Author: Charles Hartshorne
In the tablet of the universe there is no letter save Thy Name, By what name, then, shall we invoke Thee?
Jami, poet of Iran
Deus est caritas.
— THe VULGATE
[p. 174]
The relation of God to the world must necessarily be conceived, if at all, by analogy with relations given in human experience. To reject such analogies completely would be to adopt a wholly “negative” or empty theology, besides contradicting the basic religious doctrine that man is the image of God. Accordingly, a principal task of any theology is to examine the relations in which things stand in our experience in order to discover the direction in which the indeed superior, but not in every sense incomparable, relations of God are to be sought. (The Thomist view that God is not subject to relations will be dealt with in chapter 7. In any case, things have relations to God, and that is enough for the argument of this chapter.)
We could conceivably experience relations between (a) human beings and other human beings or creatures not radically superior or inferior to them; (b) human beings and creatures inferior to them; © such inferior creatures and others of their kind; (4) human beings and what is superior to them; (e) superior beings and others of their kind; (f) subhuman and superhuman beings. Since God is the most exalted of all related terms, © is not likely to be very helpful; and (d), (e), and (f) correspond to nothing [p. 175] very clearly given in our experience. Except for God himself, who is to be interpreted through analogy with something else, no definite individual unambiguously superior to man himself is known to us, unless it be the universe as a whole, and the character of this whole is part of what we wish to find out; for the questions, How is God related to the universe? and, What is the universe? must be closely connected. Nor is the universe as a whole given in any clear way. Hence our resources reduce to (a) and (b). Here we meet two conflicting considerations. (A) seems to be the religiously preferred basis of analogy. God is to the creatures as a human father to human children, or a ruler to the ruled, or a beloved to a lover, or a friend to the befriended. But philosophically this is doubly insufficient by itself: it throws no light on the radical superiority of creator to creatures; and it throws no light on the immanence or omnipresence ascribed to God. It suggests that he is merely outside things, operating on them through intermediaries, such as sound waves, light waves, etc., whereas all such intermediaries are also his creatures.
We are driven to (b) as our last resort. And here also we encounter certain difficulties. Our relation to the subhuman, to bear much analogy to the relation of God to the world, must be a relation to a whole of things all of which are radically inferior to us, and in which whole we may be said to be something like omnipresent or immanent. There is one and only one such whole — the human body. Gertain objections arise, however. The human body does not, for direct perception, contain distinct individual things, as the world to which God is to be related certainly does. It is a quasi-continuous solid, differentiated, but without clear-cut separateness or independence of parts. Hence it is feared that to interpret the world as though it were God’s body would be to deny the reality of individuals as such [p. 176] other than God. And this difficulty joins with the preference of many theologians for the pluralistic version of firsttype theism — that is, for a God in every sense independent of the world — to create a prejudice against the fair consideration of the mind-body analogy. Even for secondtype theism this prejudice is justified, unless it can be shown that the mind-body analogy can somehow be combined with the analogy of human social relations, upon which religion does insist, and which has the philosophical merit of being the only case of a relation both terms of which are equally well understood by us human beings. We know equally well what it is to be a human individual knowing or loving another human individual and to be such an individual known or loved by another. We have ourselves been both. Thus we must use this uniquely familiar relation as a hypothetical or problematic analogy in interpreting all relations in so far as less familiar — if itis true that knowledge proceeds from known to unknown. Now the main point of this chapter is that the human-tohuman analogy and the mind-body analogy can perfectly well be combined if both are adequately generalized.
First of all, modern science shows us (it might have been inferred from philosophical principles) that the seeming solidity of the body is an exaggeration of sense perception, due to the mere fact that perception is (for easily specified biological reasons) on the macroscopic scale, while the real individuals in the body are microscopic. They are not for all that a whit less real. The microscope and other even more powerful instruments of detection no more create the objects they enable us to distinguish than the unaided eye creates deer or horses. Philosophers made a pure error in philosophic method when, from the fact that no organism contains individual parts which as such are clearly percei able, they inferred that organisms probably or certainly [p. 177] contain no individual parts. The premise of the inference was that what does not appear distinctly to the human senses probably or certainly does not exist. The probabilities should have been estimated just the other way. For we have only to see that we can never, as Hume pointed out, from direct sense perception alone derive the slightest hue to the future behavior of bodies to draw the certain inference that the present actuality of bodies is very scantily revealed to our perception. For this present actuality must contain part at least of the ground of future behavior, and the fact that, as Hume so well insisted, we directly see no hint of the future in the present state of a body — for instance, no hint of the flame in the match before its being struck — is proof enough that there is something in the body which is hidden from us. Why should not this hidden something involve a multiplicity of invisible parts? And there is no reason to think these parts lacking in real individuality. It is the visible things which are typically lacking in individuality; heaps of dirt, deposits of minerals, bodies of water, clouds — it would be hard to see how anything could be less individual than these! We say the water flows; but what really does the moving — the whole mass of water, the drops, or still smaller imperceptible parts? Only science locates definite individual boundaries, distinct active agents, in these amorphous, “passive” masses.+ And it infers these individuals not only for inorganic wholes but as parts of organisms also. Thus a body, to the best of our knowledge, is really a, “world” of individuals, and a mind, if the body is one having a mind (or one capable of thinking and feeling) is to that body something like an indwelling God.
Let us see how inevitable and apt this analogy is, centuries of prejudice to the contrary notwithstanding.
Knowledge, as we know it in ourselves, has more than [p. 178] one dimension. It varies as to scope, but it varies also as to immediacy and distinctness. Human beings know, by direct and vivid intuition, only a tiny circle of facts. In this respect they seem scarcely superior to the higher animals. The greater range and reliability of human knowledge is due of course to imaginative and inferential leaps, more or less subjected to criticism, beyond immediacy. But if we could intuit the whole environment simultaneously and distinctly, there would (unless perhaps to project plans for the future) be no need for such imaginative transcendence. Nor can omniscience be conceived except as clear intuition of the entire cosmos.
Similar remarks apply to power. Man has power over many things, if we include indirect forms of control, control through intermediaries, or “instruments” in the broadest sense. But of direct power man has at any time very, very little. Omnipotence could only be direct control of every part of the universe, since indirect control is subject to the imperfections inhering in all instruments.
