs. This double operation is regarded as giving rise to all phenomena, and in it consists guidance, dispensation, providence, and natural revelation.
This kind of conception is extremely primitive, and is unfavourable to religion itself, for in it mystery is done away with and arranged according to rubric, and everything has become quite“simple.”Moreover, this doctrine has a necessary tendency to turn into the dreaded“Deism.”According to the deistic view, God made the world in the beginning, and set the system of natural causes in motion, in such a way that no farther assistance was given, and everything went on of itself. This theory is incredibly profane, and strikes God out of the world, and nature, and history at a single stroke, substituting for Him the course of a well-arranged system of clockwork. But the former theory is a very unsatisfactory and doubtful makeshift as compared with that of deism, for it is impossible to see why, if God arranged thesecausæ secundariæ, He should have made them so weak and ineffective that they need all these ingeniousconcursus,influxus,determinationes,gubernationes, and the like. Both theories are crude fabrications of the dogmatists, and they have nothing left in them of the piety they were intended to protect, nor do they become any better in this respect, however many attempts are made to define them. Religion possesses, without the aid of any stilted and artificial theories, all the things[pg 372]we have named above, and especially and most directly the last of them, namely, the experience of the revelation and communication of the Divine in the great developments and movements of spiritual and religious history. And it finds its corroboration and justification and freedom not by way of dogmatics but of criticism. It is impossible to distinguish artificially two sets of causes, and to give to the world what is alleged to be of the world, and to God what is alleged to be of God. But it is permissible to point to the insufficiency of our causal study in general, and to the limits of our knowledge. Even when we have established it as a fact that all phenomena are linked together in a chain of causes we are still far from having discovered how things actually come to pass. Every qualitative effect and change is entirely hidden from us as far as the cause of its coming about and its real and inner nature are concerned. Every effect which in kind or quantity goes beyond its cause (and we cannot make anything of the domain of living forms, of the psychical and of history without these), shows us that we are still only at the surface. Indeed, even mechanical action, often alleged to be entirely intelligible, such as the transference or transformation of energy, is, as we have seen, a complete riddle. In addition, all causality runs its course in time, and therefore partakes of all the defects and limitations of our views of time. And finally we are guided by the Kantian antinomy regarding the conditions of what is[pg 373]“given.”It destroys the charm of the“purely causal”point of view by showing that this in itself cannot be made complete and is therefore contradictory. Moreover, in the phenomena of life, and in the fact that consciousness and will control our corporeal processes, and yet can hardly be thought of as a cause“co-operating”with other causes, we found an analogy, if a weak and obscure one, of the relation that a divine teleology and governing of the world may bear to mundane phenomena. Thus mystery remains in all its strength and is not replaced by the surrogate of a too simple and shallow dogmatic theory. In confessing mystery and resting content with it we are justified by reflection on the nature and antinomy of our knowledge.
All this is true also of what religion means by creation. In the feeling of complete humility, in its experience of absolute dependence and conditionedness, the creature becomes conscious of itself as a creature, and experiences with full clearness what it means to be a“creature”and“created.”The dogmatic theory is here again only a surrogate of mystery. And again critical self-reflection proves a better guide than any theory of creation, which is quite in its place as a means of expression in religious discourse and poetry, but is quite insufficient as true knowledge. That we must but cannot think of this world either as beginning or as not-beginning is the analogue in knowledge of what religion experiences in mystery; and that this contingent and[pg 374]conditioned world is founded in everlasting, necessary, true Being, is the analogue of what religion possesses and knows through devout feeling, more directly and clearly than by any thinking, of the relations of God to the world.