Chapter 5

It is a remarkable fact that the typical exponent of popular so-called 'scientific' Agnosticism, and the founder of that higher metaphysical Agnosticism which has played so large a part in the history of modern Philosophy, should before their deaths have both made confessions which really amount to an abjuration of all Agnosticism. If the ultimate Reality is to be thought of as a rational Will, analogous to the will which each of us is conscious of himself having or being, he is no longer the Unknown or the Unknowable, but the God of Religion, who has revealed Himself in the consciousness of man, 'made in the image of God.' What more about Himself we may also hold to be revealed in the human spirit, I hope to consider in our next lecture. But, meanwhile, a word may be uttered in answer to the question which may very probably be asked--Is God a Person? A complete answer to the question would involve elaborate discussions, but for our present purpose the question may be answered very {55} briefly. If we are justified in thinking of God after the analogy of a human soul--if we are justified in thinking of Him as a self-conscious Being who thinks, feels, and wills, and who is, moreover (if I may a little anticipate the subject of our next lecture) in relation with, capable of loving and being loved by other such beings--then it seems most natural to speak of God's existence as personal. For to be a self-conscious being--conscious of itself and other beings, thinking, willing, feeling, loving--is what we mean by being a person. If any one prefers to speak of God as 'super-personal,' there is no great objection to so doing, provided that phrase is not made (as it often is) an excuse for really thinking of God after the analogy of some kind of existence lower than that of persons--as a force, an unconscious substance, or merely a name for the totality of things. But for myself, I prefer to say that our own self-consciousness gives us only an ideal of the highest type of existence which it nevertheless very imperfectly satisfies, and therefore I would rather think God is a Person in a far truer, higher, more complete sense than that in which any human being can be a person. God alone fully realizes the ideal of Personality. The essence of Personality is something positive: it signifies to us the highest kind of being within our knowledge--not (as is too often supposed) the mere limitations {56} and restraints which characterize human conscious life as we know it in ourselves. If we are justified in thinking of God after the analogy of the highest existence within our knowledge, we had better call Him a Person. The word is no doubt inadequate to the reality, as is all the language that we can employ about God; but it is at least more adequate than the terms employed by those who scruple to speak of God as a Person. It is at least more adequate and more intelligent than to speak of Him as a force, a substance, a 'something not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' _Things_ do not 'make for righteousness'; and in using the term Person we shall at least make it clear that we do not think of Him as a 'thing,' or a collection of things, or a vague substratum of things, or even a mere totality of minds like our own.[10]

LITERATURE

As has been explained in this Lecture, many idealistic writers who insist upon the necessity of God as a universal, knowing Mind to explain both the existence of the world and our knowledge of it, are more or less ambiguous about the question whether the divine Mind is to be thought of as willing or causing the world, though passages occur in the writings of most of them which tend in this direction. 'God {57} must be thought of as creating the objects of his own thought' is a perfectly orthodox Hegelian formula. Among the idealistic writers (besides Berkeley) who correct this--as it seems to me--one-sided tendency, and who accept on the whole the view of the divine Causality taken in this Lecture, may be mentioned Lotze, the 9th Book of whose _Microcosmus_ (translated by Miss Elizabeth Hamilton and Miss Constance Jones) or the third Book of his _Logic_ (translation ed. by Prof. Bosanquet), may very well be read by themselves (his views may also be studied in his short _Philosophy of Religion_--two translations, by the late Mrs. Conybeare and by Professor Ladd); Pfleiderer, _Philosophy and Development of Religion_, especially chapter v.; and Professor Ward's _Naturalism and Agnosticism_.

Among the non-idealistic writers who have based their argument for the existence of God mainly or largely upon the consideration that Causality is unintelligible apart from a rational Will, may be mentioned--among older writers Reid, _Essays on the Active Powers of Man_, Essay I. (especially chapter v.), and among more recent ones Martineau, _A Study of Religion_. Flint's _Theism_ may be recommended as one of the best attempts to state the theistic case with a minimum of technical Metaphysic.

Two little books by Professor Andrew Seth (now Seth Pringle-Pattison), though not primarily occupied with the religious problem, may be mentioned as very useful introductions to Philosophy--_The Scottish Philosophers_ and _Hegelianism and Personality_.

[1] Of course deeply religious men like Green who have held this view did not admit, or did not realize, such consequences. The tendency here criticized is undoubtedly derived from Hegel, but passages suggestive of the opposite view can be extracted from his writings, e.g.: 'God, however, as subjective Power, is not simply will, intention, etc., but rather immediate Cause' (_Philosophy of Religion_, Eng. trans., ii. p. 129).

