(4)Non-theistic Idealism. Somewhat less unmotived, if we look upon it from a merely intellectual point of view, is the theory of pre-existent souls without a personal God. Many, if not most, of you probably possess more or less acquaintance with the views of my friend, Dr. McTaggart. I cannot here undertake a full exposition or criticism of one of the ablest thinkers of our day—one of the very few English thinkers who is the author of a truly original metaphysical system. I can only touch—and that most inadequately—upon the particular side of it which directly bears upon our present enquiry. Dr. McTaggart is an Idealist; he recognizes the {97} impossibility of matter without mind. For him nothing exists but spirits, but he does not recognize the necessity for any one all-embracing or controlling Spirit: the only spirits in his Universe are limited minds like those of men and animals. He differs, then, from the Pluralist of the type just mentioned in getting rid of the hypothesis of a personal God side by side with and yet controlling the uncreated spirits. And he differs further from all Pluralists in not treating the separate spirits as so many centres of consciousness quite independent of, and possibly at war with, all the rest: the spirits form part of an ordered system: the world is a unity, though that unity is not the unity which belongs to self-consciousness. He recognizes, in the traditional language of Philosophy, an Absolute, but this Absolute is not a single spiritual Being but a Society: or, if it is to be called a single spiritual Being, it is a Being which exists or manifests itself only in a plurality of limited consciousnesses.
This scheme is, I admit, more reasonable than Pluralism. It does, nominally at least, recognize the world as an ordered system. It gets rid of the difficulty of accounting for the apparent order of the Cosmos as the result of a struggle between independent wills. It is not, upon its author's pre-suppositions, a gratuitous theory: for a mind which accepts Idealism and rejects Theism it is the only {98} intelligible alternative. But I must confess that it seems to me open to most of the difficulties which I have endeavoured to point out in Pluralism, and to some others. In the first place, there is one, to my mind, great and insuperable difficulty about it. As an Idealist, Dr. McTaggart has to admit that the whole physical world, in so far as it exists at all, must exist in and for some consciousness. Now, not only is there, according to him, no single mind in which the system can exist as a whole, but even all the minds together do not apparently know the whole of it, or (so far as our knowledge goes) ever will. The undiscovered and unknown part of the Universe is then non-existent. And yet, be it noticed, the known part of the world does not make a perfectly articulated or (if you like the phrase) organic system without the unknown part. It is only on the assumption of relations between what we know and what we don't know that we can regard it as an orderly, intelligible system at all. Therefore, if part of the system is non-existent, the whole system—the system as a whole—must be treated as non-existent. The world is, we are told, a system; and yet as a system it has (upon the hypothesis) no real existence. The systematic whole does not exist in matter, for to Dr. McTaggart matter is merely the experience of Mind. What sort of existence, then, can an undiscovered planet possess till it is {99} discovered? For Dr. McTaggart has not provided any mind or minds in and for which it is to exist. At one time, indeed, Dr. McTaggart seemed disposed to accept a suggestion of mine that, on his view, each soul must be omniscient; and to admit that, while in its temporal aspect, each soul is limited and fallible in its knowledge, it is at the same time supertemporally omniscient. That is a conception difficult beyond all the difficulties of the most arbitrary and self-contradicting of orthodox patristic or scholastic speculations. But, as Dr. McTaggart does not now seem disposed to insist upon that point, I will say no more about it except that to my mind it is a theory which defies all intellectual grasp. It can be stated; it cannot be thought.
Further, I would remind you, the theory is open to all the objections which I urged against the Pre-existence theory in its pluralistic form. I have suggested the difficulties involved in the facts of heredity—the difficulty of understanding how souls whose real intellectual and moral characteristics are uncaused and eternal should be assigned to parents so far resembling them as to lead almost inevitably to the inference that the characteristics of the children are to some extent causally connected with those of the parents.[4] Now the Pluralist can {100} at least urge that for this purpose ingenious arrangements are contrived by God—by the One Spirit whom he regards as incomparably the wisest and most powerful in the Universe. Dr. McTaggart recognizes no intelligence capable of grappling with such a problem or succession of problems. But this particular matter of the assignment of souls to bodies is only a particular application of a wider difficulty. Dr. McTaggart contends that the Universe constitutes not merely a physical but a moral order. He would not deny that the Universe means something; that the series of events tends towards an end, an end which is also a good; that it has a purpose and a final cause. And yet this purpose exists in no mind whatever, and is due to no will whatever—except to the very small extent to which the processes of physical nature can be consciously directed to an end by the volitions of men and similarly limited intelligences. As a whole, the Universe is purposed and willed by no single will or combination of wills. I confess I do not understand the idea of a purpose which operates, but is not the purpose of a Mind which is also a Will. All the considerations upon which I dwelt to show the necessity of such a Will to account for the Universe which we know, are so many arguments against Dr. McTaggart's scheme. The events of Dr. McTaggart's Universe are, upon the view of Causality which I {101} attempted to defend in my second lecture, uncaused events.
Nevertheless, as a Philosopher, I am deeply grateful to Dr. McTaggart. Not only does his scheme on its practical side seem to me preferable to many systems which sound more orthodox—systems of vague pantheistic Theism in which Morality is treated as mere 'appearance' and personal Immortality deliberately rejected—but it has done much intellectually to clear the air. Dr. McTaggart seems to me right in holding that, if God or the Absolute is to include in itself all other spirits, and yet the personality or self-consciousness of those spirits is not to be denied, then this Absolute in which they are to be included cannot reasonably be thought of as a conscious being, or invested with the other attributes usually implied by the term God.
And this leads me to say a few words more in explanation of my own view of the relation between God and human or other souls. To me, as I have already intimated, it seems simply meaningless to speak of one consciousness as included in another consciousness. The essence of a consciousness is to be for itself: whether it be a thought, a feeling, or an emotion, the essence of that consciousness is what it is for me. Every moment of consciousness is unique. Another being may have a {102} similar feeling: in that case there are two feelings, and not one. Another mind may know what I feel, but the knowledge of another's agony is (fortunately) a very different thing from the agony itself. It is fashionable in some quarters to ridicule the idea of 'impenetrable' souls. If 'impenetrable' means that another soul cannot know what goes on in my soul, I do not assert that the soul is impenetrable. I believe that God knows what occurs in my soul in an infinitely completer way than that in which any human being can know it. Further, I believe that every soul is kept in existence from moment to moment by a continuous act of the divine Will, and so is altogether dependent upon that Will, and forms part of one system with Him. On the other hand I believe that (through the analogy of my own mind and the guidance of the moral consciousness) I do know, imperfectly and inadequately, 'as in a mirror darkly,' what goes on in God's Mind. But, if penetrability is to mean identity, the theory that souls are penetrable seems to me mainly unintelligible. The acceptance which it meets with in some quarters is due, I believe, wholly to the influence of that most fertile source of philosophical confusion—misapplied spacial metaphor.[5] It seems easy to talk about a mind being {103} something in itself, and yet part of another mind, because we are familiar with the idea of things in space forming part of larger things in space—Chinese boxes, for instance, shut up in bigger ones. Such a mode of thought is wholly inapplicable to minds which are not in space at all. Space is in the mind: the mind is not in space. A mind is not a thing which can be round or square: you can't say that the intellect of Kant or of Lord Kelvin measures so many inches by so many: equally impossible is it to talk about such an intellect being a part of a more extensive intellect.