Our problem is now precise: Over what has man really direct control, and of what has he really immediate knowledge? For when we have found this area of quite immediately known and controlled objects we shall know that, as our relation to such objects, so, though in a more exalted way, is God’s relation to the universe —in so far as the theological analogy has any validity. For if we have any knowledge and power that is immediate, then — since nothing can be more immediate than immediate— the only dimension left for God’s superiority is that of scope and completeness with respect to all the objects in the universe.
Over exactly what does man have direct control? Control is the ability to carry out a purpose. Now the immediate effect of a human purpose is just one thing: a change [p. 179] in the mind and body of the purposer. Only after the man has induced in himself a shift in his muscles does any effect of his decision appear in the world beyond him. The immediate object of effective human volition is a change in the human body. In cases of paralysis the area of control is greatly limited even within the body; and it is considerably limited in extent even in the normal organism. We thus arrive at the far-reaching conclusion: the powerrelation in man which alone can be used as basis for the theological analogy is the mind-body relation, or rather, a part of this relation. However much God’s relation to the world may differ from man’s relation to his body, it must be more similar to it in one chief respect than to any other of man’s relations. For instance, let us consider the oft-cited relation of man as artisan to artificial objects. The watchmaker does not directly control the production of the watch, not in the slightest. He controls the motions of his fingers, and these in turn control the formation of the watch, directly or via intermediary tools and machines. Surely God controls the world not by hands, but by direct power of his will, feeling, and knowledge. Now it is equally not by hands that man himself Influences the nerve cells which initiate the train of activities spoken of. By the nervous mechanism man controls other things; but there is no further mechanism between his will and the nerves themselves (unless one agrees with the “occasionalists,” with Leibniz, and with certain contemporary “personalists” that God is such a mechanism, that our only direct relations are with God —a position the difficulties of which are well known). Here and here alone we are Godlike in directness of power over individuals other than our own ego. Only after this fact has been adequately exploited will it be worth while to consider the possibilities of the artisan analogy in its indirect aspects.
[p. 180] Admittedly, to say, without further qualification, that God is like us in knowing and willing would satisfy no one. All agree that if he is like us in these respects he is also, just in these respects, infinitely unlike us, for his knowledge and volition are the perfection of knowledge and will. He knows and wills eminenter, in a uniquely exalted fashion. So far there is agreement. But some theologians are so afraid that the dissimilarity involved in the eminence will be underestimated that they prefer to hold that God does not really know or will, but that at most we can say he is not ignorant or powerless. Most theologians agree, however, that this negative doctrine must at some point be dropped, and a positive affirmation of some sort accepted. But with regard to the possession of a body, the negative procedure almost completely predominated (except in Plato, who could not integrate the “ideal animal” with the Creator, and in Stoicism, which of course suffered from its own defects). Little effort was made to explore the possible meanings of an eminent, a uniquely perfect body; instead, one thought more or less vaguely and loosely about the features of the human body and what was supposed to be known about the cosmic body, thought it obvious that nothing worthy of the divine could result from such conceptions, confirmed this conclusion by appeal to the dogmas of impassivity, immutability, and simplicity, and dismissed the subject with contempt. (Theological contempt and snobbery are proverbial, and have been powerful inhibitors of analysis.)
In particular it was held obvious that bodies, being composite, and mutable, must also be destructible, though how it can really be proved that the sustaining and preserving power which even the weakest minds have over their bodies could not in the most eminent mind amount to an unconditional power to preserve the body always, I [p. 181] think it would be impossible to say. Clearly there is a fallacy of imperfect disjunction here. An organic body is both composite and simple, it is a complexity, but an integrated complexity. That the bodies we know, other than God, all suffer death as well as undergo change proves strictly nothing about the — by hypothesis unique — body of God. If such reasoning were allowed, how could we object when atheists argue that all minds, and therefore God, are more or less weak, dependent for existence upon their environment, ignorant, etc.? If the idea of body is treated according to the same principles as are generally accepted by theologians in regard to mind, it will be found that there is nothing against the conception of an indestructible body. True it is that bodies preserve themselves by developing new parts from time to time, to replace those which have disintegrated; but for the body as a whole to survive it is only necessary that the one process keep pace with the other. Now the fact that all bodies less than the universe seem eventually to fail to maintain such a balance is not inconsistent with the notion that the universe itself does maintain it. To have an external environment is to depend upon factors not under immediate control, and sooner or later these factors may happen to conflict fatally with one’s internal needs. But the universe as a whole, if it is an organism at all, must immediately control all its parts; so what is to prevent it from setting unsurpassable limits to disintegration in relation to construction? Not its composite character, for there is also its simple character as one “minded” organism (in Mead’s phrase). ‘The composition involves mutability; but the unity sets limits to mutability which make corruption of the whole impossible. The assumption that a composite must be merely that, at least potentially a mere heap of parts, is unfounded. Again, the argument that in a composite [p. 182] there must be a combining principle which holds the parts together but is itself without parts, proves only that if God be complex there must be something in him which is simple and always the same, and this is fully provided for by the A factor in the AR doctrine. The simple something in God is not God, but the abstract aspect or mere self« identity, rather than the concrete totality, of God; his essence, but not his accidents (see chapters 1, 7, and 8).
An objection to our argument might be that the immediate object of human volition cannot be the body; for according to both modern behaviorism and Aristotelianism the mind is a state or form or function of the body, and hence cannot act upon the body as a separate entity. But, however one may seek to identify body and mind, there is one distinction which must be made, that between the body as a single individual and the body as an association of cells (and these of molecules). It is to the bodily whole rather than to the bodily parts — even taking these collectively — that human thought and volition primarily belong, while the nervous changes and muscular processes are almost indifferently ascribable to the body and its parts taken collectively. The cells do not think our thoughts or will our volitions (at least, not as we do), since they are many and the human thinker and purposer is one; but to say the body changes in position or posture is precisely to refer to certain collective changes in the positions of its parts relatively to one another and to the environment of the whole collection. The body as a whole, as a dynamic individual unit (not a collection) or—it is the same thing — asa mind, wills: the parts of the body (which may be minds, but not that mind) respond. Analogously, when a army moves, this movement coincides with the sum of motions of its members, but it is not normally the members which initially will the movement. If the mind of the commander [p. 183] were more intimately and immediately effective than it is in setting up the subordinate movements and volitions which constitute the operation as attaching to the parts, the soldiers, and more responsive in its turn to impulses coming from them, the situation would be a more literal analogy to the mind-body relation than it in fact is.
