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BELIEF IN GOD 
 
BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 ITS ORIGIN, NATURE, AND BASIS 
 
 BEING THE WINKLE Y LECTURES OF THE 
 
 AND OVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 FOR THE YEAR i8go 
 
 BY 
 
 JACOB GOULD SCHURMAN 
 
 Sage Professor of Philosophy in Cornell University 
 >'^ Gt THE ■ 
 
 'TJHI7ERSIT7] 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1892 
 
3 J) d-s^- 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1890, 
 BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The following lectures were delivered 
 before the Andover Theological Seminary 
 during the first week of March. They 
 form the sixth course on the Winkley 
 foundation. That endowment is ham- 
 pered by no conditions whatever; a rare 
 and surely a fortunate circumstance for 
 any theological school. As might have 
 been expected from the spirit of broad 
 scholarship which animates the Andover 
 faculty, the Winkley lectureship has been 
 occupied by experts in different fields of 
 inquiry, who have treated, each from his 
 own peculiar point of view, of a consid- 
 erable variety of subjects, none of which, 
 however, was without some special inter- 
 est for the coming religious teachers 
 and workers of our age. Among the lec- 
 turers have been some of our foremost 
 names in theology, economics, political 
 science, and even law. The themes they 
 
Vi PREFACE. 
 
 considered were largely historical or socio- 
 logical, and generally of a practical bearing. 
 To add to the variety, an abstract subject 
 was deemed desirable for the present year. 
 But for the choice of the particular subject 
 selected, as of course for the treatment of 
 it, I alone am responsible. While I might 
 perhaps claim the sympathy of the mem- 
 bers of the Andover faculty for the general 
 spirit and outcome of these inquiries, it 
 would be strange indeed if they accepted 
 all my conclusions, or even looked at com- 
 mon beliefs from the same point of view. 
 
 No apology is needed for a fresh exam- 
 ination of the character, origin, and valid- 
 ity of our belief in God. Historical 
 studies are just now greatly in favor. But 
 no theological belief can rest on a mere 
 historical occurrence. An open-eyed theol- 
 ogy must have a philosophical basis. And 
 its fundamental and perennial inquiry is 
 into the evidence of the divine existence. 
 
 Whoever has read deeply on this sub- 
 ject must have been struck with the fact 
 that so many of his own thoughts were 
 already the thoughts of others. I cannot, 
 therefore, say that the following reflections 
 are original in any other sense than that 
 
PREFACE. Vll 
 
 they have actually been made by the 
 author. I am, in fact, aware that some of 
 them were derived from teachers, among 
 whom I would especially mention Lotze, 
 Martineau, and Pfleiderer, while others 
 have been suggested by recent writers like 
 Robertson Smith, Seeley, Fiske, R^ville, 
 and Thiele. And if it were possible to 
 deduct all I owe to the unconscious instruc- 
 tion received from the great thinkers of 
 our race, from Plato to Hegel, the resid- 
 uum of individual ownership might be 
 far from flattering. I have, however, not 
 been unmindful of the golden advice of 
 Goethe — to acquire what has been in- 
 herited in order to make it my own; 
 and the result is now submitted to the 
 candid judgment of the reader. From 
 him I cannot expect the sympathetic con- 
 sideration bestowed by my Andover au- 
 dience ; but for dispassionate criticism I 
 shall be equally grateful. I am conscious 
 of no other desire or motive in these in- 
 quiries than to discover the actual truth. 
 
 A word of apology at the close. Though 
 my subject is abstract, the treatment will, 
 I hope, be found readable, if not exactly 
 light or popular. I have, however, vent- 
 
Viii PREFACE. 
 
 ured upon the coinage of a descriptive 
 term, which, as it is not likely to go farther, 
 can do no harm, and does here really con- 
 duce to precision and brevity. A theism 
 based on the facts of the cosmos, or uni- 
 verse, is called cosmic. To the universe we 
 oppose man ; and a theism based on facts of 
 human nature might very properly be called 
 anthropic. A theism resting on this double 
 ground I coll anthropocosmic ; and I choose 
 this combination rather than cosmoanthro- 
 pic^ to indicate that, while mine is a man- 
 universe theism, man must not be inter- 
 preted in terms of the universe, but the 
 universe in terms of man ; namely, of that 
 self-conscious spirituality which makes us 
 selves and persons. Anthropocosmic theism 
 is the doctrine of a Supreme Being, who is 
 ground both of nature and of man, but 
 whose essence is not natural but spiritual. 
 
 The Brooks, 
 
 Pine Hill in Catskills, 
 
 September, 1890. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTUEE I. 
 
 Agnosticism, or the Impossibility of Belief 
 IN God 1 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 The Logical Character of Belief in God . 26 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 The Origin and Development of Belief in 
 God 73 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 Belief in God as Cause or Ground op the 
 World 128 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 Belief in God as realizing Purpose in the 
 World 171 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 Belief in God as Father of Spirits . . . 217 
 
 ix 
 
BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 AGNOSTICISM, OR THE IMPOSSIBILITY OP 
 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 Additions to our vocabulary are ren- 
 dered constantly necessary by the growth 
 of experience, the enlargement of science, 
 and the multiplication of inventions. Owing 
 to the predominance of material interests 
 in modern civilization, most of our new 
 words have come from the mint of the 
 chemical and mechanical laboratory. They 
 have been coined to describe the -various 
 elements, appliances, and processes, by the 
 knowledge of which the modern Kingdom 
 of Man has subjugated to its use and con- 
 venience the laws and powers of nature. 
 And as each piece of this verbal coinage 
 bears the image and superscription of a 
 
2 BELIEF IN GOD, 
 
 material object or operation, which may be 
 distinctly perceived through the medium 
 of one or more of the senses, it always has 
 a definite circulating value, which is not 
 liable to confusion with currency of any 
 other denomination. 
 
 When from the material we turn to the 
 spiritual world, we cannot fail to be struck 
 with the paucity of its new linguistic prod- 
 ucts. We may almost say that the termi- 
 nology of the mental and moral sciences 
 remains to-day substantially what it was 
 in the hands of our first philosophical writ- 
 ers, though here and there old words have 
 been impregnated with new ideas, as terms 
 like 'force, law, development, and history- 
 may serve to illustrate. Though concilia- 
 tory and even generous on the broad physi- 
 cal road, the Cerberus of language is inex- 
 orable on the narrow psychical path to the 
 temple of speech. 
 
 That this conservative rule has been 
 more honored in the breach than in ob- 
 servance by admittance of the new word 
 "agnosticism," cannot, at the outset at 
 least, be either maintained or denied. 
 This, indeed, will be admitted by no one 
 more readily than the agnostic himself, 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 3 
 
 whose creea or temper is to assert nothiTip r 
 without sufficient evidence . He will, how- 
 ever, m this instance very properly re- 
 mind us that the evidence is not far to 
 seek. For the term itself is but of yester- 
 day. And more than once since it came 
 into being, its proud parent has recounted 
 the circumstances of its birth, and vindi- 
 cated, before the face of an ungrateful world, 
 its right to existence. Still the natural and 
 pardonable, though purely subjective, sat- 
 isfaction of Professor Huxley with his lin- 
 guistic creation must not lull our incredu- 
 lity, or abate the suspicion — which, indeed, 
 is of genuinely agnostic stamp — that the 
 bantling of agnosticism is not altogether 
 so satisfactory and so indispensable as its 
 too partial parent represents it. 
 
 Language being the mirror of thought, 
 we might expect to find some help in ety- 
 mology. From this source we learn, first, 
 that the word "agnostic" is a barbarism, 
 since in the Greek language, from which 
 it has been imported, the privative a never 
 co-existed with the termination ^V; and, 
 secondly, that it is made up of two ele- 
 ments indicating together a privation of 
 knowledge, and so equivalent to unknow- 
 
4 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ing, unknown, or unknowable. Etymolog- 
 ically, therefore, agnosticism is indisting- 
 uishable in meaning from nescience or ig- 
 norance. The emphasis of the new word 
 must accordingly fall upon a point outside 
 the limits of its morphology. That there 
 are things we do not know, or perhaps even 
 cannot know, is a fact fully described by 
 saying we are ignorant of them. But it is 
 conceivable that a new term is needed to 
 mark a new division between knowledge 
 and ignorance. If so, the term should 
 indicate in itself how that delimitation is to 
 be made. " Agnosticism " is a redundant 
 addition to our language if intended to 
 indicate the fact that we are ignorant of 
 some things, and an inadequate addition 
 if intended to indicate what we are igno- 
 rant of. If there were people who as- 
 serted they knew everything, and others 
 who asserted they knew nothing at all, 
 the terms "gnosticism" and ''agnosti- 
 cism," in that case signifying knowledge 
 and ignorance of the same universe of fact ^ 
 would undoubtedly form a convenient ad- 
 dition to the language of descriptive phi- 
 losophy. But since men differ in opinion 
 only regarding knowledge or ignorance of 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 5 
 
 points lying between these extremes of the 
 nothing and the all, it is trivial for any one 
 to tell us he does not know without adding 
 what in particular it is which he does not 
 know. It is this I find difficult to extract 
 from the various accounts that have been 
 given of the origin and meaning of the 
 term "agnosticism." 
 
 It has indeed been more or less officially- 
 announced that " agnosticism " is not a 
 creed, but a method. We have been as- 
 sured that it consists merely in following 
 reason as far as reason can go, and then 
 confessing ignorance with regard to what 
 lies beyond. But though this definition 
 has vaunted itself in popular polemics, it 
 is of little scientific value. For it fails to 
 explain what " reason " is, and how far it 
 can validly go. In fact, this definition 
 merely makes " agnosticism " synonymous 
 with intellectual integrity. It is that 
 respect and reverence for fact which has 
 been, though not actually generated, yet 
 greatly developed and fostered by the 
 severe methods of modern scientific inves- 
 tigation. Of course it does not imply that 
 we should never go beyond the deliverances 
 of sense experience; for knowledge, ordi- 
 
6 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 nary as well as scientific, is possible only 
 when the facts of sense are grouped 
 under hypotheses or theories. And, ac- 
 cording to Darwin, speculations are of 
 vastly more importance than observations 
 for the development of the sciences. What 
 is meant is, that the agnostic, in the forma- 
 tion of hypotheses (the exclusion of which 
 would be the death-knell of scientific 
 knowledge) must not snatch at conjectures 
 which not only go beyond the facts to be 
 explained by them (for that is necessary), 
 but which have also no probability in them- 
 selves, or no ground for their support. 
 The agnostic stands by evidence, and will 
 never move without it. Where he is con- 
 fronted by conflicting testimony, if he can- 
 not strike a balance, he suspends his judg- 
 ment. For example, in the attitude of many 
 historians and literary critics towards the 
 accounts of the early Roman State and 
 the composition of the Homeric poems, we 
 have what has been called "agnosticism 
 in history and in literature." From a 
 similar conflict of evidence many persons 
 are agnostics in the field of Darwinian bi- 
 ology. Agnosticism, in this sense, demands 
 only the graduation of subjective convic- 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 7 
 
 tion according to the degrees of objective 
 evidence. Who that reasons could repu- 
 diate this principle, though there may be 
 few who really carry it out ? 
 
 Removal of prejudice, intellectual hon- 
 esty, judicial temperament : these phrases 
 all describe from slightly different points 
 of view the conception which, as we 
 have been assured, embraces "all that is 
 essential to agnosticism." I am anxious to 
 emphasize that the principle of this "ag- 
 nostic faith," far from being peculiar to 
 Professor Huxley and his intellectual con- 
 geners, is a maxim universally accepted by 
 the thinking portion, if not indeed by all 
 sane adults, of the human family. As a 
 principle, it stands on the same footing as 
 the universal laws of logical thought. In 
 actual practice either may be disregarded ; 
 but such lapses^ do not form an argument 
 either against the validity of the principle 
 or against the universality of its acceptance. 
 The substance of this agnosticism is not 
 only as old as the writer who said, " Try 
 all things, hold fast by that which is good," 
 but as old as the first rude court of justice 
 instituted by prehistoric man. It is not 
 merely the " fundamental axiom of modern 
 
8 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 science," but the indispensable condition 
 of that reflective knowledge which, long 
 before the dawn of modern science, woke 
 to life on the plains of Mesopotamia, along 
 the banks of the Nile, and throughout the 
 entire reach of the Hellenic world. 
 
 But though all reflecting persons re- 
 vere intellectual integrity, few, I suppose, 
 will feel the need of a new term to de- 
 scribe it, or if that coinage be allowed, see 
 the propriety of the term "agnosticism." 
 When Professor Huxley exhorts all men 
 to become "agnostics," will his audience 
 suspect, from that irrelevant designation, 
 that what he requires of them is that they 
 shall put away prejudice, weigh evidence 
 honestly, and deal just judgments ? To be 
 an agnostic is only to be honest and judicial. 
 If these old-fashioned Latin descriptions are 
 not sufficient, we already have in the Eng- 
 lish language a term borrowed from the 
 Greek which includes both ideas and which 
 perfectly expresses the conception under 
 consideration, — I mean the term "crit- 
 ical." And as this term, which has also 
 the advantage of the corresponding forms 
 " critic " and " criticism," naturally suggests 
 to popular thought what we have been told 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 9 
 
 is the faith whole and undefiled of those 
 who call themselves " agnostics," I cannot 
 but think that much misapprehension 
 would have been prevented had these 
 thinkers designated themselves "critics." 
 However, the new word is now a part of 
 our language. And the most we can do is 
 to bear in mind precisely what it means. 
 
 This is all the more necessary when we 
 find those who proclaim agnosticism to be 
 only a method of investigation, assuming 
 that it implies certain results in theology. 
 Their foremost champion has in fact as- 
 serted that agnosticism is to theology what 
 death is to life, a final stage in its evolu- 
 tion. And with the masses this is now 
 regarded as the true and only meaning 
 of agnosticism. But such a tenet is char- 
 acteristic rather of the partisan than of the 
 critic. And it would seem to have orig- 
 inated in the heat of recent discussions 
 over Biblical theology. For the influx of 
 German criticism into the English-speaking 
 world has at the same time unsettled tradi- 
 tional beliefs and distorted the judgment of 
 those who had already, on other grounds, 
 rejected them. These latter have failed to 
 recognize that the new movement is alto- 
 
10 BELIEF IN GOD, 
 
 gether historical, not philosophical; that 
 it affects our interpretation of documents 
 without affecting our views of the ultimate 
 problems of thought. It is no doubt true 
 that, by the sober and patient application 
 of the historical and comparative method 
 to all branches of human civilization, Ger- 
 many has, since the time of Herder, revo- 
 lutionized our views of the past history of 
 mankind, and rendered largely obsolete the 
 historical writings of the sixty or seventy 
 generations between our own century and 
 the time of Herodotus. These labors have 
 of course shed light, and abundant light, 
 on the writings of the Old and New Testa- 
 ments. And there is perhaps scarcely a 
 fact of the older record which does not 
 present itself to us in a new and changed 
 aspect. Yet the sudden discovery of this 
 critical view of the Old Testament, which 
 more than one generation of German schol- 
 ars had already represented, ought not to 
 have unbalanced the sobriety of agnostics. 
 Least of all should noisy criticisms have 
 been taken for the death-knell of theology. 
 Strife and struggle are the conditions of 
 life; and experience does not show that 
 the theology of the past is incapable of 
 
AGNOSTICISM, 11 
 
 adjusting itself to the equitable demands 
 of all modern science, physical or historical. 
 Our larger conception of the literature of 
 the Old Testament as no longer a medley 
 of proof-texts, but the artistic expression 
 in all literary forms — poetry and prose, 
 history and fable and legend, proverb and 
 prophecy — of the ever-deepening religious 
 life and the ever-growing religious insight 
 of the Jews, indicates rather the rejuvena- 
 tion than the decadence of scientific the- 
 ology. No doubt pious minds of certain 
 strata of culture will resent this invasion 
 of their conventional views. But in all 
 domains ignorance is a barrier to the dif- 
 fusion of scientific truth. Yet our convic- 
 tion always is that truth must prevail. 
 And if it prevail on the field of Biblical 
 criticism, what matters it either to one's 
 theoretical views of God, or to one's prac- 
 tical sense of life and communion with 
 Him ? Let us grant that the book of Daniel 
 was composed in the Maccabsean period, 
 that Ecclesiastes must be referred to an 
 age long after Solomon, that Isaiah was 
 written by several hands, part of it being 
 of Babylonian origin, that the Pentateuch 
 or Hexateuch is a composite work, and. 
 
12 BELIEF IN GOD, 
 
 though containmg a Mosaic element, only- 
 arrived at its present form in the exilic and 
 post-exilic periods, — and these, we learn 
 from the high authority of Canon Cheyne, 
 are "the facts generally admitted by the 
 experts," radical and orthodox alike, — is 
 it not still a fact that the great religious 
 ideas and forces of which these works are 
 the record, remain essentially what they 
 were under the older views of chronology 
 and authorship, even to the point of form- 
 ing part of a religious development or 
 revelation, that found its culminating ex- 
 pression and realization in the benign mir- 
 acle of history, the truth and life which 
 became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth ? 
 And that gracious vision of divine hu- 
 manity has only stood forth in distincter 
 features since the critics of the New Tes- 
 tament have set it more accurately against 
 the background of contemporaneous life, 
 thought, and history. Of course the lit- 
 erature of the Christian religion must be 
 subjected to the same critical study and 
 examination as other ancient documents. 
 Of course we shall have to distinguish in 
 these records between objective fact and 
 subjective seeming, between the events 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 13 
 
 they report and the contemporary moods of 
 thought they reflect. And even those who 
 differ most from Baur and Strauss must 
 acknowledge it was a memorable achieve- 
 ment in historical science when they first 
 operated the critical method on the field of 
 New Testament history, now nearly two 
 generations ago. Through them and their 
 successors we have been led, as Harnack, 
 himself a leader in the movement, declares, 
 to a knowledge " richer in historical points 
 of view." But such increase of knowl- 
 edge, though leavening traditional and his- 
 torical theology, is far from fatal to all 
 theology. Nor can agnosticism repudiate 
 theology without deserting its one essen- 
 tial principle, criticism. 
 
 The third meaning of agnosticism, and 
 the only one which deserves serious con- 
 sideration, is philosophical scepticism as 
 represented by Hume and Kant. This is 
 no doubt the ordinary signification of the 
 term on the tongues of people for whom it 
 has any definite significance. And accord- 
 ingly it is thus defined in the great diction- 
 ary of Dr. Murray with pitiless disregard to 
 that " agnostic faith whole and undefiled,'* 
 
14 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 to which alone the author of the term 
 makes absolute confession. 
 
 There is a certain propriety in the use 
 of the term " agnosticism " to express clown- 
 right darkness and incapacity of intellect 
 regarding one entire class of subjects, — 
 that, namely, which has to do with an 
 unseen or immaterial world. But that our 
 faculties are so limited, the coinage of a 
 descriptive epithet, however felicitous, by 
 no means proves. 
 
 It must be remembered that as in physi- 
 cal science so also in philosophy and theol- 
 ogy there has been great progress since the 
 eighteenth century. Old problems have 
 been recast, and old methods have been 
 abandoned. The question. Is there a First 
 Cause? is obsolete for a generation that 
 finds God in the world, and not outside 
 and apart from it. Yet it was to prove 
 the existence of such an external Deity that 
 theological thinkers of the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries spent their greatest 
 strength, as may be seen in the waitings 
 of Locke, Leibnitz, and Clarke. Whether 
 their argumentation has been weakened 
 by scepticism or not, the question of an 
 immanent Divinity is left unaffected. 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 15 
 
 Again, the enormous growth of mathe- 
 matical science in the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries imparted a character- 
 istic complexion to the entire thought of 
 the age. And theology and philosophy 
 alike, ethics not excepted, were content 
 with nothing less than an abstract demon- 
 stration of all their theses from axiomatic 
 first principles, more geometrico., as Spinoza 
 says and conspicuously illustrates in his 
 system. Following the mathematician in 
 his deductive method of proof, the ontolo- 
 gist followed him also in his disdain of 
 facts of observation, and expected, like 
 his exemplar, to acquire, solely by the 
 manipulation of his own ideas, demonstra- 
 tive knowledge of the real world, — nay, 
 of its underlying ground and government 
 as they lay prefigured in the Divine mind, 
 as well as of the existence and nature of 
 God himself. Whoever would familiarize 
 himself with this heaven-scaling way of 
 thinking must turn to the pages of the 
 now obsolete Wolff. It is true of man 
 in general, as Sydney Smith said of Dr. 
 Whewell in particular, " Science is his 
 forte, omniscience his foible." And if 
 human foibles argue the limitation of our 
 
16 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 cognitive faculties, surely the fact tliat 
 man is capable of correcting his foibles, as 
 in the person of Kant he corrected the 
 vagaries of Wolff's omniscient rationalism, 
 argues still more strongly the contrary the- 
 sis. At any rate the scepticism of Kant 
 and Hume, directed as it was upon an 
 antecedent system of thought now alto- 
 gether obsolete, can have only an histori- 
 cal interest for the philosophy of to-day. 
 That it still holds, and must hold, absolute 
 sway over our thinking is the assumption 
 upon which agnosticism, in the ordinary 
 sense of that term, is actually as well as 
 ostensibly based. 
 
 That the final dogma of yesterday is 
 only the relative truth of to-day must be 
 apparent to every believer in the evolution- 
 ary education of the human race. From 
 the standpoint of Hume's British contem- 
 poraries, his scepticism was unanswerable. 
 To them he was a monster of so hideous 
 mien, because they saw in his system the 
 inevitable outcome, under a remorseless 
 logic, of a fundamental principle which he 
 held in common with themselves. No war 
 so bitter as a civil war; no hatred like 
 that of lovers. Hume belonged to the 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 17 
 
 household of faith — in empiricism. It 
 was this common ground that needed to 
 be attacked. Aspersions on the acute and 
 logical builder of the sceptical structure 
 were of no avail, but to distract attention 
 from the all-important point, — the charac- 
 ter of the foundation. If, as the empiricist 
 asserted, all our knowledge comes to us 
 through the senses alone, there is no escape 
 from the nescience of Hume. Sensation- 
 alism is the parent of scepticism. But 
 psychology since Hume has shown that 
 sense-impressions alone do not constitute 
 human knowledge. They must be elabo- 
 rated and impregnated by thought. Much 
 that enters into your perception of a page 
 of print has not been contributed through 
 any of your senses. It is the memorable 
 achievement of Reid, the founder of the 
 Scottish school of philosophy, to have in- 
 sisted on the error of Hume's premises, 
 and in substance the view of this shrewd 
 and sober thinker has been verified, not 
 only by common sense, but also in the 
 psychological laboratories of contemporary 
 Germany. No longer can it be said that 
 because God cannot be touched, or heard, 
 or seen, therefore He cannot be known; 
 
18 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 for my friend is not known in that way 
 either. And if from certain experiences 1 
 mfer the existence of a finite person, who 
 will say that a similar process of reasoning, 
 based on similar empirical data, is falla- 
 cious because it terminates in the hypoth- 
 esis of an infinite, all-embracing person- 
 ality ? If the agnostic makes a distinction 
 in kind between these two inferences, 
 which may of course vary in degrees of 
 certainty, he must explain why the one is 
 valid and the other not. Mere assevera- 
 tions of the necessary limitations of our 
 faculties can have no place here. If to 
 sustain them you fall back on Hume's 
 theory of knowledge, you are confronted 
 by the fact that that theory rests on a 
 foundation which cannot to-day be de- 
 fended. Rectify the foundation, as the 
 modern science of mind requires, and what 
 is to prevent its supporting a faith in the 
 existence of the invisible Godhead or the 
 unseen persons you suppose you actually 
 see with your eyes ? 
 
 If Hume's philosophy is a direct proof 
 of our necessary ignorance of the unseen 
 world, it is also an indirect or reductio ad 
 ahsurdum proof of the initial premises from 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 19 
 
 which that theological scepticism was in- 
 ferred. Its permanent result has been to 
 modify the one-sided theory of knowledge 
 from which it sprang. In this work of 
 correction a prominent place must be as- 
 signed to Kant, though in some respects 
 Kant was merely the follower of Hume. 
 And his whole system is to be regarded, 
 not as a final oracle of philosophy, but a 
 mere compromise between two currents of 
 contemporaneous thought, on one of which 
 he was carried throughout all the phases of 
 his journey from the school of Wolff to the 
 throne of his critical empire. That pre- 
 dominant influence was rationalism, or the 
 theory that reason alone, apart from im- 
 pressions of sense, can give us actual 
 knowledge of the objective world. This 
 theory, it will be seen, is as one-sided as 
 the sensationalism of Hume, to which, of 
 course, it is complementary. That Kant 
 effected the union of the two cannot be 
 maintained. His position is rather this: 
 R^TiPP. fbp Tninr| dnps know things prior to 
 sense-exp erienc e of them, the mind must. 
 itself be the co-creator of things ; it endows 
 them with the forms of space and time, 
 with causal and other relations, all of 
 
20 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 which have no existence apart from the 
 mind. Hence the objects we know are not 
 things as they are in themselves, things re- 
 flected in the nnrefracting intelligence of 
 a rational spirit, bnt things as they appear 
 to us in the mind-originated forms of our 
 sensuous apprehension. We cannot know 
 God as He is, but only as He might appear 
 to us in the picture of space and time 
 which we project upon the whole material 
 world. Nay, we cannot know God even 
 as our own phenomenal creation ; for noth- 
 ing appears to us as an object without an- 
 tecedent impressions of sense. God is un- 
 known and unknowable. 
 
 But so also is the ego according to Kant. 
 I have and can have no knowledge of my- 
 self. I should know myself only as I ap- 
 peared to myself through the self-originated 
 spectacles of space and time. I know not 
 God ; I know not self ; I know not any- 
 thing else save as it appears under the 
 transformation of my knowing it. 
 
 This Humian limitation of knowledge 
 finds its place in Kant's system solely to 
 vindicate a rationalism that nobody to-day 
 accepts, sacred as it was to the scholastic 
 soul of Kant. Th^t the mind should not 
 
AGNOSTICISM, 21 
 
 have the potency to know things without 
 sense-experience of them was a thought 
 Kant found intolerable. And that is the 
 motive of his entire philosophy. But in 
 order to save this quintessence of rational- 
 ism, he was obliged to limit it to the field of 
 sensible objects. We can have knowledge 
 without sense-impressions, but only of ob- 
 jects of which sense-impressions are obtain- 
 able. God, therefore, is excluded. But 
 the exclusion, I repeat, has no other mo- 
 tive or ground than Kant's belief in the 
 rationalistic principle, and determination 
 to save it at any cost. Had this disciple 
 of Wolff found a way of saving rational 
 knowledge which would have spared the- 
 ology and metaphysics, he would have 
 been more than content; but since none 
 appeared, he would save a rational knowl- 
 edge of space and of nature even if it in- 
 volved the surrender of everything else. 
 The principle that the mind is the co- 
 creator of the objects it knows accounts 
 for a rational mathematics and physics. 
 At the same time it negates a rational the- 
 ology, since nobody wa,nts a God of his 
 own creation, like the space and spatial 
 objects of the material world. 
 
22 BELIEF IK GOD. 
 
 This scepticism is obviously the result 
 of historical conditions of thought, beyond 
 which it is the glory of Kant himself to 
 have led the reflecting intelligence of man- 
 kind. The growth of the sciences of nature, 
 by the application of the Newtonian method 
 of hypotheses and verifications, has also 
 given us new insight into the nature and 
 constitution of knowledge. We see there 
 is no rational or a priori knowledge of 
 space or nature or anything else. All our 
 cognitions are made up of perceptions of 
 sense and inferences from them or hypoth- 
 eses to explain them. Accordingly, Kant's 
 rationalistic system is overthrown, and with 
 it is broken the theological scepticism that 
 perched upon its summit. 
 
 Agnosticism, in the sense of the phil- 
 osophical scepticism of Hume and Kant, 
 is the pi'oduct of historical conditions of 
 thought that have now ceased to operate. 
 In the light of contemporary philosophy, 
 there is no ground for such an a priori 
 agnosticism. It is a sheer dogma. And it 
 is contradicted by the enunciation of it. 
 For if you hnow that your cognitive facul- 
 ties cannot go beyond the domain of objects 
 apprehended by the senses, they are already 
 
AGNOSTICISM. 23 
 
 beyond that domain. Your assertion of the 
 limitation of our knowledge is not itself a 
 fact of seeing, smelling, touching, or any 
 other form of sensuous perception. If there 
 is a barrier to the onward movement of 
 knowledge, it can only be a relative barrier. 
 The consciousness of a limit is possible 
 only to an intelligence which is capable of 
 transcending the limit. The oyster knows 
 nothing of its finiteness. Man does ; and 
 it is this that exalts him above the limits 
 of sense. 
 
 We have now completed our survey of 
 the various meanings of agnosticism. The 
 last refers to the subject of knowledge, the 
 second to an object of knowledge, and the 
 first to the method of knowledge. We all 
 agree that for the acquisition of knowledge, 
 the critical method must be followed ; no 
 one but Professor Huxley would designate 
 it agnosticism. This method must be ap- 
 plied to the study of the Bible ; but that 
 particular results regarding this particular 
 object of knowledge should be designated 
 agnosticism is to make terminology the 
 sport of individual caprice. On the other 
 hand, the dogma that the knowing sub- 
 ject is limited to the apprehension of 
 
24 BELIEF m GOD. 
 
 material objects, and can never explore 
 or even report a spiritual realm, might 
 without impropriety be described as ag- 
 nosticism. But the designation of this 
 dogma by a new term must not be taken 
 for a proof of the dogma> as would 
 seem hitherto to have been generally the 
 case. Nor shall our just demands for proof 
 be put off by a jaunty reference to Hume 
 and Kant. For if these sons of thunder 
 preached a philosophical scepticism, it was 
 only by appealing to antiquated texts, 
 which are now known to have been no 
 revelation, but mere traditional and erro- 
 neous reports of the genuine processes of 
 human intelligence. 
 
LECTURE 11. 
 
 THE LOGICAL CHAEACTER OF BELIEF IN 
 GOD. 
 
 The result of the first lecture must not 
 be overestimated. It has not been proved 
 that a knowledge of God is attainable. 
 Nothing of the kind has even been at- 
 tempted. For our refutation of agnosti- 
 cism — agnosticism, that is, in the sense of 
 philosophical scepticism — was effected, if 
 at all, by undermining its own citadel, in 
 disproving the theses whereby Kant and 
 Hume thought to restrict human knowl- 
 edge to impressions of sense or, at most, 
 to the Avorld of sensible phenomena. Nor 
 must this refutation be considered incom- 
 plete because no account has been taken of 
 the agnosticism of Sir William Hamilton 
 and of his unexpected pupil, Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer; for what is of weight in their 
 demonstration of the limitation of our cog- 
 nitive faculties goes back to the founder 
 
 25 
 
26 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 of the critical philosophy or to the subtile 
 sceptic who first waked him from his dog- 
 matic slumber. Our aim has been to put 
 agnosticism, in the person of its classic 
 defendants, on trial. And the result, I 
 submit, has been a failure to make good 
 its one essential thesis, that human knowl- 
 edge is bounded by an horizon, within 
 which there can be no altar save to the un- 
 known God. 
 
 Can we then prove that finite man is 
 adequate to a knowledge of the infinite 
 Godhead? Manifestly, at the outset we 
 have no right to make an antagonism be- 
 tween the human mind and the Divine 
 Spirit by predicating of them contradictory 
 attributes. The finite and the infinite 
 seem mutually exclusive. A single point 
 is lost in the immensities of space. And 
 yet it remains true that the vast overhang- 
 ing firmament is composed of a congeries 
 of actual points. And a closer examina- 
 tion may hereafter show that the Infinite 
 Spirit includes the finite, as the idea of an 
 organism embraces within a single life a 
 plurality of members and functions ; in 
 which case the finite and the infinite would 
 be no longer contradictory, and the contrast 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 27 
 
 they imply would convince none but the 
 unthinking of the incommensurability of 
 God with the capacity of the mind of man. ^ 
 For the present, however, all that can be 
 demanded is that the problem shall not be 
 put in terms that may prejudge the answer. 
 And to the simple inquiry whether we can 
 demonstrate the capacity of the human 
 mind to apprehend God, the sufficient 
 answer is, that we cannot prove the capa- 
 city of the mind to know anything what- 
 ever, and that it is only by actual trials, 
 most of them failures, that mankind has 
 found out what knowledge it is capable of 
 compassing. We grow in knowledge, as 
 iA virtue, by cultivating it. The attempt 
 to define the proportions of the stature 
 beyond which the intellect may not expand 
 has proved utterly vain. Philosophers may 
 analyze the elements that enter into cogni- 
 tion and describe their respective functions, 
 but this gives them no a priori criterion 
 for setting up, as Kant did, one sort of 
 knowledge as valid and another as illu- 
 sory. And if it did, they could find no 
 reason for refusing to group together our 
 knowledge of finite spirits and that of the 
 Infinite Spirit. It may be said that expe- 
 
28 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 rience alone tests all our beliefs. But when 
 the agnostic proclaims the limitations of 
 our faculties, his voucher is not experience, 
 but that precarious a priori reasoning of 
 Hume and Kant which presumes to tell us, 
 in advance, how knowledge must be con- 
 stituted, and to brand as illusion whatever 
 refuses to comply with their dogmatic 
 conditions. 
 
 The agnostic never wearies of denounc- 
 ing metaphysics. Yet, probably, the most 
 dogmatic of all contemporary metaphysi- 
 cians is the agnostic himself. For even 
 though his censure of the schools were 
 well founded, it would not be hard to 
 show that they never so completely desert 
 the solid ground of actual experience as to 
 attempt a demonstration so purely a 'priori 
 as the agnostic's delimitation of the cogni- 
 tive faculties themselves. The rationalistic 
 leayen of Kant's philosophy is now most 
 active where it is least suspected ; and, on 
 the other hand, the critical spirit of the 
 master, which can be worthily honored only 
 by the practice of independent criticism, 
 receives the idolatrous worship of a final 
 avatar in philosophy. For, let me repeat, 
 though it is now the fashion to follow Kant 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 29 
 
 in discarding metaphysics for theories of 
 knowledge, it is the emptiest of all illu- 
 sions to suppose that anything but pre- 
 sumptuous dogmatism can measure, in ad- 
 vance of actual trial, the mind's capacity 
 to know. The Critique of Pure Reason^ 
 as an analysis of the elements of knowl- 
 edge, is of great and permanent value to 
 philosophy. But as an inquiry into the 
 extent and validity of knowledge — and 
 this was its primary object — it was fore- 
 doomed to failure. For this problem is 
 unanswerable of cognition as a whole ; and 
 even in the case of particular cognitions, 
 the solution, if it is to be anything more 
 than a process of arbitrary exclusion or in- 
 clusion, turns on the greater or less adapta- 
 bility of the proposition under considera- 
 tion to the rest of our knowledge. But 
 Kant could not rid himself of the rational- 
 istic assumption that the mind, which with 
 the empiricist he supposed limited in its 
 range to the world of sense, had neverthe- 
 less the power of mapping out a priori its 
 own limitations. In this respect the criti- 
 cal philosophy has been the bane of modern 
 thought, as it is the basis of agnosticism. 
 For nothing but the great name of Kant 
 
80 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 could have kept so long from bursting that 
 rationalistic conceit which, soaring above 
 the solid ground of experience, inflates 
 itself to the deliverance of an oracle, pro- 
 claiming the fixed and everlasting boun- 
 daries of the knowable world. The scepti- 
 cism of the day is a common complaint. 
 But timid souls may find comfort in the 
 observation that current agnosticism is well 
 seasoned with gnosticism, and is perhaps as 
 near to omniscience as it is to nescience. 
 
