Philosophy and Religion Part 3

Now, the question arises--'Can such an objectivity be a.s.serted by those who take a purely materialistic or naturalistic view of the Universe?'

Whatever our metaphysical theories about the nature of Reality may be, we can in practice have no difficulty in the region of Physical Science about recognizing an objective reality of some kind which is other than my mere thinking about it. That fire will burn whether I think so or not is practically recognized by persons of all metaphysical persuasions. If I say 'I can cloy the hungry edge of appet.i.te by bare imagination of a feast,' I try the experiment, and I fail. I imagine the feast, but I am hungry still: and if I persist in the experiment, I die. But what do we mean when we say that things are right or wrong whether I think them so or not, that the Moral Law exists outside me and independently of my thinking about it? Where and how does this moral law exist? The physical laws of Nature may be supposed by the Materialist or the Realist somehow to exist in matter: to the Metaphysician there may be difficulties in such a view, but the difficulties are not obvious to common-sense. But surely (whatever may be thought about physical laws) the moral law, {74} which expresses not any matter of physical fact but what _ought_ to be thought of acts, cannot be supposed to exist in a purely material Universe. An 'ought'

can exist only in and for a mind. In what mind, then, does the moral law exist? As a matter of fact, different people's moral judgements contradict one another. And the consciousness of no living man can well be supposed to be a flawless reflection of the absolute moral ideal. On a non-theistic view of the Universe, then, the moral law cannot well be thought of as having any actual existence. The objective validity of the moral law can indeed be and no doubt is _a.s.serted_, believed in, acted upon without reference to any theological creed; but it cannot be defended or fully justified without the pre-supposition of Theism. What we mean by an objective law is that the moral law is a part of the ultimate nature of things, on a level with the laws of physical nature, and it cannot be _that_, unless we a.s.sume that law to be an expression of the same mind in which physical laws originate. The idea of duty, when a.n.a.lysed, implies the idea of G.o.d. Whatever else Plato meant by the 'idea of the good,' this at least was one of his meanings--that the moral law has its source in the source of all Reality.

And therefore at bottom popular feeling is right in holding that religious belief is necessary to Morality. Of course I do not mean to say that, were {75} religious belief to disappear from the world, Morality would disappear too. But I do think Morality would become quite a different thing from what it has been for the higher levels of religious thought and feeling. The best men would no doubt go on acting up to their own highest ideal just as if it did possess objective validity, no matter how unable they might be to reconcile their practical with their speculative beliefs. But it would not be so for the many--or perhaps even for the few in their moments of weakness and temptation, when once the consequences of purely naturalistic Ethics were thoroughly admitted and realized. The only kind of objective validity which can be recognized on a purely naturalistic view of Ethics is conformity to public opinion. The tendency of all naturalistic Ethics is to make a G.o.d of public opinion. And if no other deity were recognized, such a G.o.d would a.s.suredly not be without wors.h.i.+ppers. And yet the strongest temptation to most of us is the temptation to follow a debased public opinion--the opinion of our age, our cla.s.s, our party. Apart from faith in a perfectly righteous G.o.d whose commands are, however imperfectly, revealed in the individual Conscience, we can find no really valid reason why the individual should act on his own sense of what is intrinsically right, even when he finds himself an 'Athanasius contra mundum,' and when his own personal likings and inclinations {76} and interests are on the side of the world. Kant was at bottom right, though perhaps he did not give the strongest reasons for his position, in making the idea of G.o.d a postulate of Morality.

From a more directly practical point of view I need hardly point out how much easier it is to feel towards the moral law the reverence that we ought to feel when we believe that that law is embodied in a personal Will. Not only is religious Morality not opposed to the idea of duty for duty's sake: it is speculatively the only reasonable basis of it; practically and emotionally the great safeguard of it. And whatever may be thought of the possibility of a speculative defence of such an idea without Theism, the practical difficulty of teaching it--especially to children, uneducated and unreflective persons--seems to be quite insuperable.[3] In more than one country in which religious education has been banished from the primary schools, grave observers complain that the idea of Duty seems to be suffering an eclipse in the minds of the rising {77} generation; some of them add that in those lands crime is steadily on the increase. Catechisms of civil duty and the like have not hitherto proved very satisfactory subst.i.tutes for the old teaching about the fear of G.o.d. Would that it were more frequently remembered on both sides of our educational squabbles that the supreme object of all religious education should be to instil into children's minds in the closest possible connexion the twin ideas of G.o.d and of Duty!