In short, a man directly controls his body, within limits; and there is no clear evidence that he directly controls anything else.[1] Even if you say that bodily control is selfcontrol, it still remains (with psychological self-control) the only clear case of instantaneous, non-mediated control we have, and the theologians who deny that the world, as immediately controlled by God, is God’s body will hardly like better the doctrine that the world is God.
What, again, does a man immediately know? The evidence is clear and unambiguous only so far: a man’s awareness registers immediately, in addition to his own thoughts and feelings, certain aspects of the changes going on in the parts of his body. If there is pressure on a nerve, this abnormality, or at least a resulting abnormality in the brain, or both, will impinge upon his consciousness (under favorable conditions) without any known indirectness or loss of time. True, the awareness of the bodily abnormality is not distinct, it does not bring out what the detailed situation is for individual cells or cell groups as such, but that something is wrong with the body somewhere the man immediately knows, all inference apart. On the contrary, no event whatever taking place outside the body is, with any comparable vividness, apprehended, except after some measurable period of time. Or, to take another test of immediacy, infallibility: a man can never be certain that an object which appears to him as bent is really bent; but he can be certain, not only that it appears to him as bent, but that this bent-appearance has a physiological aspect (such as [p. 184] non-straightness of the retinal image, etc.) which is infallibly present whenever the appearance is. This may be an assumption, but no contrary instance is known, and psychophysics is based on it.[2] There is every reason to believe that the internal bodily conditions are at least more precisely correlated with experience than are the external conditions. For instance, there are some hundreds of thousands, but not billions, of distinct parts of the visual field; but this number corresponds to no real divisions in perceived inorganic objects, but to the “resolving power” of the eye due to its structure. Or again, the polar contrast between complementary colors is purely physiological rather than extrabodily, or at least it is more uniformly correlated with physiological than with physical conditions. Item for item the contents of the visual field, which appears so full of definite information concerning the external world, is full of even more definite information concerning the body (whether or not we are interested in this aspect of the matter, as we usually are not).
The reason philosophers have sometimes failed to see this fact clearly is that all our inherited and acquired patterns of behavior lead us to use the visual map as representative of the external rather than of the internal conditions, though it is more faithful to (and is immediately presenta. tive of) the latter. Visual perception is shot through with inference aiming at the external world; subtract this inference, as we must do to conceive the immediacy of omniscience, and it is the relation to the optical nervous system that remains as worthy of use in the theological analogy. Of course even this basis is inadequate, in that there is no distinct awareness of the individual cells (still less, however, of molecules outside the body), but only a sort of blurred outline of the cell structure and activity. God’s immediacy is perhaps not more immediate than ours, but it is certainly more vivid and distinct. It surpasses in this [p. 185] respect our awareness of retinal activity as this surpasses our awareness of the viscera, of which we note only vague pains and pleasures.
In sum, then, God’s volition is related to the world as though every object in it were to him a nerve-muscle, and his omniscience is related to it as though every object were a muscle-nerve. A brain cell is for us, as it were, a nerve-muscle and a muscle-nerve, in that its internal motions respond to our thoughts, and our thoughts to its motions. If there is a theological analogy, here is its locus. God has no separate sense organs or muscles, because all parts of the world body directly perform both functions for him. In this sense the world is God’s body.
In preference to the organic analogy theologians have generally resorted to one or more of several others. They have said that the world is the content of God’s mind, as ideas are of our mind (Berkeley). But this doctrine seemed to make human beings mere passive ideas of God, without genuine dynamic distinctness. (One may think that “pantheism,” as the doctrine of this chapter will perhaps be called, makes man a mere cog in the divine world machine, but after all science does not show that cells as well as molecules and electrons have no independence of action, though of course their independence must be far from absolute.) Besides, while we do appear to have some immediate power over our own ideas, we do not appear to have any immediate power over the ideas of others (‘* telepathy” apart — perhaps even granting telepathy, which need not be immediate). Now it is the ideas of others than himself that God must control, in controlling his own. When we control our ideas, the only immediate effects upon individuals not ourselves are changes in the parts of the nervous system. Thus again we are driven to the mindbody analogy as the basis of any real advance.
Additional to the artisan analogy, the mind-idea analogy, [p. 186] and the mind-body analogy, there seems to be but one other of any promise, the already mentioned social analogy. We know and control others most intimately by sympathetic understanding, by sharing interests with them. This analogy is obviously relevant in theology. It even has certain superiorities over the organic analogy. For while it is a fact that mind has immediate relations to the body it cannot be said that the nature of these relations is obvious. The paralytic may feel perfectly normal until he makes the attempt to execute a movement. Hume argued from this that we cannot be said to have intuitive knowledge of the connection between volition and bodily movement. What he was entitled to infer is that the knowledge, if it exists, is extremely indistinct, so that false inferences may easily occur. Moreover, the primary nerve-muscles with which our thought interacts are, as we pointed out above, the brain cells, not all of which are ever “paralyzed” while life continues. Nevertheless, the social analogy is in some respects superior even to this aspect of the organic analogy. There is no opaque mystery in sympathy. Of course I cannot have a vivid representation of the emotions of others without to some extent undergoing these emotions myself. The attention span is limited, or is an individual whole, and as such, even in God, must restrict itself to what can be brought into one unity of feeling. (In God the “restriction” coincides with that of actuality as such, contrasted with the all-possible.) I can realize how others feel only by doing something like feeling that way, at least “imaginatively,” myself. Hence the power of love, whereby what happens in one individual produces partially similar occurrences in another individual aware of this happening, is transparent enough.
But the trouble with the social analogy in its usual form is that it does not explain how one mind is able to communicate [p. 187] its feeling to another immediately. Human intercourse is apparently not direct contact of mind with mind, but requires intermediaries, such as vibrations of the air particles between their bodies. And the use of such intermediaries depends entirely, so far as we know, upon the mind-body relation. Thus we have two analogies, each of which is strong where the other is weak, and neither of which alone can suffice. The organic relation is factually immediate but mysterious or unintelligible as it stands. (It is further insufficient in that the relation of God to man which we particularly wish to understand is that of mind to mind, whereas the relation of a man’s mind to his cells appears to be the relation of “mind” to “matter.”) On the other hand, the human social relation, while intelligible, and a relation of mind to mind, lacks immediacy. What is to be done?