The theory of an all-inclusive Deity has recently been adopted and popularized by Mr. Campbell,[6] who has done all that rhetorical skill combined with genuine religious earnestness can do to present it in an attractive and edifying dress. And yet the same Logic which leads to the assertion that the Saint is part of God, leads also to the assertion that Caesar Borgia and Napoleon Buonaparte and all the wicked Popes who have ever been white-washed by episcopal or other historians are also parts of God. How can I worship, how can I strive to be like, how can I be the better for believing in or revering {104} a Being of whom Caesar Borgia is a part as completely and entirely as St. Paul or our Lord himself? Hindoo Theology is consistent in this matter. It worships the destructive and the vicious aspects of Brahma as much as the kindly and the moral ones: it does not pretend that God is revealed in the Moral Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or one-sided way a God of Love. If it be an 'ethical obsession' (as has been suggested) to object to treat Immorality as no less a revelation of God than Morality, I must plead guilty to such an obsession. And yet without such an 'obsession' I confess I do not see what is left of Christianity. There is only one way out of the difficulty. If we are all parts of God, we can only call God good or perfect by maintaining that the deliverances of our moral consciousness have no validity for God, and therefore can tell us nothing about him. That has been done deliberately and explicitly by some Philosophers:[7] the distinguished Theologians who echo the language of this Philosophy have fortunately for their own religious life and experience, but unfortunately for their philosophical consistency, declined to follow in their steps. A God who is 'beyond good and evil,' can be no fitting object of {105} worship to men who wish to become good, just, merciful. If the cosmic process be indifferent to these ethical considerations, we had better (with honest Agnostics like Professor Huxley) make up our minds to defy it, whether it call itself God or not.
But it is not so much on account of its consequences as on account of its essential unmeaningness and intellectual unintelligibility that I would invite you to reject this formula 'God is all.' Certainly, the Universe is an ordered system: there is nothing in it that is not done by the Will of God. And some parts of this Universe—the spiritual parts of it and particularly the higher spirits—are not mere creations of God's will. They have a resemblance of nature to Him. I do not object to your saying that at bottom there is but one Substance in the Universe, if you will only keep clear of the materialistic and spacial association of the word Substance: but it is a Substance which reveals itself in many different consciousnesses. The theory of an all-inclusive Consciousness is not necessary to make possible the idea of close and intimate communion between God and men, or of the revelation in and to Humanity of the thought of God. On the contrary, it is the idea of Identity which destroys the possibility of communion. Communion implies two minds: a mind cannot have communion with itself or with part of itself. The two may also in a {106} sense be one; of course all beings are ultimately part of one Universe or Reality: but that Reality is not one Consciousness. The Universe is a unity, but the unity is not of the kind which constitutes a person or a self-consciousness. It is (as Dr. McTaggart holds) the unity of a Society, but of a Society (as I have attempted to argue) which emanates from, and is controlled by and guided to a preconceived end by, a single rational Will.[8]
(5)The intuitive theory of religious knowledge. In other quarters objection will probably be taken to my not having recognized the possibility of an immediate knowledge of God, and left the idea of God to be inferred by intellectual processes which, when fully thought out, amount to a Metaphysic. It will be suggested that to make religious belief dependent upon Reason is to make it impossible to any but trained Philosophers or Theologians. Now there is no doubt a great attractiveness in the theory which makes belief in God depend simply upon the immediate affirmation of the individual's own consciousness. It would be more difficult to argue against such a theory of immediate knowledge or intuition if we found that the consciousness of all or most individuals does actually reveal to them {107} the existence of God: though after all the fact that a number of men draw the same inference from given facts does not show that it is not an inference. You will sometimes find Metaphysicians contending that nobody is really an Atheist, since everybody necessarily supposes himself to be in contact with an Other of which he is nevertheless a part. I do not deny that, if you water down the idea of God to the notion of a vague 'something not ourselves,' you may possibly make out that everybody is explicitly or implicitly a believer in such a Deity.
I should prefer myself to say that, if that is all you mean by God, it does not much matter whether we believe in Him or not. In the sense in which God is understood by Christianity or Judaism or any other theistic Religion it is unfortunately impossible to contend that everybody is a Theist. And, if there is an immediate knowledge of God in every human soul, this would be difficult to account for. Neither the cultivated nor the uncultivated Chinaman has apparently any such belief. The ignorant Chinaman believes in a sort of luck or destiny—possibly in a plurality of limited but more or less mischievous spirits; the educated Chinaman, we are told, is for the most part a pure Agnostic. And Chinamen are believed to be one-fifth of the human race. The task of the Missionary would be an easier one if he could {108} appeal to any such widely diffused intuitions of God. The Missionary, from the days of St. Paul at Athens down to the present, has to begin by arguing with his opponents in favour of Theism, and then to go on to argue from Theism to Christianity. I do not deny—on the contrary I strongly contend—that the rational considerations which lead up to Monotheism are so manifold, and lie so near at hand, that at a certain stage of mental development we find that belief independently asserting itself with more or less fullness in widely distant regions of time and space; while traces of it are found almost everywhere—even among savages—side by side with other and inconsistent beliefs. But even among theistic nations an immediate knowledge of God is claimed by very few. If there is a tendency on the part of the more strongly religious minds to claim it, it is explicitly disclaimed by others—by most of the great Schoolmen, and in modern times by profoundly religious minds such as Newman or Martineau. Its existence is in fact denied by most of the great theological systems—Catholic, Protestant, Anglican. Theologians always begin by arguing in favour of the existence of God. And even among the religious minds without philosophical training which do claim such immediate knowledge, their creed is most often due (as is obvious to the outside observer) to the influence of environment, of education, of social {109} tradition. For the religious person who claims such knowledge of God does not generally stop at the bare affirmation of God's existence: he goes on to claim an immediate knowledge of all sorts of other things—ideas clearly derived from the traditional teaching of his religious community. The Protestant of a certain type will claim immediate consciousness of ideas about the forgiveness of sins which are palpably due to the teaching of Luther or St. Augustine, and to the influence of this or that preacher who has transmitted those ideas to him or to his mother: while the Catholic, though his training discourages such claims, will sometimes see visions which convey to him an immediate assurance of the truth of the Immaculate Conception. Even among Anglicans we find educated men who claim to know by immediate intuition the truth of historical facts alleged to have occurred in the first century, or dogmatic truths such as the complicated niceties of the Athanasian Creed. These claims to immediate insight thus refute themselves by the inconsistent character of the knowledge claimed. An attempt may be made to extract from all these immediate certainties a residual element which is said to be common to all of them. The attempt has been made by Professor James in that rather painful work, theVarieties of Religious Experience. And the residuum turns out to be something so vague that, if not {110} absolutely worthless, it is almost incapable of being expressed in articulate language, and constitutes a very precarious foundation for a working religious creed.
The truth is that the uneducated—or rather the unanalytical, perhaps I ought to say the metaphysically untrained—human mind has a tendency to regard as an immediate certainty any truth which it strongly believes and regards as very important. Such minds do not know the psychological causes which have led to their own belief, when they are due to psychological causes: they have not analysed the processes of thought by which they have been led to those beliefs which are really due to the working of their own minds. Most uncultivated persons would probably be very much surprised to hear that the existence of the friend with whose body they are in physical contact is after all only an inference.[9] But surely, in the man who has discovered that such is the case, the warmth of friendship was never dimmed by the reflection that his knowledge of his friend is not immediate but mediate. It is a mere prejudice to suppose that mediate knowledge is in any {111} way less certain, less intimate, less trustworthy or less satisfying than immediate knowledge. If we claim for man the possibility of just such a knowledge of God as a man may possess of his brother man, surely that is all that is wanted to make possible the closest religious communion. It is from the existence of my own self that I infer the existence of other selves, whom I observe to behave in a manner resembling my own behaviour. It is by an only slightly more difficult and complicated inference from my own consciousness that I rise to that conception of a universal Consciousness which supplies me with at once the simplest and the most natural explanation both of my own existence and of the existence of the Nature which I see around me.