 The ancient sceptics went much further. 
 The sophists, Gorgias in particular, taught 
 there was no truth ; that if there were, it 
 could not be known ; and that if it could 
 be known, it could not be communicated. 
 While the modern agnostic abides in the 
 uncritical half-truth that we know only 
 phenomena, Pyrrho went on to assert the 
 utter subjectivity of all opinions, forbidding 
 any one to say, " this is so," and allowing 
 only, "this seems to me to be so." For him, 
 therefore, the normal and necessary condi- 
 tion of mind was suspension of judgment. 
 Herein he was followed by the founder of 
 the New Academy, who, however, with still 
 more rigorous consistency, would not allow 
 this principle of suspension of judgment to 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 31 
 
 pass as knowledge. The view of Arcesilaus 
 rather was that we know nothing save that 
 we know nothing, and this is not so much 
 a cognition as a feeling. It is the outcome 
 of a sceptical mood, not of reason or in- 
 sight. A similar result was reached by 
 Carneades, who forms the culminating 
 point of Academic scepticism. And the 
 conviction of the impossibility of knowl- 
 edge and the demand for suspense of 
 judgment have established themselves as 
 permanent positions in all the sceptical 
 schools. 
 
 I am not sure that the modern agnostic 
 always perceives, or at any rate is anxious 
 to recognize, his kinship with the more 
 radical schools of ancient Athens. Men 
 who find an intellectual relief in the escape 
 from a difficult problem by the assurance 
 that God is unknowable do not care to be 
 told they know nothing at all. This is a 
 shock to common sense and an outrage 
 upon science. For as scientific results 
 obtrude themselves constantly upon our 
 observation, custom makes their unques- 
 tioning acceptance a property of easiness. 
 And to question their validity, in this age 
 of scientific culture, would be like accusing 
 
32 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 Manlius in sight of the Capitol. But I con- 
 template no such attack. On the contrary, 
 I think it may be shown that the sciences, 
 by means of which the agnostic would 
 undermine our belief in God, are as well 
 established as those truths to which the 
 ancient sceptic appealed for the destruction 
 of the sciences. What I desire to empha- 
 size is the community of procedure in the 
 two cases, unwilling as the New Academy 
 would have been to admit it. For they 
 professed an unconditional denial of all 
 truth. Yet they not only gave out their 
 own results as true, they not only endeav- 
 ored to prove them by reasonings, but they 
 must have been in possession of some valid 
 truth, in relation to which, as ideal, doubt 
 of other assertions could first become pos- 
 sible. And this is precisely the position 
 of the modern agnostic. Children, on the 
 other hand, believe everything. We all 
 believe as much as we can. We follow 
 thus the line of least resistance. This is 
 why ignorant rustics, whose experience is 
 narrow and whose mental activity is not 
 much above the infantile range, are always 
 sound in the faith. There is absolutely no 
 limit to their credulity. But education 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 33 
 
 and civilization make man critical and 
 sceptical. And what each doubts is what 
 is not in harmony with some circle of facts 
 he has chosen as the absolute resting-place 
 of his intellect. The geologist disbelieves 
 the Mosaic story of creation, which for the 
 pious peasant is no poem, but a literal rec- 
 ord of fact. "The prejudice against the 
 supernatural," of which we hear so much, 
 means only that the modern belief in natu- 
 ral law is casting out that prejudice for the 
 supernatural or the extraordinary which 
 originated in the fears, imaginations, and 
 ignorance of primitive mankind. The phys- 
 icist, with his faith fixed in the undulations 
 of an impalpable ether, denies the objective 
 reality of colors. And because the experi- 
 mental method has proved so fruitful in 
 science, the agnostic refuses to lift up his 
 gaze above the natural world in which 
 alone that method can operate. For him, 
 therefore, God, if existent, is unknowable. 
 As every denial, therefore, rests on the 
 conviction of certain truths, it will be in- 
 structive to examine the character of that 
 scientific certainty which is the absolute 
 standard of the modern agnostic. Now 
 this standard is not the same as what is 
 
34 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ordinarily called common sense. For the 
 latter embraces that aggregate of the fun- 
 damental- beliefs of the race, of which some 
 have already been transformed by science, 
 while others seem altogether inaccessible 
 to it. As examples, respectively, may be 
 mentioned the now wavering belief in the 
 objectivity of color and the still unshaken 
 conviction of the existence of other reality 
 than our own ideas. The validity of this 
 antithesis between the contents of con- 
 sciousness and a world of reality of which 
 they are the reports is a question which the 
 phenomenalistic scientist relegates to meta- 
 physics. But in doing so he breaks with 
 common sense, which is not less certain of 
 this correspondence than of the truth of 
 any of the scientist's first principles. I 
 allude to the difference between phenom- 
 enalistic science and common sense, be- 
 cause the champion of popular agnosticism 
 is wont to appeal indifferently to both, in 
 happy ignorance of the fact that phenom- 
 enalistic science knows nothing of his exis- 
 tence^ and that the common sense of man- 
 kind which does recognize it is persuaded 
 also of the existence of other beings, finite 
 and infinite. 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 35 
 
 Agnosticism and phenomenalism are 
 complementary aspects of a single doc- 
 trine. The agnostic emphasizes what can- 
 not be known. The phenomenalist explains 
 that even what we do know is, not the thing 
 as it is in itself, but its appearance in our 
 consciousness. The scepticism common to 
 both is rooted in the assertion that scien- 
 tific investigation is limited to connections 
 between phenomena as objects of conscious- 
 ness. But this statement must not be mis- 
 interpreted, as it generally is. Certainty 
 belongs to what is immediately given in 
 consciousness, as, for example, a sensation 
 of bitterness; or to what is inferred or 
 constructed by thought from this sense ma- 
 terial. Thus the Copernican theory was 
 developed by thought from a host of sense 
 perceptions. And the progress of knowl- 
 edge consists just in this interpretation of 
 sensations, this passage from the immediate 
 material of sense to the mediated inferences 
 of thought. The scientist is simply doing 
 over again the intellectual work of the race, 
 whose interpretations of the same data of 
 sense can no longer hold a place in the 
 growing organism of knowledge. The 
 ancient sceptic was right in his contention 
 
36 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 that nothing was immediately given but 
 sensible impressions, and that these facts 
 of consciousness have a purely subjective 
 certainty. But it does not thence follow 
 there is no objective certainty, — no real 
 knowledge about things as they are in 
 themselves. It follows only that objective 
 certainty, which is not immediately given, 
 must be established by the interpretative 
 activity of thought. And the only real 
 value of those subjective data of sense to 
 which the sceptic limits his view, because 
 they alone are what is momentarily given, 
 is that they form a basis and a fixed point 
 of departure for the objective interpreta- 
 tions of the scientific intellect. After cen- 
 turies of conflict between sensationalism 
 and rationalism, it seems to be now pretty 
 generally accepted that scientific truth is 
 always the result of the elaboration by 
 thought of the given materials of sense. 
 The Baconian conception of the knowing 
 mind, as a mirror, passively reflecting as 
 it actually exists a world existing apart 
 from it, cannot to-day be accepted by any 
 logician of the sciences. 
 
 Scientific truth is not, therefore, as is 
 often supposed, given to us from without. 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 37 
 
 It is we, the thinkers, who make it, by 
 reflection upon the suggestive materials of 
 sensation. We construct theories of these 
 data, which are reconstructions of them to 
 thought. These interpretations must agree 
 in being accepted by all conscious minds. 
 They must also agree with that accepted 
 stock of interpretations which constitutes 
 existing science. But they show their ob- 
 jective certainty, or their basis in reality, 
 most of all when they are incapable of 
 being cast aside by the progressive rectifica- 
 tion which knowledge is constantly under- 
 going. And of all parts of our knowledge 
 none so absolutely fulfils this condition, 
 none, therefore, is so indubitably certain, 
 as that ever-growing section which has 
 found expression in laws of space and 
 time, the fundamental forms of all ex- 
 istence. Mathematics, pure and applied, 
 satisfies most completely our criteria of 
 objective certainty. 
 
 Yet there is scientific knowledge, apart 
 from the demonstrative sciences. But the 
 latter, by their clearness, their convincing- 
 ness, and their earlier and most marvellous 
 development, have had an irresistible fasci- 
 nation for our great theological reasoners. 
 
3» BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 The conditions o their development, mean- 
 time, were altogether ignored. We can 
 see, however, to take only the case of 
 geometry, that the possibility of its demon- 
 strations, and their convincing force, arise 
 from the peculiar nature of the subject of 
 investigation. For space is perfectly sim- 
 ple. It has only one attribute, — extension. 
 Every part of it is like every other part, 
 and it is capable of being represented to 
 the eye in figures which correspond accu- 
 rately to the conceptions we desire to de- 
 termine, — circles, triangles, squares, etc. 
 Geometry is a perfect science, because it 
 deals with the simplest and most trans- 
 parent of all objects of perception. We 
 could not expect the same insight into 
 material objects (stones, for example), be- 
 cause they are given to us with an unknown 
 number of attributes, thus being the very 
 opposite of those geometrical figures which 
 we construct in precise agreement with a 
 carefully defined rule. The disparity is 
 still greater when we ascend from chem- 
 istry to the sciences of life, mind, and 
 society. Here the phenomena under in- 
 vestigation are infinitely complex and be- 
 wildering, and experiment, which might 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHAMACTEB. 39 
 
 bring order into even such a chaos, is all 
 but impossible, because we have scarcely 
 any control of the conditions. At any rate, 
 a science of concrete existences cannot be 
 demonstrative. Space is the most abstract 
 of all our notions. God, on the other hand, 
 who is the ground and source and moving 
 spirit of all reality, must be the most con- 
 crete object of our thought. By no possi- 
 bility, therefore, can a theology or science 
 of God follow the demonstrative method 
 of mathematics. 
 
 The lack of this insight into the pecu- 
 liarity of mathematical knowledge led the 
 great thinkers of the seventeenth century 
 into serious confusion. Living in an age of 
 mathematical progress, to which they them- 
 selves largely contributed, they aimed at a 
 demonstration of the divine existence by 
 reasoning like Euclid's. Thus Locke could 
 maintain that we have an intuitive knowl- 
 edge of our own existence, a sensitive 
 knowledge of the existence of external- 
 things, and a demonstrative knowledge of 
 God's existence. This knowledge of God 
 he considered " the most obvious truth that 
 reason discovers," and its evidence not one 
 whit inferior to " mathematical certainty." 
 
40 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 But a proof of the existence of Goa corre- 
 sponding to Locke's ideal has never yet 
 been given ; nor, from the nature of the 
 case, can it reasonably be expected. And 
 I apprehend no little harm has been done 
 by attempting to make our belief in God 
 more certain than it actually is. We have 
 such a belief, and I hold it is legitimate ; 
 but it does not belong to that kind of abso- 
 lutely certain knowledge we are able to 
 have of objects so simple and abstract as 
 the space and numbers of mathematics. 
 
 There is, however, another sort of knowl- 
 edge. When I say " The sun will rise to- 
 morrow," or " All men are mortal," I make 
 an assertion resting upon invariable expe- 
 rience in the past. Without any hesitation, 
 you accept the proposition. At first glance 
 it seems absolutely certain. Yet it is only 
 a summation of past experiences. No day 
 has passed without the rising of the sun. 
 All men who have lived have also died. 
 But how am I to know the future will re- 
 semble the past? For if nature is not 
 uniform, men may hereafter be born who 
 shall never die. My belief that this will 
 not be so rests upon an assumption of the 
 invariability of natural laws. Such knowl- 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 41 
 
 edigQ^ which is called induction, has not the 
 same absolute certainty as geometry. Yet 
 it is the best we have in many of the 
 sciences and over a large area of the con- 
 cerns of life. 
 
 Our belief in God is not of the nature 
 of an induction. The only inductive evi- 
 dence of which it is susceptible w^ould be 
 the generalization that all or most men 
 actually possessed it. But no one would 
 say that was ground on which the belief 
 might really be based. 
 
 When we turn to the third source or 
 method of knowledge, we find the province 
 of which we have been in search. If our 
 belief in God is to be vindicated, it can 
 only be as an hypothesis in explanation of 
 certain facts. This is the ordinary method 
 of the scientist. Newton observes the fall 
 of an apple. To explain it, he forms the 
 theory of a universal mutual attraction be- 
 tween bodies. The consequences of this 
 theory were worked out mathematically, 
 and all his calculations were verified by 
 observations of new facts. In many cases, 
 such verification must be imperfect. But 
 just in proportion as it is, is our knowledge 
 removed from certainty. It may, for ex- 
 
42 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ample, be reasonably conjectured that social 
 conditions have much to do with vice, and 
 that if poverty were eliminated, drunken- 
 ness among large classes of the people 
 would scarcely survive. But this hypoth- 
 esis is not susceptible of direct verification. 
 Again, there can be no experimental verifi- 
 cation of the hypothesis of the existence 
 of intense heat in the interior of the earth. 
 Yet it explains so many facts that geolo- 
 gists regard it as a highly probable suppo- 
 sition, or, indeed, almost a certainty. To 
 the same class of probable truths must be 
 assigned the theory of natural selection, 
 DarAvin's hypothesis to account for the 
 formation of species of plants and animals. 
 Probability is the guide of life. And 
 science, if we except the small portion 
 which has a demonstrative certainty, can 
 pretend to nothing higher than probability. 
 But it must not be overlooked that there 
 are different degrees of probability. If the 
 generalizations of induction rest upon an 
 assumption of the uniformity of nature, it 
 is an assumption that commands our entire 
 confidence. If there is still doubt about 
 the existence of a luminiferous ether, the 
 long procession of phenomena which the 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 43 
 
 undulatory theory has already explained 
 forms an almost sufficient verification of it. 
 Like these, our belief in God is hypotheti- 
 cal. Its antiquity and universality give it 
 a prerogative over the hypotheses of sci- 
 ence. But, like the assurance of our own 
 existence, it is not susceptible of verifica- 
 tion by scientific tests. The most that 
 can be claimed is, I conceive, that the be- 
 lief is not absurd in itself ; that it accounts 
 for facts whose existence is admitted, and 
 accounts for them more satisfactorily than 
 any other theory. At any rate, I am un- 
 able to assign to our belief in God a higher 
 certainty than that possessed by the work- 
 ing hypotheses of science. And this allo- 
 cation of it seems to be warranted both 
 by the confessions of individual thinkers 
 of different schools and by the controver- 
 sies which we find in the long history of 
 reflective thought. 
 
 Nevertheless, an agnostic scientist might 
 object to this assignment of our belief in 
 God to the class of hypothetical truths. 
 His own creed is phenomenalism, the doc- 
 trine that we know only phenomena, or 
 what appears to consciousness, and the laws 
 governing their connections. And he might 
 
 IVER3IT71 
 
44 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 contend that, though hypotheses are the 
 life of science, the scientist must not posit 
 anything in explanation of actual phe- 
 nomena which is not itself a possible phe- 
 nomenon. The hypothesis of the divine 
 existence is regarded as illegitimate, on 
 the ground that God is not a vera causa. 
 He is not a phenomenal antecedent of the 
 consequent to be explained. Furthermore, 
 when knowledge is thus restricted to the 
 field of phenomenal sequences and co-exist- 
 ences, what place is left for theology, or 
 what facts are there which require us to 
 postulate as their condition the existence 
 of God? And even if it were conceded 
 that there were facts lying beyond the mar- 
 gin of scientific explanation, can it be said 
 they are accounted for by an hypothesis 
 which sets up as their condition an infinite 
 reality, when the phenomenalist has assured 
 us that we know nothing about reality, that 
 we know only phenomena and their laws. 
 
 It may hereafter be seen that this phe- 
 nomenalism is no part of science, but an 
 accidental accretion rooted in a dogmatic 
 metaphysics. For the present, however, 
 let this phenomenalistic account of science 
 be accepted. What then ? It by no means 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 45 
 
 follows there can be no further elaboration 
 of the facts with whose sequences and co- 
 existences the scien43es make us acquainted. 
 I see not why the intellectual interests of 
 the human spirit should be confined to the 
 acquisition of a knowledge and control of 
 phenomena. And this alone is the aim of 
 science. Its sole object is to enable us to 
 infer from present observations what lias 
 preceded them, or what will -follow them, 
 or what is now in unseen conjunction with 
 them. To this end scarcely anything is 
 needed but an accurate comparison of phe- 
 nomena. At any rate, science fulfils its 
 mission without having to raise a question 
 regarding the true ultimate nature of those 
 objects whose modes of behavior engross 
 its entire attention. 
 
 But because science has iDcen: successful 
 within the limits prescribed, we are under 
 no obligation to surrender all the other 
 ends and interests of the intellect. Among 
 these is the desire to ascertain the under- 
 lying ground, the real basis, of all exist- 
 ence. The human spirit is satisfied with 
 nothing less than a consistent view of the 
 world as a whole. And even the universe 
 of the phenomenalist, which contains noth- 
 
46 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ing but actual or possible appearances In 
 consciousness, is not exhausted for the in- 
 tellect which we might conceive to be ac- 
 quainted with all their sequences and 
 simultaneities. For it is a changing world, 
 yet not a flux of becoming in which any- 
 thing follows anything. Definite conse- 
 quents flow from definite antecedents, as 
 science both assumes and verifies. Nature, 
 even for the phenomenalist, is not a chaos 
 of different atoms, each appearing as one 
 in the series of phenomenal occurrence 
 and then vanishing forever. With such a 
 procession of abolitions and originations, 
 even phenomenalistic science would be an 
 impossibility. But to present the spectacle 
 of phenomena recurring in accordance with 
 law, nature must be the subject of real 
 inner connections and mutual dependen- 
 cies, which nothing but absorption in the 
 discovery of causal sequences could have 
 induced the scientific investigator tempo- 
 rarily to overlook. The plea that the real 
 basis of things is inscrutable might seem a 
 modest and satisfactory defence. But it 
 has already been shown that it is to a cer- 
 tain extent self-contradictory, asserting, as 
 it does, the existence of essences and the 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 47 
 
 relation in which they stand to the think- 
 ing spirit. 
 
 Yet the phenomenalist might readily 
 acquiesce in this realistic account of his 
 universe, without accepting the theory of 
 a mutual connection of all existence in a 
 unitary subject. Whether this hypothesis 
 can be defended as a fair regressive inter- 
 pretation of the facts of his world, need 
 not now be further considered. For it has 
 to be confessed that, even though this real 
 basis of phenomena be admitted, we are 
 still far from the conclusion that it is iden- 
 tical Avith God. Nor can such identifica- 
 tion be made so long as we suppose our- 
 selves ignorant of the existence of spirits, 
 including our own spirit. The difficulties, 
 therefore, raised by the phenomenalist can- 
 not, from the standpoint of his theory, be 
 altogether resolved. ^ True, he may be 
 shown that he has overlooked problems 
 as interesting to the thinking spirit as the 
 temporal relations of phenomena. But 
 even though he yielded to our argument 
 that reality must be one and intercon- 
 nected, he might persist in denying that 
 we knew anything else about it. And if 
 the ground of all phenomena cannot be 
 
48 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 determined as spiritual, we have, as theists, 
 no further interest in it. 
 
 Still, though the phenomenalist remains 
 in possession of his field, he has not won 
 any victory. For his theory is no part of 
 science; it is not even the expression of 
 any reasoned conviction. It is rather 
 the mutiny of a hasty and uncritical tem- 
 per, which lacks patience to weigh perplex- 
 ing and uncertain evidence. If reasoning 
 fails to dislodge the phenomenalist, neither 
 was it reasoning that lodged him. And so 
 long as he maintains, at least in disputa- 
 tion, the dogma that can scarcely be held 
 in fact, that the superficial procession of 
 phenomena is exhaustive of the universe, 
 or at any rate of what is knowable in it, so 
 long will he denounce as illusion our hypo- 
 thesis of the existence of God. But in 
 this condemnation it must be remembered 
 (though the agnostic constantly forgets it) 
 that our belief in every reality, even in 
 our own, shares the same fate as our belief 
 in the existence of God. It is not merely 
 metaphysical and theological entities that 
 are despatched into the limbo of vanity. 
 Thither are consigned also all other exist- 
 ences, sensible and spiritual alike. For 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 49 
 
 the phenomenalist the only meaning of Be- 
 ing is, appearing in consciousness. 
 
 It is some relief to recall that this all- 
 corroding scepticism, which is fatal to our 
 hypothesis of the divine existence solely 
 because it repudiates every extra-mental 
 reality, is not the outcome of science, but 
 of a one-sided and erroneous theory of 
 knowledge. No doubt it is often pro- 
 claimed by our men of science, but they 
 have learned it, not from the book of na- 
 ture, but from the Logic of John Stuart 
 Mill. That work first revealed to them 
 the methods they were blindly following 
 in inductive research. But its invaluable 
 logical results were infused with the spirit 
 of that extreme empiricism which teaches 
 that the only organ of knowledge is sense 
 and the only object of knowledge sense- 
 affections. Its enormous influence with 
 men of science has ensured the propaga- 
 tion both of its vital truths and its fatal 
 errors. To it, more than to any other 
 source, we owe that phenomenalism which 
 is now so widely diffused in scientific cir- 
 cles that remain closed to the influence of 
 Kant. 
 
 In a certain sense, of course, all knowl- 
 
50 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 edge is subjective ; it is an act of our con- 
 sciousness. Such subjectivity belongs to 
 the ver}^ idea of knowing. Objects must 
 be perceived by the mind, and that not as 
 they are if it does not perceive them, but 
 as they are if it does perceive them. But 
 this subjectivity of the process of knowl- 
 edge does not disprove the objective signif- 
 icance of the content of knowledge. On 
 the other hand, it must be acknowledged 
 there can be no proof that our thoughts 
 about things actually correspond to the 
 nature of things. Yet we see no ground 
 in the foregoing characteristic of knowl- 
 edge to deem ourselves the victims of illu- 
 sion. And were the existence of God 
 once established, we should venture to 
 express the conviction that He had not 
 implanted in us habits of thought which 
 are out of harmony with that world of 
 reality of which He is the source and 
 soul. 
 
 Be that as it may, science, if we put 
 aside its phenomenalistic spokesmen who 
 have already too long detained us, assumes 
 that everything is objectively real which 
 it does not discover to have originated in 
 the percipient subject. Recognizing that 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 51 
 
 all elements of our knowledge are subjec- 
 tive in the sense that they are states or 
 activities of our consciousness, it distin- 
 guishes between those which are purely- 
 subjective and those which, since they can- 
 not be explained from consciousness alone, 
 must be given to it from without, and have 
 therefore an objective significance. Here 
 science and common sense are at one in 
 their opposition to phenomenalism. They 
 both set out with the assumption that per- 
 ceptions give us objective facts. Phenome- 
 nalism, treating them as subjective, main- 
 tains they cannot be connected with the 
 world of reality. Supposing ourselves, 
 however, actually in possession of objec- 
 tive truth, it could only be by means of 
 perceptions which are acts of our con- 
 sciousness. At this subjectivity of the 
 process of knowledge, therefore, the scien- 
 tist takes no offence. For him every per- 
 ception remains objectively true till other 
 perceptions, gained under ascertained con- 
 ditions which guarantee their accuracy, 
 fall into contradiction with it and disclose 
 in it an admixture of subjective elements. 
 This mutual control of our perceptions, 
 along with the elimination of what is 
 
52 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 purely subjective in them, is brought about 
 by repeated observations, under various 
 conditions, of the same object. The indis- 
 pensableness of such critical observation is 
 a maxim of science. For experience has 
 led the scientist to suspect the presence of 
 subjective factors in all objective percep- 
 tions, and he will call nothing pure objec- 
 tive truth which has not stood the tests of 
 his regulated observations. But he never 
 finds his knowledge of the world dissolv- 
 ing altogether into subjective elements. 
 And the residuum, which must therefore 
 be given to him from without, he regards, 
 in agreement Avith common sense, as a 
 record of objective fact. 
 
 Now this procedure implies the existence 
 of a world of reality apart from conscious- 
 ness. It is a world of which percipient 
 man is only a part, a part not wholly un- 
 like other parts. But because every per- 
 cipient is the centre of his own sphere of 
 observations, the philosopher is constantly 
 tempted by speculation to make himself the 
 central or indeed the sole reality, resolving 
 all other existences into his knowledge of 
 them. To such phenomenalism science 
 brings disenchantment. It makes man but 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 53 
 
 an atom in an infinite orb of reality. But 
 it does not deny his competency to repro- 
 duce this reality in his thought. A part 
 of it he already knows, more of it he is to 
 know, all of it is knowable. Nor will the 
 scientist have natural laws treated as other 
 than records of occurrences in the actual 
 world. He is an uncompromising realist. 
 While the sceptic, the agnostic, and the 
 phenomenalist have gone on weaving their 
 tissue of argument to prove the incogniz- 
 ableness of things, science has reared a 
 solid fabric of objective knowledge, whose 
 possibility is thus demonstrated by its pres- 
 ence, and whose actuality must henceforth 
 constitute the data of sound philosophy. 
 This is a circumstance which in modern 
 philosophy has been far too little consid- 
 ered. Human knowledge is no longer the 
 medley of unsifted experience, in whose 
 contradictions the ancient sceptics found 
 their most potent weapons of attack. The 
 verified results of science, which form the 
 larger part of modern knowledge, are of 
 recent acquisition. And whatever our 
 theory of the possibility of knowing, it 
 cannot discredit truths so firmly estab- 
 lished and so frequently verified. 
 
54 BELIEF IK GOD. 
 
 Hence, though the ancient scepticism 
 were revived, it could not shake our con- 
 viction of the objective truth of the laws 
 of nature. Or rather, I should say, the 
 ancient scepticism has been rendered obso- 
 lete by the establishment through science 
 of a large body of systematized knowledge. 
 Take the ten rpoiroL or logical grounds of 
 doubt, as in the last school of Greek scep- 
 tics they were formulated by JEnesidemus 
 and repeated by Sextus Empiricus, and you 
 will find they have been answered by the 
 careful experiments of modern science. 
 Those variations in objects under different 
 conditions, which seemed to these Greek 
 thinkers impediments to knowledge, have 
 become starting-points for modern investi- 
 gators, whose reward has been the discov- 
 ery of general laws governing the changing 
 play of the objective world. Again, the 
 different and even contradictory reports of 
 perception do not prove it is nothing but a 
 subjective process in the individual. They 
 are rather a challenge, which the modern 
 scientific experimenter has taken up, to 
 separate the purely subjective from the 
 objective factors of perception. Science, 
 in making us acquainted with the laws of 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. ' 55 
 
 nature, must drive out the haunting doubt 
 of their objective reality. Experiment 
 shows that the materials of this knowledge 
 are not originated by the subject. They 
 are given to it from without. The relations 
 we know are relations that actually obtain 
 in that self-existing universe of which man 
 is a part. 
 
 I must not be understood as implying 
 that modern science proves the existence 
 of a universe outside human consciousness. 
 It only renders doubt or disproof of such 
 reality difficult and unnecessary. In a last 
 analysis " this given miracle of reality," as 
 Lotze describes it, is a primary, but inde- 
 monstrable, datum of all intelligence. All 
 knowledge is knowledge not of itself, but 
 of a reality apart from itself. And this 
 realism, we have seen, is presupposed in 
 all science and gives meaning to scientific 
 methods. Still, while science borrows from 
 common sense this fundamental belief, it 
 makes no inquiry into the ultimate nature 
 of reality. In its quest of simplicity sci- 
 ence has indeed postulated a world of 
 moving atoms, by which it has been en- 
 abled to explain many of the co-existences 
 and sequences that constitute the object of 
 
56 ' BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 its investigation. But this is only a pro- 
 visional and partial hypothesis, and it is 
 attended with many difficulties. While it 
 satisfies our love of unity and simplicity, it 
 fails to convince us that the richness and 
 variety of the universe have their source 
 and ground in the mere motion of such 
 homogeneous elements. And whatever 
 original essences be assumed, if they are a 
 plurality, we shall have to ask how they 
 could come together and form a single 
 orderly world, and what is the exact 
 nature of those actions and reactions be- 
 tween them, which science dogmatically 
 assumes, but which, from its own stand- 
 point alone, are found to contain insoluble 
 difficulties. In short, the scientific intel- 
 lect, when it reflects upon itself, its method, 
 its attainments, and its assumptions, is 
 driven beyond itself to make a final syn- 
 thesis of its knowledge, a final interpreta- 
 tion of the ultimate constitution of that 
 universe whose parts it has brought to the 
 light of an intelligence which cannot rest 
 satisfied with mere causal connections. It 
 is by such a final effort we are carried, if 
 at all, to the hypothesis of the existence of 
 God. The grounds that may warrant that 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 57 
 
 hypothesis will be considered hereafter. 
 At present our only aim is to show the 
 need of this or some similar hypothesis, in 
 addition to the results of natural science, 
 even though natural science had completely 
 fulfilled its mission, as an answer to the 
 legitimate demand of the thinking spirit 
 for a connected view of the universe as a 
 whole. Science is the record of causal 
 relations ; but causation is only a single 
 ray of that prismatic intelligence which 
 needs to diffuse itself in unbroken unity 
 over the whole sphere of Being. 
 
 The nearest approach made by science 
 to our hypothesis of the existence of God 
 lies in the assertion of the universality of 
 law. This assertion is a mere postulate 
 whose validity no experience can confirm. 
 Confirmatory instances in the past and of 
 the known warrant no inference with re- 
 gard to the future and the unknown, save 
 on the tacit admission of the principle it- 
 self, — the universality of law. What the 
 supposition is based upon is the conviction 
 of the unity and systematic connection of 
 all reality. It is this conviction, and this 
 alone, which enables us to argue from one 
 part of reality to another, from the past to 
 
58 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 the future, from tlie known to the un- 
 known. Owing to the prevalence of phe- 
 nomenalism the scientist rarely expresses 
 his initial assumption in these realistic 
 terms. The chemist or physician, however, 
 must often have a suspicion that in ex- 
 plaining phenomena he is noting their real 
 mutual dependence upon one another. Yet 
 if interrogated, he would probably speak 
 by the card, and tell you he was only not- 
 ing relations of succession and simulta- 
 neity. This, however, need not hinder us 
 from interpreting the universal postulate 
 of science as involving the existence of a 
 unitary interconnected cosmos embracing 
 all reality. And when the scientific posi- 
 tion is thus stated, the scientific impulse 
 itself forces us to the next inquiry: How 
 shall we conceive of the nature of that 
 one reality in order to make intelligible its 
 modes of behavior, as science has recorded 
 them? This is surely a legitimate ques- 
 tion. Of course it is a difficult one; but 
 we have no more right to say it is unan- 
 swerable than to say that a problem in 
 physics yet unsolved is insoluble. Equally 
 true is it that the question has not here 
 been answered. At present my only en- 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 59 
 
 deavor is to justify the asking of it. 
 Whether the hypothesis of the existence 
 of God contains a satisfactory answer is a 
 point reserved for subsequent consideration. 
 The results hitherto attained will seem 
 to many minds very inconsiderable. But 
 the progress of sound knowledge is always 
 slow. And in a matter like the present, 
 it seems advisable to begin at the begin- 
 ning, to set down nought in haste, and to 
 extenuate nought of all the objections that 
 have been brought against our undertaking. 
 And though little, something has actually 
 been gained in the course of our inqui- 
 ries, something too of not inconsiderable 
 significance. It has been seen that science 
 per se is not phenomenalistic, but realistic. 
 It has been seen that the indispensable 
 postulate of science — the universality of 
 the laws of nature — is only the expres- 
 sion of a conviction of the unity and uni- 
 versal inner connection of all reality. What 
 the nature of this reality must be, if it is 
 to render intelligible those fixed mutual de- 
 pendencies of things which science reads as 
 laws of causation, is a question the reflect- 
 ing spirit cannot possibly forego, though 
 the answer can never be more certain than 
 
60 BELIEF IX GOD. 
 
 a scientific hypothesis incapable of com- 
 plete verification. As, however, the only 
 reality we know from the inside is a spirit- 
 ual ego.) it may be premised that if the 
 hypothesis of a universal spirit or world- 
 soul accounted for the fundamental as- 
 sumptions of science, it would be in itself 
 an admissible hypothesis, and probable just 
 in proportion as we could reconcile with 
 it all the remaining facts of our knowledge. 
 Such an hypothesis I hope to be able to 
 establish with reasonable certainty. But 
 we can scarcely reckon upon the sympathy 
 either of popular or of scientific thought. 
 The mass of mankind refuses to associate 
 God with nature except as its distant 
 creator and designer. The champions of 
 the natural sciences maintain that their 
 discoveries of casual connections are the 
 be-all and end-all of our knowledge of 
 nature. Both agree in the scholastic dic- 
 tum of Sir William Hamilton : " Nature 
 conceals God." And the scientist espe- 
 cially is sure that the cosmos (man apart) 
 presents no problem that might lead us to 
 look for a divine presence. Theoretical 
 thought, he tells us, if left to itself, would 
 never find an occasion to step beyond the 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 61 
 
 connections of the material world we per- 
 ceive by our senses. It might recognize 
 the infinitude of these relations and the 
 inability of thought to compass them, but 
 beyond the horizon of actual experience it 
 would have no ground to assume anything 
 but an unbroken series of causal connec- 
 tions. This similarity of the unknown to 
 the known I do not call in question. But 
 I must repeat that it rests on the postulate 
 of the inner systematic connection of all 
 reality. And of this connection — these 
 fixed mutual actions and reactions of things 
 — theoretical thought is surely obliged to 
 form some conception. And if so, we are 
 driven by thought itself beyond the realm 
 of its achievements in science to an inter- 
 pretation of the nature of ultimate reality. 
 It is not beyond the connections of the sen- 
 sible world we expect to see God, but in 
 and through them as the sole condition of 
 their possibility. That our belief in God, 
 therefore, must be without cosmic grounds 
 cannot be conceded to the scientist. Only 
 by arbitrarily limiting the operations and 
 interests of intelligence to the bare fact of 
 causal relations can such a dogma be main- 
 tained. It is impossible to give a reason 
 
62 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 for this limitation; but the cause is no 
 doubt found in our absorption in science, 
 our adoption of scientific methods, and our 
 temptation to measure the mind of man by 
 what it has achieved in a conspicuous, 
 though single, field of its activity. It 
 seems probable, however, that in the prog- 
 ress of science the human mind will return 
 to a critical analysis of its scientific start- 
 ing-points. And in this metaphysic of 
 science what we mean when we say a 
 thing exists or an event happens will have 
 to be explained. Should it turn out that 
 our hypothesis of the being of God is the 
 only one that can render intelligible exist- 
 ence and change, which the scientist is 
 obliged to recognize, the result would be 
 what might fairly be called a doctrine of 
 cosmic theism. 
 
 This metaphysic of nature could not, 
 however, become a doctrine of cosmic the- 
 ism^ unless it had been shown that the ulti- 
 mate ground of being and change were an 
 infinite spirit. And this proof would be 
 wanting so long as man, the only spiritual 
 being we know, were omitted from the 
 data. Consequently, while nature does not 
 conceal God, it reveals him only as a meta- 
 
ITS LOGICAL 'CHARACTER. 63 
 
 physical unity, demanding characteristics 
 which would remain unintelligible to us 
 but for our own experience of self-conscious 
 existence. This is the humanistic, or, as 
 I should prefer to call it, in contrast with 
 the cosmic, the anthropic element in our 
 idea of God. I might indeed have de- 
 scribed it as anthropomorphic. But that 
 much-abused term, as its etymology sug- 
 gests, signified originally the ascription to 
 God of a human form. It was this belief 
 among the Greeks of the sixth century 
 before Christ that excited the irony and 
 aversion of Xenophanes of Colophon, the 
 burden of whose complaint was that mor- 
 tals believe the gods to have senses, voice, 
 and body like their own, just as oxen and 
 horses, if they could paint, would foolishly 
 represent the gods with the bodies of horses 
 and oxen. But the ascription to God of 
 moral and intellectual attributes akin to the 
 human was not branded as anthropomor- 
 phism by the ancients, nor by the moderns 
 either, until within very recent times. At 
 present, however, eminent professors of the 
 natural sciences, who have the ear of the 
 public, have effected this extension in the 
 use of the term; and anthropomorphism 
 
64 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 has degenerated into a fashionable epithet 
 of reproach for any theory which essays 
 to form even an hypothetical conception of 
 God. But the fashion of this world passeth 
 away ; and despite its present frown, I see 
 no alternative to our ascription of self- 
 consciousness to the one ultimate reality 
 whose existence science obliges us to as- 
 sume. For that reality must, to say noth- 
 ing more, be so constituted that it shall be 
 a unity in the midst of change. And this 
 condition is satisfied, so far as our knowl- 
 edge extends, only by self-conscious spirit, 
 of which we are immediately aware in our 
 own inner experience. Our hypothesis, 
 then, is a cosmic hypothesis, for its object 
 is to account for facts in the objective 
 world. It cannot, however, be completely 
 developed, without taking account of our 
 own conscious experience ; and this appeal 
 to man may be called the anthropic aspect 
 of the hypothesis. If, then, self-conscious- 
 ness is the only admissible form under 
 which the ground and essence of things 
 may be represented, our ultimate interpre- 
 tation of the universe is not merely a cos- 
 mic, but an anthropocosmic theism. 
 