Is it difficult to answer? What could possibly be done except to combine the two analogies so as to produce a unitary variable without either the seeming unintelligibility and materialistic character of the one or the nonimmediacy of the other? If this could not be done, then atheism might have to be accepted; but it can be done, and that with no great difficulty — indeed with the support of many lines of argument additional to those we have indicated. We have only to suppose that the mind-body relationship is immediately social. We can indeed hardly suppose that interhuman social relationships are immediate (except perhaps secondarily and in slight degree) , since practically all the known evidence is in conflict with that supposition; but there are no facts which disprove the social character of the surely immediate mind-body relation, and some which suggest it. The human body is often called a “machine”; but this is a very inadequate description, since the body is a society of living, organic cells. [p. 188] We have only to suppose that these cells possess humble forms of feeling or desire to reach the position that the human mind influences and is influenced by them through immediate (there is nothing to mediate it) sharing of feeling, with much indistinctness on both sides (by no means however with the same indistinctness, and in the same respects, on both sides). Is this not the principle, and the only principle with any analogy in our experience, by which divine love (free of the “indistinctness,” i.e., imperfection) could know and sway the world?
But can a social relation, even to parts of one’s own body, be immediate; or, to put it the other way round, can an immediate relation be social? As in all philosophical questions, we must try to exhaust the alternatives. All possible human social relations must be: (a) with radically inferior, or (b) with more or less equal, or © with radically superior individuals. And in each case we have to consider whether the relations are wholly indirect or inferential, or whether the social other is, to some extent at least, an immediate datum. It cannot be taken for granted without inquiry that the three types of relation have the same immediacy, or lack of it. Thus the all too common argument, since relations with other human minds rest upon inference from the perceived qualities and changes in their bodies, therefore all social relations are equally inferential, is thoroughly lacking in cogency, unless it has also been shown that there is no peculiar reason why relations to equals should be at least primarily indirect, as compared to other social relations.
There is such a reason, however — unfortunately for the argument. If human beings, say, saw immediately into each other’s feelings and purposes, the independence of individuals would be seriously curtailed, and with it the depth of originality and the power to surprise each other [p. 189] which make up a good part of the value of human life. It is true that Siamese twins have a certain direct intuition into each other’s sensations, and that one of them has described the great beauty of their relationship. But it is only sensations, not ideas or purposes or memories, or in the full sense emotions or sentiments, which are directly shared in this case. Nor is such an individual in a position to judge of the comparative value of such interdependence. Perhaps no human being can judge of it. But it is clear that the range of activities in which such individuals can engage is more restricted than in the normal human being. If one of them falls in love, the other has to be also in love with the same person, at the same time and in much the same ways, or else become an enforced passive participant. The solution, in one poignant case at least, was to renounce marriage. And it is hard to see how any other solution could have been desirable.
Clearly there is definite value in the privacy which human beings enjoy owing to their inability to peer directly into each other’s states. But it is quite different with radical unequals in the cosmic social scale. Suppose a man could directly intuit the feelings of a one-celled creature, such as one of his own bodily cells. This would not enslave the man or embarrass the cell. It would not enslave the man because a single cell is too slight and weak a thing for its feelings to have any predominant influence. Even should there be multitudes of cells felt at once, still, since these creatures are too limited in knowledge to cooperate to any concerted end such as might interfere with the human being, the latter, by influencing each of them a little in a desired direction, could move the whole more or less at will. Nor could the cell complain that its privacy was invaded, for however the cell may feel the human being, it cannot know or think it as such, it cannot say to itself, [p. 190] “There’s that man prying into my affairs.” The human being must be incomprehensible to the cell to such an extent as to constitute merely a sort of environment, not a definite term of a social relation. Of course, the human being would have more power over the cell than the cell over it, but that is inherent in the inferiority of the cell, and not an inconvenience, granting this inferiority. Here the idea of members of a social system “knowing their place and liking it” is unobjectionable. The trouble with this idea in its application to purely human relations is that there is no unambiguous inequality between human beings. All are fundamentally the same sort of metazoan animals, filling the same cosmological niche in the system of beings, and while any one may be superior to some other in this or that respect, there are always other respects to be considered, as well as possible advances or degenerations in the two individuals which may obliterate the difference, or reverse it. A cell is once for all not a man, and it is once for all less than a man. But only an idiot is once and for all less than a man while yet, after a fashion, a member of the human race, and an idiot is an exception for which the ground plan of the species as such naturally does not provide.
Again, consider the relations of a man to a radically superior mind, such as God. Suppose this relation were in part direct. What would this imply? The man would not have the divine as a clear and distinct datum; for if he saw God distinctly he would be God, himself omniscient. ‘Thus, as the man to the cell, the divine to the man would be a vague environment rather than a definite social other. In exceptionally exalted states, the mystic, greater definiteness might be arrived at, but complete adequacy would be impossible. It is clear that, just as the cell could not tyrannize over the man because of its comparative insignificance, [p. 191] so the man could not tyrannize over God. It is less obvious that the man might not have a complaint to make about the invasion of his privacy. Some atheists seem to dislike the idea of God for some such reason. But is there not a burden of proof upon them to justify this attitude? After all, if God peers into our thoughts, he does not do so in order to further some one-sided and partial ends, or with the likelihood of envying us, or without the capacity to grasp the context into which our thoughts must be fitted if their value is to be appreciated. God is the one being who rightfully can invade all privacies. And the vagueness which inevitably limits the direct vision which we men could possibly have of God gives us plenty of freedom of interpretation of the divine datum, this freedom going all the way to denying that there is a God. An indistinct datum can always be explained away, if not completely, still sufficiently for a good many purposes.
It is also to be remembered that even with equals on the human level there may be some direct perception, so faint as to be easily overlooked, and hence the inference from the indirectness of human-to-human social relations to the indirectness of human-to-sub-or-super-human social relations not only is a non sequitur, but its premise may very well be an exaggeration of the facts. Finally, the reasons which make an almost complete lack of direct rapport between equals on a complex level desirable or necessary may have diminishing application as one considers equality relations on lower and lower levels, say between cells, then molecules, then atoms. Human beings need wide independence from others of their kind. They do not want to have to share in the thoughts and feelings of others by automatic direct participation, such as binds us to our brains, but they want to be able to select and choose and shut out when desirable the states of mind of their fellows. [p. 192] This is appropriate to their complexity and their ability to survey wide alternatives through language, the ability to abstract and generalize. But cells need no such wide freedom. If they are pervaded by waves of mob psychology coming directly from their immediate neighbors, this is no abrogation of their dignity, of the demands of their type of structure and functioning, so long as not absolutely all initiative is thus destroyed. The appropriate ratio of independence to dependence is vastly different than in man, even infinitely different in a sense, for man can react to the infinite as such. And on the electronic level, where perhaps there is no inner diversity of parts whatever, there is nothing for the electron to do but to interact directly with its neighbors, since internal action is not possible.