(6)Religion and Psychology. I do not deny that the study of religious history, by exhibiting the naturalness and universality of religious ideas and religious emotions, may rationally create a pre-disposition to find some measure of truth in every form of religious belief. But I would venture to add a word of caution against the tendency fashionable in many quarters to talk of basing religious belief upon Psychology. The business of Psychology is to tell us what actually goes on in the human mind. It cannot possibly tell us whether the beliefs which are found there are true or false. An erroneous {112} belief is as much a psychological fact as a true one. A theory which goes on, by inference from what we observe in our own minds, to construct a theory of the Universe necessarily involves a Metaphysic, conscious or unconscious. It may be urged that the reality of religious experience is unaffected by the question whether the beliefs associated with it are true or false. That is the case, so long as the beliefs are supposed to be true by the person in question. But, when once the spirit of enquiry is aroused, a man cannot be—and I venture to think ought not to be—satisfied as to the truth of his belief simply by being told that the beliefs are actually there.
It may be contended, no doubt, that religious experience does not mean merely a state of intellectual belief, but certain emotions, aspirations, perhaps (to take one particular type of religious experience) a consciousness of love met by answering love. To many who undergo such experiences, they seem to carry with them an immediate assurance of the existence of the Being with whom they feel themselves to be in communion. That, on the intellectual presuppositions of the particular person, seems to be the natural—it may be the only possible—way of explaining the feeling. But even there the belief is not really immediate: it is an inference from what is actually matter of experience. And it is, unhappily, no less a matter of well-ascertained {113} psychological fact that, when intellectual doubt is once aroused, such experiences no longer carry with them this conviction of their own objective basis. The person was really under the influence of an intellectual theory all along, whether the theory was acquired by hereditary tradition, by the influence of another's mind, or by personal thought and reflection. When the intellectual theory alters, the same kind of experience is no longer possible. I will not attempt to say how far it is desirable that persons who are perfectly satisfied with a creed which they have never examined should (as it were) pull up the roots of their own faith to see how deep they go. I merely want to point out that the occurrence of certain emotional experiences, though undoubtedly they may constitute part of the data of a religious argument, cannot be held to constitute in and by themselves sufficient evidence for the truth of the intellectual theory connected with them in the mind of the person to whom they occur. They do not always present themselves as sufficient evidence for their truth even to the person experiencing them—still less can they do so to others. Equally unreasonable is it to maintain, with a certain class of religious philosophers, that the religious experience by itself is all we want; and to assume that we may throw to the winds all the theological or other beliefs which have actually been associated {114} with the various types of religious experience, and yet continue to have those experiences and find them no less valuable and no less satisfying. If there is one thing which the study of religious Psychology testifies to, it is the fact that the character of the religious experience (though there may be certain common elements in it) varies very widely with the character of the theoretical belief with which it is associated—a belief of which it is sometimes the cause, sometimes the effect, but from which it is always inseparable. The Buddhist's religious experiences are not possible to those who hold the Christian's view of the Universe: the Christian's religious experiences are not possible to one who holds the Buddhist theory of the Universe. You cannot have an experience of communion with a living Being when you disbelieve in the existence of such a Being. And a man's theories of the Universe always at bottom imply a Metaphysic of some kind—conscious or unconscious.
Sometimes the theory of a Religion which shall be purely psychological springs from pure ignorance as to the meaning of the terms actually employed by the general usage of philosophers. Those who talk in this way mean by Psychology what, according to the ordinary philosophic usage, is really Metaphysic. For Metaphysic is simply the science which deals with the ultimate nature of the Universe. {115} At other times attempts are made by people of more or less philosophical culture to justify their theory. The most widely influential of such attempts is the one made by M. Auguste Sabatier.[10] This attempt has at least this much in its favour—that it is not so much to the ordinary experience of average men and women that M. Sabatier appeals as to the exceptional experiences of the great religious minds. He lays the chief stress upon those exceptional moments of religious history when a new religious idea entered into the mind of some prophet or teacher,e.g.the unity of God, the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of Man. Here, just because the idea was new, it cannot (he contends) be accounted for by education or environment or any other of the psychological causes which obviously determine the traditional beliefs of the great majority. These new ideas, therefore, he assumes to be due to immediate revelation or inspiration from God. Now it is obvious that, even if this inference were well grounded, it assumes that we have somehow arrived independently at a conception of God to which such inspirations can be referred. The Psychology of the human mind cannot assume the existence of such a Being: if we infer such a Being from our own mental experience, that is not immediate but {116} mediate knowledge. It is a belief based on inference, and a belief which is, properly speaking, metaphysical. The idea of a Religion which is merely based upon Psychology and involves nothing else is a delusion: all the great Religions of the world have been, among other things, metaphysical systems. We have no means of ascertaining their truth but Reason, whether it assume the form of a rough common-sense or of elaborate reasoning which not only is Metaphysic but knows itself to be so. Reason is then the organ of religious truth. But then, let me remind you, Reason includes our moral Reason. That really is a faculty of immediate knowledge; and it is a faculty which, in a higher or lower state of development, is actually found in practically all human beings. The one element of truth which I recognize in the theory of an immediate knowledge of God is the truth that the most important data upon which we base the inference which leads to the knowledge of God are those supplied by the immediate judgements or intuitions of the Moral Consciousness.
And here let me caution you against a very prevalent misunderstanding about the word Reason. It is assumed very often that Reason means nothing but inference. That is not what we mean when we refer moral judgements to the Reason. We do not mean that we can prove that things are right or {117} wrong: we mean precisely the opposite—that ultimate moral truth is immediate, like the truth that two and two make four. It might, of course, be contended that the same Reason which assures me that goodness is worth having and that the whole is greater than the part, assures us no less immediately of the existence of God. I can only say that I am sure I have no such immediate knowledge, and that for the most part that knowledge is never claimed by people who understand clearly the difference between immediate knowledge and inference. The idea of God is a complex conception, based, not upon this or that isolated judgement or momentary experience, but upon the whole of our experience taken together. It is a hypothesis suggested by, and necessary to, the explanation of our experience as a whole. Some minds may lay most stress upon the religious emotions themselves; others upon the experience of the outer world, upon the appearances of design, or upon the metaphysical argument which shows them the inconceivability of matter without mind; others, again, may be most impressed by the impossibility of accounting in any way for the immediate consciousness of duty and the conviction of objective validity or authority which that consciousness carries with it. But in any case the knowledge, when it is a reasonable belief and not based merely upon authority, involves {118} inference—just like our knowledge of our friend's existence. The fact that my friend is known to me by experience does not prevent his communicating his mind to me. I shall try to show you in my next lecture that to admit that our knowledge of God is based upon inference is not incompatible with the belief that God has spoken to man face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.