(2) I have tried to show that the ethical importance of the idea of G.o.d is prior to and independent of any belief in the idea of future rewards and punishments or of a future life, however conceived of. But when the idea of a righteous G.o.d has once been accepted, the idea of Immortality seems to me to follow from it as a sort of corollary. If any one on a calm review of the actual facts of the world's history can suppose that such a world as ours could be the expression of the will of a rational and moral Being without the a.s.sumption of a future life for which this is a discipline or education or preparatory stage, argument would be useless with him. Inveterate Optimism, like inveterate Scepticism, admits of no refutation, but in most minds produces no conviction. For those who are convinced that the world has a rational end, and yet that life as we see it (taken by itself) cannot be that end, the hypothesis {78} of Immortality becomes a necessary deduction from their belief in G.o.d.

I would not disparage the educative effect of the belief in a future life even when expressed in the crude and inadequate metaphor of reward and punishment. Few of us, I venture to think, have reached the moral level at which the belief--not in a vindictive, retributive, unending torment, but in a disciplinary or purgatorial education of souls prolonged after death--is without its value. At the same time it is a mere caricature of all higher religious beliefs when the religious motive is supposed to mean simply a fear of punishment and hope of personal reward, even of the least sensuous or material kind. Love of goodness for its own sake is for the Theist identical with the love of G.o.d. Love of a Person is a stronger force than devotion to an idea; and an ethical conception of G.o.d carries with it the idea of Immortality.

The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust, Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky; Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.[4]

Belief in human Immortality is, as I have suggested, the postulate without which most of us cannot {79} believe in G.o.d. Even for its own sake it is of the highest ethical value. The belief in Immortality gives a meaning to life even when it has lost all other meaning. 'It is rather,' in the n.o.ble words of the late Professor Sidgwick, 'from a disinterested aversion to an universe so irrationally const.i.tuted that the wages of virtue should be dust than from any private reckoning about his own wages,' that the good man clings to the idea of Immortality. And that is not all. The value of all higher goods even in this life, though it does not depend wholly upon their duration, does partly depend upon it. It would be better to be pure and unselfish for a day than to be base and selfish for a century. And yet we do not hesitate to commend the value of intellectual and of all kinds of higher enjoyments on account of their greater durability.

Why, then, should we shrink from admitting that the value of character really is increased when it is regarded as surviving bodily death?

Disbelief in Immortality would, I believe, in the long run and for the vast majority of men, carry with it an enormous enhancement of the value of the carnal and sensual over the spiritual and intellectual element in life.

(3) A third consequence which follows from our determining to accept the moral consciousness as containing the supreme revelation of G.o.d is this. From the point of view of the moral consciousness {80} we cannot say that the Universe is wholly good. We have only one means of judging whether things are good or bad: the idea of value is wholly derived from our own ethical judgements or judgements of value. If we distrust these judgements, there is no higher court to which we can appeal. And if we distrust our most ultimate judgements of value, I do not know why we should trust any judgements whatever. Even if we grant that from some very transcendental metaphysical height--the height, for instance, of Mr. Bradley's Philosophy--it may be contended that none of our judgements are wholly true or fully adequate to express the true nature of Reality, we at all events cannot get nearer to Reality than we are conducted by the judgements which present themselves to us as immediate and self-evident. Now, if we do apply these judgements of value to the Universe as we know it, can we say that everything in it seems to be very good? For my own part, I unhesitatingly say, 'Pain is an evil, and sin is a worse evil, and nothing on earth can ever make them good.' How then are we to account for such evils in a Universe which we believe to express the thought and will of a perfectly righteous Being? In only one way that I know of--by supposing they are means to a greater good. That is really the substance and substratum of all the Theodicies of all the Philosophers and all the {81} Theologians except those who frankly trample on or throw over the Moral Consciousness, and declare that, for those who see truly, pain and sin are only additional sources of aesthetic interest in a great world-drama produced for his own entertainment by a Deity not anthropomorphic enough to love but still anthropomorphic enough to be amused.

I shall be told no doubt that this is limiting G.o.d. A human being may, it will be urged, without loss of goodness, do things in themselves evil, as a means to a greater good: as a surgeon, he may cause excruciating pain; as a statesman or a soldier, he may doom thousands to a cruel death; as a wise administrator of the poor law, he may refuse to relieve much suffering, in order that he may not cause more suffering. But this is because his power is limited; he has to work upon a world which has a nature of its own independent of his volition.