Thus we see that the lack of appreciable directness in human social relations is entirely compatible with its being nevertheless the case that not only some but even all direct interaction is social, whether the direct interaction of cell with cell, of cell with light rays striking the body, of human mind with human brain cell, of world mind with all parts of the world body. Thus on every ground we may well consider seriously the doctrine that the world is God’s body, to whose members he has immediate social relations, and which are related to each other, directly or indirectly, exclusively by social relations.
Yet what a host of traditional objections arise! The doctrine of divine impassivity will be appealed to, as implying that God could not share in, and in so far be dependent upon, the feelings of the creatures entering into the world body. We have seen, however, that there is no need to admit the impassivity of God in his total or concrete reality. Second-type theism thus refutes the objection. A perfectly loving, a just God must indeed never be moved [p. 193] one-sidedly, by the feelings of some only of the creatures, but always in a way appropriate to all of them at once. This is the meaning of ethical action, response to all on the same terms of adequate sensitivity, and of adequate creative furtherance so far as the various interests of others can be harmonized with the least sacrifice of value. The higher the mind, the more catholic is its passivity, and therefore the less is it enslaved to anyone.
But it will be said that the organic-social analogy does not give us the idea of God as creator. For by taking thought a man cannot add to his stature, cannot create, say, his bones. But then, as we have seen, it is primarily the nervous system and not the whole body that functions in our analogy, and although it seems to be true that no new nerve cells are produced by our thought or volition, it is equally clear that something new is produced in the nervous system by our efforts. We do affect the development of the cells, even if not their generation. Cells are continually growing new parts to replace those broken down. In the embryo the elementary mind may actually participate even in generation of cells. And certainly we influence the generation of atoms and molecules; in the nerve cells, for instance, where consciousness has direct effects. Now God is by hypothesis the supreme instance of the principle only imperfectly represented in us; consequently it is necessary to suppose that in him the effect of mind upon bodily growth and generation is of a higher, and even of an infinitely higher, order. If by “creation,” then, is meant “supreme influence upon growth,” the objection falls. And I see no paradox in interpreting Genesis in this sense, not to mention its almost obvious appropriateness to Plato’s Timaeus. The whole present pattern of the universe doubtless had an origin, including all the elements of that pattern mentioned in Genesis or in Plato. [p. 194] What unimaginable earlier stage of the universe they grew out of under God’s influence the Bible does not say, and why should it? To turn this reticence into an affirmation of creation ex nihilo is a procedure at which many well equipped scholars would protest. It seems reasonable to think that in saying simply, God “made” the existent world, the Bible is merely saying that he somehow brought it into being, and that Iam not disputing. Surely no one would want to read a literal use of the obviously inadequate artisan analogy into so noncommittal a word. Nor are we any better off if it be said that what is asserted is that God is the “cause” of the world; for the concept of causality has positive meaning only through some experiential analogy, and until the analogy be exhibited we have only an uncontrolled, vague, composite picture of all the analogies (a picture which is not improved by being called intellectual or super-sensory). If, again, it be said that our treatment has ignored the distinction between created and uncreated being, and has failed to realize that concepts cannot apply “univocally” to God and other things, I reply that the distinction itself has no meaning except thanks to some analogy, and that if there is in no sense any univocal meaning then theology is pure sophistry, while whatever sense does admit univocal meaning will justify our argu: ment. “Cause” is an analogy taken from volition, or from the mere rules of regular succession discovered by science, or from the experience of logical implication of conclusions by premises. The first has been dealt with, the second is obviously inapplicable, the third is almost as manifestly inappropriate. God is not a premise, that is, a proposition, nor is the world another premise. Not abstracts but concretes are here to be related. Besides, if the relation be that of premise and conclusion, then Spinoza and the necessitarians are right and freedom and contingency [p. 195] are unreal. As for final causes, we have seen how inapplicable the idea of purpose is to a merely immaterial and immutable deity; and one would still have to know what the bond of connection is by which God becomes immanent as an ideal in the human mind.
The most serious problem confronting the organic analogy, if not all theological conceptions, is that of evil. How can there be conflict, disorder, defects, in the body of God; or, if there are none, what are we to make of empirical evils and of our feeling that we should try to mitigate these? The effort to remove something accords ill with the denial that it exists! We must accordingly admit that in some sense the world body is not an absolute, perfectly harmonized unity. It may be absolutely unified in so far as unity is the basis of co-presence to one awareness, the divine omniscience; but there is experiential warrant for admitting that a kind of conflict and evil is compatible with such copresence, since otherwise we could not ourselves be aware of conflicting factors. There is intolerable discord that causes lapse of consciousness. Unlike us, God is not subject to such discord. For him and in the world body no conflicts occur except such as are to him tolerable. But this does not mean that for God no conflict and nothing unpleasant occurs at all. The idea that God equally and solely experiences bliss in all his relations is once for all a denial of the religiously essential doctrine that God is displeased by human sin and human misfortune. Without such displeasure, the words “just” and “loving” seem mockeries. f
It might perhaps be held that since painful experiences tend to be forgotten, the perfect memory of God could not admit pain. Yet nothing is commoner than painful memories, and it is hardly apparent that pain or discord is any thing like coincident with ignorance. Indeed, the vivid [p. 196] awareness of the fact that pain and conflict exist shows that pleasure and harmony are not the sole factors determining awareness. We tend to exclude unhappy thoughts, but this is not our only tendency. Therefore it is not the only motivation involved in mind. Another motivation is the social one; we tend to share in the experiences of others, even if painful, or even if not in harmony with our own (as in jealousy, hatred). Hence awareness is to be viewed as the product of a double selection, on the one hand with a view to harmony, on the other with a view to social inclusiveness. In the supreme or divine case, this would imply a maximal elimination of evil so far as this elimination is compatible with maximal social inclusiveness. Now it seems self-evident, upon careful reflection (there is in philosophy no other self-evidence) , that the elimination of evil could become absolute only if the social inclusiveness became zero.