At this point it may perhaps be well, for the sake of clearness, to summarize the position to which I have tried to lead you. I have tried to show that the material Universe cannot reasonably be thought of as having any existence outside, or independently of, Mind. It certainly does not exist merely in any or all of the human and similar minds whose knowledge is fleeting, and which have, there is every reason to believe, a beginning in time. We are bound then to infer the existence of a single Mind or Consciousness, which must be thought of as containing all the elements of our own Consciousness—Reason or Thought, Feeling, and Will—though no doubt in Him those elements or aspects of Consciousness are combined in a manner of which our own minds can give us but a very faint and analogical idea. The world must be thought of as ultimately the thought or experience of this Mind, which we call God. And this Mind must be thought {119} of as not only a Thinker, but also as a Cause or a Will. Our own and all other minds, no less than the events of the material Universe, owe their beginning and continuance to this divine Will: in them the thought or experience of the divine Mind is reproduced in various degrees; and to all of them is communicated some portion of that causality or activity of which God is the ultimate source, so that their acts must be regarded as due mediately to them, ultimately to God. But, though these minds are wholly dependent upon and in intimate connexion with the divine Mind, they cannot be regarded aspartsof the divine Consciousness. Reality consists of God and all the minds that He wills to exist, together with the world of Nature which exists in and for those minds. Reality is the system or society of spirits and their experience. The character and ultimate purpose of the divine Mind is revealed to us, however inadequately or imperfectly, in the moral consciousness; and the moral ideal which is thus communicated to us makes it reasonable for us to expect, for at least the higher of the dependent or created minds, a continuance, of their individual existence, after physical death. Pain, sin, and other evils must be regarded as necessary incidents in the process by which the divine Will is bringing about the greatest attainable good of all conscious beings. The question whether our material Universe, {120} considered as the object of Mind, has a beginning and will have an end, is one which we have no data for deciding. Time-distinctions, I think, must be regarded as objective—that is to say, as forming part of the nature and constitution of the real world; but the antinomy involved either in supposing an endless succession or a beginning and end of the time-series is one which our intellectual faculties are, or at least have so far proved, incapable of solving. The element of inadequacy and uncertainty which the admission of this antinomy introduces into our theory of the Universe is an emphatic reminder to us of the inadequate and imperfect character of all our knowledge. The knowledge, however, that we possess, though inadequate knowledge, is real knowledge—not a sham knowledge of merely relative or human validity; and is sufficient not only for the guidance of life but even for the partial, though not the complete, satisfaction of one of the noblest impulses of the human mind—the disinterested passion for truth. 'Now we see in a mirror darkly'; but still we see.
The view of the Universe which I have endeavoured very inadequately to set before you is a form of Idealism. Inasmuch as it recognizes the existence—though not the separate and independent existence—of many persons; inasmuch as it regards both God and man as persons, without attempting {121} to merge the existence of either in one all-including, comprehensive consciousness, it may further be described as a form of 'personal Idealism.' But, if any one finds it easier to think of material Nature as having an existence which, though dependent upon and willed by the divine Mind, is not simply an existence in and for mind, such a view of the Universe will serve equally well as a basis of Religion. For religious purposes it makes no difference whether we think of Nature as existing in the Mind of God, or as simply created or brought into and kept in existence by that Mind. When you have subtracted from the theistic case every argument that depends for its force upon the theory that the idea of matter without Mind is an unthinkable absurdity, enough will remain to show the unreasonableness of supposing that in point of fact matter ever has existed without being caused and controlled by Mind. The argument for Idealism may, I hope, have at all events exhibited incidentally the groundlessness and improbability of materialistic and naturalistic assumptions, and left the way clear for the establishment of Theism by the arguments which rest upon the discovery that Causality implies volition; upon the appearances of intelligence in organic life; upon the existence of the moral consciousness; and more generally upon the enormous probability that the ultimate Source of Reality should resemble rather {122} the highest than the lowest kind of existence of which we have experience. That Reality as a whole may be most reasonably interpreted by Reality at its highest is after all the sum and substance of all theistic arguments. If anybody finds it easier to think of matter as uncreated but as always guided and controlled by Mind, I do not think there will be any religious objection to such a position; though it is, as it seems to me, intellectually a less unassailable position than is afforded by an Idealism of the type which I have most inadequately sketched.
Mr. Bradley in a cynical moment has defined Metaphysics as the 'finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.' I do not for myself accept that definition, which Mr. Bradley himself would not of course regard as expressing the whole truth of the matter. But, though I am firmly convinced that it is possible to find good reasons for the religious beliefs and hopes which have in fact inspired the noblest lives, I still feel that the greatest service which even a little acquaintance with Philosophy may render to many who have not the time for any profounder study of it, will be to give them greater boldness and confidence in accepting a view of the Universe which satisfies the instinctive or unanalysed demands of their moral, intellectual, and spiritual nature.
{123}
It may perhaps be well for the sake of greater clearness to summarize my objections—those already mentioned and some others—to the system of Dr. McTaggart, which I admit to be, for one who has accepted the idealistic position that matter does not exist apart from Mind, the only intelligible alternative to Theism. His theory is, it will be remembered, that ultimate Reality consists of a system of selves or spirits, uncreated and eternal, forming together a Unity, but not a conscious Unity, so that consciousness exists only in the separate selves, not in the whole:
(1) It is admitted that the material world exists only in and for Mind. There is no reason to think that any human mind, or any of the other minds of which Dr. McTaggart's Universe is composed, knows the whole of this world. What kind of existence then have the parts of the Universe which are not known to any mind? It seems to me that Dr. McTaggart would be compelled to admit that they do not exist at all. The world postulated by Science would thus be admitted to be a delusion. This represents a subjective Idealism of an extreme and staggering kind which cannot meet the objections commonly urged against all Idealism.
(2) Moreover, the world is not such an intellectually complete system as Dr. McTaggart insists that it must be, apart from the relations of its known parts to its unknown parts. If there are parts which are unknown to any mind, and which therefore do not exist at all, it is not a system at all.
(3) If it be said that all the spirits between them know the world—one knowing one part, another another—this is a mere hypothesis, opposed to all the probabilities suggested by experience, and after all would be a very inadequate answer to our difficulties. Dr. McTaggart insists {124} that the world of existing things exists as a system. Such existence to an Idealist must mean existence for a mind; a system not known as a system to any mind whatever could hardly be said to exist at all.
(4) If it be suggested (as Dr. McTaggart was at one time inclined to suggest) that every mind considered as a timeless Noumenon is omniscient, though in its phenomenal and temporal aspect its knowledge is intermittent and always limited, I reply (a) the theory seems to me not only gratuitous but unintelligible, and (b) it is open to all the difficulties and objections of the theory that time and change are merely subjective delusions. This is too large a question to discuss here: I can only refer to the treatment of the subject by such writers as Lotze (see above) and M. Bergson. I may also refer to Mr. Bradley's argument (Appearance and Reality, p. 50 sq.) against the theory that the individual Ego is out of time.
(5) The theory of pre-existent souls is opposed to all the probabilities suggested by experience. Soul and organism are connected in such a way that the pre-existence of one element in what presents itself and works in our world as a unity is an extremely difficult supposition, and involves assumptions which reduce to a minimum the amount of identity or continuity that could be claimed for the Ego throughout its successive lives. A soul which has forgotten all its previous experiences may have some identity with its previous state, but not much. Moreover, we should have to suppose that the correspondence of a certain type of body with a certain kind of soul, as well as the resemblance between the individual and his parents, implies no kind of causal connexion, but is due to mere accident; or, if it is not to accident, to a very arbitrary kind of pre-established harmony which there is nothing in experience to suggest, and which (upon Dr. McTaggart's theory) there is no creative intelligence to pre-establish. The theory cannot be absolutely refuted, but all Dr. McTaggart's ingenuity has not—to my own mind, {125} and (I feel sure) to most minds—made it seem otherwise than extremely difficult and improbable. Its sole recommendation is that it makes possible an Idealism without Theism: but, if Theism be an easier and more defensible theory, that is no recommendation at all.