 This hypothesis, let me repeat, I do not 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. ^b 
 
 attempt to establish here. That is a task 
 to be undertaken in later lectures. At 
 present I am only maintaining that the 
 postulates of science warrant and demand 
 some interpretation of ultimate reality, and 
 that anthropocosmic theism satisfies at least 
 the formal requirements of a scientific hy- 
 pothesis. To make this clear, I have inci- 
 dentally given hints of the subsequent argu- 
 ment, which is to show that our hypothesis 
 is a tenable one in view of all the facts. 
 It will not surprise me if these hints are 
 deemed inadequate. But the proof of a 
 position ought not to be expected in a pre- 
 liminary statement and vindication of it. 
 
 To some it may seem strange that I 
 dwell upon the mere possibility of a scien- 
 tific hypothesis of the existence of God. 
 But the fact is that this possibility is gen- 
 erally denied by the spokesmen of modern 
 science. Repudiating the ideas of creation 
 and design, they find no objective basis 
 for our belief in God, no facts in nature 
 requiring such an hypothesis. We have 
 endeavored, on the other hand, to show 
 that science draws its life from an assump- 
 tion regarding the nature of reality, which 
 needs only elucidation to lead scientifically 
 
Q6 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 to the hypothesis of the divine existence. 
 Such an hypothesis, therefore, would de- 
 serve the name of knowledge, though not 
 ranking among demonstrative truths. But 
 the whole spirit of modern science is to- 
 wards the extrusion of every theistic in- 
 terpretation of the world from the domain 
 of scientific knowledge. It is supposed 
 that the only vouchers for the existence 
 of God, if indeed there are any, are to be 
 found in ourselves, — in our ethical postu- 
 lates. The idea of God is not required, we 
 are told, for the interpretation of the uni- 
 verse, but only for the satisfaction of the 
 demands of our moral nature. Without it 
 there would be moral paralysis in the life 
 of man. Here you have a form of anthropic 
 theism that may be called ethical theism. It 
 is not of the nature of a scientific hypothe- 
 sis. It is a mere subjective faith, based 
 on the conviction of the moral vocation and 
 destiny of man. But this ethical theism 
 lacks the solid basis of cosmic facts. And 
 it will remain a mere postulate, without 
 scientific foundation, until the discovery 
 is made that, if we look steadily into the 
 face, or, at any rate, into the heart of the 
 universe, we can escape permanent intel- 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 67 
 
 lectual confusion only by that hypothesis 
 of a world-spirit, which I have ventured 
 to christen an thropo cosmic theism. 
 
 The moral evidence for the existence of 
 God, taken by itself, is inadequate. As 
 part of a cumulative argument, it is, no 
 doubt, of very great weight. But if no 
 God can be found in the universe, there 
 will always be a temptation to dilute mo- 
 rality to the consistency of this cosmic 
 atheism. It is easier to relax the high 
 sense of duty to expediency than to main- 
 tain it at a tension which nothing but faith 
 in God can keep from snapping. Ethical 
 theism cannot long sustain itself beside 
 cosmic atheism. It is, therefore, a matter 
 of great moment to understand how they 
 ever came to be put together. Were it 
 true that nature conceals God while man 
 reveals Him, this combination of cosmic 
 atheism and anthropic theism would not 
 surprise us. But this is not the fact, as 
 we have already shown. On the other 
 hand, a close examination of our belief 
 in God reveals characteristics which must 
 always render it an object of some suspi- 
 cion to men of science. They accept truths 
 as objective only when all subjective fac- 
 
b» BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 tors have been eliminated from them. Sci- 
 entific truth is absolutely disinterested. It 
 reports the facts of the world as they are, 
 without any concern for the hopes and fears 
 and yearnings of the scientist himself. Now 
 we are all deeply interested in the momen- 
 tous question of the existence of God. It 
 is big with our own destiny, with the mys- 
 teries of the whence, the what, and the 
 whither of every human soul. With pro- 
 tracted thinking of God, the flood-gates of 
 the heart are opened, and all the springs 
 of life are thrown into commotion. Now 
 it may be urged, and not without appear- 
 ance of reason, that an hypothesis of the 
 existence of a Being with whom our own 
 life is so commingled, cannot have the dis- 
 interestedness, the pure objectivity, which 
 the scientist demands of every cosmic hy- 
 pothesis. Is, then, anthropocosmic theism 
 after all an illegitimate hypothesis ? Does 
 our belief in God resolve itself into mere 
 vivacious feelings, as, according to Hume, 
 is the case with our belief in all existence, 
 that of self and nature as well as that of 
 God? 
 
 One thing is certain. Those objective 
 facts in explanation of which we framed 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 69 
 
 our hypothesis remain precisely what they 
 are, Avhatever be our psychological account 
 of the grounds and motives of belief. That 
 being premised, I readily admit the influ- 
 ence of wishes, desires, and feelings, espe- 
 cially hope and fear, upon human belief. 
 It is a popular saying that men believe 
 what they want to believe : " the wish is 
 father to the thought." And the mental 
 life of the race, as of every new individual 
 born into it, begins with absolute credulity. 
 But this intellectual gluttony soon pro- 
 duces dyspepsia, and many of the former 
 relishes must be abandoned. New beliefs 
 conflict with old, and stable equilibrium is 
 restored only by elimination of the less 
 favored. In this struggle for existence, 
 the beliefs that survive may first of all be 
 those that stimulate the feelings and the 
 will, but in the long run they are those 
 that accord best with the objective facts. 
 Even among the lower animals this is nec- 
 essary, for otherwise that intelligence by 
 means of which they have escaped destruc- 
 tion could not have been a guide to action. 
 And this predominance of objective beliefs 
 over subjective interests is what intellec- 
 tual education aims to effect. The man 
 
70 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 who can maintain his intellectual centre of 
 gravity in the presence of highly exciting 
 and stingingly interesting objects of belief 
 is, at least according to the standard of 
 science, the man of ideal education. 
 
 Now what I maintain is, that in the long 
 education of the human race, at least its 
 most favored members have outgrown the 
 influence of those fancies, illusions, and 
 hallucinations which distort the intellec- 
 tual vision of infancy. And though those 
 liars — hopes and fears — are still with us, 
 we know they are liars, and stand upon 
 our guard. An illusion recognized is no 
 illusion. Now the proof that intellectual 
 judgments are independent of our own 
 wishes, is the existence of that great body 
 of objective knowledge which we call the 
 sciences. To a greater or less degree, as- 
 tronomy, chemistry, biology, and all the 
 sciences originated in practical interests. 
 The history of their growth is the history 
 of the triumph of rational belief over the 
 seductions of alchemy, astrology, witch- 
 craft, and the whole horde of subjective 
 illusions. Hopes and fears are strong, but 
 stronger still in the modern man is the love 
 of truth. And so I conclude that, though 
 
ITS LOGICAL CHARACTER. 71 
 
 the hjrpothesis of the existence of God is 
 one in which we have a deep and moving 
 interest, our minds have been so trained 
 and poised by thought, that we can esti- 
 mate the evidence of this hypothesis with 
 the same disinterestedness and objectivity 
 of attitude that we bring to the examina- 
 tion of any other wide cosmic hypothesis. 
 Of course we shall need to be on the alert 
 against the influence of feelings. But that 
 is no peculiarity of the present inquiry. 
 
 The general conclusion is that anthropo- 
 cosmic theism, though not yet established 
 as absolutely satisfactory and tenable, must 
 nevertheless be admitted to be a possible 
 and even legitimate hypothesis for the in- 
 terpretation of the ultimate facts of exist- 
 ence. The next step would be to confirm 
 this hypothesis by proof, or rather to adduce 
 the grounds on which its validity may be 
 maintained. The genius of history, how- 
 ever, must not be outraged. And before 
 advancing new arguments in favor of an- 
 thropocosmic theism, I cannot forego an 
 examination of the historical phases of 
 man's belief in God, with a view to dis- 
 covering the essence of their content and 
 the goal of their development. If it should 
 
72 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 be found, as I am persuaded is the fact, that 
 the human mind begins with a vague, natu- 
 , ralistic-humanistic conception of the gods 
 (a conception whose elements are not yet 
 differentiated, much less opposed), and that 
 reflection, after developing this latent con- 
 trast in the opposite directions of naturism 
 and animism, rises everywhere with the 
 progress of civilization to a synthesis of 
 both nature and man in one eternal and 
 spiritual ground, the history of the develop- 
 ment of the religious consciousness would 
 be itself an argument in favor of that 
 hypothesis which we here seek to estab- 
 lish. That anthropocosmic theism is the 
 goal of man's growing consciousness of 
 God, — and as goal also its final cause and 
 essential content at every stage of devel- 
 opment, — must be left to the following 
 lecture to show, from a survey of the facts 
 of religious history. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF 
 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 Space is the form of the material uni- 
 verse. But all that is, physical and psychi- 
 cal alike, exists in time, and in time has 
 come to be what it now is. To understand 
 the nature of things, therefore, we must 
 see, not only the completed result, but the 
 entire succession of phases of which it is 
 the final outcome. This is the justification 
 of that historical method which has been so 
 fruitfully applied to the sciences during the 
 present century, transforming them, from 
 a miscellany of superficial observations, 
 into a progressive and systematic record 
 of the ever-unfolding drama of the world. 
 Evolutionary science is the name ordina- 
 rily given to this new historical knowledge 
 of nature. But the same method has been 
 carried into our study of man — the prov- 
 ince of history in its narrower sense. And 
 
 73 
 
74 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 we bind together all our knowledge of 
 human thinking, doing, and suffering, by 
 this modern conception of gradual develop- 
 ment. So far, indeed, has this excellent 
 method been pushed that some philoso- 
 phers have supposed themselves to be de- 
 scribing the nature of things when they 
 were only enumerating the circumstances 
 that favored the development of them. 
 And it has been widely assumed that cer- 
 tain beliefs lost their validity when once 
 the history of their origin and growth had 
 been discovered. 
 
 But the faults arising from the misin- 
 terpretation of a principle are not to be 
 charged to the principle itself. Whatever 
 erroneous inferences have been drawn by 
 this or that evolutionist, the soundness of 
 the evolutionary method remains intact. 
 That method is based on the fact that all 
 existences, all objects of thought or in- 
 quiry, are in a state of becoming. And 
 this process is- a series of changes in time. 
 The evolutionary or historical method, 
 therefore, makes science a reproduction in 
 thought of the successive phases of object- 
 ive reality. And this is absolutely neces- 
 sary for our knowledge, since the full 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 15 
 
 nature of any reality reveals itself only 
 in the totality of its development. This 
 is a point too little noticed by current evo- 
 lutionism, which exhausts itself in discov- 
 ering the changing phases of developing 
 reality with scarce an attempt to effect a 
 synthesis of their essential content. Such 
 one-sidedness is a prolific source of scepti- 
 cism, especially in morals and religion. 
 One historical variety is confronted by an- 
 other, as though both were not differentia- 
 tions of some common species. Polytheism, 
 monotheism, and pantheism are supposed 
 to cancel one another, leaving the enlight- 
 ened mind with no belief in God. For 
 the correction of such an hasty inference, it 
 needs only to be observed that two func- 
 tions are required in all knowledge, — the 
 perception of difference, and the percep- 
 tion of likeness, and that one is not more 
 indispensable than the other. However 
 valuable the discriminations of the evolu- 
 tionary historian, they yield no knowledge 
 till fused together by the complementary 
 function of assimilation. Identity in dif- 
 ference is the characteristic both of being 
 and of thought. 
 
 We may, therefore, expect to be in- 
 
76 BELIEF IK GOD. 
 
 structed by a survey of the historical vari- 
 eties of man's belief in God. But we 
 cannot be content with the mere juxtapo- 
 sition of them. We must understand their 
 connections and the principle of their 
 growth. In a word, we are in quest, not 
 of a morphological classification of man's 
 belief in God, but of a real history of its 
 growth and development. Now we are as- 
 sured by our most trustworthy historians 
 of religion, that no tribe or nation has yet 
 been met with destitute of belief in any 
 higher beings. As this aspect of religion 
 seems a universal phenomenon of humanity, 
 it might also be assumed to be as old as the 
 human race. But so far backward we cer- 
 tainly cannot follow it. Our data do not 
 carry us far beyond the millenniums of re- 
 corded history. It would be interesting to 
 know whether man had any idea of God in 
 that long prehistoric period, when a thou- 
 sand years were but as a day, during which 
 took place the distribution of mankind over 
 the earth, the formation of races, and the 
 development of speech and languages ; but 
 of this incalculable 8eon of savagery and 
 barbarism every trace has perished, and the 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 77 
 
 memorials of the later prehistoric ages are 
 confined to rude tools and weapons. 
 
 For the epoch to which they belong, 
 however, the material arts may be taken 
 as a fair index to the general culture. The 
 archseologist can read the mental status 
 of races from the character of their celts, 
 hatchets, awls, and other implements, or 
 from such arts as cooking, pottery, and 
 weaving. From this connection between 
 the material and the mental elements of 
 culture, we are able to infer with high 
 probability that the religions of mankind 
 prior to the beginning of civilization could 
 not have been higher than the religions of 
 the lowest existing savages. If such un- 
 promising germs have given birth to the 
 great religions of the world, in the out- 
 lying regions of savagery their develop- 
 ment has been arrested. Not, of course, 
 that even there the original features of 
 religion have been preserved altogether un- 
 impaired. But we may be sure the changes 
 have not been great, since the intellectual 
 condition has remained unchanged. This 
 is confirmed by the fact that higher relig- 
 ions abound in elements of the savage 
 creed, which can only be regarded as sur- 
 
78 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 vivals and revivals ; and that these ele- 
 ments are the more apparent, as they have 
 been the more influential, the farther one 
 retraces the history of religions. While, 
 therefore, primitive religion is not to be 
 identified with any existing creed, its men- 
 tal type, at least, must be looked for in the 
 polydsemonistic beliefs of savages. 
 
 This theory of the gradual development 
 of man's consciousness of God is still often 
 opposed by the dogma of a primitive reve- 
 lation. In one sense it is quite true that 
 God has revealed himself to man. For, as 
 we are all partakers of the divine life, it 
 can only be the spirit of God that gives 
 us understanding. But from this com- 
 munity of the human and divine essence 
 must be derived also all our intellectual 
 and moral capacities. A primitive revela- 
 tion of God, therefore, could only mean 
 that God had endowed man with the ca- 
 pacity of apprehending his divine original. 
 This capacity, like every other, is innate, 
 and like every other it realizes itself only 
 in the presence of appropriate conditions. 
 The infant knows nothing, but through 
 experience and reflection it is capable of 
 knowing everything. To say, therefore, 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 79 
 
 man has had a divine revelation is tanta- 
 mount to saying he is so constituted that, 
 on reaching a certain stage of development 
 and traversing a certain field of experience, 
 he must arrive at a consciousness of God. 
 And everything we know of the psychol- 
 ogy of children and of primitive races 
 favors the supposition that the first form 
 of this consciousness expressed itself in the 
 worship of natural objects conceived as 
 superhuman persons influencing human 
 destiny. 
 
 This view of revelation is perfectly com- 
 patible with that evolutionary treatment 
 of religion which is demanded by the facts 
 of archseology and history, and (it may be 
 added) of philology and mythology too. 
 But so much cannot be said for the dog- 
 matic form in which the hypothesis of a 
 primitive revelation has crystallized in the 
 popular consciousness. Here God is rep- 
 resented as making a special supernatural 
 communication of religious truth to certain 
 favored individuals. The idea of God is 
 brought to man from without, by means of 
 a miraculous revelation. As, however, this 
 pure and true idea of God is not to be found 
 among any of the varieties of early history, 
 
80 BELIEF IiV GOD. 
 
 it is conjectured that it was lost almost as 
 soon as it was gained by the fall of primi- 
 tive man from his high estate of sin- 
 lessness. This solution of the theistic 
 problem is beset by invincible difficulties. 
 I pass over the unscientific character of 
 the hypothesis and its dependence upon 
 arbitrary assumption. I shall not under- 
 take to inquire whether the narration in 
 the book of Genesis, which is supposed to 
 contain the primitive revelation, makes any 
 such claim; and whether, even if it does. 
 Biblical criticism has not refuted its preten- 
 sion by showing that the record is no history 
 of the actual beginning of things, but only 
 a reproduction of current traditions regard- 
 ing that beginning. I confine myself to a 
 single issue, namely, the psychological 
 possibility of such a primitive revelation ; 
 and I hold it is quite inconceivable. The 
 theory arose when men knew little of an- 
 tiquity, when the golden age of mankind 
 was still believed to lie at the beginning. 
 There was no more scruple about assigning 
 elevated ideas to primitive man than there 
 was in accepting the belief of his inter- 
 course with the Creator. But modern 
 discoveries have changed all that. We 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 81 
 
 now know that our earliest ancestors lived 
 a life of cruel hardships, of constant strug- 
 gles, and of unimaginable savagery, gross- 
 ness, and ignorance. And the farther we 
 can follow man back through that stony 
 age, the nearer is he seen to approach the 
 condition of the animal. Now, how could 
 such an one apprehend any of the sublime 
 truths of spiritual religion, even if a teacher 
 were there to give him the instruction? 
 Learning is a process of interpreting the 
 unknown by what is already known. And 
 the knowledge of primitive man, who was 
 engaged in an absorbing struggle for life, 
 whose experience scarcely got beyond ob- 
 jects of food, shelter, and defence, whose 
 very language denoted only sensible things 
 and events, did not contain the elements 
 necessary for an assimilation of the doc- 
 trine of the existence of one infinite spirit, 
 even though one imagined it poured into 
 all the avenues of his intelligence by an 
 external revealer. No, the teacher is not 
 a pump ; the pupil is not a tub. And the 
 necessity of a human faculty of compre- 
 hension cannot be dispensed with even 
 when the Eternal Wisdom condescends to 
 instruction. The influence of mind on 
 
82 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 mind is never mechanical. There is always 
 self -active co-operation. Even 
 
 " A jest's prosperity lies in the ear 
 Of him that hears it, never in the tongue 
 Of him that makes it." 
 
 And on this principle no primitive savage, 
 no innocent Adam still merged in the life 
 of nature and of sense, could ever con- 
 struct in thought the doctrine of God as 
 one infinite spirit, even though we suppose 
 it communicated ah extra. It follows, 
 therefore, that this idea is the natural 
 product of man's own mental activities in 
 the gradual course of their development. 
 
 For an interpretation of the early re- 
 ligious history of mankind, which has first 
 been seriously studied in recent years, we 
 should look in vain to the unhistoric ra- 
 tionalism of the eighteenth century. In 
 the article on Religion in the Dictionnaire 
 JPhilosophique, Voltaire makes monotheism 
 the primitive religion, and supposes the 
 sages of antiquity were deists like himself. 
 Yet he makes a suggestion of profound 
 truth and insight when he likens the men- 
 tal attitude of man in the infancy of the 
 race to the mental attitude of our children. 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 83 
 
 Embryologists tell us that the foetus in its 
 development passes through all the stages 
 of animal existence, thus reproducing in 
 miniature the evolutionary history of the 
 species. That its mental life after birth 
 should also reflect the mental life of the 
 infancy of mankind is a corollary that 
 equally demands acceptance. But we are 
 not dependent upon a priori reasoning for 
 our knowledge of primitive modes of 
 thought. They are preserved for us by 
 savages; whose arts show them to be on 
 the same mental plane as primitive man- 
 kind; that is, the earliest men of whom 
 anything is known. Now observation of 
 savage races reveals to us characteristics 
 of thought which we find also in our chil- 
 dren. The most striking feature perhaps 
 is the unrestrained tendency to personify 
 natural objects. The lowest savage en- 
 dows everything with a life like his own, 
 though often on a larger, or even on a 
 smaller scale. For him nature is a com- 
 plex of beings, each of which is animated 
 by desires, passions, and affections. His 
 attitude towards them is that of a little 
 girl towards her dolls and toys which she 
 knows to be friendly companions, or 
 
84 BELIEF IN GOD. ^ 
 
 towards new and strange objects before 
 which she hesitates or from which she 
 starts back in alarm. A consequence of 
 this personification is the obliteration of 
 sharp distinctions between one kind and 
 another, as well as between things of the 
 same kind. Science having resolved the 
 universe into a multiplicity of kinds and 
 individuals, it is the aim of modern philos- 
 ophy to make a synthesis of them under a 
 monistic conception of all existence. But 
 primitive man, like the little child, ignores 
 our distinctions between the animate and 
 the inanimate kingdoms, between plants 
 and animals, and between man and beast. 
 The growth of knowledge has consisted in 
 a progress from the vague to the definite ; 
 and with early mankind the world was 
 as yet undefined and shadowy, a manifold 
 blur of indeterminate personalities, all akin 
 because all like himself. This crude phi- 
 losophy of nature was also the theology of 
 primitive savages. And it lives on in the 
 lower strata of civilization, where, though 
 the prevailing conception of the Godhead 
 is anthropomorphic, the list of gods is 
 drawn from all quarters of the organic 
 and inorganic world, including at once 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 85 
 
 animals and trees, sun, moon, and stars, 
 the earth, or even the stones upon its sur- 
 face. Men, animals, plants, and natural 
 objects form to the personifying imagina- 
 tion of primitive manl?:ind a unitary kin- 
 dred, any member of which might be 
 represented as a god without prejudice to 
 the others. And whether it was a personi- 
 fied tree or stone that Avas so represented, 
 it enjoyed the same rights in the matter of 
 ritual, and exercised the same influence 
 and effects upon its worshippers, as a god 
 of human or superhuman embodiment. 
 
 It will be a matter for future investiga- 
 tion, if any, to determine the accidents or 
 caprices, as we call them, that led to the 
 deification of certain objects and not of 
 others. That among many races the sun 
 or the sky should have enjoyed this pre- 
 eminence is intelligible enough, and the 
 deification of domesticated animals may 
 perhaps be explained by their familiar in- 
 tercourse with uncivilized man ; but the 
 larger number of the objects of early wor- 
 ship do not carry on their face the obvious 
 reasons of their exaltation. Some external 
 relation to the first worshippers may always 
 be conjectured. But suclif casualties can- 
 
86 BELIEF /xV GOD. 
 
 not, at present at least, be ascertained. 
 On the other hand, there are certain psy- 
 chological conditions which every object 
 of worship must fulfil ; and, failing these, 
 no natural being, even though personified, 
 could ever be transmuted into a god. First 
 of all, the worshipper must be in some way 
 dependent upon it. It must be, or seem 
 to him to be, superior to himself. When 
 stones, which were once worshipped as 
 mighty giants, came to be regarded as 
 things, worship of them ceased; for with 
 growing control of natural objects, man 
 instinctively felt they were lower than 
 himself. An object of worship must be 
 capable of arousing a sense of dependence 
 and inferiority. From the perception of 
 this fundamental relation may arise two 
 other feelings, both of which, though in 
 degrees varying to the vanishing-point, 
 must be produced by every object wor- 
 shipped as a god. One of these, according 
 to its shades, we name fear, awe, or terror; 
 and its presence in the religious sentiment 
 is the truth of the words of Statins : Pri- 
 mus in orhe deos fecit timor. But fear 
 alone would have been inadequate. And 
 we know that nature, and even the very 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 87 
 
 same natural objects, which at one time 
 terrify the savage and the chikl, at another 
 time fill them with delight. If primitive 
 man was scared to his cave by the gathering 
 clouds and the rattling thunder, he felt 
 himself strongly attracted by the kindly 
 sun, which rolled majestically across the 
 unsullied azure. Or, in sublunary regions, 
 the rock over which he one day stumbles 
 becomes at another time the hiding-place 
 from which he takes his prey. If he then 
 dreaded it as a superior evil being, he now 
 delights in it as helpful and beneficent. 
 Thus of necessity his gods are objects both 
 of his terror and of his confidence, either 
 separately, or, as e^^erience widened, of 
 both together. Nor is there any incom- 
 patibility in this union of fear and love 
 of the same object. For when terrible 
 phenomena do not actually harm us, we 
 delight in their presence, as tragedy cer- 
 tainly demonstrates. Accordingly fear or 
 awe will not prevent man's yearning for 
 communion or fellowship with those supe- 
 rior beings towards which joy, admiration, 
 or affection attracts him. And in this com- 
 munion with the powers that govern his 
 destiny, we have another characteristic of 
 
88 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 the earliest as of the latest faith in God. 
 An actual proof of the solidarity of the 
 life of gods and men is found in the insti- 
 tution of sacrifice, which shallow rational- 
 ism has treated as a bribe offered by selfish 
 worshippers to selfish gods, but which his- 
 torical investigations prove to have been 
 a common meal of man and gods, the 
 expression and the seal of a community of 
 feeling, purpose, and existence. And just 
 in so far as this relationship of the deity 
 to his worshippers is vividly realized, do 
 nature religions take on an ethical char- 
 acter. The superhuman kinsman invests 
 with religious sanctions the social customs 
 and institutions of the kindred group of 
 worshippers. 
 
 Still it is probable that the earliest re- 
 ligions were neither directly moral nor 
 immoral, — they were simply non-moral; 
 and the sentiment of dependence upon the 
 gods and communion with them presup- 
 poses a considerable evolution of intelli- 
 gence. So that there is nothing unlikely 
 in the assumption that the palseontological 
 races either had no religion, or apprehended 
 only in dim, fugitive outline the elements 
 out of which religion was afterwards to 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT, 89 
 
 grow. But when men did arrive at a sta- 
 ble consciousness of the gods, we cannot 
 but hold, from what we know of the facts 
 of religious history and the operations of 
 undeveloped intelligence as seen in chil- 
 dren and savages, that these gods were per- 
 sonifications of natural objects, conceived 
 as superior to men, and to some extent, at 
 least, as arbiters of their destiny. 
 
 From this probable, though inferential, 
 primary consciousness of the Godhead, all 
 other phases of the belief may be accounted 
 for in a fairly satisfactory manner. Evo- 
 lution is a progress from the indefinite and 
 homogeneous to the definite and hetero- 
 geneous. But in the historical world, as 
 Darwin showed in the organic, progressive 
 evolution is often accompanied by retro- 
 gression or backward development. And 
 it ought not to surprise us if, while the 
 history of the religious consciousness ex- 
 hibits in general a successive unfolding of 
 richer and purer forms, a different move- 
 ment is observable among those sections of 
 mankind which have never felt the vitaliz- 
 ing breath of civilization. For the causes 
 of civilization are also the causes of relig- 
 ious development. They are to be sought 
 
90 BELIEF IN GOB. 
 
 partly perhaps in the genius of races and 
 of individuals, but mainly, I suspect, in a 
 larger knowledge of nature with the con- 
 sequent development of all the intellectual 
 faculties, and in a richer experience of 
 social and political events and institutions, 
 which has the effect of subduing random 
 impulses and self-seeking appetencies as 
 well as quickening the activity and enlarg- 
 ing the range of conscience and affection. 
 When knowledge, morality, and social 
 order grow, man's idea of the Godhead 
 expands in the same proportion. Where 
 they are stationary, it may change, but it 
 cannot advance. Primitive religion, there- 
 fore, will undergo two fundamental sorts 
 of variation : one progressive, in the direc- 
 tion of a higher and fuller content; the 
 other, non-progressive or, in very unfavor- 
 able circumstances, even retrogressive ; that 
 is, farther removed from actual reality. 
 The first gives us the religions of historic 
 races ; the second, those of savages and the 
 lowest barbarians. 
 
 The religion of these rude peoples may 
 be described as an unorganized polydsemon- 
 ism. It consists in the belief in the exis- 
 tence of an indefinite and motley tlii^ong 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 91 
 
 of spirits who may be controlled by magic, 
 which only rarely rises to the attitude of 
 worship. It is often designated animism 
 oifetichism; but the terms are used some- 
 what vaguely. This religion is considered 
 by the English school of evolutionists to 
 represent man's earliest consciousness of 
 the Godhead. But it almost certainly de- 
 mands more reflection and abstraction than 
 primitive intelligence was capable of. For 
 it implies a clear distinction between soul 
 and body, and the peopling of nature with 
 independent spirits. And this is much 
 less naif and simple than the concrete per- 
 sonification of natural objects. From this 
 primordial belief it can be readily derived, 
 but the sequence of connection cannot be 
 reversed. The savage who has arrived 
 at the power of reflecting cannot but be 
 struck with the strange phenomena of 
 dreams, trances, and death. We explain 
 dreams by the distinction between objec- 
 tive events and subjective illusions. But 
 early thought knows no such distinction. 
 The savage who dreams he has gone to a 
 distant country and met strange inhabi- 
 tants can only explain the fact by assum- 
 ing that, since his body has lain all the 
 
92 BELIEF m GOD. 
 
 time at home, his soul can go out on jour- 
 neys of its own and bring back reports of 
 what it sees and encounters. In a swoon 
 there seems to be the same temporary ab- 
 sence of the soul. At death, the spirit 
 quits the body forever, but it continues to 
 live a phantom life of its own, and in this 
 form often visits the survivors in dreams 
 and visions. What we call illusions and 
 hallucinations the barbaric psychologist 
 treats as direct perceptions of spirits. 
 These subtle essences he names after the 
 breath which is felt to be the life or soul of 
 man ; and even developed languages like 
 the Aryan and Semitic still retain the traces 
 of this early theory of ghosts. But of 
 course not only men, but also horses and 
 dogs, and not only animals, but things, in a 
 word, all objects of organic and inorganic 
 nature, have souls which come and go 
 like the souls of men. Naturally, there- 
 fore, adoration of spirits supplants the wor- 
 ship of concrete natural objects. And of 
 spirits the*" manes of departed ancestors 
 occupy a foremost place. They are sup- 
 posed to keep up their interest in the liv- 
 ing, who consult them, share with them 
 secrets, and even provide them with food 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 93 
 
 — a custom of which a survival may still 
 be seen on the festival of All Souls, at the 
 cemetery of Pere-Lachaise. 
 
 Ancestor-worship has been, and still is, 
 one of the great faiths of the world. And 
 it has always in its first stages made for 
 morality ; since the ancestor who cared for 
 his children while alive would punish vio- 
 lations of established customs now he had 
 become a god. In early times the bond of 
 blood was the sole basis of rights and ob- 
 ligations. Accordingly, when a deity was 
 conceived as a blood relation of a group of 
 kinsmen, he brought to their social order 
 and morality the superhuman sanctions of 
 religion. But while the worship of the 
 dead keeps up the old-fashioned virtues of 
 the tribe, it prevents all moral progress; 
 and by clinging to the ethical ideals of a 
 society that has passed away, it may in 
 time become positively injurious. Yet it 
 must not be forgotten that the conception 
 of the brotherhood of mankind, which is 
 the greatest moment of progress in the his- 
 tory of morality, rests upon the earlier 
 fact of the fraternal relationship which 
 actually existed between all members of 
 the kindred clan ; and that the sentiment 
 
94 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 of humanity has still much of warmth and 
 zeal to borrow from all the sweet charities 
 of parent, child, and brother. 
 
 But the manes of ancestors are not the 
 only higher spirits which animistic relig- 
 ions exalt above the commonalty of souls. 
 As these rule over the life of man, so 
 among the nature-spirits there are great 
 gods who rule the universe. The highest 
 natural deity is apt to be the heaven-god, 
 or the soul of the sky. But in savage 
 religions this supreme being would seem 
 to have little advantage in the innumer- 
 able throng of nature-spirits, among whom 
 there is no such ground of preference as 
 ancestry afforded in the case of the souls 
 of the dead. Indeed, the lowlier spirits 
 might be the more attractive because they 
 seemed more manageable. And there was 
 no limit to the multiplication of deities, 
 now that they were not dependent for their 
 being upon objective reality. At any rate, 
 observation of savages, African, Polyne- 
 sian, and American, shows us that animis- 
 tic religions produced an indeterminate 
 chaos of atomistic divinities, whose limited 
 powers and mutable destinies put their 
 worshippers upon the idea of bringing them 
 
OBIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 95 
 
 into subjection to human caprice. Hence 
 the origin of magic, which plays so large 
 a part in polydsemonistic religions. Fi- 
 nally, as a spirit might be domiciled, forci- 
 bly or fortuitously, in any portable object, 
 which thereafter served (like an idol) to 
 symbolize or represent it, we see at once 
 the close connection between animism and 
 fetich-worship. Fetichism is in fact the 
 lowest form of animism, having much the 
 same relation to it as adoration of images 
 to worship of the invisible gods. 
 
 The demons or spirits of barbarous relig- 
 ions tended to fade away into airy noth- 
 ings, the sport of man's superior power 
 and caprice, because they had lost that 
 local habitation and definite character 
 which a fixed connection with natural 
 objects gave them in earlier thought. But 
 even with a separation of nature-spirits 
 from the sphere of their material embodi- 
 ment, another course of development was 
 also open. If savages dissipated them into 
 empty phantoms, races which had reached 
 the lower stages of civilization invested 
 them with the moral and spiritual poten- 
 cies of that life which the worshippers had 
 begun to feel and lead. It is written that 
 
96 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 " God created man in his own image " ; 
 but it is no less true, and necessarily true, 
 that human thought has always created 
 God in the image of man. But it makes 
 all the difference in the world to theology 
 what is regarded as the essence of the 
 human exemplar. Hegel and the Hotten- 
 tot alike proclaim the affinity of man and 
 the Godhead; but to one the essence of 
 man is rational spirit, to the other some 
 vague, invisible ether. And the animistic 
 divinities, in their fickle and insubstantial 
 character, reflect the low, capricious, and 
 irrational life of savage tribes, which lacks 
 that stablishing and exalting that comes 
 only from consecration to the high ideal 
 ends of civilization. On the other hand, 
 where favored clans amalgamated and cre- 
 ated political institutions, so that higher 
 morals and better manners became inevita- 
 ble, where knowledge grew, and men had 
 a freer outlook upon the universe, the 
 throngs of personified objects were gener- 
 alized into great spirits of nature, which, 
 though ruling the world, were nevertheless 
 brought into close moral relation with 
 mankind. It is of these quasi-personal 
 nature-spirits that imagination, with its 
 
OBIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 97 
 
 eye on the corresponding natural phenom- 
 ena, weaves the complex and highly origi- 
 nal tissues of mythology. The events of 
 nature are co-ordinated into the parts and 
 scenes of a drama, enacted by these manlike 
 spirits or powers of nature. Such mythol- 
 ogies are found in China, India, Persia, 
 Nineveh, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Italy, 
 Germany, and, in the new world, in Mexico 
 and Peru. They represent the gods as 
 relatively independent of their natural 
 elements. So far they agree with animism. 
 But two essential differences are to be 
 noted. First, the detachment from nature 
 is never complete (Zeus, for example, al- 
 ways remains the heaven-god) ; for the 
 myths and stories of the gods and heroes 
 manifestly grow out of the personification 
 and dramatization of natural phenomena. 
 And, secondly, there associates itself to the 
 naturalistic aspect of the god an analogous 
 spiritual function which has reference to 
 some of the ideal ends, moral, intellectual, 
 or political, to which incipient civilization 
 has already devoted itself. It matters not, 
 therefore, whether these mythological re- 
 ligions of early civilization be designated 
 polytheism or only advanced polydsemo* 
 
98 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 nism, they indicate a real progress in the 
 development of the religious consciousness 
 of mankind. The progress, however, is not 
 to be measured by the richness or grace of 
 mythologies (which certainly reflect the 
 imagination of their makers), but by the 
 nature of all those ends, moral and spirit- 
 ual, in the realization of which the worship- 
 ping races have recognized their supreme 
 historical mission, and in relation to which, 
 therefore, they could not but fashion the 
 character of the gods who presided over 
 their destiny. 
 