[2] The idea of Causality was by Kant identified with the idea of logical connexion, _i.e._ the relation of the premisses of a syllogism to its conclusion; but this does not involve _time_ at all, and _time_ is essential to the idea of Causality. For an admirable vindication of our immediate consciousness of Causality see Professor Stout's chapter on 'The Concept of Mental Activity' in _Analytic Psychology_ (Book II. chap. i.).

[3] _Excursion_, Book IV.

[4] For the further development of this argument see Lecture IV.

[5] See especially the earlier chapters of _The Philosophy of the Unconscious_ (translated by W. C. Coupland).

[6] Of course passages can be quoted from Hegel himself which suggest the idea that God is Will as well as Thought; I am speaking of the general tendency of Hegel and many of his disciples. Some recent Hegelians, such as Professor Boyce, seem to be less open to this criticism, but there are difficulties in thinking of God as Will and yet continuing to speak of ultimate Reality as out of Time.

[7] It may be objected that this is true only of 'conceptual space' (that is, the space of Geometry), but not of 'perceptual space,' _i.e._ space as it presents itself in a child's perception of an object. The distinction is no doubt from many points of view important, but we must not speak of 'conceptual space' and 'perceptual space' as if they had nothing to do with one another. If the relations of conceptual space were not in some sense contained or implied in our perceptions, no amount of abstraction or reflection could get the relations out of them.

[8] _Sociology_, vol. iii. p. 172.

[9] _Naturalism and Agnosticism_, vol. ii. pp. 191-2.

[10] For a further discussion of the subject the reader may be referred to my essay on 'Personality in God and Man' in _Personal Idealism_.

{58}

LECTURE III

GOD AND THE MORAL CONSCIOUSNESS

A course of purely metaphysical reasoning has led us up to the idea of God--that is to say, of a conscious and rational Mind and Will for which the world exists and by which that world and all other spirits are caused to exist. I have passed over a host of difficulties--the relation of God to time, the question whether or in what sense the world may be supposed to have a beginning and an end, the question of the relation in which God, the universal Mind, stands to other minds, the question of Free-will. These are difficulties which would involve elaborate metaphysical discussions: I shall return to some of them in a later lecture. It must suffice for the present to say that more than one answer to many of these questions might conceivably be given consistently with the view of the divine nature which I have contended for. All that I need insist on for my present purpose is--

(1) That God is personal in the sense that He is a {59} self-conscious, thinking, willing, feeling Being, distinguishable from each and all less perfect minds.

(2) That all other minds are in some sense brought into being by the divine Mind, while at the same time they have such a resemblance to, or community of nature with, their source that they may be regarded as not mere creations but as in some sense reproductions, more or less imperfect, of that source, approximating in various degrees to that ideal of Personality which is realised perfectly in God alone. In proportion as they approximate to that ideal, they are causes of their own actions, and can claim for themselves the kind of causality which we attribute in its perfection to God. I content myself now with claiming for the developed, rational human self a measure of freedom to the extent which I have just defined--that it is the real cause of its own actions. It is capable of self-determination. The man's actions are determined by his character. That is quite consistent with the admission that God is the ultimate cause of a self of such and such a character coming into existence at such and such a time.

(3) I will not say that the conception of those who regard the human mind as literally a part of the divine, so that the human consciousness is in no sense outside of the divine, is necessarily, for those who hold it, inconsistent with the conception of {60} personality both in God and man: I will only say that I do not myself understand such an assertion. I regard the human mind as derived from God, but not as being part of God. Further discussion of this question I reserve for my next lecture.