(6) Dr. McTaggart's whole theory seems to me to waver between two inconsistent views of Reality. When he insists that the world consists of a system or Unity, he tends towards a view of things which makes the system of intellectual relations constituting knowledge or Science to be the very reality of things: on such a view there is no impossibility of an ultimate Reality not known to any one mind. But Dr. McTaggart has too strong a hold on the conviction of the supremely real character of conscious mind and the unreality of mere abstractions to be satisfied with this view. If there is no mind which both knows and wills the existence and the mutual relations of the spirits, the supreme reality must be found in the individual spirits themselves; yet the system, if known to none of them, seems to fall outside the reality. The natural tendency of a system which finds the sole reality in eternally self-existent souls is towards Pluralism—a theory of wholly independent 'Reals' or 'Monads.' Dr. McTaggnrt is too much of a Hegelian to acquiesce in such a view. The gulf between the two tendencies seems to me—with all respect—to be awkwardly bridged over by the assumption that the separate selves form an intelligible system, which nevertheless no one really existent spirit actually understands. If a system of relations can be Reality, there is no ground for assuming the pre-existence or eternity of individual souls: if on the other hand Reality is 'experience,' an unexperienced 'system' cannot be real, and the 'unity' disappears. This is a line of objection which it would require a much more thorough discussion to develope.
(7) On the view which I myself hold as to the nature of Causality, the only intelligible cause of events is a Will. The events of Dr. McTaggart's world (putting aside the very {126} small proportion which are due, in part at least, to the voluntary action of men or spirits) are not caused at all. His theory is therefore open to all—and more than all—the objections which I have urged in Lecture II. against the theory which explains the Universe as the thought of a Mind but not as caused by that Mind.
(8) It is just possible that some one might suggest that the first of my objections might be met by the allegation that there is nothing in the scheme which forbids us to suppose that the whole of Nature is known to more than one of the spirits which make up Reality, though not to all, or indeed any, of the human and non-human spirits known to us. I should reply (a) that the considerations which lead to the hypothesis of one omniscient Being do not require more than one such spirit, andentia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem; (b) such a scheme would still be open to Objection 7. If it is a speculative possibility that all Nature may exist in the knowledge of more than one spirit, it cannot well be thought of as willed by more than one spirit. If the Universe, admitted to form an ordered system, is caused by rational will at all, it must surely be caused by one Will. But perhaps a serious discussion of a polytheistic scheme such as this may be postponed till it is seriously maintained. It has not been suggested, so far as I am aware, by Dr. McTaggart himself.
(9) The real strength of Dr. McTaggart's system must be measured by the validity of his objections to a Theism such as I have defended. I have attempted to reply to those objections in the course of these Lectures, and more at length in a review of hisSome Dogmas of ReligioninMind(N.S.), vol. xv., 1906.
[1] Cf. Flint'sTheism, Ed. v., p. 117 and App. xi.
[2] The most illuminating discussion of time and the most convincing argument for its 'objectivity' which I know, is to be found in Lotze'sMetaphysic, Book II. chap. iii., but it cannot be recommended to the beginner in Metaphysic. A brilliant exposition of the view of the Universe which regards time and change as belonging to the very reality of the Universe, has recently appeared in M. Bergson's L'Évolution Créatrice, but he has hardly attempted to deal with the metaphysical difficulties indicated above. The book, however, seems to me the most important philosophical work that has appeared since Mr. Bradley'sAppearance and Reality, and though the writer has hardly formulated his Natural Theology, it constitutes a very important contribution to the theistic argument. Being based upon a profound study of biological Evolution, it may be specially commended to scientific readers.
[3] Such a view is expounded in Dr. Schiller's early workThe Riddles of the Sphinxand in Professor Howison'sThe Limits of Evolution. The very distinguished French thinker Charles Renouvier (La Nouvelle Monadologie, etc.), like Origen, believed that souls were pre-existent but created.
[4] I use the word 'causally connected' in the popular or scientific sense of the word, to indicate merely an actually observed psycho-physical law.
[5] In part, perhaps, also to a mistaken theory of predication, which assumes that, because every fact in the world can be represented as logically a predicate of Reality at large, therefore there is but one Substance or (metaphysically) Real Being in the world, of which all other existences are really mere 'attributes.' But this theory cannot be discussed here.
[6] InThe New Theology.
[7]E.g.by Mr. Bradley inAppearance and Realityand still more uncompromisingly by Professor A. E. Taylor inThe Problem of Conduct, but I rejoice to find that the latter very able writer has recently given up this theory of a 'super-moral' Absolute.
[8] I think it desirable to mention here that Professor Watson's account of my views in hisPhilosophical Basis of Religioncompletely misrepresents my real position. I have replied to his criticisms inMind, N.S. No. 69 (Jan. 1909).
[9] This is sometimes denied by Philosophers, but I have never been able to understand on what grounds. If I knowa priorithe existence of other men, I ought to be able to saya priorihow many they are and to say something about them. And this is more than any one claims.
[10] InEsquisse d'une Philosophie de la Religion d'après La Psychologie et l'histoire.
{127}
I have tried in previous lectures to show that the apprehension of religious truth does not depend upon some special kind of intuition; that it is not due to some special faculty superior to and different in kind from our ordinary intellectual activities, but to an exercise of the same intellectual faculties by which we attain to truth in other matters—including, however, especially the wholly unique faculty of immediately discerning values or pronouncing moral judgements. The word 'faith' should, as it seems to me, be used to express not a mysterious capacity for attaining to knowledge without thought or without evidence, but to indicate some of the manifold characteristics by which our religious knowledge is distinguished from the knowledge either of common life or of the physical Sciences. If I had time there would be much to be said about these characteristics, and I think I could show that the popular distinction between knowledge and religious {128} faith finds whatever real justification it possesses in these characteristics of religious knowledge. I might insist on the frequently implicit and unanalysed character of religious thinking; upon the incompleteness and inadequacy of even the fullest account that the maturest and acutest Philosopher can give of ultimate Reality; upon the merely probable and analogical character of much of the reasoning which is necessarily employed both in the most popular and in the most philosophical kinds of reasoning about such matters; and above all upon the prominent place which moral judgements occupy in religious thought, moral judgements which, on account of their immediate character and their emotional setting, are often not recognized in their true character as judgements of the Reason. Most of the mistakes into which popular thinking has fallen in this matter—the mistakes which culminate in the famous examination-paper definition of faith as 'a means of believing that which we know not to be true'—would be avoided if we would only remember, with St. Paul and most of the greater religious thinkers, that the true antithesis is not between faith and reason but between faith and sight. All religious belief implies a belief in something which cannot be touched or tasted or handled, and which cannot be established by any mere logical deduction from what can be touched or tasted or handled. So far from implying {129} scepticism as to the power of Reason, this opposition between faith and sight actually asserts the possibility of attaining by thought to a knowledge of realities which cannot be touched or tasted or handled—a knowledge of equal validity and trustworthiness with that which is popularly said to be due to the senses, though Plato has taught us once for all[1] that the senses by themselves never give us real knowledge, and that in the apprehension of the most ordinary matter of fact there is implied the action of the self-same intellect by which alone we can reach the knowledge of God.
It may further be pointed out that, though neither religious knowledge nor moral knowledge are mere emotion, they are both of them very closely connected with certain emotions. Great moral discoveries are made, not so much by superior intellectual power, as by superior interest in the subject-matter of Morality. Very ordinary intelligence can see, when it is really brought to bear upon the matter, the irrationality or immorality of bad customs, oppressions, social injustices; but the people who have led the revolt against these things have generally been the people who have felt intensely about them. So it is with the more distinctly religious knowledge. Religious thought and insight are largely dependent upon the emotions to which religious {130} ideas and beliefs appeal. The absence of religious thought and definite religious belief is very often (I am far from saying always) due to a want of interest in Religion; but that does not prove that religious thought is not the work of the intellect, any more than the fact that a man is ignorant of Politics because he takes no interest in Politics proves that political truth is a mere matter of emotion, and has nothing to do with the understanding. Thought is always guided by interest—a truth which must not be distorted with a certain modern school of thought, if indeed it can properly be called thought, into the assertion that thinking is nothing but willing, and that therefore we are at liberty to think just what we please.
And that leads on to a further point. Emotion and desire are very closely connected with the will. A man's moral insight and the development of his thought about moral questions depend very largely upon the extent to which he acts up to whatever light he has. Vice, as Aristotle put it, isphthartike arches—destructive of moral first principles. Moral insight is largely dependent upon character. And so is religious insight. Thus it is quite true to say that religious belief depends in part upon the state of the will. This doctrine has been so scandalously abused by many Theologians and Apologists that I use it with great hesitation. I have no sympathy {131} with the idea that we are justified in believing a religious doctrine merely because we wish it to be true, or with the insinuation that non-belief in a religious truth is always or necessarily due to moral obliquity. But still it is undeniable that a man's ethical and religious beliefs are to some extent affected by the state of his will. That is so with all knowledge to some extent; for progress in knowledge requires attention, and is largely dependent upon interest. If I take no interest in the properties of curves or the square root of -1, I am not very likely to make a good mathematician. This connexion of knowledge with interest applies in an exceptional degree to religious knowledge: and that is one of the points which I think many religious thinkers have intended to emphasize by their too hard and fast distinctions between faith and knowledge.
Belief itself is thus to some extent affected by the state of the will; and still more emphatically does the extent to which belief affects action depend upon the will. Many beliefs which we quite sincerely hold are what have been called 'otiose beliefs'; we do not by an effort of the will realize them sufficiently strongly for them to affect action. Many a man knows perfectly that his course of life will injure or destroy his physical health; it is not through intellectual scepticism that he disobeys his {132} physician's prescriptions, but because other desires and inclinations prevent his attending to them and acting upon them. It is obvious that to men like St. Paul and Luther faith meant much more than a mere state of the intellect; it included a certain emotional and a certain volitional attitude; it included love and it included obedience. Whether our intellectual beliefs about Religion are energetic enough to influence action, does to an enormous extent depend upon our wills. Faith is, then, used, and almost inevitably used, in such a great variety of senses that I do not like to lay down one definite and exclusive definition of it; but it would be safe to say that, for many purposes and in many connexions, religious faith means the deliberate adoption by an effort of the will, as practically certain for purposes of action and of feeling, of a religious belief which to the intellect is, or may be, merely probable. For purposes of life it is entirely reasonable to treat probabilities as certainties. If a man has reason to think his friend is trustworthy, he will do well to trust him wholly and implicitly. If a man has reason to think that a certain view of the Universe is the most probable one, he will do well habitually to allow that conviction to dominate not merely his actions, but the habitual tenour of his emotional and spiritual life. We should not love a human being much if we allowed ourselves habitually to {133} contemplate the logical possibility that the loved one was unworthy of, or irresponsive to, our affection. We could not love God if we habitually contemplated the fact that His existence rests for us upon judgements in which there is more or less possibility of error, though there is no reason why we should, in our speculative moments, claim a greater certainty for them than seems to be reasonable. The doctrine that 'probability is the guide of life' is one on which every sensible man habitually acts in all other relations of life: Bishop Butler was right in contending that it should be applied no less unhesitatingly to the matter of religious belief and religious aspiration.
The view which I have taken of the nature of faith may be illustrated by the position of Clement of Alexandria. It is clear from his writings that by faith he meant a kind of conviction falling short of demonstration or immediate intellectual insight, and dependent in part upon the state of the will and the heart. Clement did not disparage knowledge in the interests of faith: faith was to him a more elementary kind of knowledge resting largely upon moral conviction, and the foundation of that higher state of intellectual apprehension which he called Gnosis. I do not mean, of course, to adopt Clement's Philosophy as a whole; I merely refer to it as illustrating the point that, properly considered, faith is, or rather includes, a particular kind or stage {134} of knowledge, and is not a totally different and even opposite state of mind. It would be easy to show that this has been fully recognized by many, if not most, of the great Christian thinkers.
One last point. It is of the utmost importance to distinguish between the process by which psychologically a man arrives at a religious or other truth and the reasons which make it true. Because I deny that the truth of God's existence can reasonably be accepted on the basis of an immediate judgement or intuition, I do not deny for one moment that an apparently intuitive conviction of the truth of Christianity, as of other religions, actually exists. The religious belief of the vast majority of persons has always rested, and must always rest, very largely upon tradition, education, environment, authority of one kind or another—authority supported or confirmed by a varying measure of independent reflection or experience. And, just where the influence of authority is most complete and overwhelming, it is least felt to be authority. The person whose beliefs are most entirely produced by education or environment is very often most convinced that his opinions are due solely to his own immediate insight. But even where this is not the case—even where the religious man is taking a new departure, revolting against his environment and adopting a religious belief absolutely at variance with the established {135} belief of his society—I do not contend that such new religious ideas are always due to unobserved and unanalysed processes of reasoning. That in most cases, when a person adopts a new creed, he would himself give some reason for his change of faith is obvious, though the reason which he would allege would not in all cases be the one which really caused the change of religion. There may be other psychological influences which cause belief besides the influence of environment: in some cases the psychological causes of such beliefs are altogether beyond analysis. But, though I do not think M. Auguste Sabatier justified in assuming that a belief is true, and must come directly from God, simply because we cannot easily explain its genesis by the individual's environment and psychological antecedents, it is of extreme importance to insist that it is not proved to be false because it was not adopted primarily, or at all, on adequate theoretical grounds. A belief which arose at first entirely without logical justification, or it may be on intellectual grounds subsequently discovered to be inadequate or false, may nevertheless be one which can and does justify itself to the reflective intellect of the person himself or of other persons. And many new, true, and valuable beliefs have undoubtedly arisen in this way. Even in physical Science we all know that there is no Logic of discovery. It {136} is a familiar criticism upon the Logic of Bacon that he ignored or under-estimated the part that is played in scientific thinking by hypothesis, and the consequent need of scientific imagination. Very often the new scientific idea comes into the discoverer's mind, he knows not how or why. Some great man of Science—I think, Helmholtz—said of a brilliant discovery of his, 'It was given to me.' But it was not true because it came to Helmholtz in this way, but because it was subsequently verified and proved. Now, undoubtedly, religious beliefs, new and old, often do present themselves to the minds of individuals in an intuitive and unaccountable way. They may subsequently be justified at the bar of Reason: and yet Reason might never have discovered them for itself. They would never have come into the world unless they had presented themselves at first to some mind or other as intuitions, inspirations, immediate Revelations: and yet (once again) the fact that they so present themselves does not by itself prove them to be true.