To apply the same explanation to the evil which G.o.d causes, is to make Him finite instead of Infinite, limited in power instead of Omnipotent.

Now in a sense I admit that this is so. I am not wedded to the words 'Infinite' or 'Omnipotent.' But I would protest against a persistent misrepresentation of the point of view which I defend. It is suggested that the limit to the power of G.o.d must necessarily spring from the existence of some other thing or being outside of Him, not created by Him or under His {82} control. I must protest that that is not so.

Everybody admits that G.o.d cannot change the past; few Philosophers consider it necessary to maintain that G.o.d could construct triangles with their angles not together equal to two right angles, or think it any derogation from his Omnipotence to say that He could not make the sum of two and two to be other than four. Few Theologians push their idea of Freewill so far as to insist that G.o.d could will Himself to be unjust or unloving, or that, being just and loving, he could do unjust or unloving acts. There are necessities to which even G.o.d must submit.

But they are not imposed upon Him from without: they are parts of His own essential nature. The limitation by which G.o.d cannot attain His ends without causing some evil is a limitation of exactly the same nature. If you say that it is no limitation of G.o.d not to be able to change the past, for the thing is really unmeaning, then I submit that in the same way it may be no limitation that He should not be able to evolve highly organized beings without a struggle for existence, or to train human beings in unselfishness without allowing the existence both of sin and of pain. From the point of view of perfect knowledge, these things might turn out to be just as unmeaning as for G.o.d to change the past. The popular idea of Omnipotence is one which really does not bear looking into. If we supposed the world {83} to contain no evil at all, still there would be in it a definite amount of good. Twice such a world would be twice as good. Why is there not twice that amount of good? A being who deliberately created only a good world of limited quant.i.ty--a definite number of spirits (for instance) enjoying so much pleasure and so much virtue--when he could have created twice that number of spirits, and consequently twice that amount of good, would not be perfectly good or loving. And so on _ad infinitum_, no matter how much good you suppose him to have created. The only sense which we can intelligibly give to the idea of a divine Omnipotence is this--that G.o.d possesses all the power there is, that He can do all things that are in their own nature possible.[5]

But there is a more formidable objection which I have yet to meet. It has been urged by certain Philosophers of great eminence that, if we suppose G.o.d not to be unlimited in power, we have no guarantee that the world is even good on the whole; we should not be authorized to infer anything as to a future life or the ultimate destiny of Humanity from the fact of G.o.d's goodness. A limited G.o.d might be a defeated G.o.d. I admit the difficulty. This is the 'greatest wave' of all in the theistic {84} argument. In reply, I would simply appeal to the reasons which I have given for supposing that the world is really willed by G.o.d. A rational being does not will evil except as a means to a greater good. If G.o.d be rational, we have a right to suppose that the world must contain more good than evil, or it would not be willed at all. A being who was obliged to create a world which did not seem to him good would be a blind force, as force is understood by the pure Materialist, not a rational Will. That much we have a right to claim as a matter of strict Logic; and that would to my own mind be a sufficient reason for a.s.suming that, at least for the higher order of spirits, such a life as ours must be intended as the preface to a better life than this. But I should go further. To me it appears that such evils as sin and pain are so enormously worse than the mere absence of good, that I could not regard as rational a Universe in which the good did not very greatly predominate over the evil. More than that I do not think we are ent.i.tled to say. And yet Justice is so great a good that it is rational to hope that for every individual conscious being--at least each individual capable of any high degree of good--there must be a predominance of good on the whole. Beings of very small capacity might conceivably be created chiefly or entirely as a means to a vastly greater good than any that they {85} themselves enjoy: the higher a spirit is in the scale of being, the more difficult it becomes to suppose that it has been brought into existence merely as a means to another's good, or that it will not ultimately enjoy a good which will make it on the whole good that it should have been born.

I could wish myself that, in popular religious teaching, there was a franker conception of this position--a position which, as I have said, is really implied in the Theodicies of all the Divines. Popular unbelief--and sometimes the unbelief of more cultivated persons--rests mainly upon the existence of evil. We should cut at the roots of it by teaching frankly that this is the best of all possible Universes, though not the best of all imaginable Universes--such Universes as we can construct in our own imagination by picturing to ourselves all the good that there is in the world without any of the evil. We may still say, if we please, that G.o.d is infinite because He is limited by nothing outside His own nature, except what He has Himself caused. We can still call Him Omnipotent in the sense that He possesses all the power there is. And in many ways such a belief is far more practically consolatory and stimulating than a belief in a G.o.d who can do all things by any means and who consequently does not need our help. In our view, we are engaged not in a sham warfare with an evil that is really {86} good, but in a real warfare with a real evil, a struggle in which we have the ultimate power in the Universe on our side, but one in which the victory cannot be won without our help, a real struggle in which we are called upon to be literally fellow-workers with G.o.d.

LITERATURE

The subject is more or less explicitly dealt with in most of the works mentioned at the end of the last two lectures, and also in books on Moral Philosophy too numerous to mention. Cla.s.sical vindications of the authority of the Moral Consciousness are Bishop Butler's _Sermons_, and Kant's _Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals_ and other ethical writings (translated by T. K. Abbott). I have expressed my own views on the subject with some fullness in the third book of my _Theory of Good and Evil_.

[1] See especially Book II. Lect. iii.

[2] 'We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: but in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous.' (_Treatise_, Part I, Section ii., ed. Green and Grose, vol. ii. p. 247.) 'The distinction of moral good and evil is founded in the pleasure or pain, which results from the view of any sentiment, or character; and as that pleasure or pain cannot be unknown to the person who feels it, it follows that there is just so much virtue in any character as every one places in it, and that 'tis impossible in this particular we can ever be mistaken.'

(_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 311.)

[3] There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the Universe without what most of us understand by Theism, though not without Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical character; but because such non-theistic modes of religious thought exist in Buddhism, for instance, it does not follow that they are reasonable, and, at all events, they are hardly intelligible to most Western minds. Such non-theistic Religions imply a Metaphysic quite as much as Christianity or Buddhism. There have been Religions without the idea of a personal G.o.d, but never without Metaphysic, _i.e._ a theory about the ultimate nature of things.

[4] Tennyson's _Wages_.

[5] The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is 'c.u.m possit Deus omnia efficere quae esae possunt, non autem quae contradictionem implicant, omnipotens merito dicitur.' (_Summa Theol_., Pars I. Q. xxv. art. 8.)

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LECTURE IV

DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS

In the present lecture I shall try to deal with some of the difficulties which will probably have been arising in your minds in the course of the last three; and in meeting them, to clear up to some extent various points which have been left obscure.

(1) _Creation_. I have endeavoured to show that the world must be thought of as ultimately an experience in the mind of G.o.d, parts of which are progressively communicated to lesser minds such as ours. This experience--both the complete experience which is in His own mind and also the measure of it which is communicated to the lesser minds--must be thought of as willed by G.o.d. At the same time I suggested as an alternative view that, even if we think of things as having an existence which is not simply in and for minds, the things must be caused to exist by a rational Will. Now the world, as we know it, consists of a number of changes taking place in time, changes which are undoubtedly represented in thought as changes happening to, or {88} accidents of, a permanent substance, whether (with the Idealist) we suppose that this substance is merely the object of Mind's contemplation, or whether (with the Realist) we think of it as having some sort of being independent of Mind. But what of the first of these events--the beginning of the whole series? Are we to think of the series of events in time as having a beginning and possibly an end, or as being without beginning or end?

What in fact are we to make of the theological idea of Creation, often further defined as Creation out of nothing? It is often suggested both by Idealists and by Realists that the idea of a creation or absolute beginning of the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me to be a piece of unwarrantable _a priori_ dogmatism--quite as much so as the closely connected idea that the Uniformity of Nature is an _a priori_ necessity of thought. No doubt the notion of an absolute beginning of all things is unthinkable enough: if we think of G.o.d as creating the world at a definite point of time, then we must suppose G.o.d Himself to have existed before that creation. We cannot think of an event in time without thinking of a time before it; and time cannot be thought of as merely empty time. Events of some kind there must necessarily have been, even though those events are thought of as merely subjective experiences involving no relation to s.p.a.ce. A beginning of existence is, {89} indeed, unthinkable. But there is no difficulty in supposing that this particular series of phenomena which const.i.tutes our physical Universe may have had a beginning in time. On the other hand there is no positive evidence, for those who cannot regard the early chapters of Genesis as representing on such a matter anything but a primitive legend edited by a later Jewish thinker, that it had such a beginning. It is no doubt more difficult to represent to ourselves a beginning of s.p.a.ce; and the notion of an empty s.p.a.ce, eternally thought but not eternally filled up by any series of phenomena of the s.p.a.ce-occupying kind, represents a rather difficult, though not (as it seems to me) an absolutely impossible conception. The question, therefore, whether there was a beginning of the series of events which const.i.tute the history of our physical world must (so far as I can see) be left an open one.