We have led up to the idea of God's existence. But so far we have discovered nothing at all about His character or purposes. And it is clear that without some such knowledge the belief in God could be of little or no value from any religious or moral point of view. How are we to learn anything about the character of God? I imagine that at the present day few people will attempt to prove the goodness or benevolence of God from an empirical examination of the facts of Nature or of History. There is, no doubt, much in History and in Nature to suggest the idea of Benevolence, but there is much to suggest a directly opposite conclusion. Few of us at the present day are likely to be much impressed by the argument which Paley bases upon the existence of the little apparatus in the throat by which it is benevolently arranged that, though constantly on the point of being choked by our food, we hardly ever are choked. I cannot help reminding you of the characteristic passage: 'Consider a city-feast,' he exclaims, 'what manducation, what deglutition, and yet not one Alderman choked in a century!' Such arguments look at the matter from the point {61} of view of the Alderman: the point of view of the turtle and the turkey is entirely forgotten. I would not for a moment speak disrespectfully of the argument from design. Darwinism has changed its form, but anybody who reads Edouard von Hartmann's _Philosophy of the Unconscious_ is not likely to rise from its perusal with the idea that the evidences of design have been destroyed by Darwinism, whatever he may think of Hartmann's strange conclusion that the design can be explained by the operation of an unconscious Mind or Will. The philosophical argument of Mr. R. B. Haldane in _The Pathway to Reality_,[1] and the purely biological argument of Dr. John Haldane in his two lectures on _Life and Mechanism_, and still more recently the brilliant and very important work of M. Bergson, _L'Evolution Creatrice_ have, as it seems to me, abundantly shown that it is as impossible as ever it was to explain even the growth of a plant without supposing that in it and all organic Nature there is a striving towards an end. But the argument from design, though it testifies to purpose in the Universe, tells us nothing about the nature of that purpose. Purpose is one thing; benevolent purpose is another. Nobody's estimate of the comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence, {62} I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life. There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly be derived--from the evidence of our own moral consciousness.

Our moral ideals are the work of Reason. That the happiness of many ought to be preferred to the happiness of one, that pleasure is better than pain, that goodness is of more value than pleasure, that some pleasures are better than others--such judgements are as much the work of our own Reason, they are as much self-evident truths, as the truth that two and two make four, or that A cannot be both B and not B at the same time, or that two straight lines cannot enclose a space. We have every right to assume that such truths hold good for God as well as for man. If such Idealism as I have endeavoured to lead you to is well founded, the mind which knows comes from God, and therefore the knowledge which that mind possesses must also be taken as an imperfect or fragmentary reproduction of God's knowledge. And the Theist who rejects Idealism but admits the existence of self-evident truths will be equally justified in assuming that, for God as well as for man, two and two must make {63} four. We have just as much right to assume that our moral ideas--our ideas of value--must come from God too. For God too, as for us, there must exist the idea, the ultimate category of the good; and our judgements of value--judgements that such and such an end is good or worth striving for--in so far as they are true judgements, must be supposed to represent His judgements. We are conscious, in proportion as we are rational, of pursuing ends which we judge to be good. If such judgements reveal God's judgements, God must be supposed to aim likewise at an ideal of good--the same ideal which is revealed to us by our moral judgements. In these judgements then we have a revelation, the only possible revelation, of the character of God. The argument which I have suggested is simply a somewhat exacter statement of the popular idea that Conscience is the voice of God.

Further to vindicate the idea of the existence, authority, objective validity of Conscience would lead us too far away into the region of Moral Philosophy for our present subject. I will only attempt very briefly to guard against some possible misunderstandings, and to meet some obvious objections:

(1) It need hardly be pointed out that the assertion of the existence of the Moral Consciousness is not in the slightest degree inconsistent with recognising its gradual growth and development. The {64} moral faculty, like every other faculty or aspect or activity of the human soul, has grown gradually. No rational man doubts the validity--no Idealist doubts the _a priori_ character--of our mathematical judgements because probably monkeys and possibly primitive men cannot count, and certainly cannot perform more than the very simplest arithmetical operations. Still less do we doubt the validity of mathematical reasoning because not only children and savages, but sometimes even distinguished classical scholars--a Macaulay, a Matthew Arnold, a T. S. Evans,--were wholly incapable of understanding very simple mathematical arguments. Equally little do we deny a real difference between harmony and discord because people may be found who see no difference between 'God save the King' and 'Pop goes the Weasel.' Self-evident truth does not mean truth which is evident to everybody.

(2) It is not doubted that the gradual evolution of our actual moral ideas--our actual ideas about what is right or wrong in particular cases--has been largely influenced by education, environment, association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps natural selection--in short, all the agencies by which naturalistic Moralists try to account for the existence of Morality. Even Euclid, or whatever his modern substitute may be, has to be taught; but that does not show that Geometry is an arbitrary system {65} invented by the ingenious and interested devices of those who want to get money by teaching it. Arithmetic was invented largely as an instrument of commerce; but it could not have been invented if there were really no such things as number and quantity, or if the human mind had no original capacity for recognizing them. Our scientific ideas, our political ideas, our ideas upon a thousand subjects have been partly developed, partly thwarted and distorted in their growth, by similar influences. But, however great the difficulty of getting rid of these distorting influences and facing such questions in a perfectly dry light, nobody suggests that objective truth on such matters is non-existent or for ever unattainable. A claim for objective validity for the moral judgement does not mean a claim for infallibility on behalf of any individual Conscience. We may make mistakes in Morals just as we may make mistakes in Science, or even in pure Mathematics. If a class of forty small boys are asked to do a sum, they will probably not all bring out the same answer: but nobody doubts that one answer alone is right, though arithmetical capacity is a variable quantity. What is meant is merely that, if I am right in affirming that this is good, you cannot be likewise right in saying that it is bad: and that we have some capacity--though doubtless a variable capacity--of judging which is the true {66} view. Hence our moral judgements, in so far as they are true judgements, must be taken to be reproductions in us of the thought of God. To show that an idea has been gradually developed, tells us nothing as to its truth or falsehood--one way or the other.