It is to be noted that omniscience must in some fashion know evil. Now to know involves experience; hence God must experience the quality of evil. Could he experience the evil of conflict if there were nothing in his being but sheer harmony?
Does this imply that God must experience wickedness through himself being wicked, as he must experience conflict by himself suffering from it? I reply that conflict is positive in a sense in which wickedness is not. God is himself qualified by what is positive in evil, namely discord, which is not mere absence of harmony, but positive clash. But he is not qualified by the privative element essential to moral evil, namely blindness to the interests of others. Let it not be said that “blindness” is here equivocal; for it really does mean some kind of ignorance. There is no such thing as selfishness which does not involve lack of realization of the concrete effects of action [p. 197] upon others. The common word “thoughtless” is indicative. The real ignorance of the poor shown in all societies by the exploiting rich is an example of the essential connection between lack of goodness and lack of awareness.
It may be said that there is an element of positive willfulness in wickedness, which we call perversity. But the answer is that it is not simply as deliberate volition that perversity is perverse, but as the deliberate choice of nonrealization over realization. The “greatest” or divine realization cannot make this choice, but can experience it as made by others, because it can itself participate in the positive factors, and can see by comparison the privation or ignorance involved.
It may again be argued that God must participate in negative as well as positive factors. This, however, can in a sense be admitted, yet harmonized with what has been said. In conflict, which we have called positive, there is a negative element. Indeed, in all difference there is negation of similarity, and in similarity, negation of difference. So in conflict there is negation of harmony. But to experience this it is not necessary to experience privation as ignorance, if by that is meant non-realization of a part of what is real. It is only necessary to experience that ais not b, or that ab is not a harmonious whole. Moral and cognitive evil, which in the absolute case are indistinguishable, are in the absolute case equally self-contradictory. Only aesthetic evil, which alone is not privative (it is not the absence of things which harmonize but the presence of things which conflict) , can qualify God.
From another point of view this is clear enough, in that aesthetic evil is “suffered,” while moral evil is enacted, chosen. God must suffer all things, for he must participate in all things to know them, but he cannot be said to choose all things, for he has granted choices also to the creatures. [p. 198] The partial passivity implied in knowledge agrees perfectly with the tolerance implied in love, and both agree with the denial of wickedness to God. The good man is not freed by his goodness from dependence for full happiness upon the welfare of his neighbors, but he is, to the extent of his goodness, freed from dependence upon them for the goodness itself. God, being entirely good, is entirely independent of all others for that goodness, which is inalienably and wholly his own choice; but if goodness means love, then God is dependent for happiness upon others to a unique degree; for whereas we are left unaffected by the misery or joy of millions we do not know even the existence of, God has nowhere to hide himself from any sorrow or joy whatever, but must share in all the wealth and all the burden of the world. The cross is a sublime and matchless symbol of this, partly nullified by theological efforts to restrict suffering and sympathy to God as incarnate. The point is that in whatever sense incarnation is required to make God passive, in that sense the incarnate God is the only God that reason, all revelation apart, can give us any conception of, as well as the only God of use to religion.
The Aristotelian conception of the body as wholly passive in relation to the soul is an overstatement of the important fact that the human mind is incomparably more powerful than any one of the individuals composing its body, so that the mind has a directing, “forming” power not otherwise found in the bodily system. Had Aristotle known of cells, molecules, and atoms, I cannot conceive of his persisting in the one-sided conception which some of his followers still support. And even did we not know of cells and the rest, there are philosophical objections to the doctrine. Being is power, and any relation in which a thing was wholly powerless would be a relation in which the [p. 199] thing was nothing. This truth was concealed by the notion that matter, while powerless, could produce negative effects merely by virtue of its lack of ability to “receive” certain forms. I fear no way of validating such a distinction can be found. Men act on kittens and kittens act on men; and no matter how lowly a thing may be, if it is a real individual it reacts upon all things, however exalted. Cells, molecules, electrons, exhibit in no way any exception to this principle. It is even harder, on scientific grounds (though not on general philosophic ones) , to justify the assertion that men can act on and “form” their cells and molecules, than the assertion that the latter act on and form men.[3]
Since there are no gradations in the intimacy of things to God, though there are, in a certain sense, gradations in the intimacy of God to things (sin and saintliness, etc.) , God cannot, as we have already noted, have a nervous system or sense organs, for these are bodily parts with a preferential relation to the mind. And if by “sensation” we mean experience mediated by sense organs, then God has no sense experiences. But if by sensation we mean that aspect of experience which is neither thought nor volition, neither meaning nor action, but qualitative feeling, then God can as little be free from sensation as men. It seems stupid ingratitude to deride the “sensuous” in favor of the “spiritual,” when not one of us could possibly choose to exist at all without the contribution which the sensory qualities make to life. (In all the heavens that ever really appealed to men, sensations, of music and color and even smell, have playeda role.) God will have not the least but the most of the richness supplied by such qualities; but he will derive them from all parts of the world body, not merely from focal points which would constitute sense organs, He will have them also at all times (except so far [p. 200] as future at those times), and not intermittently, interrupted by sleep, sickness, inattention, darkness, as we do; nor will he be overwhelmed by sensations of one type, such as a loud noise, while deprived of intense feeling of another type, butall will be in a rich balance. Thus he really contains “all positive perfections” (so far as actual, and potential ones only as such, as potential)
Let us sum up in terms of a definition. The body of a given mind is that much of the world which the mind immediately knows and controls and suffers. It is the locus of attachment to the system of real things. A disembodied mind, as Leibniz said —alas, without applying it to God! —would simply not belong to existence. ‘There is an obVious relativity in the definition, which has for consequence that the nervous system is as it were a body within the body, and that in some diluted sense the whole universe may be included in the body of any mind, just as physics now says a particle may be conceived as a wave-train pervading space. But God is that mind which enjoys the fullest in timacy with all things, and therefore in an undiluted sense has all the world for body. It is an implication of this that the world is not less but more organic than a man, and if the reader doubts this, let him remember that at least the world order persists, no matter what else undergoes destruction, It isa bit strange to regard the most stable order as the least orderly.