Of course if the argument of Lord Kelvin be accepted, if he is justified in arguing on purely physical grounds that the present distribution of energy in the Universe is such that it cannot have resulted from an infinite series of previous physical changes, if Science can prove that the series is a finite one, the conclusions of Science must be accepted.[1] Metaphysic has nothing to say for or against such a view.

That is a question of Physics on which {90} of course I do not venture to express any opinion whatever.

(2) _The time-series_. I am incompetent to p.r.o.nounce an opinion on the validity of such arguments as Lord Kelvin's. But, however we decide this question, there will still remain the further and harder question, 'Is the series of all events or experiences, physical or psychical (not merely the particular series which const.i.tutes our physical Universe), to be thought of as finite or infinite? On the one hand it involves a contradiction to talk of a time-series which has a beginning: a time which has no time before it is not time at all; any more than s.p.a.ce with an end to it would be s.p.a.ce. On the other hand, we find equally, or almost equally, unthinkable the hypothesis of an endless series of events in time: a series of events, which no possible enumeration of its members will make any smaller, presents itself to us as unthinkable, directly we regard it as expressing the true nature of a positive reality, and not as a mere result of mathematical abstraction. Here then we are presented with an antinomy--an apparent contradiction in our thought--which we can neither avoid nor overcome. It is one of the cla.s.sical antinomies recognized by the Kantian Philosophy--the only one, I may add, which neither Kant himself nor any of his successors has done anything to attenuate or to remove. {91} Kant's own attempted solution of it involved the impossible supposition that the past has no existence at all except in so far as it is thought by some finite mind in the present.

The way out of this difficulty which is popular with post-Kantian Idealists is to say that G.o.d is Himself out of time, and eternally sees the whole series at once. But, in the first place, that does not get over the difficulty: even if G.o.d does see the whole series at once, He must see it either as limited or as endless, and the old antinomy breaks out again when we attempt to think either alternative. And secondly, when you treat a temporal series as one which is all really present together--of course it may all be _known_ together as even we know the past and the future--but when you try to think of G.o.d as contemplating the whole series as really present altogether, the series is no longer a time-series. You have turned it into some other kind of series--practically (we may say) into a s.p.a.cial series. You have cut the knot, instead of unravelling it. I have no doubt that the existence of this antinomy does point to the fact that there is some way of thinking about time from which the difficulty disappears: but we are, so far as I can see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers resent the idea of an insoluble problem. By all means let them go on trying to solve it. I can only say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility {92} of any solution of the time-difficulty which I have so far seen. For the present at least--I strongly suspect for ever--we must acquiesce on this matter in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the absurdity of regarding time as merely subjective; we can show that it belongs to the very essence of the Universe we know; we can show that it is as 'objective' as anything else within our knowledge. But how to reconcile this objectivity with the difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious purposes it seems enough to believe that each member of the time-series--no matter how many such events there may be, no matter whether the series be endless or not--is caused by G.o.d. The more reflecting Theologians have generally admitted that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the same as that of Creation. A G.o.d who can be represented as 'upholding all things by the power of his word' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were any meaning in that phrase) out of time altogether.[2]

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(3) _The creation of spirits_. It may seem to some of you that I may have so far left out, or too easily disposed of, an important link in our argument. I have given reasons for thinking that the material world cannot be explained without the a.s.sumption of a universal Consciousness which both thinks and wills it. I have a.s.sumed rather than proved that the lesser minds, in which the divine experience is partially reproduced, are also caused to exist and kept in existence by the same divine Will.

But how, it may be said, do we know that those minds did not exist before the birth of the organisms with which upon this planet they are connected? The considerations which forbid our thinking of matter as something capable of existing by itself do not apply to minds. A consciousness, unlike a thing, exists 'for itself,' not merely 'for another': a mind is not made what it is by being known or otherwise experienced by another mind: its very being consists in being itself conscious: it is what it is for itself. It is undoubtedly impossible positively to disprove the hypothesis of eternally pre-existent souls.