 For proof and illustration of this position 
 let us look for a little while at the concep- 
 tions of the Godhead reached respectively in 
 the religions of the Indo-Germanic and the 
 Semitic races. These great races are the 
 bearers of civilization. To the first belong 
 the Indians, the Persians, the Letto-Slavs, 
 the Germans, the Greeks, the Romans, 
 and the Kelts. The latter includes the 
 Arabs, the Hebrews, the Phoenicians, the 
 Aramseans, the Babylonians, and the As- 
 syrians. The mere collocation of these 
 great historic names is enough to remind 
 you that I can attempt only the slightest 
 sketch of the development of their ideas of 
 the Godhead. 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 99 
 
 As comparative philology has proved 
 that all the Indo-Germanic races once pos- 
 sessed the same language, so more recently 
 has the identity of their original religion 
 been established by comparative mythol- 
 ogy. This religion bears the clearest im- 
 press of its naturalistic origin. And sub- 
 lime, as in the main it is, it has not 
 altogether escaped the deteriorating ten- 
 dency to animism. Still there can be no 
 doubt that it derived its god from celestial 
 phenomena. They are the "shining ones." 
 Chief among them was the heaven-father, 
 the Zeus and Jupiter of the Greeks and 
 Romans, who was, however, partially sup- 
 planted in Indian worship, and altogether 
 transformed in character by the Germans. 
 Of the Indian development of this old 
 Aryan religion, we have a picture in the 
 Vedas. What characterizes Vedic religion 
 is the moralization of the original powers 
 of the sky. The heaven-god, Varuna, who 
 created and upholds all things, is the sus- 
 tainer, not only of the order of the uni- 
 verse, but of moral law in the life of man. 
 He punishes iniquities, transgressions, and 
 sins ; but to the humble and contrite he is 
 gracious and forgiving. The heavenly 
 
100 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 brightness of the god's material embodi- 
 ment is the objective side of his inner 
 wisdom and purity of character. And 
 this feature of the Vedic consciousness of 
 the Godhead is the natural result of an 
 infusion of the old Aryan light-gods with 
 the spiritual ends to which Indian culture 
 had already devoted itself. The evolution 
 is clearer in the case of Yaruna than in 
 the case of Indra, the storm-god, or Agni, 
 the fire-god, or Aditya, the sun-god. Yet, 
 according to the hymns, Indra was to be 
 approached in faith. And Agni was the 
 typical heavenly priest, the mediator be- 
 tween gods and men, ruler and helper of 
 the sacrifice. In this pantheon Varuna 
 seems in himself to be the highest god; 
 but the deity actually worshipped is, for 
 the time being, regarded as chief, to whom 
 all the rest are subject. This monarchy in 
 a democracy, ephemeral as is the monarch's 
 reign, appears to betoken an endeavor of 
 the human spirit to rise from multiplicity 
 to unity in its conception of the deity. 
 
 The Vedic religion was followed by 
 Brahminism, a system of caste and sacer- 
 dotalism. It made little change in the 
 theology of the people. But it gave birth 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 101 
 
 to schools of philosophy, whose esoteric 
 doctrines overcame the polytheism of the 
 masses by identifying the world with the 
 divinity, or making him its creator, or even 
 by denying altogether its objective reality. 
 In this uncontrolled tide of profound 
 but fruitless speculation, we find side by 
 side the types and elements of much later 
 thought: the hylozoism and pantheism of 
 the Greeks, Christian theism, the mysti- 
 cism of Bohme, the acosmism of Spinoza, 
 the ethical atheism of Fichte, and the ab- 
 solute idealism of Hegel. Of these forms 
 of monistic speculation, the best known, 
 though probably not the earliest, is that 
 which makes Brahma the world-germ, the 
 womb of all existence. But this impersonal 
 being is himself, without form or attributes, 
 a mere indeterminate unity. And those 
 who have reached the " higher knowledge " 
 see that this seemingly real world he has 
 produced is nothing but an illusion, a phan- 
 tasmagoria (Maja). Alongside of this or- 
 thodox theology of the Brahmins we find 
 the heretical system of Sankhya. It denies 
 the unity of the world-soul ; and substitutes 
 for it a plurality of individual souls and 
 matter. But the outcome is not unlike 
 
102 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 that of the Vedanta doctrine of Brahma. 
 For the soul does nothing ; it only knows. 
 And the world is an illusion, the ground of 
 which lies in primordial matter. The prac- 
 tical result, therefore, of the two schools, 
 as of all Brahminic speculation, was the 
 self -alienation of the spirit from nature. 
 But in this divorce from the real object of 
 his knowledge, nothing was left for man 
 but mystic introspection, absorption in him- 
 self, which was also regarded as union with 
 God. In speculative repudiation of the 
 things of sense, in monastic renunciation 
 of the world, in mystic fusion of the self 
 with the eternal Brahma, who neither acts 
 nor suffers, lay the chief end and the re- 
 demption of man. 
 
 But this deliverance could only be for 
 the elect. Buddhism, which followed the 
 philosophy of the Brahmins, was a simple 
 gospel of universal redemption. It was 
 the first national religion to become inter- 
 national or universal : a position which has 
 since been attained only by Christianity and 
 Mohammedanism, Like these. Buddhism 
 is steeped with the personality of its 
 founder. His relation to Brahminism, 
 from which came his contemplative ascet- 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 103 
 
 icism, is much the same as that of Jesus to 
 Judaism. It would be too much, however, 
 to say that the Brahmins were as the scribes 
 and Pharisees. Yet Buddha rejects their 
 entire system of tradition, legalism, wor- 
 ship, and penance. But whereas Jesus 
 proclaims that God is spirit and father, 
 Buddha relegates the doctrine of the God- 
 head to those metaphysical speculations 
 which make not for pious conversation, 
 nor unworldliness, nor the destruction of 
 desire, nor ceasing, nor rest, nor knowl- 
 edge, nor Nirvana. His is a religion 
 without God. It is an ethical evangel 
 to all the suffering sons of humanity. 
 Buddha has read the world-secret of the 
 necessity of pain, and offers a way of re- 
 demption. Change is the law of the uni- 
 verse. As soon as an act of will relieves 
 man from the pain of one desire, another 
 has taken its place, so that endless pain is 
 the consequence of volition. The will, 
 therefore, must be extinguished. And its 
 extinction is brought about by insight into 
 that law of change which makes all desire 
 for happiness self-defeating. This is the 
 redemption offered by Buddhism, as it is 
 the essence of Schopenhauer's pessimism. 
 
104 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 Nirvana is nothing more nor less than that 
 quiescent state of consciousness in which 
 desire has been extinguished and the will 
 is at rest. It was not so much this doc- 
 trine, however, as the gracious personality 
 of the man who first realized it, that made 
 Buddhism one of the world's great creeds. 
 Not, in fact, until it had really become a 
 religion by the strange irony of making its 
 founder a god, did Buddhism move the 
 heart and subdue the intellect of oriental 
 nations. But it could not become the 
 faith of the more progressive branches of 
 the Aryan family. It negated their strug- 
 gles for advancement by systematically 
 turning away from the world. When its 
 first mighty wave of universal compassion 
 had spent itself. Buddhism settled down 
 to resignation, to quietism, to indiiference, 
 to the despairing scepticism that comes 
 from the absence of a positive ideal of life. 
 Though sharing with Christianity a com- 
 mon point of departure in the idea and 
 felt need of redemption, it lacks the Chris- 
 tian conception of the kingdom of God in 
 which the yearnings of the spirit find com- 
 plete satisfaction, and that, too, through the 
 fulness of a life which is the very opposite 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 105 
 
 of the Buddhist panacea, — self-annihila- 
 tion. 
 
 When Buddha had been deified, and his 
 appearance on earth explained as one of a 
 series of incarnations, Brahminism regained 
 its hold upon the masses, which had been 
 greatly relaxed through its conflict with 
 Buddhism, by finding gods adapted to the 
 popular consciousness in the two surviving 
 elemental deities, Vishnu and Siva. These 
 the Brahmins set by the side of their own 
 god Brahma. And the philosophical de- 
 mand for unity was met by treating all 
 three as manifestations of the one primor- 
 dial god, Brahma. And not only the doc- 
 trine of the Trinity, but the doctrine of the 
 God-man, was also familiar to later Brah- 
 minism. The avatars of Vishnu, whose 
 presence in an individual made that indi- 
 vidual very god while still leaving him 
 very man, were numerous and various. 
 But the most important was Vishnu's in- 
 carnation in Krishna. And Krishna be- 
 came in Brahminism the rival of the deified 
 founder in Buddhism, a divine saviour, an 
 incarnation (though but one of many) of 
 the highest godhead. 
 
 If among the Indians the old Aryan the- 
 
106 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ology developed into a mystic and dream- 
 ing metaphysic with an ascetic ethic, among 
 their cousins, the Iranians, who dwelt be- 
 tween mountains and deserts in a somewhat 
 harsh climate, there Avere preserved, along 
 with the ancient hardihood and valor, the 
 simplicity of earlier thought and the prac- 
 ticalness of earlier morality. The Iranian 
 religion, which in later centuries became 
 the state religion of Persia, is known as 
 Mazdeism or Parseeism, and was ascribed 
 to the reformation of Zoroaster. To the 
 Brahminist doctrine of the illusoriness of 
 the world and the motionless indifference 
 of the one real existence, Mazdeism opposed 
 the conception of a universal world-struggle 
 in which the ever-living and active god- 
 head was engaged in overcoming those 
 limitations to his absoluteness, which, as 
 a matter of fact, seem actually existent and 
 operative. Virtue, therefore, could not be 
 placed in quietism and renunciation of the 
 world, but only in action and struggle, and 
 the victory over the world which they en- 
 sure. 
 
 Mazdeism inclines both to polytheism 
 and monotheism. It exalted far above the 
 pantheon of lower divinities Ahura-mazda, 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. lOT 
 
 the all-wise .lord or spirit. The name 
 Aliura indicates a connection with Asura, 
 the heaven-god of the Hindoos. Ahura is 
 glorified as the creator of the world, and 
 the source of truth, light, and purity. The 
 doctrine of his sublime supremacy was, it 
 is probable, the chief element in the preach- 
 ing of Zoroaster. But with the survival 
 of old Aryan nature-gods, the doctrine was 
 liable to corruption. And in fact not only 
 these, but new personifications also, some 
 of them quite ideal, were grouped about or 
 under the supreme Ahura. First came the 
 circle of the " sacred immortals," consisting 
 of Ahura and six spirits, who seem to be 
 personifications of abstract ideas (such, for 
 example, as purity, wisdom, immortality), 
 though in some cases a sensuous reference 
 is also discernible. Beyond these was the 
 lower and larger circle of the "worshipful" 
 spirits. They consisted partly of old Aryan 
 light-gods, and partly of fresh creations out 
 of abstract notions. Of the latter sort was 
 the personification of prayer as a divine 
 logos or creative word. Last in the de- 
 scending scale of good spirits came the 
 " genii," the souls of the dead and the im- 
 mortal part of the living. They prove that 
 
108 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 Mazdeism had not altogether outgrown the 
 animism of ruder peoples. 
 
 The same influence, combined with the 
 opposition between light and darkness, may 
 help us to understand the dualism of this 
 religion. For while it teaches adoration 
 only of Ahura and the good spirits who do 
 his pleasure, it recognizes the existence of 
 a kingdom of evil spirits, subject to Ahri- 
 man, the " striker " or " attacker," who is 
 the opponent of Ahura, and the source of 
 all the evil, sin, and imperfection in the 
 world. The good spirits dwell in heaven 
 above, the evil spirits in the lower regions. 
 And this world, which lies between the 
 two, is, as in the cosmography of Paradise 
 Lost, the scene of their conflict. The war- 
 fare rages everywhere, and in everything. 
 It was Ahriman who brought death into 
 the world, and seduced the first pair to 
 sin. With his deviltries he compasses man 
 about on every side. And though Maz- 
 deism knows nothing of a fall among the 
 angels, Ahriman in all other respects may 
 be compared with Milton's Satan. It was 
 only in late times he rose to the rank of 
 Ahura himself. Originally he was a subor- 
 dinate power, and his sole function was to 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 109 
 
 thwart, obstruct, and pervert the good and 
 wise ends of the great creator and ruler 
 of the world. Man seeks protection against 
 him in worship. At death the good walk 
 across the bridge to heaven, while the 
 wicked, finding it too narrow, tumble into 
 the depths of hell, where demons torment 
 them till the fire of the great judgment 
 burns up Ahriman and all the evil in ex- 
 istence. From the flames rise a new heaven 
 and a new earth, refined and purified by the 
 consuming fire. Over this transfigured 
 universe, in which the dead shall have 
 been resuscitated (sinners being purged 
 and quickened to a new life), Ahura- 
 Mazda, in the presence of a glorified and 
 redeemed humanity, is to reign forevermore 
 in undisputed supremacy. But this con- 
 summation will not come for three thou- 
 sand years, and then only at the hand of a 
 saviour who is to be conceived of the holy 
 spirit of Zoroaster, and born of a virgin 
 mother. 
 
 The germs of the dualism of the Persians 
 and of the polytheism of the Hindoos are 
 to be found in the theology of the Wends 
 or Letto-Slavs, which is, however, the low- 
 est of all the Indo-Germanic religions. Its 
 
110 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 nature-gods have not yet been moralized. 
 Its doctrine of spirits is scarcely above the 
 level of the animism of savages, if we dis- 
 regard its more poetic expression. When 
 it was supplanted by Christianity, it was 
 still at a stage of development greatly infe- 
 rior to that attained by the oldest Vedic 
 religion. 
 
 It seems to be due rather to a difference 
 of race than of civilization that religion 
 attained a higher development among the 
 Germans than among the Slavs. The supe- 
 riority attaches, however, only to their con- 
 ception of the gods : their doctrine of the 
 soul and immortality, as well as their rude 
 cultus, being obviously a continuation of 
 animism. Germanic theology resembles 
 Persian. While the Letto-Slavs, in com- 
 mon with all the Aryan nations, conceived 
 of a dual conflict between the powers of 
 nature, the Persians and Germans alone 
 gave to the physical occurrence an ethical 
 interpretation. The terrible forces of the 
 natural world, which were at first pictured 
 as giants devoid of moral character, devel- 
 oped in course of time into evil beings, 
 who stood opposed to the good deities. 
 These last, of whom Odin and Thor were 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. Ill 
 
 the chief, were also personified powers of 
 nature; but they were nature-gods who 
 had been humanized and moralized. In 
 the conflict with the giants, the good dei- 
 ties are victorious till the death of Balder. 
 Afterwards the monsters of wickedness 
 break forth in uncontrolled fury, and over- 
 whelm all the ordinances and appointments 
 of the world. This is the " twilight of the 
 gods." They struggle against this general 
 dissolution of the elements, but in the end 
 they perish with their assailants. Then 
 comes the final act of this great world- 
 drama, — a general resurrection, renova- 
 tion, and purification, after which man 
 lives a life of unalloyed happiness, and the 
 supremacy of the highest god continues 
 undisputed. 
 
 It was not on Oriental or Germanic, but 
 on Hellenic soil, that the spirit of the Aryan 
 race produced its richest mythology and its 
 highest religion. This superior develop- 
 ment is doubtless due to that unique com- 
 plex of circumstances which enabled the 
 Greeks, if not absolutely to create, at least 
 to invest with full life and perfect form, 
 the main branches of human culture, — art, 
 science, literature, and philosoDhy^ — and 
 
112 BELIEF IK GOD. 
 
 to infuse into conduct and the modes of 
 social intercourse a grace and decorum, a 
 freedom and dignity, which are quite as 
 characteristic of the Hellenic spirit as 
 its intellectual and aesthetic achievements. 
 The genius of this remarkable people com- 
 bined in a wonderful degree the most 
 prominent and even opposite characteris- 
 tics of human nature. They were at once 
 practical and speculative, lovers of beauty 
 and lovers of truth, healthfully realistic, 
 yet passionately devoted to the ideal, appre- 
 ciative of the individual, yet bent on seeing 
 the individual in relation to the whole. 
 No doubt, too, their bright air and sky, as 
 well as the wonderfully varied features of 
 their country, have left an impress upon 
 their religion. But much greater was the 
 influence of free intercourse among them- 
 selves and with their foreign neighbors, — 
 an intercourse pre-determined and facili- 
 tated by their location on the islands and 
 coasts which, like an irregular bridge, con- 
 nect Europe and Asia. Who can estimate 
 the beneficent results of intercourse between 
 man and man ? To take only one example, 
 it may be said to have moralized the race. 
 Within historic times we can see, in con- 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 113 
 
 sequence of intercourse, the narrow mo- 
 rality of the tribe expanding to the broad 
 code of a multitribal nation ; and in recent 
 centuries the same agency has been making 
 national morality international and human- 
 itarian. Naturally enough, then, it has 
 been regarded as a law of the history of 
 religions that the richness and elevation 
 of their context are proportional to racial 
 and inter-racial intercourse. 
 
 Of this law Greek religion is a striking 
 example. In the Pelasgic period its gods 
 were still nature-powers, and its worship, 
 to some extent, fetichistic. Yet through 
 assimilation and fusion of foreign ideas, 
 many of them Semitic, the Greeks formed, 
 in very early times, a circle of divinities 
 and heroes, ennobled by all that is best, 
 highest, and most divine in man. Our 
 earliest picture of this pantheon is con- 
 tained in the Homeric poems. The gods 
 appear as superhuman beings, Avho share 
 with man intelligence and moral freedom, 
 but not less appetites, passions, and all the 
 weaknesses flesh is heir to. But a deeper 
 view reveals a distinction between the 
 gods of poetic mythology and the supreme 
 rulers of the world. For, however human 
 
114 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 in their failings the individual gods show 
 themselves, they stand forth in their total- 
 ity as the inviolable upholders of moral or- 
 der, the sublime judges and avengers of the 
 acts of men. And this twofold aspect is 
 especially observable in Zeus, who compre- 
 hends in his own potent will the will of 
 the Olympian council, of which he is the 
 chief. Like the Christian pope, Zeus is 
 conceived in the Homeric poems to be fal- 
 lible as an individual, but infallible as head 
 of the sacred convocation. And the anal- 
 ogy happily illustrates his relation to the 
 other gods, who are scarcely more than 
 representatives and executives of the su- 
 preme ruler of gods and men. Yet this 
 divine monarchy is not to be identified with 
 monotheism. For, though the Greek be- 
 lieved in a single government of the world, 
 and was persuaded that a stern justice pre- 
 sided over the affairs of men, he found no 
 difficulty in the supposition that it was 
 administered by a plurality of gods. There 
 was a unity of result without a unity of 
 personal agency. Here we touch a striking 
 difference between Greek and Jewish the- 
 ology. When Plutarch blamed the Jews 
 for not making the Deity benevolent and 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 115 
 
 friendly to man, he showed a right sense of 
 the importance of goodness in man's con- 
 ception of the divine character, but he 
 betrayed utter indifference to the sublime 
 Judaic thought of the unity of God. It 
 must be added, however, that the greatest 
 dangers to Greek religion came rather from 
 anthropomorphism than from polytheism. 
 It was no easy thing to worship in spirit 
 and in truth gods whom tradition, poetry, 
 and statuary had invested Avith definite 
 human forms. 
 
 The post-Homeric development of popu- 
 lar theology in Greece consisted mainly of 
 a purification and deepening of the ethical 
 character of the Homeric divinities. Its 
 most significant phase was the exaltation 
 of Apollo, originally a light-god, to the 
 rank of divine author of all moral, intellec- 
 tual, and religious illumination and purifi- 
 cation. He became the embodiment of the 
 ideal ends of life, — of the true, the beauti- 
 ful, and the good. Of the clarifying and 
 ennobling influence of his worship we may 
 form an idea from the lofty and fervid 
 odes of Pindar. Yet Apollo is not su- 
 preme god ; he is son of Zeus, and media- 
 tor and saviour of men. Of Zeus himself 
 
116 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 Pindar's conception is practically monothe- 
 istic. But ^schylus reproduces the Ho- 
 meric thought of a fate to which even 
 Zeus himself is subject. And he illustrates 
 both the older view of the implacable jus- 
 tice of the god, who visited the iniquities 
 of the fathers upon the children even to 
 the third and fourth generation, and the 
 serene piety of the age of Pericles, which 
 mitigated the wrath of heaven and trans- 
 formed the envy and jealousy of the gods 
 into love, tenderness, and forgiving mercy. 
 The best exponent, however, of this highest 
 stage of Greek religion is Sophocles. He, 
 too, is full of reverence for Zeus. But the 
 divine government, instead of being an 
 object of fear and awe, is interpreted in 
 a spirit of cheerful piety, trustful resigna- 
 tion, and heartfelt and simple devotion. 
 It is already seen that God is love, and 
 that, as in the (Edipus Coloneus, there is 
 reconciliation for even the chief of sinners. 
 This ethical monotheism of the choicest 
 spirits of the Greeks was in all probability 
 above the reach of the multitude. Yet it 
 necessarily influenced their thinking, even 
 though an unapproachable ideal. The 
 same is true of the metaphysical panthe- 
 
ORWrn AND DEVELOPMENT. 117 
 
 ism which dominated Greek philosophy 
 throughout its entire course of a thousand 
 years. As monotheism was the outcome 
 of the Greek conception of God as gov- 
 ernor of the workl and supporter of moral 
 order, pantheism was the doctrine in which 
 the philosophers found an ultimate prin- 
 ciple for the interpretation of the universe 
 as a whole. The Deity is regarded as the 
 soul of the cosmos, and conceived now 
 materialistically, now ideally, and again 
 in both fashions, without any conscious- 
 ness of their distinction. The theology of 
 Aristotle, indeed, is an abstract monothe- 
 ism, but the outspoken pantheism of the 
 Stoics is much truer to the spirit of Greek 
 speculation. And though we cannot here 
 trace the influence of Greek philosophy 
 upon Christian theology, one point of 
 juncture may be noted. The soul or rea- 
 son of the world, which the Stoics desig- 
 nated " Logos," became in the mediating 
 philosophy of the Jewish Philo (30 B.C.- 
 50 A.D.) the most universal intermediary 
 between God and man, nay, the first-born 
 son of God, the second God, — thus sup- 
 plying early Christianity with the Hellenic 
 formula: "In the beginning was the Lo- 
 
118 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 gos, and tlie Logos was with God, and tlie 
 Logos was God." 
 
 It now remains to describe briefly the 
 character of Semitic religions, of which 
 Christianity was the noble fruitage. In 
 former times the differences between Se- 
 mitic and Aryan religions were supposed 
 to be original and fundamental. But more 
 recent investigations, conducted in the 
 light of a fuller knowledge of primitive 
 thought and culture, make it highly prob- 
 able that the two races began on lines 
 which were scarcely distinguishable. Yet 
 from a very early period two differences 
 — one psychological, the other historical — 
 must have tended to produce divergency 
 of development. As between the demands 
 of the heart and the head the Semites were 
 disposed to satisfy the former, the Aryans 
 the latter ; as soon, that is to say, as cul- 
 ture had advanced far enough to bring out 
 the consciousness of their antithesis. And 
 even, unconsciously, the Aryan eye was 
 turned outward, the Semitic inward; the 
 one seeing nature-gods rather than free 
 spirits, the other inclining in the oppo- 
 site direction to animism. Hence every 
 Semitic clan had its deity, who was the 
 
ORIGIN- AND DmrELOP-MENT. 119 
 
 counterpart, not of the forces and aspects 
 of nature, but of the longings and wants 
 of the worshippers. Such was the inti- 
 mate and exclusive relation .between Bel 
 and the Babylonians, Baal and the Canaan- 
 ites, Chemosh and the Moabites, Dagon 
 and the Philistines, and, in €arly times, 
 Jehovah and the Hebrews. Of course this 
 distinction is not to \>q carried so far as 
 to exclude all objective or cosmic features 
 from Semitic theology. On the contrary, 
 star-worship is a characteristic of it. Yet 
 it remains true that, as the Semites have 
 never distinguished themselves in objective 
 science, so their theology is prevailingly 
 subjective. Their adoration of the supra- 
 mundane powers expresses their sense of 
 the exalted character of the divinity, and 
 of man's absolute dependence upon him. 
 This feature of Semitic religion — its rec- 
 ognition of a celestial Lord over nature, 
 before whom man is very dust — is proba- 
 bly due to the historical circumstance that 
 the Semites, unlike so many branches of 
 the Aryan family, never attained to politi- 
 cal freedom, and could therefore only con- 
 ceive of the divine government after the 
 analogy of the despot's relation to his 
 
120 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 enslaved subjects. In this conjunction of 
 religion with a despotic monarchy may 
 also be found an explanation of the sup- 
 posed innate tendency of the Semites to 
 monotheism. This certainly it is which 
 makes the Hebrews appear monotheists 
 prior to the Babylonian captivity. 
 
 Among the Semites, as elsewhere, mono- 
 theism is the gradual achievement of the 
 human spirit. The ancient religion of the 
 Arabs was a mixture of nature-worship, 
 animism, and fetichism. And these ele- 
 ments lived on even after Mohammed, 
 transplanting to Arabian soil the kernel of 
 Judaism, founded Islam with the formula : 
 " There is no God but God, and Moham- 
 med is his prophet." Indeed, Islam has 
 become a universal religion only by the 
 admission of extraneous beliefs and prac- 
 tices which are more akin to animism 
 than to monotheism; namely, the adoration 
 of the saints and the worship of Moham- 
 med himself as divine mediator with Allah. 
 In the case of the Northern Semites the re- 
 ligious development was at an early period 
 much more rapid. This was due to inter- 
 course with non-Semitic peoples. Thus 
 the inscriptions show the Babylonio-Assyr- 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 121 
 
 ian pantheon to have been derived from 
 the theology of the Akkadians, a people 
 who in very remote times occupied Meso- 
 potamia, where they originated astronomy 
 and invented the cuneiform writing. Even 
 among the Semites in Syria, Canaan, and 
 Phoenicia, the purely Semitic ideas are ob- 
 scured by foreign deposits. The gods fell 
 into two classes, male and female ; and the 
 generic names by which they were denoted 
 — Baal and Ashtoreth — must have come 
 from Chaldea. It was at any rate a licen- 
 tious religion, as was inevitable from the 
 sexual analogy on which its theology was 
 based. But so little is yet definitively es- 
 tablished regarding the evolution of the 
 religious spirit of the Semites among these 
 branches of the race that no apology is 
 needed for turning to the Hebrews. 
 
 The Hebrews, like other Semitic clans, 
 had their tribal god, who helped them 
 against their enemies, gave oracles for the 
 guidance of their national affairs, and de- 
 livered judgments in cases too difficult for 
 human decision. As the Ammonite had 
 Milcom and the Moabite Chemosh, so 
 Israel had his Jehovah. It was through 
 hard fighting that the Canaanite was di'iven 
 
122 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 out of the promised land. Jehovah, there- 
 fore, was primarily a god of war. The 
 very name Israel means "God fighteth"; 
 and this defender of his people is desig- 
 nated the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. 
 After their settlement in Canaan and their 
 adoption, at the hands of the conquered, of 
 an agricultural life, the Israelites naturally 
 imitated, in their service of Jehovah, the 
 luxurious festivals which the Canaanites 
 held in honor of Baal. And in fact the 
 two gods were almost identified by the 
 masses. Even the most devout worship- 
 pers claimed only a supremacy for Jehovah. 
 But the religion of Israel was saved from 
 extinction by numerous wars, which, as 
 they intensified national feeling, revived 
 the faith in which it centred and out of 
 which it sprang, Jehovah was the bond 
 of national unity among the Israelites. He 
 had delivered them from bondage; and 
 with the priceless boon of freedom, he had 
 given them, in the Ten Words, a law of 
 social righteousness. They had a national 
 destiny and a national god. In peace and 
 prosperity they might yield to the sensuous 
 attractions of the Canaanite worship. But 
 in battle they felt themselves again the 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 123 
 
 host of Jehovah. And by the close of the 
 period of the Judges, Canaan had become 
 the land of the God of Israel, so that the 
 people had no strong motive to worship 
 Baal. But the supremacy of Jehovah was 
 all that Samuel, Saul, David, and Solomon 
 maintained ; and even the Baal denounced 
 b}^ Elijah stood for a political alliance to 
 which the people were opposed. But in 
 the eighth century B.C. the prophets began 
 to insist upon the worship of Jehovah 
 alone. They had arrived at the concep- 
 tion of an absolute difference between 
 Jehovah and the gods of the nations. 
 These were seen to be the reflex of the 
 worshippers, without any fixed character 
 or steady will of their own. But as the 
 prophets pondered over the dealings of 
 Jehovah with His people, they perceived 
 in Him a will higher and steadier than the 
 human, leading them on towards the real- 
 ization of a purpose which their own minds 
 had never formed. Thus Jehovah approved 
 himself a being of moral character and holy 
 will, who was bent on making Israel a peo- 
 ple of righteousness. Hence arose Hebrew 
 monotheism, which as yet relnained na- 
 tional. That is to say, it had its ground 
 
124 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 in the organization and historic achieve- 
 ment of the nation. The prophet Amos, 
 indeed, rose to a larger conception of God 
 as the ruler of the destinies of all nations. 
 But Israel could realize the thought of 
 universal monotheism only through the 
 collapse of its own nationality and its long 
 exile in Babylon. As the Jewish mind 
 then came under the influence of Babylo- 
 nian and Persian thought, so in later cen- 
 turies it was open to the philosophy of the 
 Greeks, and from this blending of Aryan 
 and Semitic elements came in due time 
 that universal religion which has been the 
 soul of European and American civiliza- 
 tion. It may be hard to define what the 
 Christian religion is. But the religion of 
 Christ consisted in a vivid consciousness 
 that Jehovah, whom Jeremiah and the 
 second Isaiah described as gracious and 
 forgiving to his people Israel, was the uni- 
 versal Father, a God of love to every son 
 of man. Otherwise expressed, the new 
 religion taught that God was spirit, nay, 
 the spirit in all spirits, and that in con- 
 formity with this nature and relation His 
 attitude to man was one of unbroken and 
 unlimited love. 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 125 
 
 On its anthropic side the conception of 
 the Godhead is here completely and defin- 
 itively formulated. The Father-Spirit must 
 take the place hereafter of natural or quasi- 
 natural powers in man's consciousness of 
 God. Instead of hostile divinities, of whom 
 even the Greeks retained a memory, namely, 
 their belief in the envy of the gods, we see 
 a divine heart of infinite love. Though 
 those great ideas were soon obscured by 
 the emergence of the older doctrines and 
 the rise of new dogmas, they were at least 
 actually born, and not only born, but real- 
 ized and incorporated in the life and teach- 
 ings of the divinest of all the sons of men. 
 They could, therefore, never utterly perish. 
 And in something like their pristine purity 
 they seem to be breaking afresh on the re- 
 flective consciousness of the modem world, 
 which many centuries of education have 
 enabled to spell out the meaning of that 
 of which religious genius has immediate 
 feeling and apprehension. 
 
 But no age or person can do the entire 
 thinking of later generations. And as re- 
 gards this higher consciousness of God, our 
 problem is to make it cosmic as well as 
 anthropic. For it originated, let us remem- 
 
126 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ber, among' a people who had no science of 
 nature, for whom nature had no interest in 
 comparison \vith the events and ends of 
 human life and history. On the other 
 hand, the Aryan conception of God was 
 rooted and fixed in the powers and aspects 
 of the natural world. They were human- 
 ized and moralized, but their objective at- 
 tachments were never completely loosened. 
 Hence, in its highest reach among the 
 Greeks, the Aryan spirit, while postulat- 
 ing an ethical monotheism, still cleaved to 
 the pantheism which was the necessary 
 development of its philosophy of nature. 
 Between such a metaphysic and natural 
 science, of which the Greeks were also the 
 originators, there seems to be a close, if not 
 necessary, connection. The union was pro- 
 claimed indissoluble by Giordano Bruno, 
 the martyr of modern science. And as he 
 spoke under the inspiration of the new Co- 
 pernican astronomy, so under the influence 
 of recent physics and of Darwinian biology 
 Professor Tyndall spoke to the same effect 
 in his now famous Belfast address. I do 
 not hide, therefore, the conviction that the 
 problem of the modern theist consists in 
 the union of the Aryan and Semitic modes 
 
ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT. 127 
 
 of interpreting existence. We must have 
 a synthesis of the Father of all spirits with 
 the groutid of all nature. In other words, 
 we shall be satisfied with nothing less than 
 anthropocosmic theism. 
 
 The evidence for this hypothesis must 
 be considered in the lectures that follow. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 BELIEF IN GOD AS CAUSE OE GEOUND OF 
 THE WOELD. 
 
 It is now sixty years since Carlyle w rote 
 his Characteristics. In that famous essay 
 on the evils of reflection he maintained 
 this thesis: Unconsciousness belongs to 
 pure, unmixed life ; consciousness to a dis- 
 eased mixture and conflict of life and 
 death; the one is synthetic and creative, 
 the other analytic and destructive. To 
 Carlyle his own generation (which was of 
 course like every other) seemed the most 
 intensely self-conscious that ever had ex- 
 isted. He complained that all its relations 
 to the universe, to man, to God, had be- 
 come a matter of inquiry and of doubt. 
 Everything had to be anatomically probed 
 into and studied ; nothing would go on of 
 its own accord and do its function quietly. 
 Alas ! alas ! " had Adam remained in Para- 
 128 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 129 
 
 dise, there had been no anatomy and no 
 metaphysics." 
 
 Certainly if knowledge was the conse- 
 quence of the fall, as scepticism is the 
 fruit of knowledge, Adam's continuance 
 in Paradise would have dispensed us from 
 the obligation to find proofs for the exist- 
 ence of God. A man needs proof only of 
 that which has become doubtful to him. 
 Hence, even in the world as we find it, the 
 overwhelming majority of mankind have 
 not the slightest personal interest in a dem- 
 onstration of the divine existence. Like 
 innocent Adam they have not eaten of the 
 tree of knowledge, they have not suffered 
 from its sour fruit. Extremes meet ; and as 
 to the simple peasant so also to the poet ra- 
 tional theology is a matter of little mo- 
 ment. He sees the divine idea of the 
 world, he feels the divine presence in his 
 heart; and with the experience of these 
 immediate intuitions and emotions, why 
 should he heed or need the slow-built argu- 
 ments of the intellect? 
 
 They that be whole need not a physi- 
 cian, but they that be sick. Were all man- 
 kind unreflecting Adams or victoriously 
 creative Goethes, we should indeed need 
 
130 BELIEF 12^ GOD. 
 
 no philosophy of religion. But it is be- 
 tween this upper and nether altitude that 
 modern education leaves her votaries. For 
 us the fever of doubt is actually burning ; 
 and philosophy is the means to allay it. 
 Our belief in the existence of God is not 
 fresh and whole as when we absorbed it 
 with our mothers' milk. A larger knowl- 
 edge and experience has dislocated our 
 faith. And we want to know of philoso- 
 phy, whether in the march of mind a place 
 can still be found for the ancient belief in 
 God. The idea of the divine being still 
 haunts us, and the heart yearns for its ac- 
 ceptance by the intellect ; but as thought 
 produced the discord so only thought, free 
 and dispassionate, can restore the harmony. 
 Can then our faith be vindicated at the 
 bar of reason? Are there proofs, valid 
 proofs, of the existence of God ? 
 