I may perhaps illustrate what I mean by the analogy of Poetry. I suppose few people will push the sound-without-sense view of Poetry to the length of denying that poets do sometimes see and teach us truths. No one—least of all one who is not even a verse-maker himself—can, I suppose, analyse the intellectual process by which a poet {137} gets at his truths. The insight by which he arrives at them is closely connected with emotions of various kinds: and yet the truths are not themselves emotions, nor do they in all cases merely state the fact that the poet has felt such and such emotions. They are propositions about the nature of things, not merely about the poet's mental states. And yet the truths are not true because the poetfeelsthem, as he would say—no matter how passionately he feels them. There is no separate organ of poetic truth: and not all the things that poets have passionately felt are true. Some highly poetical thoughts have been very false thoughts. But, if they are true, they must be true for good logical reasons, which a philosophical critic may even in some cases by subsequent reflection be able to disentangle and set forth. Yet the poet did not get at those truths by way of philosophical reflection: or, if he was led to them by any logical process, he could not have analysed his own reasoning. The poet could not have produced the arguments of the philosopher: the philosopher without the poet's lead might never have seen the truth. I am afraid I must not stay to defend or illustrate this position: I will only say that the poets I should most naturally go to for illustration would be such poets as Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, though perhaps all three are a little {138} too consciously philosophic to supply the ideal illustration.
I do not think it will be difficult to apply these reflections to the case of religious and ethical truth. All religious truth, as I hold, depends logically upon inference; inference from the whole body of our experiences, among which the most important place is held by our immediate moral judgements. The truth of Theism is in that sense a truth discernible by Reason. But it does not follow that, when it was first discovered, it was arrived at by the inferences which I have endeavoured to some extent to analyse, or by one of the many lines of thought which may lead to the same conclusions. It was not the Greek philosophers so much as the Jewish prophets who taught the world true Monotheism. Hosea, Amos, the two Isaiahs probably arrived at their Monotheism largely by intuition; or (in so far as it was by inferential processes) the premisses of their argument were very probably inherited beliefs of earlier Judaism which would not commend themselves without qualification to a modern thinker. In its essentials the Monotheism of Isaiah is a reasonable belief; we accept it because it is reasonable, not because Isaiah had an intuition that it was true; for we have rejected many things which to Isaiah probably seemed no less self-evidently true. And yet it would be a profound mistake to assume that {139} the philosophers who now defend Isaiah's creed would ever have arrived at it without Isaiah's aid.
I hope that by this time you will have seen to some extent the spirit in which I am approaching the special subject of to-day's lecture—the question of Revelation. In some of the senses that have been given to it, the idea of Revelation is one which hardly any one trained in the school—that is to say, any school—of modern Philosophy is likely to accept. The idea that pieces of information have been supernaturally and without any employment of their own intellectual faculties communicated at various times to particular persons, their truth being guaranteed by miracles—in the sense of interruptions of the ordinary course of nature by an extraordinary fiat of creative power—is one which is already rejected by most modern theologians, even among those who would generally be called rather conservative theologians. I will not now argue the question whether any miraculous event, however well attested, could possibly be sufficient evidence for the truth of spiritual teaching given in attestation of it. I will merely remark that to any one who has really appreciated the meaning of biblical criticism, it is scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an attestation. In proof of that I will merely appeal to the modest, apologetic, tentative tone in which {140} scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would usually be classed among the defenders of miracles—men like the Bishop of Ely or Professor Sanday of Oxford—are content to speak of such evidences. They admit the difficulty of proving that such miraculous events really happened thousands of years ago on the strength of narratives written at the very earliest fifty years after the alleged event, and they invite us rather to believe in the miracles on the evidence of a Revelation already accepted than to accept the revelation on the evidence of the miracles. I shall have a word to say on this question of miracles next time; but for the present I want to establish, or rather without much argument to put before you for your consideration, this position; that the idea of revelation cannot be admitted in the sense of a communication of truth by God, claiming to be accepted not on account of its own intrinsic reasonableness or of the intellectual or spiritual insight of the person to whom it is made, but on account of the historical evidence for miraculous occurrences said to have taken place in connexion with such communication. The most that can reasonably be contended for is that super-normal occurrences of this kind may possess a certain corroborative value in support of a Revelation claiming to be accepted on other grounds.
What place then is left for the idea of Revelation? {141} I will ask you to go back for a moment to the conclusions of our first lecture. We saw that from the idealistic point of view all knowledge may be looked upon as a partial communication to the human soul of the thoughts or experiences of the divine Mind. There is a sense then in which all truth is revealed truth. In a more important sense, and a sense more nearly allied to that of ordinary usage, all moral and spiritual truth may be regarded as revealed truth. And in particular those immediate judgements about good and evil in which we have found the sole means of knowing the divine character and purposes must be looked on as divinely implanted knowledge—none the less divinely implanted because it is, in the ordinary sense of the words, quite natural, normal, and consistent with law. Nobody but an Atheist ought to talk about the unassisted human intellect: no one who acquiesces in the old doctrine that Conscience is the voice of God ought either on the one hand to deny the existence of Revelation, or on the other to speak of Revelation as if it were confined to the Bible.
But because we ascribe some intrinsic power of judging about spiritual and moral matters to the ordinary human intellect, it would be a grievous mistake to assume that all men have an equal measure of this power. Because we assert that all moral and spiritual truth comes to men by {142} Revelation, it does not follow that there are not degrees of Revelation. And it is one of the special characteristics of religious and moral truth that it is in a peculiar degree dependent upon the superior insight of those exceptional men to whom have been accorded extraordinary degrees of moral and spiritual insight. Even in Science, as we have seen, we cannot dispense with genius: very ordinary men can satisfy themselves of the truth of a hypothesis when it is once suggested, though they would have been quite incompetent to discover that hypothesis for themselves. Still more unquestionably are there moral and spiritual truths which, when once discovered, can be seen to be true by men of very commonplace intellect and commonplace character. The truths are seen and passed on to others, who accept them partly on authority, by way of social inheritance and tradition; partly because they are confirmed in various degrees by their own independent judgement and experience. Here then—in the discovery of new spiritual truth—we encounter that higher and exceptional degree of spiritual and ethical insight which in a special and pre-eminent sense we ought to regard as Revelation or Inspiration. Here there is room, in the evolution of Religion and Morality, for the influence of the men of moral or religious genius—the Prophets, the Apostles, the Founders and Reformers of Religions: and, since {143} moral and spiritual insight are very closely connected with character, for the moral hero, the leader of men, the Saint. Especially to the new departures, the turning-points, the epoch-making discoveries in ethical and religious progress connected with the appearance of such men, we may apply the term Revelation in a supreme or culminating sense.
It is, as it seems to me, extremely important that we should not altogether divorce the idea of Revelation from those kinds of moral and religious truth which are arrived at by the ordinary working of the human intellect. The ultimate moral judgements no doubt must be intuitive or immediate, but in our deductions from them—in their application both to practical life and to theories about God and the Universe—there is room for much intellectual work of the kind which we commonly associate rather with the philosopher than with the prophet. But the philosopher may be also a prophet. The philosophically trained Greek Fathers were surely right in recognizing that men like Socrates and Plato were to be numbered among those to whom the Spirit of God had spoken in an exceptional degree. They too spoke in the power of the indwelling Logos. But still it is quite natural that we should associate the idea of Revelation or Inspiration more particularly with that kind of moral and intellectual discovery which comes to exceptional men by way {144} of apparent intuition or immediate insight. We associate the idea of inspiration rather with the poet than with the man of Science, and with the prophet rather than with the systematic philosopher. It is quite natural, therefore, that we should associate the idea of Revelation more especially with religious teachers of the intuitive order like the Jewish prophets than with even those philosophers who have also been great practical teachers of Ethics and Religion. But it is most important to recognize that there is no hard and fast line to be drawn between the two classes. The Jewish prophets did not arrive at their ideas about God without a great deal of hard thinking, though the thinking is for the most part unexplicit and the mode of expression poetic. 'Their idols are silver and gold; even the work of men's hands. . . . They have hands and handle not; feet have they and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.' There is real hard reasoning underlying such noble rhetoric, though the Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his argument against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form of a dialectical argument like Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas. In the highest instance of all—the case of our Lord Jesus Christ himself—a natural instinct of reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how he came by the truth that he communicated to men; but, though I would not deny that the deepest {145} truth came to him chiefly by a supreme gift of intuition, there are obvious indications of profound intellectual thought in his teaching. Recall for a moment his arguments against the misuse of the Sabbath, against the superstition of unclean meats, against the Sadducean objection to the Resurrection. I want to avoid at present dogmatic phraseology; so I will only submit in passing that this is only what we should expect if the early Church was right in thinking of Christ as the supreme expression in the moral and religious sphere of the Logos or Reason of God.