Sometimes that hypothesis is combined with Theism. It {94} is supposed that G.o.d is the supreme and incomparably the most powerful, but not the only, self-existent and eternal Spirit. This hypothesis--sometimes spoken of as Pluralism[3]--has many attractions: from the time of Origen onwards the idea of Pre-existence has seemed to many to facilitate the explanation of evil by making it possible to regard the sufferings of our present state as a disciplinary process for getting rid of an original or a pre-natal sinfulness. It is a theory not incapable of satisfying the demands of the religious Consciousness, and may even form an element in an essentially Christian theory of the Universe: but to my mind it is opposed to all the obvious indications of experience. The connexion between soul and body is such that the laws of the soul's development obviously form part of the same system with the laws of physical nature.

If one part of that system is referred to the divine Will, so must the whole of it be. The souls, when they have entered animal bodies, must be supposed to be subject to a system of laws which is of one piece with the system of physical laws. If the physical part of the world-order is referred to the divine Will, the psychical part of it must be equally referred to {95} that Will. The souls might, indeed, conceivably have an independent and original nature of their own capable of offering resistance to the divine intentions. But we see, to say the least, no indications of a struggle going on between an outside divine Will and independent beings not forming a part of the divine scheme. At all events, the result of this struggle, if struggle there be, is (so far as we can observe) a system, complete and orderly, within the psychical sphere as much as within the purely physical sphere. And in particular the body is exactly fitted to the soul that is to inhabit it. We never find the intellect of a Shakespeare in connexion with the facial angle of a negro; bodies which resemble the bodies of their parents are connected with souls between which a similar resemblance can be traced. If the souls existed before birth, we must suppose those souls to be kept waiting in a limbo of some kind till a body is prepared suitable for their reception. We must suppose that among the waiting souls, one is from time to time selected to be the offspring of such and such a matrimonial union, so as to present (as it were) a colourable appearance of being really the fruit of that union. Further, before birth the souls must be steeped in the waters of Lethe, or something of the kind, so as to rid them of all memory of their previous experiences. Such a conception seems to {96} me to belong to the region of Mythology rather than of sober philosophical thought. I do not deny that Mythology may sometimes be a means of pictorially or symbolically envisaging truths to which Philosophy vaguely points but which it cannot express in clearly apprehensible detail. But such a Mythology as this seems to be intellectually unmotived and unhelpful. It is not wanted to explain the facts: there is nothing in our experience to suggest it, and much which is _prima facie_ opposed to it. It really removes no single difficulty: for one difficulty which it presents some appearance of removing, it creates a dozen greater ones. It is a hypothesis which we shall do well to dismiss as otiose.

(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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sumption 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 a.s.signed 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 G.o.d--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 a.s.signment of souls to bodies is only a particular application of a wider difficulty. Dr. McTaggart contends that the Universe const.i.tutes 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

And this leads me to say a few words more in explanation of my own view of the relation between G.o.d 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 a.s.sert that the soul is impenetrable. I believe that G.o.d 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 a.n.a.logy 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 G.o.d's Mind. But, if penetrability is to mean ident.i.ty, 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 s.p.a.cial 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 s.p.a.ce forming part of larger things in s.p.a.ce--Chinese boxes, for instance, shut up in bigger ones. Such a mode of thought is wholly inapplicable to minds which are not in s.p.a.ce at all. s.p.a.ce is in the mind: the mind is not in s.p.a.ce. 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 a.s.sertion that the Saint is part of G.o.d, leads also to the a.s.sertion 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 G.o.d. How can I wors.h.i.+p, 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 wors.h.i.+ps the destructive and the vicious aspects of Brahma as much as the kindly and the moral ones: it does not pretend that G.o.d is revealed in the Moral Consciousness, or is in any exclusive or one-sided way a G.o.d of Love. If it be an 'ethical obsession' (as has been suggested) to object to treat Immorality as no less a revelation of G.o.d 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 G.o.d, we can only call G.o.d good or perfect by maintaining that the deliverances of our moral consciousness have no validity for G.o.d, 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 G.o.d who is 'beyond good and evil,'

can be no fitting object of {105} wors.h.i.+p 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 G.o.d or not.