 Before answering this question, I must 
 point out that we have here to do neither 
 with a new belief nor with altogether new 
 grounds to support it. A being in whom 
 the consciousness of God were altogether 
 wanting could not be expected to acquire 
 it from our argumentation. No descrip- 
 tion of color can communicate an idea of 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 131 
 
 it to the blind. The human faculties and 
 their normal operations must be assumed. 
 And these have brought man in the coui'se 
 of human history to a consciousness of God. 
 No doubt different conceptions of the God- 
 head have prevailed among different peo- 
 ples. But the drift and issue of the re- 
 ligious consciousness, as it unfolds itself 
 in the course of civilization, are clear and 
 unmistakable. Accordingly, the grounds 
 and motives which led man to form and 
 mould the conception of God must still 
 be the basis of our proofs for the validity 
 of the conception. There is a spirit in 
 man, and the way of the spirit is the 
 method of the philosopher. He aims to 
 bring into the full blaze of consciousness 
 the darkling, unsuspected considerations 
 that shaped the thinking of the race. It 
 would be a mistake, however, to regard 
 the philosopher as a mere photographer of 
 spiritual processes invisible to the rest of 
 mankind. He is also a chemist whose 
 crucible is reflective thought. And in it 
 he tests the elements which have hitherto 
 passed as independent and indissoluble con- 
 stituents of human belief. It may very 
 well happen, therefore, that a theory which 
 
132 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 was stable enough for earlier thought will 
 fail to produce conviction in us. Only 
 since reason is everywhere one and the 
 same, the philosopher must recognize in 
 that primitive theory a relative truth. And 
 in dealing with the grounds of belief in 
 God, it is especially important that we 
 should distinguish the formulas, more or 
 less imperfect, in which they have been 
 expressed, from the essential substance and 
 content which philosophy reflecting upon 
 them sees to have been already involved in 
 the religious consciousness of the rudest 
 thinkers though they themselves were un- 
 aware of it. 
 
 Im Anfang war die That. This profound 
 saying of Goethe's means in the present 
 case that the act and fact of man's appre- 
 hension of God preceded his meditating 
 afterthought of it. And this situation of 
 affairs deserves more consideration than it 
 generally receives. That the human spirit 
 is, as a matter of fact, in possession of the 
 idea of God is an argument for the exist- 
 ence of God unless it can be shown that 
 certain ideas, though uniformly produced, 
 are insubstantial pageants of the phantasy. 
 It is no reply to say that all men once 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 133 
 
 believed in the motion of the sun round 
 the earth. Science does reveal to us modes 
 of behavior of things, of which our ances- 
 tors unskilled in experiment and artificial 
 observation could have no suspicion. And 
 the scientific interpretation of the fuller 
 body of facts naturally differs from the 
 prescientific interpretation of the narrow 
 field of unassisted perception. But exist- 
 ence itself as distinguished from its modes 
 of behavior is unapproachable by science. 
 And if we cast out our belief in God be- 
 cause it is prescientific, the same logic will 
 forbid us to believe in the existence of a 
 self or of an objective world. Real exist- 
 ence we cannot prove ; we cannot even con- 
 struct it in thought. Our belief in it be- 
 longs to the nature of intelligence itself. 
 We cannot imagine a consciousness stripped 
 of this primary constituent without ceasing 
 to be a consciousness. Science may change 
 our views of what reality does, but not our 
 intuition that reality is. Now human in- 
 telligence has recognized two dependent 
 realities and one independent reality. It 
 knows the soul as unitary substratum of 
 all mental phenomena, the world as the 
 complex of all natural phenomena, and 
 
134 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 God as the absolute ground and source of 
 both the soul and the world. The thorough 
 agnostic repudiates all three realities and 
 breaks with common sense. He is con- 
 sistent, but for us impossible. Generally, 
 however, the divine existence is denied 
 while that of the world at least is as- 
 sumed. In such a case we demand to 
 know why intelligence is allowed to make 
 a synthesis of a part of its experience into 
 an objective world and forbidden to make 
 a synthesis of the residue into a soul, and 
 of both soul and world into one absolute 
 ground or God. Until this discrimination 
 can be justified in some other way than by 
 an indiscriminate denunciation of " theol- 
 ogy" or an undiscerning appeal to that 
 obsolete rationalism which forms so large 
 a part of the philosophy of Kant, I see no 
 way of escaping the conclusion that man's 
 consciousness of God, as ultimate principle 
 of all reality, is at least strong presumptive 
 evidence of the real existence of God. 
 
 But there can be no doubt that this evi- 
 dence generally fails to produce conviction, 
 whether because it escapes observation or 
 is really insufficient in itself. The sceptic 
 has an idea of God, but he is without be- 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WOULD. 135 
 
 lief in the objective counterpart. It falls 
 to reflective thought, therefore, to discover 
 other grounds of conviction. And these 
 constitute what are called par excellence 
 the arguments for the existence of God. 
 These arguments stand related to the tri- 
 partite division of the human soul. As 
 man is active, rational, and moral, so the 
 causality, design, and goodness exhibited 
 throughout all existence are judged to be 
 the expression of a divine will, intelli- 
 gence, and moral nature. The existence 
 of this being is demonstrated by showing 
 that the world in its origin and orderly 
 constitution and man as a moral agent are 
 explicable only if we postulate an eternal 
 first cause, a wise designer, and a moral 
 governor. The grounds, therefore, for be- 
 lief in the existence of God are at once 
 cosmic and anthropic. The last yields 
 what is known as the moral argument. 
 The first, which contains the two concep- 
 tions of the causation and the rationality 
 of the universe, yields respectively the so- 
 called cosmological and teleological argu- 
 ments for the existence of God. 
 
 Such, in outline, is the argumentation to 
 which we now address ourselves. It seems 
 
136 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 scarcely credible that in proofs which have 
 satisfied reason, in the person of so many 
 distinguished thinkers, we shall not find 
 essential truth. It would be false mod- 
 esty, or something worse, however, did I 
 not express m}^ conviction that the one 
 vital truth which underlies all these argu- 
 ments receives but a very imperfect ex- 
 pression in any of them. Nor can it be 
 attained by a mere synthesis of their com- 
 plementary phases. There is needed a 
 higher standpoint, — a more spiritual view 
 of God, a more dynamic view of the world, 
 and a more organic view of their connec- 
 tion with one another, and of both with 
 man. It is, however, by traversing and 
 transcending the successive stages of the 
 old theistic argument that thought most 
 naturally, if not inevitably, ascends to the 
 all-surveying altitude of anthropocosmic 
 theism. And I see no better way of estab- 
 lishing that theory than by developing it 
 in relation to others, whose truth it must 
 absorb, whose limitations it must avoid. 
 As oldest, simplest, most concrete and pic- 
 torial, I begin with the cosmological argu- 
 ment for the existence of God. 
 
 This argument originates in a condition 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 137 
 
 of mind in which observation (internal, as 
 well as external) and reflection, both of 
 which are presupposed to a considerable 
 degree in the teleological and moral argu- 
 ments, are at the very lowest stages of de- 
 velopment. Who made it? is a question 
 that can properly be asked only where a 
 maker and a material apart from the maker 
 are both upon the scene. This is the case 
 with man, whose entire external activity 
 is directed upon the transformation of ma- 
 terial masses or elements into new shapes 
 or combinations. Thus, the savage makes 
 tools and weapons of pieces of stone, and 
 the civilized man constructs machinery and 
 apparatus of wood, iron, and steel. Now, 
 although God, simply because there is noth- 
 ing outside him, cannot be a mechanism, it 
 is natural for the sensuous, pictorial thought 
 of unreflecting humanity so to conceive him. 
 This naif anthropomorphism, overlooking 
 the absence of the condition absolutely 
 necessary for such an analogy between the 
 divine and the human activity, represents 
 God as standing in the same relation to the 
 world as man to the machine his hands have 
 fashioned. This picturesque theology takes 
 on surprisingly delightful forms in the 
 
138 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 minds of children. And the infantile races 
 all tell their legends of the divine creation 
 of the world. That is a graphic myth 
 which represents God as living primevally 
 in a mussel, whose two shells, when forced 
 apart, became heaven and earth, while the 
 waters are the streams of perspiration that 
 flowed from the struggling creator. Greek 
 cosmogony pictures the formation of the 
 world from an original chaos. In all these, 
 as in the Chaldean legend, the world and 
 the gods grow up together ; cosmogony is, 
 at the same time, theogony. But in the 
 more advanced Hebrew thought of the 
 first chapter of Genesis, which seems to be 
 dependent upon the Chaldean account of 
 creation for its idea of a primeval chaos of 
 water and darkness, the spirit of God is 
 conceived as pre-existent and independent 
 of the chaotic mass, which he separates 
 and moulds by the mere fiat of his will. 
 No one can fail to recognize in this sub- 
 lime story a notion of the Godhead infi- 
 nitely higher than in the theogonic myths 
 of earlier and more naturalistic thinking. 
 And beneath all its graceful touches of Ori- 
 ental fancy, which the unimaginative Oc- 
 cident has too long taken for the prose of 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 139 
 
 an abstract system, lies in noble outline 
 the essential truth of the dependence of 
 the sensible universe upon an infinite and 
 eternal Spirit. But the philosopher can- 
 not follow the poet in conjoining, in this 
 arbitrary, fortuitous fashion, the creative 
 spirit and the act of creation. God did 
 not first exist, and then, as though in need 
 of something else, create a world. It is of 
 the essence of spirit. to manifest or reveal 
 itself. And just because God is spirit, the 
 world is his constant expression. Creation 
 is the eternal self-revelation of God. Fur- 
 thermore, though, in the Biblical narra- 
 tive, God is represented as higher than 
 nature and independent of it, he is yet not 
 the All. Chaos is real, and apparently 
 eternal, too. This dualism could not stand 
 the examination of thought. And in op- 
 position to the Gnostic philosophizings of 
 the second century, the church put for- 
 ward the dogma of a miraculous creation 
 of the world out of nothing. This has re- 
 mained the official doctrine of Christen- 
 dom. But some of the greatest Christian 
 theologians have been unable to maintain 
 the dogma in its original purity. As 
 Thomas Aquinas confessed that it could 
 
140 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 be believed only on the authority of the 
 church, so the " angelic doctor " of our own 
 day — the venerable James Martineau — 
 in his Study of Religion^ seems to make 
 the creation of the world an eternal pro- 
 cess, conceiving it as a self-sundering of 
 the deity, in whom in some way the world 
 was always contained. That natural sci- 
 ence long ago broke with the traditional 
 view of creation needs, I suppose, scarcely 
 to be observed. 
 
 The husk of the argument from causal- 
 ity ma}^ be peeled off and thrown away, 
 but its kernel seems to me imperishable 
 truth. That soul of truth lies in the recog- 
 nition that the world, which is immediately 
 revealed to us in sense-perception, and the 
 processes of which are recorded in science, 
 has a deeper ground than this material 
 appearance, — a ground which reflective 
 analysis obliges us to hold as spiritual. If 
 the scientist is not conducted to this ulti- 
 mate source of things, it is because, in his ab- 
 sorbij^ study of the orderly sequences and 
 co-existences of events, he is under no obli- 
 gation, and finds no occasion, as in general 
 he has not the inclination, to raise the 
 ultimate question of the ground of the 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WOULD. 141 
 
 possibility of those phenomena and their 
 laws. If, on the other hand, he turns and 
 rends the theistic argument from causality, 
 it is because, in his repulsion from the 
 fanciful and arbitrary forms in which pic- 
 torial thinking has represented it, he loses 
 sight of the sole essential content of the 
 argument, the witness of the natural to 
 the spiritual. His procedure is all the 
 more excusable for the reason that the pro- 
 fessed champions of theism — not excepting 
 so thoughtful and intelligent a reasoner 
 as Professor Flint of Edinburgh — have 
 almost invariably put forward the accidents 
 of the causal argument for its essence. In- 
 sisting that nature is but the name for an 
 effect whose cause is God, in just the same 
 fashion as one natural event or existence 
 is the effect of another, they have not hesi- 
 tated to assert that the atoms into which 
 science has resolved all material things, 
 are "manufactured" articles, supernatural 
 creations of God. This attempt to picture 
 the making of reality shocks the sound 
 instincts of the scientist, without bringing 
 any satisfaction to the higher religious 
 mind. What is needed is, not a super- 
 natural creation of a non-existent world, 
 
142 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 but a natural interpretation of the world 
 we find actually given, and can never anni- 
 hilate, even in thought. What both the 
 scientific and religious consciousness de- 
 mand is a God here in the world, not there 
 outside of it or making it. 
 
 Why this argument, in spite of its more 
 abstract formulation in terms of causality, 
 should yet continue to emphasize only that 
 external relation of God to the world which 
 the innocent anthropomorphism of infan- 
 tile thought pictured as creation, may be 
 explained partly by the authority of tra- 
 dition, and partly by the presence of an 
 underlying truth, for which a more appro- 
 priate mode of expression has not yet been 
 discovered. In a certain sense, no doubt, 
 the creational dogma satisfies the yearning 
 of the intellect for an explanation of things, 
 but the explanation is so arbitrary, and 
 even so childish, that the persistence of the 
 dogma can scarcely be due to theoretical 
 considerations. But students of human 
 civilization know that of all its factors 
 none so stubbornly resist change as the 
 ideas and institutions of religion. This 
 conservatism of the religious consciousness 
 explains why the church always seems 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 143 
 
 agfainst the saviours and renovators of man- 
 kind. It explains, too, why religious be- 
 liefs survive after their grounds have been 
 completely undermined by more scientifio 
 views of nature and of man. Such beliefs 
 are apt to perpetuate themselves, apart 
 from the unconscious sway of feeling, by 
 alliance with ideas and considerations quite 
 foreign to those which gave them birth; 
 and I cannot but think that the creational 
 form of the argument from causality owes 
 its present respectability, not so much to 
 its theoretical sufficiency, as to its capacity 
 for satisfying the devotional needs of a 
 certain class of worshippers. Originally 
 a philosophy of the world, it is now a mere 
 postulate of the heart that craves a more 
 human God than it can find throbbing in 
 the pulsations of universal being. For the 
 worship of such a heart, God must be 
 sharply separated from the cold, mechan- 
 ical realm of natural law ; and this external 
 realm must yet be so subject to the divine 
 will that interference with its normal order 
 must be permissible if the prayer of faith 
 demands it. Both ends are gained by 
 making God the arbitrary creator of a 
 world which is conceived as an instituted 
 
144 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 mechanism, not as a spontaneous life. But 
 the presuppositions that require such con- 
 clusions are those of a narrow piety, how- 
 ever sincere. The error consists in forcing 
 the given facts of the universe into an 
 arbitrary scheme of our own making, which 
 is quite foreign to them. What God is 
 we can know only through the revelation 
 he has made of himself in nature and in 
 the soul of man. It is therefore manifestly 
 illogical to begin by assuming there is any 
 incompatibility between the course of the 
 world and the heart of the eternal. The 
 one must express the other, as the coun- 
 tenance is the image of the soul within. 
 If God's ways are not as our ways, nor his 
 thoughts as our thoughts, it is surely a 
 mistaken piety that continues to assert they 
 are, and refuses to study the divine char- 
 acter in the one record in which it is 
 described, — a record that is perennially 
 unfolding itself to him who has eyes to 
 look into the mysteries of the life of man 
 and of nature. These are the tokens by 
 which we shall know the ever-living, ever- 
 active God. Others there are not, howso- 
 ever we may fondly dream. To him who 
 examines these comes wisdom, and the be- 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 145 
 
 ginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. 
 In awe and reverence the new-born soul 
 discerns that the one great fact is the eter- 
 nal life of God. Man recognizes that his 
 own highest life consists in hopeful, trust- 
 ful resignation to the Infinite Spirit, with 
 whom he feels himself in union and com- 
 munion. The glow of such a faith con- 
 sumes the somewhat selfish piety which 
 thinks of God as existing mainly to guar- 
 antee satisfaction to the wishes and desires 
 of the human heart. He that loses his life 
 shall find it. In this joyous resignation to 
 the will of the Father-Spirit man will cease 
 to think of nature as a set of arrangements 
 instituted mainly with reference to man- 
 kind; and, with this practical prejudice 
 removed, theoretical reflection will be left 
 free to show that nature is the living gar- 
 ment of God, as eternal as the infinite 
 spirit of whom it is the revelation. It is 
 therefore only the lowest kind of piety 
 that needs for its support that dogma of 
 creation which thought can never accept. 
 It is the piety that would construct the 
 world according to its preconceived ideas. 
 Substitute for it the higher piety, which 
 accepts in faith, hope, and love the given 
 
146 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 facts of the universe, as the eternal expres- 
 sion of the mind of God, and the heart will 
 have no motive for suggesting an obsolete 
 interpretation of the essential content of 
 the argument from causality. But heart 
 and mind, according well, will now recog- 
 nize that the underlying truth of the dogma 
 of creation is the eternal dependence of 
 the world upon God. 
 
 I have dwelt on this point at some length 
 beCau'se I am convinced it is not so much 
 the theoretical grounds (which are yet to be 
 examined), but the supposed needs of the 
 pious heart, that lend support to the dogma 
 of creation, and put philosophical theists 
 upon the track of defending it by an ap- 
 peal to the law of causality. Those well- 
 meant efforts, it will be seen presently, end 
 in failure. But let me here point out that 
 the insistence upon the dogma of creation 
 as essential to belief in God, has given ag- 
 nostics an opportunity, which they have 
 not missed, of undermining all theology. 
 Who taught Mr. Herbert Spencer that " ul- 
 timate religious ideas " all arise out of and 
 converge upon the question of the origin 
 of the world? Those theists, I should an- 
 swer, who, instead of seeking God here 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 147 
 
 and now as ultimate principle of the uni- 
 verse, both in its own being and in our 
 knowledge of it, refuse to see him at all, 
 if not as an external creator in long past 
 ages. Taking the problem, as those theists 
 have formulated it, Mr. Spencer easily 
 shows it to be insoluble. His reasoning, 
 indeed, is not new. It consists in showing 
 that even if we grant the assumptions of 
 the creationist, his theory cannot be real- 
 ized in thought : it is a mere name or sym- 
 bol of a process wholly unintelligible to 
 us, because outside of the circle of our 
 experience. And, secondly, it would not 
 in the least help us to understand the ori- 
 gin of the material of which the universe 
 consists. No simile can make intelligible 
 to us the creation of matter out of nothing, 
 which is the real mystery. Then, lastly, 
 it might be asked, How came there to be 
 an external agency? But without dwell- 
 ing upon this last point, Ave have enough 
 left to warrant the rejection of the crea- 
 tionist's dogma. And Mr. Spencer rejects 
 it. In my opinion, a great gain might 
 thereby have enured to theology, had not its 
 defenders identified with this suppositious 
 creation the fact of the existence of God. 
 
148 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 But as tlie case stood, Mr. Spencer was en- 
 titled to say : " If it is from the creation 
 of the world you argue to a First Cause, I 
 declare God unknowable, since creation is 
 absolutely inconceivable." But Mr. Spen- 
 cer was not entitled to go farther. As 
 originator of the world at some point of 
 time, God is certainly inconceivable. But 
 as eternal ground of all existence, God" is 
 not only conceivable, but necessary to the 
 thought that goes far enough in its analysis 
 of given reality. How short a journey Mr. 
 Spencer made in this direction is evidenced 
 by his naif designation of the doctrine of 
 the eternal existence of the world as the 
 atheistic theory, and his declaration that 
 self-existence is rigorously inconceivable. 
 The fact is, he has been taught by the 
 theist there is no God who does not begin 
 things ; and since he finds no evidence of 
 such absolute origination, which is also in- 
 conceivable, he draws the all too hasty con- 
 clusion that the power which the universe 
 manifests to us is utterly inscrutable. Thus 
 agnosticism becomes the theoretical result 
 of that practical postulate of the pious heart 
 which demands that God shall have cre- 
 ated the world in order that he may control 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 149 
 
 it with some reference to the needs of man- 
 kind. The dogma that, on a certain plane 
 of reflection, reconciles head and heart in 
 religion, on a higher plane proves incon- 
 ceivable to the one and unrefreshing to the 
 other. 
 
 I have failed in my purpose if it is not 
 now clear to you that, logically considered, 
 there is no connection between the ques- 
 tion of the existence of God and the sup- 
 posed creation of the world in time. Or, 
 to speak more precisely, as we do not know 
 that the world had a beginning in time, and 
 see no evidence to suppose it had, while the 
 very thought is beset with inner contradic- 
 tions, it is impossible to base on such a 
 supposition our belief in the existence of 
 God. This conclusion, however, you may 
 hesitate to accept until a fuller hearing has 
 been given to those who, denying our doc- 
 trine of the eternal existence of the world, 
 hold that it originated in time, and is, 
 therefore, an effect which must have been 
 produced by an adequate cause — a cause 
 that there is other warrant for identifying 
 with God. 
 
 To these defenders of theism I readily 
 concede all that is demanded by the most 
 
150 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 favorable interpretation of the principle of 
 causality. Whatever has begun to be, 
 whether a thing or an event, must have a 
 cause or antecedent which accounts for it. 
 So much may be admitted as self-evident. 
 And its self-evidence, let us grant, is not 
 affected by Hume's irrefragable demonstra- 
 tion that we can give no reason for the 
 necessity which always attaches to our 
 thought of the relation between cause and 
 effect. For everything that has come to 
 be, there is a cause of its coming to be. If, 
 then, it can be shown that the universe had 
 a commencement, it may be maintained 
 with absolute certainty that there existed 
 a cause adequate to this great event. On 
 the other hand, the causal principle has no 
 application unless it can be proved that the 
 world had a beginning. If it be an eternal 
 existence, thought does not demand any- 
 thing further. Accordingly, it will be ad- 
 mitted by every candid mind that the 
 argument for the divine existence which 
 is based on the principle of causality can 
 be no stronger than the proof that the 
 world actually had an origin in time. 
 
 How, now, is the absolute beginning of 
 the universe to be established? That the 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD, 151 
 
 individual objects we perceive have all 
 come into existence, nobody will be dis- 
 posed to call in question. They are com- 
 pounded of divers elements which came 
 together in the lapse of time. There was 
 a period when the strata of the earth's 
 crust had no existence, when the earth 
 itself was not, and the living things that 
 creep upon it, when sun, moon, and stars 
 were a blank, and all our world one vast 
 abyss of impalpable ether. But when facts 
 like these are cited to prove that the uni- 
 verse is an effect, the one important cir- 
 cumstance is overlooked, that if at any 
 given moment the universe is an effect, its 
 cause is found in the state of the universe 
 at the preceding moment. We find no such 
 thing as an absolute beginning. Alike in 
 our examination of particular objects and 
 of the entire solar system, what we find is, 
 that reality abides, while its phases vary. 
 The confusion between relative and abso- 
 lute beginning, which is unavoidable for 
 immature thought, but which the Hellenic 
 mind had overcome in the first stage of its 
 philosophy, ought not to have been offered 
 as the foundation of theism to a generation 
 that had just made the great discovery of 
 
152 BELIEF m GOD. 
 
 the law of the conservation of energy and 
 the indestructibility of substance. To the 
 modern scientist, as to the ancient Greek 
 cosmologist, the universe is eternal, but 
 subject eternally to evolutions and disso- 
 lutions. As a whole, it is not an effect of 
 anything outside itself. And if you cannot 
 find God in the world as its substance and 
 very self, you certainly cannot make him 
 first cause of whai you have so far failed 
 to prove an event in time. 
 
 But at this point the argument from 
 causality takes a new turn. It admits for 
 the nonce, at any rate, that there is some- 
 thing eternal in the physical universe ; and, 
 having identified this eternal element with 
 dead atoms, it challenges them alone to 
 produce the world we know. The chal- 
 lenge is unanswerable. Matter and motion 
 are in the world ; but they are its mechan- 
 ism, not its essence. The atomistic theory 
 furnishes a useful net to catch the world 
 in for the purpose of expressing its rela- 
 tions by mathematico-physical formulse. 
 But of course it abstracts from everything 
 in the world save extended atoms moving 
 in a void. And these no more constitute 
 the universe than a skeleton constitutes 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 153 
 
 the living organism that once built it up 
 for the development of its own life. When 
 the atomistic framework of thought is rep- 
 resented as the formative principle of the 
 cosmos, the abstract thinker has simply 
 become the slave of his own abstractions. 
 Of course the germ of the universe must 
 have been pregnant with all tliat the uni- 
 verse has since become. There, too, lay 
 order, unity, life, thought. But this per- 
 fectly just conclusion makes against that 
 separation of nature and spirit, of which 
 our theist was guilty when he admitted, at 
 least for the sake of argument, the exist- 
 ence of eternal and immutable atoms of 
 matter. Material atoms, he argues, even 
 if eternal, could not produce our world. 
 Ordering intelligence is necessary. But 
 the law of parsimony forbids the assump- 
 tion of two ultimate causes if one is suffi- 
 cient. Matter alone is not sufficient. But 
 mind which originates the universe, when 
 matter is given, could presumably have 
 created its materials as well as control 
 them. Therefore, a Supreme Intelligence 
 is the cause of the universe. The argument 
 which began with conceding the eternity 
 
154 BELIEF' IIT GOD. 
 
 of matter ends with an assurance of the 
 eternity of spirit alone. 
 
 But neither has this intellectual somer- 
 sault made good the position, without 
 which the argument from causality is of 
 none effect. It has not yet been shown 
 that the universe actually had a beginning 
 in time. The one-sided abstraction of ma- 
 terialism has been brushed away by an 
 equally one-sided abstract spiritualism. 
 Matter is a mere symbolic conception. 
 What we actually know is a complex of 
 material things, arranged and organized 
 as nature. Go back as far as science and 
 imagination can carry you, and this exter- 
 nal sphere, however changed in aspect, re- 
 mains still a cosmos. To posit, therefore, 
 the eternity of a chaos of atoms is a sheer 
 absurdity. You can reach it only by an- 
 nihilating in thought this orderly reality 
 that is given to us. You pulverize the 
 body of nature, and then find the dust 
 inadequate to produce the universe. You 
 next call in the aid of Intelligence. But 
 being unwilling to accept two ultimate prin- 
 ciples, you ask us to believe that spirit once 
 existed without embodiment, and sometime 
 afterwards manufactured nature. Mean- 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 155 
 
 time we have waited patiently for the 
 indispensable proof that nature, both the 
 inner spirit and the outer material expres- 
 sion, was not an eternal existence. The 
 refutation of materialism, far from touch- 
 ing this question, only showed that the 
 universe, whether created or uncreated, is 
 the scene of intelligence, as well as of 
 mobile and extended atoms. That one of 
 these was prior to the other has as little 
 meaning as that two intersecting lines are 
 prior to the angle they enclose. We can 
 in thought attend either to the intersecting 
 lines or to the enclosed angle ; but in reality 
 there never can be an angle without inter- 
 secting lines, nor intersecting lines without 
 an angle. Similarly the universe we knoAV, 
 and therefore the only universe we can talk 
 about, embraces not only moving particles 
 but a plan of their arrangement, and not 
 only a material cosmos but organic life and 
 self-conscious thought. In this case, it is 
 true, natural history assures us there was 
 a time when the earth held no living or 
 thinking beings. But since they have act- 
 ually appeared, it is certain there never was 
 a time when nature had not the capacity 
 of producing them. And instead of regard- 
 
156 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ing nature before their emergence as a chaos 
 of atoms, we are bound to interpret it as a 
 developing cosmos, which contains in itself 
 the promise and potency of all terrestrial 
 life and intelligence. To ask if the atoms 
 took counsel together and formed the world, 
 is an absurd question, for it supposes atoms 
 existing apart from intelligence. But atoms 
 are merely the hypothetical elements of that 
 material vesture in which spirit has eter- 
 nally expressed itself. Spirit is the eternal 
 reality, and nature its eternal manifesta- 
 tion. The vice of the argument for the 
 origination of the world in time is, that it 
 mistakes the relation between intelligence 
 and its expression for an opposition of 
 entities, of which one has to be shown 
 prior to the other. In truth, nature is the 
 externalization of spirit, and no more sep- 
 arable from it than the spoken word from 
 the thought it symbolizes. 
 
 I think it will now be conceded that 
 the argument from causality, through fail- 
 ure to prove that the universe began in 
 time, cannot demonstrate the existence of 
 a First Cause outside the universe. And 
 this conclusion is independent of Kant's 
 dictum that the causal relation holds good 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 15T 
 
 only of phenomena within the universe, 
 not of the universe itself and something 
 beyond. I will not object to your apply- 
 ing the causal relation to the universe as 
 a whole, provided you can show that, like 
 any other effect, it has come into existence 
 at some moment of time. But this co7i- 
 ditio sine qua non it is impossible to satisfy. 
 Hence I conclude that the truth of the 
 argument from causality lies not in an 
 extra-mundane Cause or Maker of a cre- 
 ated world, but in an intra-mundane Cause 
 or ground of an uncreated world. Against 
 both these latter conceptions, however, 
 Kant would protest. Restricting causality 
 to sensible phenomena, and maintaining 
 we could know nothing of what lay be- 
 yond or beneath, he would pronounce the 
 conception of an " intra-mundane cause " 
 an empty illusion. I have shown, in an 
 earlier lecture, that this agnosticism is in 
 large part the outcome of a rationalism 
 which later thought has completely over- 
 come. And with the modern view of the 
 relation between sensation and thought, 
 we find it perfectly legitimate to interpret 
 sensible phenomena, which are only the 
 raw material of knowledge, in terms of 
 
158 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 their supersensuous ground. And the real 
 meaning of the argument from causality 
 is that the objects we perceive by sense 
 are not themselves ultimates, since their 
 material character of independence van- 
 ishes in the light of reflective thought ; 
 and that, standing as they do in fixed 
 relations to one another as members of a 
 single cosmos with a single system of laws, 
 they must be interpreted as moments of 
 one underlying reality, which to explain 
 all their characteristics, can only be con- 
 ceived as an infinite spirit. The conten- 
 tion that this spirit has expressed itself 
 eternally through nature will also be met 
 by the Kantian disproof of the eternity of 
 the world. But keen as is the reasoning 
 in all Kant's antinomies, which Hegel re- 
 garded as the crowning achievement of 
 the Critique., I can find no contradiction 
 in the thought that far as we recede in 
 time we never touch the initial point of 
 existence. And since what is true of the 
 area actually traversed by thought is true 
 of all that remains, we may, following the 
 reasoning of the mathematicians, conclude 
 that nowhere had the world a beginning 
 in time. On the other hand, we can see 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 159 
 
 the absurdity of annihilating at any given 
 stage of our regression the universe which 
 is given to us as real. If such legerdemain 
 is practised for the sake of winning a deity, 
 it is certainly unnecessary ; for God is ever 
 present, underneath our hands and among 
 our feet, in the actual world which is given 
 to us and which we can think of only as 
 eternal. 
 
 Our datum is the universe of reality. A 
 sound philosophy must discover God, if 
 there be a God, here and now at the heart 
 of this reality. When we think of it as 
 non-existent to make place for a creator, 
 we are only playing with an abstraction 
 that could never have been formed save 
 as an opposite to the given fact of exist- 
 ence. 
 
 It may further be remarked that our 
 views of matter have undergone a great 
 change since Locke gave to the argument 
 from creation its first classic expression in 
 modern philosophy. We still hold that 
 the invisible things of God are clearly 
 seen from the existence of the world, be- 
 ing understood by the things that appear, 
 even His eternal power and Godhead ; but 
 we can talk no longer of a making, manu- 
 
160 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 facturing, or creating of matter. Yet to 
 Locke such creation of an incogitative 
 material being seemed one and the first 
 great piece of God's workmanship; and 
 for that reason he refused to think of mat- 
 ter as co-existent with an eternal mind. 
 Now were mind mere thought and matter 
 mere passive extension, as the philosophy 
 of the seventeenth century conceived them, 
 we might hesitate to bring them together 
 in one existence. But the science of later 
 centuries has shown that we can draw no 
 clear line between cogitative and incogita- 
 tive beings (to use Locke's phrases), and 
 that this seemingly passive, inert matter 
 that forms the stuff of the world consists 
 of elements or molecules, whose essence 
 lies in activity and which can scarcely be 
 distinguished from souls. Or, in more 
 precise terms, while Locke's conception of 
 nature was that of a vast mass of dead 
 extended substance, we know it as an in- 
 finitude of activities, ranging from mole- 
 cules to souls and forming an aggregate 
 which is a cosmos, whose containing, vivi- 
 fying, and ordering principle is God. For 
 Locke, the Deity is needed only as creator 
 of the inert world. For us, He is the 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 161 
 
 universal life in which all individual ac- 
 tivities are included as moments of a single 
 organism. Of these individual activities 
 that constitute what we call the created 
 world some are higher than others, some 
 have risen to the relative independence of 
 self-conscious souls ; but none of them are 
 other than parts or functions of the eter- 
 nal life of God, who, as the Scripture says, 
 is above all and through all and in all, and 
 in whom we live and move and have our 
 being. 
 
 We have now reached a point of view 
 from which it may be seen that the relation 
 of God to the world is not happily described 
 in terms of causation. God is the imma- 
 nent ground of the universe. The universe 
 is the eternal expression of the divine will. 
 But as ordinarily understood, cause and 
 effect express a relation between finite and 
 separable things. This is too meagre a 
 category for representing the eternal con- 
 nection between the existence and the 
 external or mundane manifestation of the 
 infinite Spirit. But in a way not often 
 suspected the notion of cause and effect 
 does, as Lotze has in recent times insisted, 
 lead to this very conception of the God- 
 
162 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 head. The course of the argument must 
 now be exhibited, although its abstractness 
 demands fuller treatment than can be given 
 to it in the remainder of this lecture. 
 
 The causal relation is absolutely neces- 
 sary for our apprehension of the facts of 
 the universe. So much even Hume admits, 
 sceptical as his theory of causation is. 
 Now although science can get along with 
 abstracting from everything in this relation 
 save order in time, we fall victims to our 
 own abstractions when we suppose that 
 causation is nothing else than uniformity 
 of sequence or co-existence. This is only 
 the temporal expression of a real connection 
 between things. How there came to be 
 such a thing as causal efficiency in the 
 world we can no more explain than how 
 there came to be an actual, and not merely 
 a thinkable, world, or why, given reality, it 
 should not have been in everlasting rest 
 rather than in an eternal state of becoming. 
 But given the fact of efficient causation, 
 we may, nevertheless, ask what we mean 
 by that fact and how the universe must be 
 constituted to make it possible, mysterious 
 as in its nature the fact will still remain. 
 In a word, how can things act on one 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 163 
 
 another, as we say they do when causally 
 connected ? 
 