(3) In comparing the self-evidence of moral to that of mathematical judgements, it is not suggested that our moral judgements in detail are as certain, as clear and sharply defined, as mathematical judgements, or that they can claim so universal a consensus among the competent. What is meant is merely (_a_) that the notion of good in general is an ultimate category of thought; that it contains a meaning intelligible not perhaps to every individual human soul, but to the normal, developed, human consciousness; and (_b_) that the ultimate truth of morals, if it is seen at all, must be seen immediately. An ultimate moral truth cannot be deduced from, or proved by, any other truth. You cannot prove that pleasure is better than pain, or that virtue is better than pleasure, to any one who judges differently. It does not follow that all men have an equally clear and delicate moral consciousness. The power of discriminating moral values differs as widely as the power of distinguishing musical sounds, or of appreciating what is excellent in music. Some men may be almost or altogether without such a power of moral discrimination, just as some men are wholly {67} destitute of an ear for music; while the higher degrees of moral appreciation are the possession of the few rather than of the many. Moral insight is not possessed by all men in equal measure. Moral genius is as rare as any other kind of genius.

(4) When we attribute Morality to God, it is not meant that the conduct which is right for men in detail ought to be or could possibly in all cases be practised by God. It is a childish objection (though it is sometimes made by modern philosophers who should know better) to allege with Aristotle that God cannot be supposed to make or keep contracts. And in the same way, when we claim universal validity for our moral judgements, we do not mean that the rules suitable for human conduct would be the same for beings differently organized and constituted. Our rules of sexual Morality are clearly applicable only to sexually constituted beings. What is meant in asserting that these rules are universally and objectively valid is that these are the rules which every rational intelligence, in proportion as it is rational, will recognize as being suitable, or conducive to the ideal life, in beings constituted as we are. The truth that permanent monogamous marriage represents the true type of sexual relations for human beings will be none the less an objectively valid ethical truth, because the lower animals are below it, while superior beings, {68} it may be, are above it. Universal love is none the less the absolute moral ideal because it would be absurd to say that beasts of prey do wrong in devouring other creatures, or because war is sometimes necessary as a means to the end of love at our present imperfect stage of social and intellectual development. The means to the highest good vary with circumstances; the amount of good that is attainable in such and such circumstances varies also; consequently the right course of conduct will be different for beings differently constituted or placed under different circumstances: but the principles which, in the view of a perfect intelligence, would determine what is the right course for different beings in different circumstances will be always the same. The ultimate principles of our moral judgement, _e.g._ that love is better than hate, are just as applicable to God as they are to us. Our conception of the highest good may be inadequate; but we certainly shall not attain to greater adequacy, or a nearer approach to ultimate truth, by flatly contradicting our own moral judgements. It would be just as reasonable to argue that because the law of gravitation might be proved, from the point of view of the highest knowledge, to be an inadequate statement of the truth, and all inadequacy involves some error, therefore we had better assume that from the point of view of God there is no difference whatever {69} between attraction and repulsion. All arguments for what is called a 'super-moral' Deity or a 'super-moral' Absolute are open to this fatal objection: moral judgements cannot possibly rest upon anything but the moral consciousness, and yet these doctrines contradict the moral consciousness. The idea of good is derived from the moral consciousness. When a man declares that from the point of view of the Universe all things are very good, he gets the idea of good from his own moral consciousness, and is assuming the objective validity of its dictates. His judgement is an ethical judgement as much as mine when I say that to me some things in this world appear very bad. If he is not entitled to assume the validity of his ethical judgements, his proposition is false or meaningless. If he is entitled to assume their validity, why should he distrust that same moral consciousness when it affirms (as it undoubtedly does) that pain and sin are for ever bad, and not (as our 'super-moral' Religionists suggest) additional artistic touches which only add to the aesthetic effect of the whole?

I shall now proceed to develop some of the consequences which (as it appears to me) flow from the doctrine that our belief in the goodness of God is an inference from our own moral consciousness: