Chapter 8

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, the _Varieties 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 as _parts_ of 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.