 This mutual influence is generally at- 
 tributed to contact in space. And in many 
 cases, if not in all, the approximation of 
 one body to another is the indispensable 
 condition of their reciprocal action. But 
 this obseryation, customary as it is, gives 
 no explanation of the real ground of all 
 physical occurrence. What inner con- 
 nection is there between contact in space 
 and the exertion of physical action? If 
 two beings were really independent of one 
 another, how could a change of position in 
 space affect their self-contained sufficiency 
 or induce them to become dependent upon 
 one another? If through a certain co- 
 existence in space (contact, for example) 
 two things originally and essentially in- 
 different to one another are forced out of 
 their indifference and compelled to have 
 respect to one another, so that the one orders 
 its states according to the states of the 
 other, then it must be supposed that this 
 co-existence is more than a co-existence 
 in space, being perhaps a metaphysical 
 co-existence of which the spatial is only a 
 symbol, and consequently that the self- 
 
164 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 sufficing independency of the two things 
 is not actual, but apparent only in and 
 through the isolating nature of space. At 
 any rate, mere spatial contact does not 
 explain why things originally indifferent 
 to one another, become susceptible of 
 mutual action or wherein action consists. 
 Equally unintelligible is the popular 
 saying that in efficient causation some 
 influence passes oyer from the cause to the 
 effect. The states of A are A's and the 
 states of B are jB's, and as the first cannot 
 leave their attachment and wander over to 
 B^ neither could B receive them if they 
 did. And were the case otherwise the 
 problem would still remain; only instead 
 of asking why A^ we should now ask why 
 a state of A should produce a change in 
 B^ which was originally self-sufficing and 
 independent of everything else. The 
 causal relation, in a Avord, cannot be 
 thought without contradiction if we con- 
 tinue to represent it as a transferrence of 
 efficacy from one independent element to 
 another. This conception of transeunt 
 action must be abandoned. And so much 
 was recognized by the authors of the 
 theories of Occasionalism and Pre-estab- 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 165 
 
 lished Harmony, whatever other defects 
 may be found in their systems. How 
 causal action is produced, how it comes 
 about that the realization of a certain con- 
 dition effaces one state and superinduces 
 another in the real world, no philosophy 
 can pretend to explain. But given this 
 indubitable fact, then it may be thinkable 
 from one point of view and unthinkable 
 from another. Now that the occurrence 
 of something should be the condition of 
 the occurrence of something else we readily 
 admit so long as both states fall within 
 the unity of a single being. But that a 
 state of one being should be the condition 
 of the state of another separate and inde- 
 pendent being is little less than contra- 
 dictory. The former operation we call 
 immanent, the latter transeunt. Mani- 
 festly then, the desideratum of thought is 
 that causality shall be construed as the 
 immanent operation of one single and real 
 being, as infinite as the universe whose 
 processes we apprehend through the notion 
 of causal efficiency. 
 
 The unity of being is involved in the 
 notion of reciprocal action between indi- 
 vidual beings. If A and B were really 
 
166 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 independent and self-subsisting unities, the 
 states of A would be quite indifferent to 
 B. But ^ and B are so far from this 
 mutual indifference that each concerns 
 itself with the states of the other and con- 
 forms its own to them. Nothing remains 
 for us, therefore, but to surrender the vul- 
 gar belief in the existence of a multiplicity 
 of independent things. There is but one 
 real being ; and of it A and B and all ex- 
 isting things must be conceived as parts, 
 moments, or functions. We perceive them 
 separately; but they are not really inde- 
 pendent and self-subsisting. The difficulty 
 in understanding the influence of A upon 
 B vanishes when the false supposition 
 which we all bring from " common sense," 
 namely, that finite things, so long as they 
 exist, have an absolute existence, is re- 
 placed by a philosophical monism that 
 treats them, not as self-subsisting essences, 
 but as manifold elements, of which the 
 existence and content (to appropriate the 
 language of Lotze) is throughout condi- 
 tioned by the nature and reality of the one 
 self-identical existence of which they are 
 organic members. In a case of reciprocal 
 action, when A becomes a, B becomes 5, 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 167 
 
 and we naively describe the occurrence as 
 tlie transeunt operation of one isolated 
 reality upon another. But when A and 
 B are recognized as modifications of the 
 one absolute being, it will be seen that the 
 change oi A to a is already a change in this 
 absolute being. And if this absolute being 
 is to maintain its identity it must set up a 
 compensating change or state 5, which ap- 
 pears to our apprehension as a change in 
 the thing B. Thus what seems to us an 
 action of A upon B is in truth only an im- 
 manent operation of the one absolute being. 
 In maintaining its own identity, it brings 
 about that appearance of connection be- 
 tween A (^a} and B (5), each of which is 
 complementary to the other, in expressing 
 the ever-abiding import of the one absolute 
 being. 
 
 Efficient causation is a fact. It cannot 
 be interpreted without contradiction as an 
 action between independent beings. The 
 assumption, which in common life we all 
 make, that there is a multiplicity of origi- 
 nally self-subsisting things, must therefore 
 be abandoned. In its place we must set 
 the postulate of one absolute being, of 
 which so-called things are merely states or 
 
168 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 modifications. In this absolute being and 
 for it, through it, and by means of it, and 
 above all for the sake of it, individual 
 things exist, act, and cease to exist. Of 
 these immanent existences some are mere 
 states of the absolute reality; others are 
 also self-conscious subjects, which in a 
 measure lift themselves above and outside 
 the universal basis of existence. The dif- 
 ference between the two groups is, in 
 Hegelian language, that of being an sicli 
 (in itself, or simply) and being fiir sich 
 (for itself). To the former class belongs 
 the whole world of impercipient things, 
 with all their so-called activities. To the 
 latter class belong all spiritual beings, that 
 is, every subject which is conscious of its 
 states and opposes itself to them as the 
 permanent unity that has them. That is a 
 subject of states, which distinguishes itself 
 from its states. That is a unity which op- 
 poses itself as one to the multiplicity of its 
 states. But this spiritual life, of which we 
 are immediately aware in ourselves, is pre- 
 cisely what is required of the absolute be- 
 ing if it is to satisfy the conditions for the 
 sake of which it was postulated. The uni- 
 tary, all-embracing reality, which emerged 
 
AS CAUSE OF THE WORLD. 169 
 
 from our analysis of efficient causation, 
 takes accordingly the characteristics of an 
 infinite spirit. 
 
 Thus the causal argument proper points 
 to anthropocosmic theism. And the causal 
 argument improperly so designated, namely 
 the inference from creation, contains at least 
 the truth of the eternal dependence of the 
 world upon God. But the nature of that 
 being which is the ground of the world, 
 and which we have called God, remains as 
 yet undefined. We have, indeed, expressed 
 a conviction of the life and spirituality of 
 the one absolute reality. For we could 
 find nothing but living spirit that was able 
 to solve the problem of holding together 
 in a unity those modifications or moments 
 into which our analysis of causality com- 
 pelled us to resolve all finite things. And 
 this spirit must be volitional as well as 
 self-conscious; for without will there 
 could be no activity, no efficient causa- 
 tion, no material universe. But further 
 determination of that absolute life, as it is 
 in itself and as it manifests itself in nature 
 and in human history, is necessary to the 
 satisfaction both of the philosophical and 
 the religious consciousness. And this I 
 
170 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 hope will be to some extent attained in 
 the two remaining lectures, the next of 
 which will start with the argument from 
 teleology. 
 
LECTURE V. 
 
 BELIEF IN GOD AS REALIZING PURPOSE 
 IN THE WORLD. 
 
 We have convinced ourselves that the 
 ground or immanent "cause" of the uni- 
 verse must be an Infinite Spirit. Of the 
 nature of spirit we are immediately aware 
 through our own self-conscious experience. 
 In the light of this microcosm we must 
 regard ultimate reality as a subject con- 
 scious of states, which it distinguishes from 
 itself as the unity that has them and holds 
 them together, and as a subject exerting 
 will-power whereby changes are produced 
 in the totality of these states, yet without 
 detriment to the identity of the absolute 
 life they all express. This is the underly- 
 ing truth of the argument from a First 
 Cause. It takes the universe up into the 
 eternal life of God. 
 
 Popular thought, as usual, attempts to 
 gain pictorial distinctness by turning this 
 
 171 
 
172 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 organic union into a process of fabrication 
 with well-marked differences of space, of 
 time, of power, and of essence between the 
 universe and God. God was first, and the 
 world afterwards ; and as in the regressive 
 eternity he was alone before its creation, 
 so in the progressive eternity he will be 
 alone after its annihilation. The world is 
 limited in its extension ; but God fills the 
 immensities of space. The world is a store- 
 house of second causes ; God is the First 
 Cause ; and though it was he who invested 
 the world with its powers, that was long 
 ago, and ever since the world has gone 
 on of itself, while he has been a mere 
 sabbatic observer. God is the absolutely 
 perfect being; the universe, like every- 
 thing finite, is imperfect. Such is the hard 
 and fast theology of popular thought, of 
 which the deism of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury is the most highly developed sample. 
 But these theses are all not merely arbi- 
 trary and improbable, but unthinkable and 
 contradictory. What God did he was al- 
 ways doing ; and the universe is the eter- 
 nal manifestation of his activity. If you 
 call it a creation, it is a continuous crea- 
 tion. And those second causes, which you 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 173 
 
 think stored up in the material universe, 
 — what are thoy but centres of energy 
 through which the one supranatural will 
 pours forth his all-animating life and 
 power ? The world is not a machine, 
 charged with limited dynamics, but the 
 expression of one ever-active and inex- 
 haustible will. Furthermore, that the ex- 
 ternal manifestation is as boundless as the 
 life it expresses, science makes exceedingly 
 probable. In any event, we have not the 
 slightest reason to contrast the finitude of 
 the world with the infinitude of God. At 
 the farthest imaginable remove of space, 
 the universe stretches indefinitely beyond, 
 and we can think of it only as illimitable. 
 Lastly, as the universe, at every moment 
 of its existence, expresses at least a phase 
 of the divine life, its so-called imperfection 
 resolves itself into a momentary aspect, a 
 part, of a perfect whole. At no moment 
 does it reveal the absolute fulness of the 
 divine life ; but at no moment is it any- 
 thing else than a function of that divine 
 life. 
 
 Nor let us draw back from these inexor- 
 able demands of thought as pantheistic. So 
 long as we have an infinite spirit holding 
 
174 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 communion with finite spirits, we need not 
 be terrified by a terminological bugbear. 
 And this essential of theism (of which we 
 shall have more to say in the next lecture) 
 is certainly not endangered by the cosmic 
 philosophy I have just propounded in refu- 
 tation of deism. That nature should be 
 comprehended as the living tissue which a 
 divine spirit is ever a-weaving may be un- 
 acceptable to the unreflecting masses, as 
 it certainly is to the materialistic philoso- 
 pher ; but there is nothing in the doctrine 
 dangerous, or even antipathetic, to natural 
 theology. I cannot even agree with those 
 who think that the theist is concerned to 
 maintain the actuality of a divine life or 
 agency beyond the natural order of things, 
 and prior to it. For if the natural order 
 is eternal and infinite, as there seems no 
 reason to doubt, it will be difficult to find 
 a meaning for " beyond " and " prior." Of 
 this illimitable, ever-existing universe God 
 is the inner ground and substance. He is, 
 of course, no more identical with the world 
 than a man's self is identical with his 
 body. It may, therefore, readily be con- 
 ceded that God is more than the contents 
 of nature, if by these is meant a summa- 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 175 
 
 tion of all natural existences as perceived 
 or perceivable hy the senses. On the other 
 hand, there is no evidence, nor does any 
 religious need require us to believe, that 
 the divine being manifest in the universe 
 has an actual or possible existence some- 
 where else, in some transcendent sphere ; 
 though in such a supposition there is, of 
 course, no contradiction, and it has re- 
 cently been urged with noble fervor by 
 Dr. Martineau. That God should speak 
 his whole being in the world of natural, 
 animate, and human powers seems incredi- 
 ble to this great religious thinker. Agree- 
 ing in the doctrine of All-immanency^ which 
 finds nothing in the objective world but 
 God, he couples with it the doctrine of 
 Some-transcendency^ which makes God not 
 only almighty in the sense of all the infin- 
 ite might there is, but mighty for abso- 
 lutely all things, conceivable and real alike. 
 Now, it is no doubt possible that though 
 nature and humanity are manifestations of 
 God, they do not express his whole being, 
 any more than our words are an exhaustive 
 expression of our personality. Yet it is 
 equally conceivable that God has revealed 
 his whole being, though man has yet read 
 
176 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 but part of the revelation. And in any 
 case, we may be sure that the revelation, 
 whether total or partial, is a true expres- 
 sion of the divine nature. Hence we can- 
 not follow Dr. Martineau in treating the 
 cosmos which has come into being as but a 
 sample of an unknown number that might 
 have been. Such a plurality of cosmic 
 possibilities he thinks necessary for the 
 vindication of the ways of God, against 
 those who complain of the arrangements 
 of the present world, and attribute them to 
 weakness, as though God could not have 
 done otherwise. 
 
 In short, this belief in a divine potency to 
 realize an infinitude of possible universes is 
 the opposite pole to J. S. Mill's suggestion 
 of a beneficent but baffled designer of the 
 world. But the motive to a philosophy, how- 
 ever moving it may be,' is no proof of the 
 validity of that philosophy. And I cannot 
 discover any theoretical ground for that no- 
 tion of Some-transcendency which plays so 
 large a part in Dr. Martineau's system of 
 theism. Complete as is his break with de- 
 ism, I cannot but regard this feature of his 
 teaching as an unconscious survival from 
 the deistic conception of God's relation to 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 177 
 
 the universe. Of course, if God created the 
 universe at a definite moment of time, he 
 leads a transcendent life apart from it. 
 And in imagining the process of creation, 
 the deist naturally represented the divine 
 builder as realizing, through his will, one 
 of a number of ideas which floated before 
 his mental vision. When, however, the 
 world is regarded as an eternal act, as it is 
 by Dr. Martineau, it becomes more diffi- 
 cult, though perhaps not absolutely impos- 
 sible, to preserve the analogy to a human 
 artificer. We have not the same motive 
 as before for emphasizing that selective 
 will-function which we attribute to self- 
 conscious beings who begin events. Of 
 course this is no reason for conceiving 
 God as devoid of will. But the divine 
 will differs at least in two respects from 
 the human. With God volition and reali- 
 zation are one. And conflicting motives 
 being absent from an all-wise being, the 
 divine will functions with a perfection so 
 absolute that, even to a spectator who be- 
 lieved in freedom, it would have at least 
 the appearance of determination. Our best 
 analogy is not the perplexed and hesitat- 
 ing mechanician, but the good man, who, 
 
178 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 by a kind of necessity of his character, can- 
 not but will the virtuous acts which ex- 
 press that character. Of course the good 
 man has made this second nature by moral 
 endeavor. But the fact remains that the 
 perfection of human nature is reached only 
 when will has become, as it were, second- 
 arily automatic. 
 
 Now, of all human volition, it is this that 
 is likest God's. The divine will can express 
 itself only as it does, because no other ex- 
 pression would reveal what it is. Of such a 
 will the eternal universe is the eternal reali- 
 zation. If you cease to think of God under 
 the deistic conception of creator, author, de- 
 signer, or maker of the universe, you can 
 justify his ways only by appeal to the move- 
 ments of this universe, which are, in truth, 
 his volitions ; for any primeval selection and 
 realization of this cosmic scheme, in prefer- 
 ence to others equally possible, you have 
 not the slightest ground to assume. The 
 world is not one of countless possible 
 machines, as the mathematico-mechanical 
 genius of the eighteenth century conceived 
 it, but the organic expression, and the only 
 real expression, of the life of an eternal 
 and infinite spirit. To imagine its place 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 179 
 
 taken by another world is to imagine God 
 other than he is. The possibility of a 
 multitude of worlds is like the possibility 
 of a multitude of gods. But a right 
 thought of ultimate reality must recognize 
 it as the primal ground of distinction be- 
 tween the actual and the possible, — a dis- 
 tinction, therefore, not applicable to that 
 reality itself. 
 
 As popular thought has turned the truth 
 of a self-revealing spirit into the picture 
 of an external creator of the world, so it 
 has converted the fact of arrangement, 
 especially noticeable in the realm of or- 
 ganic life, into an argument for the exist- 
 ence of a designer of the world. From 
 the orderly arrangements and adaptations 
 that appear an inference is made to a 
 rational creative architect of the universe. 
 In the history of philosophy this step ap- 
 pears to have been first consciously taken 
 by Anaxagoras. To him the beauty, har- 
 mony, and design in the world seemed in- 
 explicable save as the work of a rational, 
 intending, and omnipotent intelligence or 
 z^oO?. His predecessors inclined to material- 
 ism or to hylozoism. But from this time 
 onward designing mind remained a cosmic 
 
180 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 principle in the schools of Greek philos- 
 ophy. Socrates is especially noteworthy 
 for the prominence he gives to ends in the 
 interpretation of nature, though he con- 
 ceives them rather superficially and almost 
 altogether in relation to human welfare as 
 a final object. This anthropocentric tele- 
 ology continued to flourish in the post- 
 Aristotelian schools, and in the dogmatic 
 theology of Christendom it was an essen- 
 tial constituent. It was the natural coun- 
 terpart of a geocentric astronomy, and both 
 received their doom at the hand of Coper- 
 nicus. So that at the present day we 
 should all agree in the observation of 
 Hegel that, though wine be useful to man, 
 neither religion nor science is profited by 
 supposing the cork-tree to exist for the 
 sake of the corks which are cut' from its 
 bark to serve as stoppers for wine-bottles. 
 Obviously from this class of adaptations 
 to external ends, all of which are incidental 
 results of the otherwise established con- 
 stitution of natural objects and forces, no 
 inference can be made to the character of 
 the power that animates the universe. 
 The modern teleologist, therefore, turns to 
 adaptations to internal ends. These he 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 181 
 
 finds, in living organisms, where tlie parts 
 exist and act for the sake of the whole, 
 by the idea of which they seem to be con- 
 trolled. Here at any rate there appears 
 to be indication of an aim in nature. Not 
 that the teleologist regards the rest of the 
 world as aimless. On the contrary, he is 
 persuaded that the order of the whole cos- 
 mos, which science is only beginning to 
 reveal to us, is evidence of an intelligent 
 cause. But the marks of intentionality are 
 more obvious in the field of organic nature 
 than elsewhere. The features of intend- 
 ing will, nowhere absent, are especially 
 discernible in the adaptations and adjust- 
 ments of the parts and functions of living 
 beings. And it is these select and con- 
 spicuous instances that form the starting 
 point of the so-called argument from design. 
 This argument, under the designatiorl of 
 the physico-theological proof of the exist- 
 ence of God won the respect, if not the 
 assent, of the " all-destroying " Kant. Of 
 all proofs to establish the existence of a 
 Supreme Being, Kant pronounced it the 
 oldest, the clearest, and the most conso- 
 nant with human reason. And in spite 
 of later attempts at improvement, his 
 
182 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 analysis of the argument is still perhaps 
 the best that has ever been given. He 
 enumerates four principal points. First, 
 there are in the world clear indications 
 of intentional arrangements, various and 
 boundless. Secondly, these could not have 
 originated spontaneously from the nature 
 of things themselves, but only through 
 means selected and arranged on pui-pose 
 by a rational disposing principle, accord- 
 ing to certain fundamental ideas. Thirdly, 
 there exists, therefore, a free, intelligent 
 cause of the world. Fourthly, the unity 
 of this cause may be inferred from the 
 unity of the reciprocal relations of the 
 parts of the world. 
 
 Without inquiring at present into the 
 inner connection and consistency of this 
 argument, I may observe that it cannot 
 get under way at all without affirming the 
 presence of aims and intentions in the 
 world. Intentionality we know from our 
 own self-conscience experience. The tele- 
 ological theist ought, therefore, to compare 
 the works of nature with the purposive 
 activity of man to discover whether they 
 have the marks of intending thought. 
 Given design, there must of course be a 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE, 183 
 
 designer; but that there is design any- 
 where in the world nothing but the dis- 
 covery of analogies to the intellectual pur- 
 pose of man can make even probable. 
 
 It was much easier in the eighteenth 
 century than it is to-day to be persuaded 
 of the presence of design in the universe. 
 The growth of chemistry and biology has 
 made impossible to us that mechanical view 
 of nature which the physics of Galileo 
 and Newton impressed indelibly upon the 
 mind of earlier generations. Conceiving 
 God as an extraneous maker of the world, 
 they regarded living organisms as curiously 
 wrought machines which, more than any 
 other piece of the divine handiwork, 
 showed the purposive activity of the great 
 artificer. Indeed, the whole inanimate uni- 
 verse, from the structure of the solar sys- 
 tem to the fall of an apple, was accounted 
 for by the inherent qualities of matter and 
 the empirical laws of motion, so that in 
 the field of cosmic infinitude God was 
 needed only as original creator of unar- 
 ranged materials. But for the science of 
 that day living organisms were not amen- 
 able to similar treatment. And not only 
 did they demand a creator for their matter, 
 
184 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 but a designer for their balanced and har- 
 monious forms. The arrangement of mat- 
 ter in the inorganic world seemed natural 
 and necessary; in the organic, supernatural 
 and contingent. Here, therefore, reflec- 
 tion found machines in which the divine 
 artificer with wondrous skill and cunning 
 had embodied plans and realized ends of 
 transcendent intelligence. And this re- 
 mains the view of the generality of man- 
 kind until this day. 
 
 But it is no longer so inevitable for the 
 scientist. The scientific view of nature 
 has been transformed by the recent discov- 
 eries of the conservation of energy, of the 
 dynamics of molecules, and of the cellular 
 structure of organisms. Had the thinkers 
 of the eighteenth century been aware of 
 these later results in physics, chemistry, 
 and biology, there can be little doubt they 
 would have left us a purely mechanical 
 or, at any rate, naturalistic account of or- 
 ganic beings. This would have been quite 
 conformable with their habitual mode of 
 thought. But whether such expulsion of 
 purpose from the organic sphere would 
 have been justifiable is by no means so evi- 
 dent. All that I am maintaining is the 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 185 
 
 greater difficulty of establishing the pres- 
 ence of purpose in the world under the 
 changed conditions of contemporary sci- 
 ence. We have gained so much more 
 knowledge of nature's operations that even 
 the correlation of parts and functions in 
 living organisms has no longer that unique 
 unexplicableness that stamped it for earlier 
 thinkers the special product of creative 
 purpose. 
 
 This explains why a philosophical the- 
 ologian like Dr. Flint virtually abandons 
 the argument from design. He misses the 
 analogy between the works of nature and 
 the products of art. The former, he says, 
 disclose adaptations, but not purposes. An 
 organism is defined as a systematic unity 
 whose parts are definitely related to one 
 another and co-ordinated to a common is- 
 sue. In it we find an orderly arrangement. 
 And it is the presence of order, not of pur- 
 pose or intention, that justifies, according 
 to Dr. Flint, our inference to a divine in- 
 telligence. 
 
 Still, we shall find it difficult to surren^ 
 der altogether our teleological view of the 
 world. Though unable in perhaps the ma<- 
 jority of cases to assign ends to the nicely 
 
186 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 co-ordinated structures of living beings, we 
 cannot but believe that they do actually, 
 realize ends preconceived by intelligence. 
 Of course it must not be hastily assumed 
 that every conspicuous property or function 
 which we find in objects, is their intrinsic 
 end. " That the property of rain is to wet, 
 and fire to burn," is of interest only in the 
 natural philosophy of Touchstone. Again, 
 though conic sections are described by the 
 movements of the planets, it would be rash 
 to suppose such orbits were the final cause 
 of their existence. On the other hand, it 
 scarcely admits of doubt that the end of 
 the eye is sight, and of the ear hearing. Of 
 this kind is the abiding truth, as I think 
 every candid person must concede, in the 
 so-called argument from design. But this 
 fact tells us nothing of the intelligence 
 that had a preconception of the end. And 
 for anything we can see to the contrary, it 
 may be immanent in the original nature of 
 the elements, or if it is external to them, it 
 may have its seat in a plurality of creative 
 spirits. There is much, therefore, wanting 
 before a theistic structure can be reared on 
 the teleological basis. Indeed, did we not 
 already know from the cosmological argu- 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 187 
 
 ment of the existence of one infinite spirit 
 as ground of all existence, we should, I 
 think, never become convinced of it by 
 means of the argument from design. But 
 given that belief in anthropocosmic theism, 
 we readily find in the adaptations of or- 
 ganisms the expression of an infinite self- 
 conscious will and intelligence. 
 
 Of course the case would be much worse 
 were the reality of purpose in the world 
 denied or explained away. The teleologist 
 holds that living beings are conspicuous 
 examples of the realization of an end, for 
 the sake of which all their adjustments and 
 adaptations originated. That end could be 
 conceived only by an intelligence. But as 
 the animal's organs are ready-made gifts 
 of nature, and its instincts original endow- 
 ments, intelligence, it is held, works through 
 it as a medium rather than in it as a sub- 
 ject. Organisms do not shape themselves 
 by self-conscious reflection; and yet they 
 are the embodiment of reason. It is this 
 circumstance that justifies their comparison 
 with works of art, and, in spite of many 
 dissimilarities, suggests the inference to 
 an organizing intelligence. But manifestly 
 this inference would be supererogatory, if 
 
188 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 it were thinkable that ends might be real- 
 ized in the organic world without any 
 preconception of them. In the products 
 of human skill the idea always goes before 
 and guides the movements of the hand. 
 And as our own causation is the only one 
 we know immediately, and know on the 
 inner as well as on the outer side, we 
 have taken it as a universal type, and 
 supposed with Aristotle that without an 
 idea there could be no action directed 
 upon an end. And as the idea was not to 
 be found in the living organisms them- 
 selves, it was naturally located in a su- 
 preme intelligence that worked through 
 them. But the modern philosophy of un- 
 consciousness would change all that. It 
 sets out, not with self-conscious intelligence 
 which is nearest and best known, but with 
 animal instincts which are earlier, more 
 distant, and more opaque. Because there 
 is no intention on the part of the animal 
 that follows its instincts, it is assumed that 
 nature, working blindly, may realize ends. 
 This universal mode of operation comes in 
 man to the light of consciousness. Man 
 knows that he realizes ends ; but, according 
 to Schopenhauer, the end also operates as 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 189 
 
 a motive on a being that knows it not. 
 Nor is this paradox relieved by Hartmann's 
 motiving the will with an unconscious idea. 
 The contradiction remains, that ends un- 
 conceived should ever become motives for 
 their own appropriate realization. To hu- 
 man understanding this is simply unin- 
 telligible. It asserts and denies in the 
 same breath. Whether or not there be 
 purpose in the world, no end can exercise 
 an influence on its own realization unless 
 it be actually present to an intelligence. 
 
 The philosophy of unconsciousness is of 
 course pledged to the ejection of a conscious 
 intelligence from nature. That it should, 
 however, cleave so tenaciously to ends, of 
 which that intelligence alone is the condi- 
 tion, is a remarkable testimony to the 
 strength of our natural conviction of the 
 presence of purpose in the world. Unfor- 
 tunately this ineradicable belief in design, 
 this rejection of a purposeless universe, has 
 been associated in the popular mind with 
 certain theories regarding the realization 
 of purpose, which modern science has ren- 
 dered obsolete. The ordinary teleologist 
 deems himself under obligation to set an 
 impassable barrier between the inorganic 
 
190 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 and the organic world. So that in the 
 legitimate inquiry of science for a natural 
 origin and development of living organisms 
 he sees something antagonistic to his 
 belief in design. Just as the plain man 
 wants a God who is separate in space and 
 time, in essence and action from the only 
 reality he knows anything about, so his 
 faith in the intentionality of things would 
 be surer if the field of organic nature were 
 hedged about and separated from the inor- 
 ganic, and the natural law that reigns 
 inexorably in the latter held only dubious 
 and accommodating sway in the former. 
 Perhaps it is not too much to say that the 
 generality of mankind emphasize the won- 
 derful and unaccountable constitution of 
 living organisms rather than the end or 
 purpose it embodies. For this makes the 
 postulate of a wonder-working creator all 
 the more necessary. Thus beside the ma- 
 terial world Avith its natural processes, 
 conceived of vaguely as once non-existent 
 though now self-subsistent, popular thought 
 sets up a second principle as supernatural 
 and ever-active ground of living beings 
 which it mysteriously produces or creates. 
 This conception of the argument from 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 191 
 
 design has been outgrown by modern views 
 of nature and irrevocably shattered by 
 Darwinian biology. The scientist no, 
 longer believes in external interference 
 with the order of nature. The formation 
 of living organisms must be explained by 
 processes as purely natural as the occur- 
 rences of the physical world. It is true 
 that this ideal is as yet unrealized in the 
 case of the first germs of life. But there 
 is nothing absurd in the supposition that 
 these should one day be derived from the 
 elements of the material world. And, 
 however that may be, the growth of germs 
 can already be understood as a physico- 
 chemical process. Hence even if conscious 
 design is operative in the organic world, it 
 realizes its ends in accordance with those 
 laws of mechanism which in the popular 
 estimation are exclusive of design. An 
 end would be for us as good as non- 
 existent which could not express itself 
 through the regular sequences and co- 
 existences of the natural world. And an 
 end so expressing itself must be regarded 
 as the necessary product of causal con- 
 nections. It is not, as popular thought 
 puts it, that an external designer brings 
 
192 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 together at any given moment the means 
 necessary for the realization of the end; 
 but from moment to moment the status of 
 the natural world as a whole and in every 
 detail is precisely what it is determined 
 to be by the condition of its own inherent 
 powers and agencies. If, therefore, in the 
 organic world ends are realized, as we 
 believe they are, the ground must be sought 
 not outside the realm of natural law, but 
 within it — or rather in an intelligence 
 whose purpose is expressed through the 
 medium of natural law. In a word, the 
 teleology of to-day must be perfectly com- 
 patible with the scientific postulate of 
 universal and invariable causality. 
 
 It is at this point that the Darwinian 
 theory of natural selection has come into 
 such violent conflict with the popular view 
 of design. Darwin maintained there was 
 a natural cause for the development of 
 life with all its organs, functions, and in- 
 stincts ; and that in any given case the 
 finished organ, function, instinct, or entire 
 organism was only one surviving form out 
 of many possible forms, and owed its pre- 
 dominance over them to the greater bene- 
 fits, as regards food, protection, and the 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 193 
 
 like, which it ensured to its survivor in 
 the universal struggle for existence. The 
 Darwinian view is no doubt destructive 
 of the ordinary conception of design. In 
 bringing the whole organic field under the 
 rule of natural law it has taken a step 
 which most teleologists still hesitate to 
 follow. And in substituting for specially 
 designed and sudden creations the idea 
 of slowly differentiating organisms between 
 which struggle for life is the only arbiter, 
 it shocks common sense with the sugges- 
 tion alike of a chance government of the 
 world and of a reckless prodigality of 
 material in the attainment of its final con- 
 figuration. But no theory can gainsay this 
 apparent wastefulness of life with the facts 
 of biology before our eyes. And what is 
 here called chance is really causation, but 
 causation meandering through obscure and 
 mazy paths where we had supposed that 
 the direct way was the only possible line 
 of advance. But it would be a mistake to 
 regard Darwinism as a refutation of the 
 doctrine of ends in nature. It is merely 
 the refutation of a particular theory, 
 though a venerable one, regarding the 
 mode in which ends are realized in the 
 
194 BELIEF IN GOD, 
 
 organic world. No doubt for the great 
 majority who are unable to distinguish 
 between the accidents and the essence of 
 teleology, the collapse of the older biology 
 is synonymous with the doom of the argu- 
 ment from design. But sober reflection 
 will convince us that it only changes the 
 location and mode of realizing ends. If 
 everything in the universe were derived 
 according to natural laws from a primordial 
 arrangement of elements, we might be 
 surprised that things had developed in one 
 way rather than in another, but we could, 
 nevertheless, entertain no doubt that if 
 intention were manifest in the issue, it 
 must already have been present at the 
 beginning. And by a wonderful forecast 
 of genius, Paley virtually accepted the 
 modern theory of evolution. 
 
 " Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant 
 thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." 
 The eye has supplied the teleologist with 
 more examples of intention than any other 
 organ. Suppose now that Darwin is correct 
 in assuming that natural selection, by a 
 successive consolidation of favorable varia- 
 tions, has converted the simple apparatus 
 of an optic nerve, coated with pigment and 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 195 
 
 invested by transparent membrane, into 
 the perfect human «eye with its nerves and 
 muscles, its lenses and humors, its retina 
 and coatings, and all its innumerable con- 
 trivances for perfect adaptation to the 
 function of seeing. Is then the eye the 
 realization of no divine idea? Rather is 
 not all this mechanism of variations, strug- 
 gles, and inheritances in the organic world, 
 which awaited so long the interpretation 
 of Darwin, merely the preordained means 
 for the realization of ideas eternally present 
 to the supreme intelligence and in a manner 
 already prefigured in the lowest germs of 
 life from which otherwise they could never 
 have been developed into actuality ? Divine 
 intention does not become an accidental 
 result when you have described its manner 
 of working, however surprising that manner 
 may be. 
 
 It will be interesting and instructive to 
 study Darwin's own views of the bearing 
 of natural selection upon the teleological 
 conception of the world. In his systematic 
 works there is not infrequent allusion to 
 the subject, but in the delightful volumes 
 of Life and Letters recently given to the 
 public, we have the inmost confessions of 
 
196 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 a candid soul, unbaring itself to the view 
 of trusted friends. Readers of Macaulay's 
 biography will recall his remark that, if 
 Clarissa Harlow e had been lost, he and 
 his sisters could have reproduced it from 
 memory. It was not a novel, but a classic 
 treatise on teleology, that left a similarly 
 indelible impress upon the mind of Macau- 
 lay's great scientific contemporary. On 
 November 15, 1859, Darwin wrote to Sir 
 John Lubbock : " I do not think I hardly 
 ever admired a book more than Paley's 
 'Natural Theology.' I could almost for- 
 merly have said it by heart." That Paley's 
 argument from design in nature was, how- 
 ever, invalidated by the discovery of nat- 
 ural selection, Darwin firmly believed. 
 Nevertheless he refused to regard the uni- 
 verse as the product of blind necessity; 
 but a satisfactory setting for his teleology 
 in relation to his science he was never able 
 to achieve. His attitude is best indicated 
 in the correspondence with Asa Gray. 
 Writing on May 22, 1860, he said: "I 
 cannot anyhow be contented to view this 
 wonderful universe, and especially the na- 
 ture of man, and to conclude that every- 
 thing is the result of brute force. I am 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 197 
 
 inclined to look at everything as result- 
 ing from designed laws, with the details, 
 whether good or bad, left to the working 
 out of what we may call chance. Not that 
 this notion at all satisfies me." And again, 
 on June 5, 1861 : " I have been led to think 
 more on this subject of late, and grieve 
 to say that I come to differ more from you. 
 It is not that designed variation makes, as 
 it seems to me, my deity, 'natural selec- 
 tion,' superfluous ; but rather from studying 
 lately domestic variation, and seeing what 
 an enormous field of undesigned variability 
 there is ready for natural selection to ap- 
 propriate for any purpose useful to each 
 creature." And shortly after, on Septem- 
 ber 17, this answer to Gray's question what 
 would convince him of design : " If I saw 
 an angel come down to teach us good, and 
 I was convinced from others seeing him 
 that I was not mad, I should believe in 
 design. If I could be convinced thoroughly 
 that life and mind was, in an unknown 
 way, a function of other imponderable 
 force, I should be convinced. If man was 
 made of brass or iron, and no way con- 
 nected with any other organism which had 
 ever lived, I should perhaps be convinced." 
 
198 BELIEF IiY GOD, 
 
 In the short but pathetic chapter on 
 " Religion," the editor has brought to- 
 gether a number of Darwin's deliverances 
 on the subject of design, especially in rela- 
 tion to the teleological argument for the 
 existence of God, " In my most extreme 
 fluctuations," he wrote, as late as 1879, " I 
 have never been an atheist, in the sense of 
 denying the existence of a God." lie 
 explicitly states what ought never to have 
 been doubted, that the theory of evolution 
 is " quite compatible with the belief in a 
 God." And to several correspondents he 
 repeats in substance what he wrote to a 
 Dutch student in 1873 : " The impossibility 
 of conceiving that this grand and wondrous 
 universe, with our conscious selves, arose 
 through chance, seems to me the chief 
 argument for the existence of God." It is 
 true he is always haunted by the doubt 
 that this argument may not be valid. To 
 the Duke of Argyle's remark that some of 
 the Darwinian writings themselves brought 
 to light the obvious workings of mind in 
 nature, he replied, " Well, that often comes 
 over me with overwhelming force, but at 
 other times," and he shook his head 
 vaguely, " it seems to go away." Perhaps 
 
AS REALIZING PUHPOSE. 199 
 
 his habitual mode of thought is most com- 
 pletely and precisely expressed in the fol- 
 lowing sentence from a letter to Miss 
 Wedgwood: "The mind refuses to look 
 at this universe, being what it is, with- 
 out having been designed ; yet, where one 
 would most expect design, viz. in the 
 structure of a sentient being, the more I 
 think on the subject, the less I can see 
 proof of design." 
 
 This is the heart of Darwin's teleological 
 problem. He conceived that natural selec- 
 tion could produce the most exquisite struc- 
 tures, if attainable through gradations, as 
 he knew in general they were ; and finding 
 nothing of design in the action of natural 
 selection, which is simply struggle for life 
 and survival of the fittest, he had no place 
 for design in the organic world, where, if 
 anywhere, it ought to have been present. 
 But what of those variations which are 
 the material upon which natural selection 
 works? That they too were undesigned 
 Darwin convinced himself by a very strik- 
 ing argument. If we are not to believe 
 that the forms are preordained of the 
 broken fragments of rock tumbled from 
 a precipice, which are fitted together by 
 
200 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 man to build his house, why should we 
 believe that the variations of domestic ani- 
 mals or plants are preordained for the sake 
 of the breeds ? And if Providence did not 
 design for man's amusement those varia- 
 tions in the rock pigeon, out of which man 
 has yet made by his own selective accumu- 
 lation the pouter or the fan-tail pigeon, 
 why should it be imagined that the varia- 
 tions by which, through the action of 
 natural selection, the beautifully adapted 
 woodpecker has been formed, were provi- 
 dentially designed? Broken stones are not 
 produced by nature in order that men may 
 build houses out of them. Peculiarities 
 of domestic animals are not produced by 
 nature in order that breeders may consoli- 
 date them into new varieties. Why, then, 
 are variations in living beings held to 
 be designed, when, through the selective 
 action of the struggle for life, those best 
 adapted to the environment are consoli- 
 dated and perpetuated in new forms ? If 
 the principle of design is given up in the 
 one case, Darwin's conviction was that 
 there was no shadow of reason for retaiu- 
 ing it in the other; and to Asa Gray, who 
 believed in designed variations, he wrote 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 201 
 
 (November 26, 1860) : " I cannot believe 
 this ; and I think you would have to believe 
 that the tail of the fan-tail was led to vary 
 in the number and direction of its feathers 
 in order to gratify the caprice of a few 
 men." To the same effect he writes (April, 
 1860) to Lyell about the crop of the pouter, 
 which pigeon-fanciers have produced : " It 
 seems preposterous that a maker of a uni- 
 verse should care about the crop of a 
 pigeon, solely to j)lease man's silly fancies. 
 But if you agree with me in thinking such 
 an interposition of the Deity uncalled for, 
 I can see no reason whatever for believing 
 in such interpositions in the case of natural 
 beings, in which strange and admirable 
 peculiarities have been naturally selected 
 for the creature's own benefit." 
 
 Forcible as this reasoning is — and Dar- 
 win wrote in his autobiography, in 1876, 
 that he had never seen it answered — I 
 cannot but think it gains much of its 
 plausibility from a confusion between in- 
 trinsic and extrinsic ends. It must be 
 freely acknowledged that neither the 
 stones are there for the sake of the house- 
 builder nor the extra tail-feathers for the 
 sake of the pigeon-f 
 
 ^v 
 
202 BELIEF /iV GOD. 
 
 there, they may be utilized for human ends, 
 and that whether, considered in themselves, 
 they are purposive or purposeless. But 
 that men can accomplish their designs by 
 means of existing objects, with properties 
 and activities of their own, is a matter of 
 course, and proves nothing further, cer- 
 tainly not the absence of ends inherent in 
 the nature of those things which also hap- 
 pen to be serviceable to the plans of men. 
 The intentionality that looks through the 
 eye is not affected by the accidental cir- 
 cumstance that breeders may consolidate 
 chance ocular peculiarities into some fixed 
 habit. That is man's design, a design su- 
 perimposed upon the realized end of na- 
 ture. But suppose it is shoAvn that the 
 eye itself is the surviving summation of 
 a series of variations of that sort, what 
 then ? I should answer that as the varia- 
 tions, after sifting through natural selec- 
 tion, have produced the eye, without 
 interference on the part of man, it may be 
 supposed their preordained goal. And as 
 I find it impossible to believe that a blindly 
 working nature should realize ends of 
 which it has no knowledge, I conclude 
 there is an intelligence working through 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 203 
 
 nature, with a preconception of this idea, 
 just as it is the intelligence of the fancier, 
 with his antecedent idea of a pouter or 
 fantail, that enables him to utilize the 
 means for calling them into existence. I 
 admit that the means by which nature's 
 designs are realized appear to us, under 
 the Darwinian theory, to partake of waste- 
 ful and ridiculous excess. But it should 
 be remembered that in the life of the eter- 
 nal spirit, in whom and through whom are 
 all beings, the forms that are quenched 
 in the struggle for existence may fulfil 
 ends just as truly as the more successful 
 forms that gain a somewhat longer history. 
 There are ends everywhere in nature. 
 We are not always able to describe them 
 with so much certainty as in the case of 
 the eye. These ends shape the nature and 
 course of the variations — though through 
 causal connections — out of which organ- 
 isms and organs are consolidated. Over 
 and above their own immanent ends, 
 organisms also lend themselves to the 
 extrinsic designs of man. These proposi- 
 tions, which seem to me to describe a tena- 
 ble system of teleology in its relation to 
 the Darwinian theory of natural selection, 
 
204 BELIEF m GOD. 
 
 are not in a single instance in conflict with 
 that theory, or with the facts of conscious 
 selection on the part of agriculturists and 
 horticulturists. By this system it will be 
 seen that the location of design is carried 
 back from the existing to the earliest or- 
 ganisms and their variations; or if you 
 choose to make a leap that science cannot 
 yet take, to the molecular constitution of 
 the so-called inorganic world. Here, in 
 fact, with unerring instinct the most phil- 
 osophical follower of Darwin has already 
 domiciled it, though without recognition of 
 the spirituality of that primordial reality 
 to which must belong the purposes realized 
 in the course of evolution. If without 
 going so far we stop at the primitive germs 
 of life, must we not think of them as en- 
 dowed with a constitution capable of varia- 
 tion only along certain preordained lines of 
 development? Such, at any rate, is the 
 view of Professor Huxley. And from 
 Darwin's own standpoint it seems to me 
 the conception of design in the organic 
 world should not have been thrown over 
 until he had found an answer to that co- 
 nundrum which on November 25, 1859, he 
 somewhat profanely propounded to Mr. 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 205 
 
 Huxley. "You have," he says, "most 
 cleverly hit on one point which has greatly 
 troubled me ; if, as I must think, external 
 conditions produce little direct effect, what 
 the devil determines each particular varia- 
 tion? What makes a tuft of feathers 
 come on a cock's head, or moss on a moss- 
 rose ? " Until that query is answered, the 
 proof that the eye has " come " by way of 
 natural selection instead of having been 
 " specially made," is no proof that its com- 
 ing was unintentional. And when the 
 query is answered, it will be seen that 
 though we have in the eye a result which 
 is brought about only in accordance with 
 the inexorable laws of causation, it is a re- 
 sult that cannot be exhaustively explained 
 on a merely mechanical or blind necessita- 
 rian theory of the universe. 
 
 Development does not negate design ; it 
 rather affirms it. When we say that any- 
 thing develops, we mean that it undergoes 
 changes which occur in a determinate man- 
 ner and lead towards a definite end. Of 
 this law of its development the organism 
 is itself not aware. Nor can it have re- 
 ceived the law from other individual be- 
 ings, which are all in the same position. 
 
206 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 To understand evolution, therefore, we 
 must, as in the similar case of causation, 
 trace it back to the real ground of the uni- 
 verse itself. And as causation proved to 
 be immanent changes, self-determined and 
 compensatory, in the life of the one abso- 
 lute spirit, so in a last analysis evolution 
 signifies besides such causation the self- 
 posited order of divine ideas in accordance 
 with which these changes actually occur. 
 In their relation to his will these ideas of 
 the Infinite Spirit must be regarded as ends. 
 Man sees the causal mechanism by which 
 they are realized, but to discern the ideas 
 themselves is generally beyond his power. 
 In the organic world he catches glimpses 
 of them. And in the life of the human 
 spirit they confront him in a self-con- 
 scious miniature. 
 
 But it is nature that brings to the birth 
 not only living organisms, but also self- 
 conscious minds. Yet they seem beyond 
 the trick of nature as we have ordinarily 
 understood her. Should some Polixenes 
 
 remind us that 
 
 " Even that art 
 Which you say adds to nature, is an art 
 That nature makes " — 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 207 
 
 we shall not quarrel about names. But 
 since what life and mind add to the world 
 is something that mere blind mechanism 
 could not of itself have produced, we are 
 forced to see in nature a spiritual ground 
 which, with an absolute self-consciousness 
 of its own, may yet be said to sleep in the 
 stone, dream in the animal, and again wake 
 to life in man. The universe is a realized 
 scheme of divine ideas ; but, though they 
 emerge to sight in organisms, we should 
 never have suspected their presence but 
 for our own self-conscious spirits, which 
 are the chiefest product, and therefore the 
 best interpretation, of the ultimate ground 
 of things. Now as science cannot dispense 
 with mechanical causes, neither can our 
 own spirit, which originates science, allow 
 us to regard the world as only mechanical. 
 Darwin shows that if the idea of purpose 
 be retained, we must not allow the arrange- 
 ments of particular things to be made by a 
 will external to them, since they can all be 
 accounted for by means of causal actions 
 and reactions. What remains, then, is to 
 unite with causality a principle of immanent 
 teleology. And this uiuon, as it does not 
 violate any of the postulates or facts of 
 
208 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 science, is absolutely necessary for the in- 
 terpretation of nature a-s the actual source 
 of life and self-conscious intelligence. That 
 such a synthesis of causality and teleology 
 has already been made by many philosoph- 
 ical scientists, there seems good reason 
 to believe. But so great is the current 
 prejudice in scientific circles against spirit 
 that, though reflection will convince any 
 one that spirit is the only possible ground 
 of this synthesis, these scientists continue 
 to talk in materialistic language of a pri- 
 mordial molecular arrangement as the ulti- 
 mate principle of their philosophy. For 
 our own part, we must state explicitly our 
 belief in the existence of one absolute 
 spirit, of which all finite beings are the 
 members or functions. And as the reality 
 of finite things is but a mode of divine 
 activity, so their development according to 
 law and purpose is but the conformity of 
 the divine will to ideas of the divine rea- 
 son. In a last analysis cosmic force and 
 intentionality alike converge in God. 
 
 It was precisely such a metaphysic that 
 Darwin needed for escape from the haunt- 
 ing doubt of the reality of design in nature. 
 " If I could be convinced thoroughly," he 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 209 
 
 said, in words already quoted, " that life 
 and mind was in an unknown way a func- 
 tion of other imponderable force, I should 
 be convinced." The real ground of doubt, 
 you see, lies in the implied assumption that 
 life and mind are the mere fortuitous prod- 
 ucts of a blind arrangement of material 
 elements. But from such an unconscious 
 materialism philosophical reflection is able 
 to deliver us. And a sound metaphysic 
 will show the very thing that Darwin de- 
 siderated, namely, that life and mind, and 
 not only life and mind, but matter too, are 
 functions of other imponderable force, of 
 an absolute spiritual life in which all 
 things have the root of their reality. 
 
 But while the teleological path may be 
 thus made plain for those whose philoso- 
 phy has already assured them of the exists 
 ence of God, it is quite another question 
 whether in itself it would conduct the 
 doubt-driven wanderer to that primal 
 ground of reality and truth. The difficulty 
 is in establishing empirically the universal 
 presence of design. How few are the 
 cases in which we can find an intrinsic 
 end and a combination of appropriate 
 means for its realization ! And even when 
 
210 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 we seem to succeed, as for example in the 
 development of plants, how seldom are the 
 ends realized anything of absolute worth ! 
 The entire existence of plants is to them- 
 selves a matter of indifference, constructed 
 though they obviously are with reference 
 to the continuation of their kind. They 
 subserve, it is true, the extrinsic end of 
 maintaining sentient life, since, whatever 
 be the intermediary chemical processes, all 
 animal tribes ultimately depend for food 
 upon vegetation. But that only provokes 
 the further question, What, then, is the 
 absolute value of animal existence ? Man 
 is the paragon of animals. And in man we 
 feel there is something of absolute worth. 
 But can we make this quintessence of dust 
 the ultimate end of all existence ? Does 
 not anthropocentric teleology miss that 
 true cosmic perspective which comes of 
 remembering that the chief end of man, as 
 of all finite tilings, is to glorify God ? 
 
 But it is not merely that the ends we 
 discern are few and comparatively unim- 
 portant. It is not merely that in the great 
 majority of cases there seems to be a fail- 
 ure of ends. Worse than all, our picked 
 instances of intentionality are largely neu- 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 211 
 
 tralized by nature's crop of misadjustment, 
 uselessness, mischief, and disease. I do 
 not mean that if we were quite certain of 
 purposive activity in the favorable cases, 
 we should yield that certainty when sur- 
 rounded by so many exceptions of a con- 
 trary sort. But I mean that one who 
 looked impartially at nature, on the fair 
 side and on the foul, might on the whole 
 doubt whether a principle of irrationality 
 or blind chance might not as easily have 
 produced certain semblances of design as 
 an infinite reason and goodness that wealth 
 of opposite instances. 
 
 This disaffection towards Nature is the 
 inevitable result of endeavoring to read 
 in her modes of behavior the impenetrable 
 secrets of divine purpose We know from 
 our analysis of reality that there must be 
 an infinite spirit, with self-consciousness 
 and will. We know, therefore, there must 
 be purpose and intention in the world, 
 though it is scarcely given to us to dis- 
 cover it by observation. Yet though veri- 
 fying vision fails, this is only what might 
 have been expected from the nature of the 
 case. And on no account, if we are to 
 interpret the universe by a single prin- 
 
212 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ciple, as science, philosophy, and theology 
 alike demand, can we forego our hypothe- 
 sis of anthropocosmic theism. 
 
 But of this belief in God the argument 
 from design, strictly estimated, could never 
 supply the evidence. Its kernel of truth 
 lies in the perception that the interpreta- 
 tion of the material is to be sought for in 
 the living and the conscious, and that life 
 and consciousness, though realizing them- 
 selves through mechanism, could not have 
 been produced by it, and must indeed be 
 considered functions of one all-embracing 
 spirit. But vrhen this truth assumes the 
 form of a demonstration of the divine ex- 
 istence from the presence of design in the 
 processes of nature, tAvo defects appear in 
 the argument, either of which is sufficient 
 to break it. First, while the designed 
 arrangements found in the world neces- 
 sarily imply intelligence, it may be imma- 
 nent in the organisms that exhibit its 
 marks, or, since in some cases that cannot 
 be the case, it may be found in a plurality 
 of external creators. And this last as- 
 sumption really accords well with the facts 
 of the case. For, in the second place, the 
 universality of design cannot, as we have 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 213 
 
 seen, be established by empirical observa- 
 tion. And the things that are designed 
 may be set over against the things that are 
 undesigned, and each sphere assigned, as 
 in the Persian mythology, to one of two 
 opposite creative principles. That this 
 logically valid procedure is not generally 
 thought of is due to the fact that those 
 who use the argument from design are 
 already convinced of the existence of God. 
 They unconsciously shut their eyes to the 
 instances of misadjustment and purpose- 
 lessness. As in the temples were hung 
 the votive offerings of those only who had 
 escaped drowning, so in the argument from 
 design it is rare to find any display of con- 
 trary facts. It is, as Bacon observed, the 
 vice of the human mind to neglect nega- 
 tive instances. And that the argument 
 from design fails at least to give them their 
 due weight, we may realize if we put our- 
 selves in the position of the sceptic, and 
 inquire how we could overcome to his 
 satisfaction the objections I have just 
 urged against the conclusiveness of the 
 teleological proof for the existence of God, 
 as that proof is ordinarily understood. 
 Yet the fact remains that thought cannot 
 
214 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 surrender the teleological view of the world. 
 That existence has a meaning and a pur- 
 pose is as certain to us as that existence is. 
 Now, the supreme end of all things must be 
 what theologians call the glory of God — 
 the one absolute reality. But God glorifies 
 himself in communicating himself. Hence 
 we may say, with Plato and with Jonathan 
 Edwards, the one last end of all things is 
 that the infinite good might be communica- 
 ted. But the Universal Spirit can reveal 
 himself only in and through individual spir- 
 its, who have the power to know him and 
 the capacity to enjoy him. And since we 
 know of no other finite spirit than man, we 
 may venture the inference, bold though it 
 is, that man is indispensable for the attain- 
 ment of God's glory. Thus man becomes 
 implicated with the final cause of all crea- 
 tion. And here we have an answer to the 
 question concerning anthropocentric teleol- 
 ogy raised a few pages back. In its vulgar 
 form that doctrine has been dislocated by 
 the sciences, especially the heliocentric as- 
 tronomy. But in its deepest thought, it has 
 been reinstated by that theory of evolution 
 which forms the culminating point of mod- 
 ern science. If man is no longer the spatial 
 
AS REALIZING PURPOSE. 215 
 
 centre of a universe that dances attendance 
 upon him, he is the latest offspring of time 
 in a universe that for vast geologic ages 
 has groaned and travailed together with 
 his birth. As Aristotle rightly saw, the 
 end of nature is the production of man. 
 All things are his. And unless the evolu- 
 tionist's analogy between the course of the 
 world and the growth of an organism is 
 misleading, all things, in a certain sense, 
 are for his sake. We cannot for a moment 
 believe that man is merely an incident in 
 a blind rush of mechanical changes. On 
 the other hand, we do not, even in the case 
 of man, expect to find the realization of a 
 final purpose without causal connections. 
 But it is certainly a very suggestive fact, 
 as Darwin, but especially Wallace, has 
 pointed out, that natural selection, which 
 is the moving power' of the organic world, 
 and which was an active agent in the pro- 
 duction of our species, ceases to operate in 
 man, whose development goes on by means 
 of self-conscious deliberation, choice, and 
 effort. ]\Ian is to throw off his brutish 
 heritage, and press on towards perfect life 
 by his own free agency. And the goal of 
 his endeavor is the actualization of those 
 
216 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 spiritual potencies with which he feels him- 
 self charged. In the words of Pythagoras, 
 man's aim is to be like God. In this God- 
 likeness there is a communion with God, 
 which is man's response to the ultimate 
 end of all creation, — the communication 
 of the goodness of God. 
 
 Here, tlien, along with the general doc- 
 trine of purpose, we have a specifically an- 
 thropic teleology. God has crowned man 
 with glory and honor. Whether we vis- 
 ualize his regal position as the centre of 
 cosmic space or the climax of cosmic time, 
 the fact remains that the human spirit is 
 the organ of that communication of God 
 which is the end of the universe. 
 
 The nature of the communion between 
 the Infinite and the finite spirit must be 
 reserved for the following lecture. 
 
LECTURE VI. 
 
 BELIEF IN GOD AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 
 
 So far the hypothesis of the existence 
 of one infinite spirit has presented itself 
 as a philosophical principle for the expla- 
 nation of the universe as a whole. We were 
 led to it, you will remember, by an analy- 
 sis of the fact of becoming or change. Or, 
 more particularly, we found it impossible 
 to understand how things should act upon 
 one another, if, as is ordinarily supposed, 
 they are in reality independent of one 
 another. The fact of reciprocal action of 
 things being given, however, there was no 
 alternative but to regard things as func- 
 tions of one all-inclusive reality which, 
 while remaining identical with itself, yet 
 underwent immanent changes in its states. 
 And this postulate our own self-conscious 
 experience enabled us to satisfy in deter- 
 mining the ground of all existence as 
 spiritual. Ultimate reality, we said, must 
 
 217 
 
218 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 know itself as one amid the multiplicity 
 of its states. And as the source of changes 
 in itself, this reality, we did not hesitate 
 to declare, must be volitional as well as 
 self-conscious. The infinite spirit is no 
 mere sabbatic observer of changes that 
 occur in the universe ; it is itself the pro- 
 ductive ground of them, and they are its 
 states and apart from it have no existence. 
 In the externalization of this spirit through 
 what we call the material world, there 
 must of course be marks of purpose. But 
 it is so seldom human vision can discern 
 them that were we confined to the empiri- 
 cal argument from design, there would be 
 some excuse, at least in mutinous and atra- 
 bilious moods, for treating it as a disproof 
 rather than a proof of the existence of 
 God. Yet it by no means follows, as so 
 many thinkers have hastily concluded, that 
 modern science and Darwinism in partic- 
 ular oblige us to conceive the universe in 
 its entirety and in all its details as the 
 product of a blindly working mechanical 
 necessity. For in that universe we find 
 life and mind. And though science should 
 ultimately succeed in reducing them to 
 their material conditions, — a prospect that 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 219 
 
 is to-day only a dim expectancy, — their 
 peculiar content and significance would 
 not thereby be accounted for, and we should 
 simply be constrained to re-interpret in 
 other than material language the primor- 
 dial elements which wore capable of blos- 
 soming and ripening, under the fixed laws 
 of mechanism, into the flower and fruit 
 of living self-conscious spirit. Hence that 
 teleological view of the world required by 
 the results of our previous metaphysical 
 analysis cannot be disannulled by science, 
 either as science now stands or might ever 
 conceivably stand in the future. As cos- 
 mic principle, therefore, the hypothesis of 
 an infinite self-conscious and volitional 
 being appears to stand on a quite solid 
 basis. 
 
 Even this belief in God is anthropic as 
 well as cosmic in its character. For if the 
 universe as a whole supplies the facts for 
 the explanation of which this hypothesis 
 was needed, it is from man alone we bor- 
 row the content of the hypothesis. The 
 self-conscious essence that is at home witli 
 us in the human microcosm we see to be 
 the interpretative principle of the all-em- 
 bracing macrocosm. But there is a second 
 
220 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 sense in which this theism deserves to be 
 called anthropic. Over and above the cos- 
 mic facts on which we have based the exist- 
 ence of God as a metaphysical being there 
 are specifically human facts that shape 
 and color the conception thus generically 
 established. God is not merely the ground 
 of all things. Not that I would disparage 
 for a moment a metaphysical result short 
 of which the comprehending intellect of 
 man can never rest satisfied. But as the 
 chief end of man is not knowledge, or, to 
 express it more cautiously, as man is more 
 than a knowing intelligence, so his interest 
 in God must go much farther than the 
 conception of Him as an ultimate princi- 
 ple for the interpretation of all existence. 
 For our understanding of the universe, 
 and for the universe itself so far as it is 
 not spiritual, no other determination of the 
 divine nature is necessary. But the com- 
 plex nature of man forces us to consider 
 other predicates of God. For man has a 
 heart and a soul as well as a mind. And 
 a conception of God that satisfies merely 
 the intellect may crush the emotions and 
 aspirations, paralyze the will, and tear 
 from conscience all that is precious, en- 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 221 
 
 nobling, and supremely worthful in the 
 life of humanity. That such ruthless in- 
 tellectual tyramiy is now the fashion in 
 circles of higher thought I would neither 
 conceal from myself nor from you. But 
 the suggestion may be ventured that after 
 all what is true in these matters must ap- 
 prove itself true to the whole man. Only 
 the intellect, it is true, can trace the modes 
 of procedure of reality, as science records 
 them. But in determining the nature of 
 reality itself, the whole being of man, 
 which is the only part of reality we know 
 immediately from the inside must be 
 allowed to appear as witness. Whoever 
 treats himself as the evanescent and worth- 
 less product of blind mechanical motions 
 and percussions may of course reach a 
 more or less consistent theory of the uni- 
 verse, but he has purchased it in violation 
 of all the dearest rights and claims of 
 personality. The question really is whether 
 for the sake of completely realizing the 
 scientific ideal of explaining everything by 
 determinable mechanical processes, the self 
 in whom and for whom and through whom 
 all this scientific knowledge exists should 
 itself be brought down to the level of the 
 
222 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 categories through which it explains the 
 world of objects ; so that whatever spirit- 
 ual content resisted such reduction should 
 be declared illusory surplusage even though 
 it included the beautiful and the good, the 
 belief in freedom, and the hope of im- 
 mortality. It is from its notion of the 
 self, the inevitable centre of everybody's 
 world, that every system of philosophy 
 takes its origin and tone. And the mechan- 
 ical philosophy will always be found irre- 
 fragable by the man who, as Schelling 
 somewhere says, is himself able to realize 
 it in practice; that is, who does not find 
 unendurable the thought of working away 
 at his own annihilation, surrendering the 
 freedom of the will, and being merely the 
 modification of a blind object in whose in- 
 finitude he finds sooner or later his own 
 ethical destruction. Of course appeals to 
 sentiment and prejudice would here be out 
 of place. But the soberest reflection, I 
 may be permitted to say, makes it impos- 
 sible for me to accept this view of person- 
 ality. Nor can I see any ground for it 
 except an unreasoning prejudice in favor, 
 exclusively, of the methods of objective 
 science and a resolute determination to 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 223 
 
 carry them into the life of spirit (itself 
 the author of all science) even though the 
 first condition of success be the denial of 
 everything that is essentially characteristic 
 of spirit. Much as I admire the achieve- 
 ments of the scientific intellect, it is 
 
 " Not for these I raise 
 
 The song of thanks and praise ; 
 But for those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outward things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
 Blank misgivings of a Creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realised, 
 High instincts, before which our mortal Nature 
 Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised : 
 But for those first affections, 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 Which, be they what they may, 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing ; 
 
 Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal Silence : truths that wake, 
 
 To perish never ; 
 Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 
 
 Nor Man nor Boy, 
 Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy ! " 
 
 Now, if this priceless heritage of person- 
 ality, these pure affections, high instincts, 
 supersensuous cravings, and deep-seeing 
 
224 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 intuitions, are to be kept inviolate, as tliey 
 must be if we believe tbem to have an 
 absolute worth, adequate provision must 
 be made for them in any philosophy that 
 is to approve itself true to the entire nature 
 of man. Reality is vastly richer than human 
 thought can compass. And speculation that 
 escapes superficiality is almost certain to 
 fall into the opposite vice of one-sidedness. 
 There are more things, if not in the heavens 
 and on the earth, assuredly in the self-con- 
 scious life of man, than are dreamt of in 
 the mechanical philosophy; and if it is 
 awakened to their presence, it can only 
 explain them as illusions that accompany 
 the functioning of those natural forces 
 which it regards as sole reality. Person- 
 ality is the rock on which such naturalistic 
 theories always suffer shipwreck. We can- 
 not believe ourselves to be the incidental 
 and evanescent appearances they would 
 make us. And for this reason, too, pan- 
 theism is an unsatisfactory philosophy. 
 However superior to the mechanical the- 
 ory in its conception of ultimate reality, in 
 determining the relation of God to finite 
 beings, it leaves no room for human per- 
 sonality. On this crucial point we must 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIBITS. 225 
 
 examine also how the case stands with 
 anthropocosmic theism. 
 
 We have held that the one eternal and 
 ultimate reality is the absolute life of God. 
 As self-conscious and volitional, we desig- 
 nate it spiritual life. Now, it is the nature 
 of spirit to manifest itself. The material 
 world, accordingly, we regard as the expres- 
 sion of the divine will. It is not, as the 
 deist supposed, an instituted system of once 
 created, though now self-subsisting reali- 
 ties, which might, as it were, go on to 
 exist, though God should cease to be. It 
 is the continuous efflux of the divine en- 
 ergy, and apart from God has absolutely 
 no existence. Material things exist simply 
 as modes of the divine activity ; they have 
 no existence for themselves. Spiritual 
 things, on the other hand, exist at once in 
 God and for themselves. They are in God ; 
 for as God is the underlying ground of all 
 things, so philosophy must confess with 
 Scripture that in him we too live and move 
 and have our being. But the characteristic 
 of spiritual beings is, that, like their divine 
 source, they are also for themselves. That 
 is to say, they know themselves as one 
 amid a multiplicity of states which they 
 
226 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 recognize as their own, and they know 
 themselves as freely initiating action on a 
 scene where all other actions are the de- 
 termined issues of antecedent conditions. 
 How beings can be self-contained . persons 
 and at the same time elements of the divine 
 life, we can never perhaps precisely under- 
 stand ; but the planets of the solar system 
 and the cells in the living organism may 
 serve as rude analogies for the visualizing 
 imagination. At any rate, there is no es- 
 cape from the difficulty unless we deny one 
 side of the contrast. But the immanence 
 of all that exists in God is a result of 
 philosophical analysis that can lead to no 
 other conclusion. And the fact of our own 
 personality is an inexpugnable deliverance 
 of consciousness. 
 
 But these positions, be it observed, are 
 not mutually contradictory. And, in fact, 
 the main barriers to their union come al- 
 together from the hard and fast delimita- 
 tions of the popular understanding. If all 
 things are in God, it is assumed that all 
 things alike are without independence. Of 
 course this is true to the extent that no 
 finite things have originated their own 
 existence, a point on which all are happily 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 227 
 
 agreed. But it is false if it means that 
 spiritual and material beings, because all 
 included in the one absolute life, are all 
 on the same plane of reality or unreality. 
 The one kind has risen to a consciousness 
 of self and of freedom ; the other has not. 
 And whether they be in or out of the divine 
 being, the difference between self and self- 
 less stuff is the greatest we know or can 
 imagine. Nor is there any reason why 
 God should not manifest himself in and 
 through degrees of reality, varying from 
 zero to infinity. 
 
 So much truth, at leasts it seems to me 
 to lie in the Hegelian contention that iden- 
 tity and difference are both necessary to 
 the being of the infinite spirit. But the 
 difference above spoken of was rather a 
 difference in the modes of its activity than 
 a difference between those and the spirit 
 itself. Hegel, however, does not oppose 
 man and God. And for my own part, I am 
 unable to see how we can believe in God 
 without at the same time regarding the 
 finite spirit, so far as its essential ground 
 is concerned, as identical, within the limits 
 of its range, with the infinite spirit. It is 
 so because it is an ego. Whatever is not 
 
228 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 an ego stands on a lower plane ; though ego 
 and non-ego are both alike included in the 
 divine life. But in the case of the ego., we 
 have not merely a mode of the divine ac- 
 tivity ; we have, as it were, a part of the 
 divine essence. So that man's greater in- 
 dependence is in fact the result of man's 
 greater dependence upon God. God's love 
 to man is already metaphysically prefigured 
 in the gift of himself for the creation of 
 man. Or, if we choose to express this 
 spiritual relationship in the utterly inade- 
 quate language of causality, we may say 
 that while the infinite spirit is the first 
 cause, finite spirits are the only second 
 causes, — causes because they have the 
 power of initiating action; second causes 
 because they derive it from the first cause, 
 in relation to whom they are effects. The 
 constituents of man's personality are of 
 God, but they carry in their make and 
 constitution the assurance that man does 
 through their operations a portion of work 
 which God has vacated on his behalf. As 
 Dr. Martineau has expressed it: Man is 
 included in Avhat God has caused^ though 
 excepted from what he is causing ; so that 
 while author of all our possibilities, God 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 229 
 
 is not responsible for our actualities. But 
 Dr. Martineau's reference to time is some- 
 what misleading ; for it might be taken to 
 imply that God had set up finite spirits 
 and then left them to themselves. But the 
 fact is, that God is ever present and active 
 in us, so that our existence would collapse 
 were he to withdraw.* But the things he 
 causes are yet distinguishable from the 
 things we cause, and that though in a last 
 analysis our capacity of free initiation is 
 also referable to the supreme cause. Man 
 comes from God and is in God ; but what 
 distinguishes him from selfless things is 
 that he exists for himself and acts of him- 
 self. 
 
 The immanence of both the world and 
 man in God is not, therefore, inconsistent 
 with a belief in the insubstantiality of soul- 
 less things and the free personality of the 
 human spirit. But though our conception 
 of God does not negate the self, it has not, 
 so far as yet developed, provided for any 
 special relation, as, for example, of affec- 
 tion or communion between man and God. 
 Derived from reflection upon the universe, 
 the absolute was endowed with spirituality 
 solely because nothing else was able to 
 
230 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 solve the cosmic problem. That is to say, 
 if God was to be conceived merely as 
 ground of all things, we found he must 
 have the attributes of self -consciousness, 
 power, and self-existence. Such a being is 
 all that is needed by the metaphysician for 
 the explanation of reality and its changes. 
 Whether God is more than a self-conscious, 
 active world-soul remains undecided ; and 
 it can be determined only on the basis of 
 certain special facts of which neither the 
 metaphysician nor the scientist is required 
 to take account. These are the ideals of 
 the human heart. Voicing what ought to 
 be, they present a striking contrast to what 
 is. Yet if God is in truth the ultimate 
 ground of all things, there must be in his 
 nature a principle of union even of the 
 ideal and the real. Yet it is just at this 
 point that scepticism, and honest scepti- 
 cism, too, has always intervened most ef- 
 fectively to balk the aspirations of Chris- 
 tian faith, which can stop at no conception 
 of God short of that of Holy Father. Even 
 David Hume acknowledged the force of 
 the theistic argument till it reached its 
 concluding demonstration of the moral na- 
 ture of God. We shall, therefore, find it 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 231 
 
 no easy task to establish the conviction 
 that in the everlasting ground of things 
 there is a heart of goodness that answers 
 to the supreme' ideals of the moral con- 
 sciousness of mankind. Yet this is a mat- 
 ter of the most vital concern to every one 
 of us. For if God be not Love, the Chris- 
 tian faith is vain. 
 