The thought of great religious thinkers is none the less Revelation because it involves the use of their reasoning faculties. But I guarded myself against being supposed, in contending for the possibility of a philosophical or metaphysical knowledge of God, to assume that religious truth had always come to men in this way, or even that the greatest steps in religious progress have usually taken the form of explicit reasoning. Once again, it is all-important to distinguish between the way in which a belief comes to be entertained and the reasons for its being true. All sorts of psychological causes have contributed to generate religious beliefs. And when once we have discovered grounds in our own reflection or experience for believing them to be true, there is no reason why we should not regard all of them as {146} pieces of divine revelation. Visions and dreams, for instance, had a share in the development of religious ideas. We might even admit the possibility that the human race would never have been led to think of the immortality of the soul but for primitive ideas about ghosts suggested by the phenomena of dreams. The truth of the doctrine is neither proved nor disproved by such an account of its origin; but, if that belief is true and dreams have played a part in the process by which man has been led to it, no Theist surely can refuse to recognize the divine guidance therein. And so, at a higher level, we are told by the author of the Acts that St. Peter was led to accept the great principle of Gentile Christianity by the vision of a sheet let down from heaven. There is no reason why that account should not be historically true. The psychologist may very easily account for St. Peter's vision by the working in his mind of the liberal teaching of Stephen, the effect of his fast, and so on. But that does not prevent us recognizing that vision as an instrument of divine Revelation. We at the present day do not believe in this fundamental principle of Christianity because of that dream of St. Peter's; for we know that dreams are not always truth or always edifying. We believe in that principle on other grounds—the convincing grounds (among others) which St. Luke puts into St. Peter's mouth {147} on the following morning. But that need not prevent our recognizing that God may have communicated that truth to the men of that generation—and through them to us—partly by means of that dream.
The two principles then for which I wish to contend are these: (1) that Revelation is a matter of degree; (2) that no Revelation can be accepted in the long run merely because it came to a particular person in a peculiarly intuitive or immediate way. It may be that M. Auguste Sabatier is right in seeing the most immediate contact of God with the human soul in those intuitive convictions which can least easily be accounted for by ordinary psychological causes; in those new departures of religious insight, those unaccountable comings of new thoughts into the mind, which constitute the great crises or turning-points of religious history. But, though the coming of such thoughts may often be accepted by the individual as direct evidences of a divine origin, the Metaphysician, on looking back upon them, cannot treat the fact that the psychologist cannot account for them, as a convincing proof of such an origin, apart from our judgement upon the contents of what claims to be a revelation. Untrue thoughts and wicked thoughts sometimes arise equally unaccountably: the fact that they do so is even now accounted for by some as a sufficient proof of direct diabolic suggestion. When we have judged the {148} thought to be true or the suggestion to be good, then we, who on other grounds believe in God, may see in it a piece of divine revelation, but not till then.
From this point of view it is clear that we are able to recognize various degrees and various kinds of divine revelation in many different Religions, philosophies, systems of ethical teaching. We are able to recognize the importance to the world of the great historical Religions, in all of which we can acknowledge a measure of Revelation. The fact that the truths which they teach (in so far as they are true) can now be recognized as true by philosophic thought, does not show that the world would ever have evolved those thoughts, apart from the influence of the great revealing personalities. Philosophy itself—the Philosophy of the professed philosophers—has no doubt contributed a very important element to the content of the historical Religions; but it is only in proportion as they become part of a system of religious teaching, and the possession of an organized religious community, that the ideas of the philosophers really come home to multitudes of men, and shape the history of the world. Nor in many cases would the philosophers themselves have seen what they have seen but for the great epoch-making thoughts of the great religion-making periods. And the same considerations which show the importance of religious movements in the {149} past tend also to emphasize the importance of the historical Religion and of the religious community in which it is enshrined in modern times. Because religious truth can now be defended by the use of our ordinary intellectual faculties, and because all possess these faculties in some degree, it is absurd to suppose that the ordinary individual, if left to himself, would be likely to evolve a true religious system for himself—any more than he would be likely to discern for himself the truths that were first seen by Euclid or Newton if he were not taught them. To under-estimate the importance of the great historical Religions and their creators has been the besetting sin of technical religious Philosophy. Metaphysicians have in truth often written about Religion in great ignorance as to the real facts of religious history.
But because we recognize a measure of truth in all the historical Religions, it does not follow that we can recognize an equal amount of truth in all of them. The idea that all the Religions teach much the same thing—or that, while they vary about that unimportant part of Religion which is called doctrine or dogma, they are all agreed about Morality—is an idea which could only occur to the self-complaisant ignorance which of late years has done most of the theological writing in the correspondence columns of our newspapers. The real student of comparative {150} Religion knows that it is only at a rather advanced stage in the development of Religion that Religion becomes in any important degree an ethical teacher at all. Even the highest and most ethical Religions are not agreed either in their Ethics or in their Theology. Not only can we recognize higher and lower Religions; but the highest Religions, among many things which they have in common, are at certain points diametrically antagonistic to each other. It is impossible therefore reasonably to maintain that fashionable attitude of mind towards these Religions which my friend Professor Inge once described as a sort of honorary membership of all Religions except one's own. If we are to regard the historical Religions as being of any importance to our own personal religious life, we must choose between them. If we put aside the case of Judaism in its most cultivated modern form, a form in which it has been largely influenced by Christianity, I suppose there is practically only one Religion which would be in the least likely to appeal to a modern philosophical student of Religion as a possible alternative to Christianity—and that is Buddhism. But Buddhist Ethics are not the same as Christian Ethics. Buddhist Ethics are ascetic: the Christianity which Christ taught was anti-ascetic. In its view of the future, Buddhism is pessimistic; Christianity is optimistic. Much as {151} Buddhism has done to inculcate Humanity and Charity, the principle of Buddhist Humanity is not the same as that of Christianity. Humanity is encouraged by the Buddhist (in so far as he is really influenced by his own formal creed) not from a motive of disinterested affection, but as a means of escaping from the evils of personal and individual existence, and so winning Nirvana. We cannot at one and the same time adhere to the Ethics of Buddhism and to those of Christianity, though I am far from saying that Christians have nothing to learn either from Buddhist teaching or from Buddhist practice. Still less can we at one and the same time be Atheists with the Buddhist and Theists with the Christian; look forward with the Buddhist to the extinction of personal consciousness and with the Christian to a fuller and more satisfying life. To take an interest in comparative Religion is not to be religious; to be religious implies a certain exclusive attachment to some definite form of religious belief, though it may of course often be a belief to which many historical influences have contributed.