But organic order, you may say, is only one kind of order. Granted; it is the order of an individual as such rather than of a mere group, or of a mere part of an indi, vidual. Now the cosmic order is the most individual, the most distinctive, of all. It belongs to this actual universe, not to any of the possible universes. It belongs to every part of this universe, even more completely than the ind. Vidual gene pattern belongs to all parts of an animal body. [p. 201] Quantum mechanics and relativity are the gene structures of all things, not of most things, in the present actual cosmos. One might go on. The blindness of some philosophers to the seemingly obvious in this regard is perhaps not easy to explain. Possibly they fail to see that though the cosmic structure belongs to all things in the cosmos it belongs to none of them as their individuality, which is rather always a special case of the cosmic individuality, as each of a man’s cells is a special case of the man’s individual pattern. Cosmic individual unity, that is, organicity, is far other than local organicity, but other by being sublimely more, never less — for example, as to “growth,” for which the cosmos has infinite time. Nothing proves that the cosmic gene pattern is fixed forever. Indeed, the law of entropy indicates that it has not always been and will not always be. A creative side of nature there must be, and its local manifestations in planetary life cannot exhaust its reality, or there would have been no cosmos to “run down” toward the “heat death.” The presupposed “running up” or creation cannot be less fundamental as a cosmic function, however hidden from us its larger operations may be. Ifrigid persistence in an identical pattern were an aesthetic or spiritual value, the fact that the present cosmic pattern is going bankrupt would be disturbing; but all our aesthetic and spiritual experience indicates that such rigidity or monotony would be hideous beyond any nightmare. Every pattern, every style, has its day in art, even in the cosmic art, and it is satisfying that physics actually has evidence of this. (See Whitehead’s neglected little book, The Function of Reason —a work of pure genius if there isone.) The cosmos grows ever new patterns for itself, and in this way too is organic beyond our imaginative grasp. It exceeds any requirements of individuality that we can clearly understand or measure.
[p. 201] There are three religious analogies which we have yet adequately to consider.
It is plain enough that as the cell is in the man so the man is in the cosmos, and even though God be more than the cosmos, “more than x” has definite meaning only if we know what x really is, so that we cannot be mistaken in using the cell-man-cosmos relationships, so far as they go, in tying to interpret how man is related to God. But also we cannot be mistaken in so using the relation of man to his fellows. For in that relation only are we on both sides of the relationship with approximately equal understanding, knowing what it is both for a man to know and love and influence, and for a man to be known and loved and influenced. We cannot possibly, with the same distinctness, know what it could be to a man’s cell either to love or to be loved, still less how atoms and other subanimal organisms can figure in such relationships. Thus all roads lead to the common result that, inadequate though the resulting conception of God may be, the organicsocial analogy must be the best means of constructing such a conception open to us. The fact that one is thereby committed to a certain interpretation of the mind-body relation, and also to the view that all individuals in nature are capable of some lowly form of social relationship, that is, to a relational form of [p. 205] panpsychism, will repel some thinkers. But it may be suggested that if God is essentially love, nothing can be incapable of being loved (as dead matter must be), and that to be rich in implications beyond those immediately sought is one of the most unfailing signs of a good rather than a poor theory. Moreover, for theology to leave the general nature of so-called dead matter, if not the entire relation of mind to things in space, a wholly unilluminated affair would be most inappropriate in view of the absolutely universal relevance implied in the very idea of God.
The idea of the world as a divine organism is at least as old as Plato, and was a favorite idea in antiquity. But the idea could not come into its own until certain other ideas inherited from the Greeks were overcome, such ideas as that the supreme being must be totally immutable, impassive, and self-sufficient, or that some portions of matter can contain no sentience or social connectedness whatever. Modern science and logic show that these ideas are based upon no real evidence. By giving them up we open the way toa more frank and intelligible treatment of the theological analogies.[4]
[p. 209]
An example of how neglect of the mind-body analogy may persist even in a theology by no means slavishly bound to tradition is afforded by the empirical theology of H. N. Wieman. This writer, for instance, says:
“God . . . is not merely man lifted to the nth dimension of perfecyn… . God is different from man, God works concretely. Man cannot do that… . Man’s plans, his ideals, his purposes, are necessarily abstractions by reason of the very nature of the human mind… . The forming of “internal relations” is creation. A common word for it is [p. 210] growth. It is God’s working, not man’s. Hence mind and personality would cramp God. . . . He cannot be so limited.” (“Some Blind Spots Removed,” Christian Century, Jan. 25, 1939, p. 116. See also various books by Professor Wieman, who is perhaps the most radical of empirical and third-type theists of our time.
Now if by “man’s working” is meant his way of acting on objects outside his body, the argument is strong. But surely our influence upon the growth of our own iinds and bodies is concrete and creative, even though more or less radically weak and intermittent. If this intuitiveorganic, not abstract-external, working of mind as we know it be conceived as it would be if it embraced the whole, instead of, as in us, but a fragment, of the universe, does it not imply precisely the supreme power fo promote growth which Professor Wieman so justly demands as the divine prerogative? In such a supreme organism abstraction would have no function, except as the contrast between abstract and concrete is inherent in reality as such by virtue of the intrinsic generality or indetermination of the future.
(Purposes in us are abstract for two reasons, or in two ways: (1) we do not intuit organically, directly, and vividly more than a tiny portion of the world with which we have to deal, and so have to rely largely upon abstract generalization; (2) purposes, any purposes, refer to the future, and s0 cannot be wholly particularized or concrete, since only the past can be so represented. The first ground for abstractness would be absent from God, for it is a mere privation, our lack of complete grasp of reality; the second, which is inherent in existence as such, would be present in God. Absolute concreteness is as meaningless as an up where is no down. To be sure, the abstractness of the future is not literally the result of ab. stracting from details which are there, but is the non-existence of such details in the partially indeterminate future. Thus God may be the nth dimension of mind in its intuitive aspect, as concrete where the past and present are concerned, and abstract in the sense only in which futurity means abstractness in proportion to the degree of futurity, the more Femote portions of future time being those less concretely purposed by
It might be suggested also that it would be in conformity with Professor Wieman’s advocacy of the method of science in philosophy to weigh the fact that qualitative distinctions, such as the passage quoted above Proposes as holding between man and God, have repeatedly been shown fo have only provisional significance for science. The problem may be Rot to allocate “creativity" to the right subject, but to measure the actual differences in degree and direction of creativity, even though in the comParison between man and God the difference in degree may be infinite. Can any empirical test for “absolute uncreativeness” be so much as con. ceived? Is not any such assertion a priori, metaphysical —and that in the “bad sense”?