 Nevertheless I would not emphasize this 
 aspect of truth, to which we must soon re- 
 turn, without mentioning another, which I 
 am sure has been too much overlooked by 
 theological thinkers. God has many attri- 
 butes ; and though goodness is the one that 
 affects most deeply the human heart, crea- 
 tive power and wisdom are just as real 
 and are much more manifest to the empiri- 
 cal observer. It may, therefore, be quite 
 misleading to say, as is often done, that a 
 God without moral character is no God at 
 all. As a matter of fact, the first gods, as 
 was shown in an earlier lecture, were prob- 
 ably non-moral beings. And even civilized 
 peoples, like the Greeks and Romans, were 
 wont in early times to trust in the gods, 
 not because they were benevolent, but be- 
 cause they had been properly propitiated. 
 Of this sort is the faith of the modern 
 
232 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 scientist. In his imagination and feelings 
 he cannot realize the universe, but he looks 
 upon it with awe and wonder and a deep 
 sense of mystery. Now this attitude 
 towards the universe is a worthy and ad- 
 mirable one, and much more reverential 
 than is too often found in those who have 
 learned that the heart of things is also in- 
 finitely good and loving. Though moral 
 ideals may be the highest, we strive 
 not only after goodness, but also after 
 truth, beauty, and fulness of life. And 
 whosoever finds in the universe- the reali- 
 zation of any one of his ideals will bow 
 down and worship the eternal spirit that 
 thus reveals itself to his soul. It matters 
 not that we all see the Godhead from our 
 own point of view. That is an inevitable 
 consequence of our individuality. And it 
 is surely no disparagement of any man's 
 worship that it is awakened and exercised 
 through the medium of that soul which 
 God has given him. To the scientist God 
 is the principle of order, to the artist the 
 soul of beauty, to the man of virtue the 
 will that is absolutely holy. In the Chris- 
 tian church the anthropic view of God has 
 always predominated over the cosmic ; and 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 233 
 
 this has led to an undue disparagement of 
 beauty and truth as compared with virtue. 
 Art and science have been treated as secu- 
 lar, if not positively irreligious. Now 
 modern culture protests against the puri- 
 tan enthronement of goodness above truth 
 and beauty. It regards them as co-equal 
 sister-graces, divine forms that haunt the 
 mind of man and stimulate him to the real- 
 ization of something absolutely worthful. 
 For the decalogue it would substitute the 
 wider new commandment of Goethe : Live 
 resolutely in the Whole, in the Good, in 
 the Beautiful. We all want more life, and 
 it is the yearning for it that leads us to 
 practical religion ; that is, to communion 
 with God. And what I understand Goethe 
 to mean is that this fulness of life with 
 God is best attained when we seek it 
 in the knowledge of the universe, in the 
 practice of moral disciplines, and in the 
 admiration of every thing of beauty. This 
 artistic aspect was especially conspicuous 
 in the Greeks, whose religion was, as 
 Hegel calls it, a religion of beauty. Of 
 the remaining branches of Goethe's pre- 
 cept, life in the Whole is the ideal of the 
 scientist, life in the Good of the ordinary 
 
234 BELIEF IN- GOJ. 
 
 Christian.- But the highest religion can 
 be content with nothing short of the 
 synthesis demanded by Goethe. And I 
 expect it to emerge from the mutual 
 attraction exercised upon each other by 
 ecclesiastical Christianity and secular sci- 
 ence. Religious thinkers will drop their 
 exclusively anthropic idea of God. They 
 will come to see that God is not merely 
 the guarantee of those human hopes about 
 which religion has in the past too exclu- 
 sively turned, but also the sustaining 
 ground of the universe, whose order is 
 revealed by science. And scientific think- 
 ers have already developed a natural the- 
 ology, though in their zeal to destroy the 
 old, they have almost lost sight of their 
 own discovery. Has not the man of sci- 
 ence an object of worship ? He calls it 
 Nature rather than God ; but what's in a 
 name? It is an object that inspires awe, 
 and the scientist's most frequent complaint 
 against popular Christianity is that it is 
 too familiar with that Eternal Being be- 
 fore whom prophets of old hid their faces 
 in the dust. Again, Nature inspires con- 
 fidence as well as terror. To the man who 
 obeys her laws she gives peace and even 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 235 
 
 Joy. As the priests of old knew how to 
 win the favor of the gods, so the scientist 
 understands how to gain the co-operation 
 of Nature. If, in its revolt against tradi- 
 tional Christianity, modern science has 
 been forced to construct de novo a religion 
 of its own, what it has attained is an ob- 
 ject of worship resembling the God of Si- 
 nai, though conceived altogether in terms 
 of cosmic science. And as the anthropic 
 theism of ecclesiastical Christianity is des- 
 tined to take on also a cosmic character, it 
 seems not rash to predict that the cosmic 
 theism of secular science will complete 
 itself by taking account of human ideals, 
 and so go on to add to the awe of Judaism 
 the loving confidence of Christianity. In 
 that event, the two theological tendencies 
 of the day, the positive and negative (as 
 generally regarded), would meet and coal- 
 esce in anthropocosmic theism. And as 
 neither the one nor the other would have 
 any quarrel with art, but rather both de- 
 mand it as a complementary grace, perfect 
 religion would coincide with Goethe's ideal 
 of perfect culture : Life in the Whole, the 
 Good, and the Beautiful. 
 
 But this prospect is not yet realized. 
 
236 BELIEF IN GOD, 
 
 And though the drift of thought tends 
 thitherward, it is obstructed, perhaps defin- 
 itively, by the scientist's inability to believe 
 that the universe at heart is moral, or con- 
 cerns itself in any way with the ideals of 
 man. The relation of the universe to hu- 
 man ideals is the question of questions for 
 Christian theology. In a recent book en- 
 titled Das Wesen der Religion^ which has 
 gone through several editions in Germany, 
 but seems to be unknown in this country, 
 Dr. Bender, of Bonn University, has very 
 ingeniously attempted to show that all re- 
 ligions, alike in their practical and their 
 theoretical aspects, in their rituals and dog- 
 mas, as well as in their revelations, take 
 their origin and content from an effort to 
 protect and realize the ends and ideals of 
 life, be these ideals sensuous or spiritual, 
 individual or universal, naturalistic, ies- 
 thetic, or moral. According to Dr. Bender, 
 the interests and aims of religion are the 
 same as those of culture, though the mode 
 of attaining them is different. In the one 
 case, man is sufficient to himself; in the 
 other, not. But in both cases the impulse 
 is the same, — the instinct that moves us 
 to preserve, enrich, perfect, and beautify 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 237 
 
 our own lives. Belief in God is merely 
 an act of self-preservation in favor of our 
 ideals. The central question of religion is 
 not God, but man. The idea of God does 
 not explain anything ; it simply calms our 
 fears when our ideals seem unrealizable in 
 the world. Prayer is the means by which 
 man in the struggle for existence calls to 
 his aid higher powers, in order to maintain 
 his aims when his own power is insufficient. 
 Thus the organizing principle of all relig- 
 ions is the conception of an end or ideal 
 of life and the belief in its realizability. 
 From this source come all the supernatural 
 beings of religion, the highest, of course, 
 included. And the nature of these beings 
 is also determined by the character of the 
 ideals, in whose interest they have been 
 originated. 
 
 This is an anthropic theology with a ven- 
 geance. The only proof of the existence 
 of God is that man needs his help when 
 the world bears hard on human ideals ! 
 Of course, this is not Dr. Bender's own 
 theistic argument. He comes before us, 
 not as a metaphysician, but as a psycholo- 
 gist whose aim is to trace the motives and 
 processes that have led men everywhere to 
 
238 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 a conception and worship of the Godhead. 
 That mankind has been under a great illu- 
 sion both as regards the datum from which 
 and the transcendent object to which the 
 inference has been made, appears to be Dr. 
 Bender's own personal view. And we have 
 already seen that there is no purely an- 
 thropic tenable argument for the existence 
 of God. Where we take issue with Dr. 
 Bender is in maintaining that there is a 
 cosmic basis for our belief in God. And 
 though religious thinking often ignores it, 
 as our historical sketch made clear enough, 
 it also at times gives it the fullest promi- 
 nence. I question, therefore, the correct- 
 ness of Dr. Bender's analyses, ingenious 
 and fresh as they generally are. His book 
 is another of the many brilliant volumes 
 which have been written to explain how 
 belief in God, considered as devoid of objec- 
 tive foundation actually came into exist- 
 ence. And though it might attract us by 
 its exhaustive treatment of human ideals, 
 we must leave it with the remark that it 
 never raises the question which for us is 
 all-important; namely, whether, as a mat- 
 ter of fact, universal reality concerns itself 
 about human ideals. 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIEITS. 239 
 
 Students of German philosophy will rec- 
 ognize in Dr. Bender's account of the psy- 
 chological process of religion a universal 
 application of Kant's moral argument for 
 the existence of God. Certainly Kant's 
 moral argument has more to recommend it 
 than the illusory inferences which, accord- 
 ing to Dr. Bender, mankind have made for 
 the preservation of their interests and ends. 
 For Kant, at any rate, believed in the abso- 
 lute worth of the moral ideal. The mis- 
 fortune, however, is that, instead of con- 
 necting with that doctrine the existence of 
 God, he took the roundabout and dubious 
 course of connecting it with the propor- 
 tioning of happiness to virtue, which he de- 
 clared a requirement of the practical reason. 
 But Kant's whole ethical system is in irrec- 
 oncilable opposition to this eudsemonism. 
 And what is still more fatal, introspection 
 and reflection fail to convince us of the 
 necessary connection between goodness and 
 happiness. Yet unless virtue and rewards 
 are to be adjusted, Kant has no function 
 for the deity, and no other proof of liis 
 existence. 
 
 The fact will have to be recognized 
 sooner or later that there is no anthropic 
 
240 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 proof of the existence of God, The moral 
 ideal of man may throw some light upon 
 the moral character of God, but it is power- 
 less to prove the divine existence. More 
 than this I cannot concede to Dr. Martineau, 
 who maintains that conscience reveals to 
 us God with the same directness and cer- 
 tainty as sense-perception reveals an exter- 
 nal world. The true state of the case 
 seems rather to be that, though conscience 
 does not prove the existence of one infinite 
 spirit, it yet obliges us to invest it, if 
 existent, with the predicate of righteous- 
 ness. If there be a God, moral laws seem 
 best explained as expressions of his nature. 
 It is difficult, if not impossible, to think 
 that the everlasting ground of things should 
 be indifferent to those virtues and graces 
 of character that constitute for us the 
 chief end of man. 
 
 Against this Avay of thinking Kant raised 
 and emphasized the objection that moral 
 law cannot be given to us from without. 
 It must be imposed upon us by ourselves, 
 since only such autonomous legislation is 
 consistent with moral self-determination. 
 This objection may be allowed as against 
 the popular view that treats conscience as 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIHITS, 241 
 
 a supernatural and unique endowment of 
 the human spirit, a foreign addition to its 
 own proper make-up. If a human being 
 could exist without a consciousness of 
 right and wrong and a sense of the 
 authority of the one over the other, its 
 free life would, as Kant insisted, be turned 
 into bondage by obedience to a moral law- 
 imposed by some external lawgiver. But 
 such an hypothesis does not answer to the 
 nature of man. Man has a moral constitu- 
 tion, and, as Kant rightly saw, he imposes 
 upon himself a law of unconditional obli- 
 gation. Our problem begins where Kant's 
 ends. How can we explain man's recog- 
 nition of moral law apart from an innate 
 endowment which is as distinctively char- 
 acteristic of the human spirit as intelligence 
 or will, and which, like these, must have 
 its ground in the one infinite Spirit? It 
 is not denied that the moral consciousness 
 has its history, just like the intellect. And 
 in the course of its development we can see 
 its gradual purification and expansion. But 
 though certain ethical institutions, like the 
 family, for example, are differently regarded 
 at different times and in various stages of 
 civilization, the quintessence of morality is 
 
242 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 as clearly discernible amongst savages as 
 amongst ourselves, and when due allowance 
 is made for a society whose normal condi- 
 tion is war, the difference either vanishes 
 or remains such as is inevitable from the 
 inequality of development in the intellec- 
 tual faculties and in social organization. 
 Now such a permanent and essential factor 
 in man's make-up must have its ground in 
 the eternal Spirit from which we derive 
 our existence. God, therefore, is a God of 
 righteousness. 
 
 This conclusion, it must now be ad- 
 mitted, is not inevitable for the man who 
 can repudiate the absolute and self-attest- 
 ing majesty of moral law. And various 
 attempts have been made to explain it as 
 an illusion incident to the circumstances 
 of its origin. The most fashionable theory 
 to-day is that mankind was moralized by 
 fortuitous modes of conduct, among which 
 the struggle for existence decided which 
 was best. This theory of evolutionary 
 morals is not so much false as incomplete. 
 There can be little doubt that it was amid 
 the warfare of life that man first awoke to 
 a sense of the value of courage and all the 
 sterner virtues, and even the gentler vir- 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 243 
 
 tues of honesty, truthfulness, fidelity, and 
 compassion, may have been quickened by 
 the same rude process. But the physical 
 conditions under which any mental pro- 
 duct (even a sensation) appears are a very 
 different thing from the nature of that 
 product itself, and they do not in the 
 least touch the question of the innate con- 
 stitution of the soul that enables it to make 
 this response to those external stimulants. 
 And what we have been maintaining is 
 that our perception of right and wrong, 
 and our recognition of the authority of 
 the right, even if they have been quick- 
 ened by natural selection, testify clearly 
 to a moral capacity in the human spirit, 
 which must have its ground in the one 
 infinite Spirit. But should any one see in 
 moral law merely a code of prudential max- 
 ims that had forgotten their selfish utilities 
 and taken themselves for absolute goods, 
 he might retort that though morality had 
 its root in the soul, it was merely a self- 
 seeking root, whose native ugliness had 
 been overlaid by the casual products of 
 natural selection. If the moral ideal, which 
 we have believed something absolutely 
 worthful, were only a form of selfishness 
 
244 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 in disguise, it would of course cease to be 
 an ideal for those who had seen into the 
 illusion, and they would be left Avithout 
 any motive for postulating a moral charac- 
 ter in God. In a last resort, our view of 
 the moral character of God is conditioned 
 by our interpretation of the moral nature 
 and vocation of man. 
 
 I am not, however, disposed to believe 
 that our ethical schools differ as much in 
 this interpretation as they themselves sup- 
 pose. No school would to-day assert that 
 the essence of goodness is selfishness. All 
 schools agree that a large part, if not the 
 whole, of goodness consists in what in its 
 various degrees we name benevolence, love, 
 or self-sacrifice. This is the fundamental 
 principle of Christian ethics, whether we 
 regard the life or the teaching of its founder. 
 But that love is the fulfilling of the law is 
 also the doctrine of John Stuart Mill, the 
 classic expounder of utilitarianism. And 
 though the utilitarian theory has been 
 modified in many ways by an infusion of 
 Darwinism, the "absolute ethics" of Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer still has for goal the 
 Golden Rule of Jesus of Nazareth. More 
 than this ought never to have been claimed 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 245 
 
 by the intuitional moralist. For all our 
 moral codes and institutions are but em- 
 pirical attempts to realize this transcendent 
 ideal. That there is such a moral ideal no 
 school denies, or can deny. But while the 
 intuitional moralist has contented himself 
 with the bald statement of the fact, his 
 more scientific opponents have endeavored 
 to discover the circumstances and processes 
 of its realization. Some of their work has 
 been valuable ; but as for the most part it 
 lay outside the ken of history, it has been 
 made up of arbitrary and dogmatic conjec- 
 ture. But discarding all this surplusage, 
 we find the schools of derivative morality 
 agreeing with the intuitionist in the recog- 
 nition of an absolutely worthf ul moral ideal, 
 — an ideal that is an end in itself, never a 
 means to anything else. And this ideal is 
 described, subjectively, as universal benevo- 
 lence or love ; objectively, as the well-being 
 of mankind. 
 
 Of this ideal human morality is the real- 
 ization. It is this ideal that shapes the 
 relations and institutions that bind us to 
 one another and condition our appropria- 
 tion of external objects. It would of course 
 forever remain a blank in the mind, were 
 
246 BELIEF IN GOB. 
 
 there not a world of persons and things that 
 presented material for its plastic operation. 
 But given these, it realizes itself through 
 differentiation ; that is to say, it takes • as 
 many forms as the material provides for. 
 Thus in relation to the datum of sex, it 
 yields the institution of marriage and the 
 virtue of chastity. In relation to the datum 
 of labor, it yields the institution of prop- 
 erty and the virtue of justice. Of course 
 with deeper insight into the essential con- 
 tent of the ideal, we become dissatisfied 
 with existent morality, and press forward 
 to the mark of a higher calling. This is* 
 moral progress, which begins with indi- 
 viduals, and ultimately embraces nations. 
 Though slow, it has already made sevem,! 
 revolutions in the history of the family; 
 and if I rightly read the signs of the times, 
 it seems likely in our own generation to 
 change our views of property and justice. 
 
 To come now to the application of this 
 doctrine. I have maintained that though 
 the basis of the theistic argument is cosmic, 
 it is only our own self-conscious spirit that 
 enables us to discover what the natute of 
 the cosmic principle really is. But though 
 an intelligent and volitional being would 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 247 
 
 account for the phenomena of the material 
 world, it would supply no ground for the 
 moral ideal of man, which is as real as any- 
 other fact in the universe. We must not, 
 therefore, hesitate to carry our " anthropo- 
 morphism " so far as to conceive the Spirit 
 of the universe as a God of love. It is 
 true that this attribute of God is not so 
 fully evidenced as the others. They are re- 
 quired both for the interpretation of nature 
 and of humanity ; this, only for the inter- 
 pretation of the moral life of man. Still, 
 it is highly improbable that the eter- 
 nal Reality which has brought us forth, 
 and charged us with the duty of loving 
 one another, — so that love is the highest 
 good and end in life, — should itself be a 
 loveless Reality. And when we further 
 remember that we have no experience of a 
 Spirit in whom self-consciousness and will 
 are divorced from goodness, we shall find 
 ourselves obliged by sheer consistency, if 
 we say, as we must say, that God is spirit, 
 to acknowledge also that God is love. In- 
 deed, did our metaphysics go far enough, 
 it would have to confess that man has an 
 ideal of goodness solely because the infinite 
 spirit, of which the finite is a partial reve- 
 
248 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 lation, is the perfect realization of good- 
 ness. I do not mean, of course, that God 
 realizes in himself our differentiated moral- 
 ity, — our ethical precepts, laws, and insti- 
 tutions. For these have significance only 
 for a finite spirit that has outside itself a 
 world of co-equal spirits and of things, 
 with which it holds external relations. 
 But love, which is the underlying ground 
 of all our morality, may be actualized in 
 the divine nature. For love is precisely 
 that which effaces distinction between our- 
 selves and another. And God's love for man 
 is the expression of his oneness with us. 
 This oneness, however, was implied in our 
 metaphysical theory of anthropocosmic the- 
 ism, which is thus confirmed by the result 
 of our ethical reflections. It only remains 
 to add that if, as we acknowledged, man 
 has communion with God through the 
 avenues of the true and the beautiful, the 
 deepest communion comes through the love 
 that answers to our consciousness of God's 
 love, since nothing else but love can abolish 
 the distinction between its subject and its 
 object. 
 
 We cannot attribute goodness to the 
 eternal ground of things without feeling 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 249 
 
 painfully the contradictions of actual ex- 
 perience. At the breath of sin .and suffer- 
 ing every theory of the universe grows 
 sombre and unsteady. But that there is 
 nevertheless a striving after a supreme end 
 in the world is a belief we cannot be made 
 to surrender. Good must in some way be 
 the final cause of ill. Absolute evil — 
 evil in itself, in its beginning, and in its 
 issue — is an eternal devil we cannot brook 
 to keep its state in the world. This is the 
 motive to every theodicy. This is why 
 we have a problem of evil, but no corre- 
 sponding problem of good. Into such a 
 deep subject we cannot plunge at the 
 close of this series of lectures. But I may 
 observe that as among lower animals the 
 struggle for life has conduced to greater 
 perfection, so men too are made perfect 
 through suffering. And that not merely 
 through chastening of character, which is 
 a discipline that perhaps healthy men need 
 as much as the sick, who, it must be ac- 
 knowledged, sometimes miss it through ex- 
 tremity of suffering. But suffering induces 
 men to look for remedies. And these are 
 to be found only through a knowledge of 
 natural laws. Without human needs primi- 
 
250 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 tive man would not have undertaken the 
 labor of investigation. And God, as ground 
 of nature, would have remained unknown 
 to mankind. In a very real sense, there- 
 fore, God could not have revealed himself 
 to the race without human suffering. And 
 the end being attained, man is using his 
 knowledge of nature for the elimination of 
 suffering, which has already proceeded at 
 such a rate that it is scarcely optimistic to 
 forecast its ultimate disappearance. Mean- 
 while the study of nature, to which need 
 compelled mankind, will continue an end 
 in itself. Even if we had a perfect science 
 of medicine, the infinite complexity and 
 immensity of nature would still be unex- 
 plored. 
 
 As suffering leads men to a knowledge 
 of the cosmic manifestation of God, so also 
 it is the indispensable condition of the 
 emergence of sympathy and compassion in 
 the heart of man. Without suffering and 
 mutual needs there could be no human 
 fellowship and love. The sociability of 
 animals, which prefigures human love, is 
 founded on the same basis. But as love is 
 the cementing principle of human society, 
 so it is love that unites us to God. It is 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 251 
 
 through love, as we have seen, that the 
 infinite spirit reveals itself in a very espe- 
 cial way to the finite. Without some feel- 
 ing of want, some suffering in a greater 
 or less degree, man could not receive this 
 revelation of the heart of God. 
 
 Nor is the problem of sin altogether 
 insoluble from the point of view of the 
 theism here advanced. At least we can 
 understand how it originates and conjec- 
 ture the function it subserves. That the 
 possibility of sin is the correlative of the 
 free initiative God has vacated on man's 
 behalf is an old and not unsatisfactory ex- 
 planation of its origin. Now the essence 
 of sin, as mystics have always felt, is the 
 enthronement of self. It is selfishness, 
 self-isolation. Yet without such self-absorp- 
 tion there could be no sense of union with 
 God. For consciousness is possible only 
 through opposition. To knoAv A we must 
 know it through not- J.. Alienation from 
 God is the necessary condition of com- 
 munion with God. And this is the mean- 
 ing of the scripture that where sin abounded 
 grace shall much more abound. 
 
 The movement of consciousness from the 
 one pole to the other, or what we call con- 
 
252 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 version, may also be understood, in a meas- 
 ure, from the standpoint of antliropocos- 
 mic theism. The change is very properly 
 described as a new birth. For that man 
 is made a new creature who has come to 
 see that God and not self is the centre of 
 reality. Still it must not be forgotten 
 that a natural birth is only the emergence 
 into light of a reality that already existed 
 in a definite fashion. So in the new birth 
 the soul simply actualizes in its life and 
 experience what was metaphysically po- 
 tential before ; namely, its union with God. 
 God and man were always one ; God was 
 always love : the new birth consists in 
 man's recognition and appropriation of tliis 
 fact. 
 
 The doctrine of the God-man is the nat- 
 ural consequence of our theory of uni- 
 versal being. God is the Father of spirits; 
 men are the children of God. That the 
 sons of the divine Father should be dif- 
 ferently endowed is a matter that presents 
 no difficulty. The great spirits of the race 
 are the standard-bearers of its civilization ; 
 and we are all the richer for the artistic 
 sense of Pheidias, the organizing power of 
 Caesar, the poetic genius of Shakespeare, 
 
AS FATHER Oh' SPIRITS. 253 
 
 and the scientific intellect of Newton. 
 Greater yet is our debt to those still higher 
 spirits that have lived and died for the 
 good. Nor among these choicest sons of 
 the universal Father is there any meta- 
 physical impropriety in supposing one to 
 be in some pre-eminent sense the Son of 
 God. I do not know, however, that any 
 gain would come to our theology in de- 
 scribing this unique personality as " very 
 God," much less as " mere man." For it 
 is a false metaphysic that separates God 
 and man, and entangles itself with its own 
 one-sided abstractions. Personality can- 
 not be rendered in terms of any abstract 
 system, without omitting its essence. We 
 can he persons, and feel the influence of 
 persons, but personality is something other 
 than any definition of it. That men are 
 now giving up the search for barren for- 
 mulae to describe the Christ and insisting 
 everywhere on the vitalizing power of his 
 gracious personality, seems to me the most 
 hopeful feature in the religious life of our 
 day. Only in this way is it possible for 
 the Son of Man to become the actual 
 saviour of humanity. 
 
 Of that life and immortality brought to 
 
264 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 light in the Gospel, our theistic theory- 
 supplies the metaphysical basis. Because 
 man lives in God here and now, he shall 
 live with God in the kingdom where time 
 and space are not. This is a metaphysical 
 insight that carries us far beyond all the 
 materialistic objections to existence after 
 death. But even on that lower plane it 
 may not be out of place to remark that 
 though physical and psychical changes co- 
 exist, we are still as far as ever from see- 
 ing any necessary connection between them 
 which might justify the belief that when 
 the brain is out the man is dead. The 
 difference between the ego and the brain 
 is absolute. One is a thing, closely con- 
 nected, it is true, with our life ; the other 
 is a self that is conscious of its existence 
 and opposes itself to mere things. This 
 selfhood it is also that forbids us to merge 
 at death the individual into the universal 
 life. Pantheistic disparagement of person- 
 ality runs counter to our experience of its 
 existence, our conviction that it is the 
 highest fact in the universe, and our re- 
 flective insight into its indispensableness 
 for the self-revelation of God, whom the 
 pantheist mistakes for an infinite that ex- 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 255 
 
 eludes the finite. Not only is the self an 
 inexpugnable reality, but its capacity of 
 knowing and loving being of larger scope 
 than can be satisfied by the measure of 
 our earthly life, its very make and func- 
 tions carry with them the postulate of 
 eternity. And this postulate is accredited 
 by a theory that conceives death as a mere 
 change in things, while the ego continues 
 to live in the embrace of the absolute life. 
 Because we are one with God, the ground 
 of our communion can never be broken. 
 And in the development of the religious 
 consciousness, it was this lively sense of 
 present conftnunion with God that first led 
 men to conceive of an eternal continuance 
 of it hereafter. Such, at any rate, is the 
 forceful and aspiring logic of the earlier 
 Psalmists and the writer of the book of 
 Job. So, also, was it with the assurance 
 that nothing evil could happen to the good 
 man, that Socrates, after rehearsing all 
 other arguments against annihilation, com- 
 posed himself for death. 
 
 Of rewards and punishments which once 
 played so prominent a part in natural 
 theology, our metaphysical theory, strictly 
 considered, has nothing to say. We have 
 
256 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 a 
 
 given reasons for our faith in an intelligent 
 and moral ground of the universe, whose 
 life makes human life divine and immortal, 
 whose love is of such incalculable reach, 
 that even sin and suffering must be the 
 media of its revelation. That God is Love 
 was the good tidings of the Gospel of 
 Christ. And love is the fulfilling of the 
 whole law. It is superfluous, therefore, to 
 predicate any other moral attribute of God. 
 Popular theology, however, insists that the 
 Deity must also be described as just. And 
 in this instance it receives powerful sup- 
 port from Dr. Martineau, who contends 
 that our moral nature compels us to con- 
 ceive of God as invested with these three 
 attributes : benevolence towards sentient 
 beings ; justice towards moral beings who 
 are under probation ; amity towards beings 
 that have attained a moral harmony. In 
 view of this contention, we must inquire 
 what is meant by the justice of God, and 
 especially its relation to the doctrine of 
 rewards and punishments. 
 
 In this inquiry it is important to bear in 
 mind two facts. First, in early times jural 
 and ethical notions were not distinguish- 
 able. If in the course of ages they have, 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 257 
 
 at least to a considerable extent, become 
 differentiated and taken on distinctive char- 
 acteristics, their common source was un- 
 written custom. It need not surprise us, 
 therefore, to find that at the present day the 
 moral continues to be confounded with the 
 legal. The penalties by which laws are 
 enforced are transferred from crimes to 
 evils ; and the divine author of moral law 
 becomes, like the earthly sovereign, a ter- 
 ror to evil-doers. Secondly, the trium- 
 phant faith in the love and goodness of 
 God is, as we have shown in an earlier 
 lecture, a late growth in the religious con- 
 sciousness of mankind. It has not yet, 
 even *in Christendom, succeeded in dis- 
 placing the older conception of the Deity 
 as a God of wrath and terror. And a sort 
 of compromise has silently established it- 
 self between the ethical religion of Christ 
 and the earlier legal religions, whereby the 
 essential features of both, contradictory 
 though they are, have been perpetuated. 
 It is to this source, and not to tlie deliver- 
 ances of the moral consciousness, that I 
 refer Dr. Martineau's list of the divine at- 
 tributes. Justice is a civic virtue which 
 has too narrow a meaning to predicate of 
 
258 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 the Christian conception of God. Our 
 courts of justice have too long furnished 
 us with metaphorical descriptions of the 
 divine government. From the primitive 
 notion of the Deity as a judge or sovereign 
 enforcing his arbitrary decrees, we must 
 rise to the Christian thought of a loving 
 Father bent on the education of the hu- 
 man race. And from this higher point of 
 view, if any place were left for a divine 
 punitive function, it could have no other 
 end than the well-being of the sufferer. 
 
 It is to this higher standpoint that the 
 moral and religious consciousness of our age 
 is steadily advancing. To the economic 
 and jural consciences of earlier genera- 
 tions there seemed a necessary connection 
 between virtues and rewards and between 
 vices and punishments. The conventional 
 penalties attached by legislatures to the 
 violation of laws seemed to belong to the 
 nature of things ; and God himself, to be 
 just, was conceived as distributing felicity 
 and suffering according to the deserts of 
 the recipient. But it is no sense of justice 
 that demands punishment for crime. The 
 only possible justification for inflicting 
 punishment upon a criminal is either the 
 
AS FARTHER OF SPIBITS. 259 
 
 protection of society or the improvement 
 of the criminal, or both ends combined. 
 But the Omnipotent needs no protection 
 against evil doers. Neither does he, any 
 more than the perfect human father, have 
 to resort to punishment for the education 
 of his children. External punishment, 
 therefore, is unthinkable for human sins. 
 Nor can there be any external reward for 
 human goodness, the very essence of which 
 consists in being for its own sake. The 
 hope of rewards would transform virtue 
 into prudence. 
 
 But the truth which this prudential and 
 legal theory of external rewards and pun- 
 ishments fails to express is clear enough 
 when we take a more philosophic view of 
 the human soul. If we neither personify 
 nor localize spiritual conditions, it yet re- 
 mains true that in the divinely established 
 order of things, every act or thought leaves 
 its impress on our character and makes us 
 either more godlike or more carnal. This 
 immanent natural causation popular the- 
 ology takes for an external administration 
 in another sphere of being. Here is the 
 basis of those legal and penal ideas it 
 associates with the future life. The truth, 
 
260 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 of course, is that heaven and hell, as they 
 will be, have begun here and are in us now. 
 
 " The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." 
 
 Nothing requires us then to modify the 
 conclusion already reached that love is the 
 complete expression of the moral character 
 of God. This also is the burden of the 
 revelation through Christ as it is the one 
 imperishable idea of every form of the 
 Christian faith. I believe, therefore, that 
 it is to the religion of Christ, as the abso- 
 lute religion, that we shall find ourselves 
 approximating, the deeper our soundings in 
 the soul of man and of nature. But that 
 religion is not to be confounded with any 
 rigid and unprogressive creed that claims, 
 in a formidable array of ancient articles, a 
 monopoly of Christian truth. Not merely 
 do we need, what Locke so earnestly de- 
 manded, a broadening of the bottom of 
 religion ; we need also a recognition of its 
 constant progressiveness. For our knowl- 
 edge of God must continue to grow with 
 our knowledge of humanity and nature 
 through which alone he reveals himself. 
 The endless problem of religious thought 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 261 
 
 will therefore be the resetting of the 
 religion of Christ in the framework of 
 contemporary knowledge. When this is 
 wanting, there arises a warfare, not indeed 
 as the vulgar suppose of science with re- 
 ligion, but of later science with earlier 
 science in terms of which religion is still 
 expressed. Modern science is not antag- 
 onistic to the religion of Christ, but it is 
 fatal to those confessions of the Christian 
 religion which have been embodied in an 
 antiquated psychology, anthropology, cos- 
 mology, and history. The process of re- 
 adjustment is going on rapidly, and it is 
 much more thorough in the actual beliefs 
 of men than in the revised creeds that are 
 supposed to represent them. Even the 
 new biblical criticism has won a victory 
 almost as complete as that of astronomy, 
 geology, and zoology. The sober and 
 cautious spirit of modern culture has once 
 for all domiciled itself in the realm of 
 theology also. 
 
 It is perhaps on the subject of miracles 
 that the readjustment is slowest and most 
 difficult. Nor is this astonishing, since, as 
 Goethe put it, 
 
262 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 Das Wunder ist des Glauhens liebstes KindA 
 
 Both the metaphysical possibility and the 
 historical evidence of miracles have been 
 canvassed with a great array of learning 
 and philosophy. The a priori arguments 
 are pretty nearly what they were in the 
 time of Hume. But the problem has 
 taken on a new complexion from the ad- 
 vance in critical and historical scholarship. 
 Miracles can be accounted for, — at least, 
 in the belief of those who describe them. 
 And whether they actually happened or 
 not is a question that is left to answer it- 
 self. It is, however, on the answer to this 
 question, that many religious minds sup- 
 pose their faith to depend. And on this 
 point I will venture a couple of observa- 
 tions. The first is that whatever may be 
 the final word regarding miraculous hap- 
 penings in the realm of nature, every hu- 
 man soul in the present condition of our 
 knowledge is a miracle — a miracle which 
 is especially conspicuous in the great 
 geniuses of our race. Such a miracle was 
 the founder of Christianity whose marvel- 
 lous personality still works wonders on the 
 
 1 The Miracle is dearest Child of Faith. 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIRITS. 263 
 
 souls of men. This is a fact of actual ex- 
 perience which every inquirer may verify 
 for himself. And as it is not supported, 
 neither is it invalidated by any views that 
 may be entertained regarding a unique 
 power exercised over nature two thousand 
 years ago. My second observation is that 
 in considering miracles we must always 
 distinguish between the picture or symbol 
 and the thing signified. For example, 
 most religions, including the Christian, 
 tell of the miraculous ascension of their 
 founders to heaven. Now the thought 
 which it is here attempted to picture before 
 the eyes, is that the souls of the good, 
 untouched by death, live eternally with 
 God. With this thought philosophy and 
 theology have alike made us familiar. 
 And we are able to realize it without the 
 aid of the visualizing imagination. But 
 to the average Jew and Greek of the first 
 Christian century, whose conception of the 
 hereafter was that of a shadowy existence 
 in the underworld of sheol or hades, the 
 Christian doctrine of an actual and eternal 
 life with God was novel, startling, and al- 
 together unrealizable in abstract thought. 
 But what understanding could not con- 
 
264 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 ceive, imagination could symbolize in pic- 
 tures of cosmic space. It is in fact a law of 
 religious history that vision always comes 
 to the aid of faith. And up to the time 
 of the Copernican astronomy the visual 
 picture of a flight above the stars served 
 to realize and verify the belief in continued 
 life with God. But in the restless march 
 of mind, the aids of one generation become 
 the obstacles of the next. And our helio- 
 centric astronomy, with its conception of il- 
 limitable space and infinite worlds, with its 
 delocalization of heaven and decentraliza- 
 tion of earth, has made the once expressive 
 picture of an ascension through the clouds 
 altogether meaningless. The abstract doc- 
 trine of immortality has itself become 
 perfectly intelligible to us. The symbol 
 which once interpreted it now only ob- 
 scures it. Meantime popular theology has 
 taken the symbol for the substance. It is 
 concerned to prove that the Christ actually 
 disappeared in the upper air from the 
 vision of his disciples. It ignores the one 
 important question, what was the meaning 
 or intention of this flight even if we sup- 
 pose it to have taken j)lace. To pre-Co- 
 pernican thought it meant of course an 
 
AS FATHER OF SPIBITS. 265 
 
 ascent to heaven. But in our theory of 
 the universe it can have no such signifi- 
 cance. It is in fact an obsolete picture of 
 an eternal truth. That truth is the fact 
 of continued life with God, uninterrupted 
 even by death. Here is the real mystery, 
 the miracle of miracles, in whose naked 
 presence all symbols vanish away. 
 
 From sjmibol to essence, from picture to 
 reality, from myth to fact, from the Chris- 
 tian religion to the religion of Chi'ist : 
 such is the movement which under the in- 
 fluence of scientific criticism is reshaping 
 the theology of our day. The . goal is no 
 longer dogmas about the Messiah, but the 
 actual content of the revelation made in 
 and through the historic Christ. This, it 
 is felt, is the imperishable essence of every 
 form of Christianity. Now, though it is no 
 doubt difficult to describe adequately a 
 religion that was embodied in a personality, 
 it will be admitted that the main constitu- 
 ent of the religion of Christ was a sense 
 of filial relation to God conceived as uni- 
 versal Spirit and Father. The examina- 
 tion we have undertaken of the grounds 
 for belief in God seemed, therefore, to 
 be demanded by the movement and ten- 
 
266 BELIEF IN GOD. 
 
 dency of contemporary Christian theology. 
 What its value may be as a contribution 
 to the question at issue, must be left to 
 others to determine. But for my own part 
 I think it has been shown that the phe- 
 nomena both of the universe and of human 
 life require the thinking mind to postulate 
 a Supreme Ground of things which we are 
 entitled to describe as self-conscious Spirit 
 and loving Father. 
 
 TJNIVERSIT 
 
 Typography by J. S, Gushing & Co., Boston. 
 Presswork by Berwick & Smith, Boston. 
 
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