[p. 211]
However this may be, to have translated this aspect of the old quali tative theology into modern terms and made it a fresh issue is an achieve‘ment for which one can only be grateful to Professor Wieman (and others working in a similar vein). Is the contrast between “creator” as such and “created” as stich, between creating and being created, absolute, a matter of all or nothing, or is it relative even though infinite? See H. N. Wieman and W. M. Horton, The Growth of Religion (Willett, Clark & Co., 1938).
A view dlose to the one expressed in this chapter is that of Profesor Montague, who says that the universe is God’s body, and that God is perfect in goodness and knowledge, although his power is “limited.” The Power might still be perfect if this means the greatest conceivable, and if Montague would grant that no supreme being is conceivable who would not be limited by a universe of things “within himself yet not himself, and if he would grant further that God enjoys all the power conceivable, subject to this inevitable limitation. Montague reminds me of Fechner — whose doctrine also was similar—in the vividness, sincerity, and penefratlon of his thought. Like Fechner he seams not_to-be suficlently reciated, and partly for similar reasons, which in both cases have little ta’do with the Yalue of their contibutious to thedlogy. See William Pepperell Montague, The Ways of Things (Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1940), especially pp. 110-23.
Somewhat farther from my own view is that of Fechner’s greatest philosophical admirer, William James, James finally concluded that Fech ner was probably right in regarding finite minds as parts of some more inclusive mind or minds. Thus two great philosophical psychologists agree on this point. But James seems to me to have strangely erred in his interpretation of Fechiner’s notion of God. Fechner did not slur over, to any great extent, the distinction between God and the timeless absolute. Nor was he so little interested in God as James seems to think. Above all, Fechner avoided two errors from which ieading him failed to save James the notion that without an “external” environment God would be re sponsible for all that happens, would be sheer power acting upon nothing. distinguishable from itself; and the notion that if a being included all space he must include all time also in a single moveless instant. Fechner saw that an internal environment sufficed to establish a division of power and responsibility between God and the included individuals; and he saw that the whole in time is not, like the momentary whole in space, a single, definite whole. He did not spatialize time, and so was able to have a pluralism of events without putting anything outside God, since the new events mean, in a sense, a new God, as a man is a new man every moment, The “pluralism” needed for novelty, like that needed for finite responsibility, is within God not between him and something external. question we shall return in chapter 8. See William James, A Pluratistic Universe (Longmans, Green & Co., 1909) , especially pp. 293-95, $10, 318.
Cf. the remark of David Hume, “No animal can move immediately anything bu the members of is own body” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part VIII). Hume goes on to point out that, reasoning by analogy, we should expect God to be the mind whose body is the universe, wih the result that God would depend on the word as truly as the world depends on him, for equality of action and reaction seems to be a universal law of nature. Hume did not stop to note that as between the human mind and any one of its member cells or atoms (he did not know definitely of these, to be sure) there is by no means equality of action, since the human individual is incomparably more powerful than any lesser individual contained within him, Even taking all the parts collectively, there was nothing but a vague speculative extension of the laws of physics to make them apply to subject matters having litle analogy to those of which the laws were known to be true to support Hume’s notion of a mere equality as between mind and body. What Hume was entirely justified in insisting upon was that a God in every respect independent of the world could not be related to the world in any way to which we have any analogy whatever. The world mind must be passive as well as active. Action and reaction need not be equal in relations between wholes and parts, indeed cannot be; but action and reaction there must be. Activity is mutual, social, or nothing. ↩︎
Bichowsky says: “The first law of psychology . . . is: If in introspection, relations are found between conscious content and these relations are of the kind that can exist between nerve impulse groups, then these relations do exist between nerve impulse groups. . . ” See F. R. Bichowsky, “Factors Common to the Mind and to the External World,” Journal of Philosophy, XXXVIL, 47-84. ↩︎
For an interesting discussion, from the point of view of a Roman Catholic biologist, of the problem of the relations between the organism and the individual forming its parts, see the paper, by Hauber, “Mechanism and Teleology in Current Biological Theory,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, XIV, 45-70. Hauber favors a panpsychic theory of cells and other inferior organisms, holding that these have their own simple forms of feeling. But he does not face the evidence for ascribing also some slight initiative or individuality of action to the part-organisms, hence for admitting that the total organic individual is passive as well as active in relation to its parts. Naturally also he does not suggest the corresponding problem of the universe as an organism, He misses the essential mutuality of the part-whole relation, its social character. Misled by Aristotelian terminology, he suggests that when it is in a larger organism the lesser organism has no “substantial” form (although it is an individual) but is “merely a quality or accidental form of the larger unit,” whereas in an inorganic environment it has “a mental life entirely its own.” The absoluteness of this distinction — either the mental life belongs only to an including organism, or it belongs only to the included organism ~is characteristic of Thomism (note the word “entirely” in the quotation). The relativity and mutuality of existence cannot be adequately grasped without a more radical detachment from Aristotle and Thomas than even this relatively free representative of Roman Catholic doctrine could attain. Otherwise he would not have thought of included organisms as “strictly submerged” in their including organism, any more than he would have thought of the independence of organisms in an inorganic environment as absolute, or the distinction between organic and inorganic as absolute, or the distinetion between an organism as such and the universe. Such absolute dualisms or dichotomies are not scientific or philosophical, since no conceivable evidence could establish them. “Relatively submerged” would fit any evidence that could be alleged for “absolutely submerged.” ↩︎
The perception that the mind-body analogy, so far from amounting to a weak pantheism, or to a denial of the transcendence of the God of religion, is in fact the only way to achieve a just synthesis of immanence and transcendence, the only way to avoid the twin errors of mere naturalism and mere supernaturalism, is excellently expressed in the following quotation:
“It is hard to think of God as being at one and the same time truly immanent and truly transcendent. Perhaps . . . it is better to fall back upon an analogy. We human beings . . . are immanent in our bodies, in the sense that our life is intimately bound up with and expressed through our bodies. At the same time we are transcendent to our bodies, in the sense that we do not remain a dimly diffused energy but somehow, somewhere come to a self-conscious focus and can look down upon our bodies and to a degree master them. In the same way, God may be thought of as being immanent in the universe in that his life is intimately bound up with and expressed through it, and at the same time transcendent to his universe in that somehow, somewhere he comes to a self-conscious focus and is more than his universe… . This dual relationship in ourselves . . . we accept . . . every day as a fact; we may as well do the same concerning God. What is true of the microcosm can also be true of the macrocosm.”
The author quoted (Nevin C. Harner, professor of Christian education, Theological Seminary, Reformed Church in the U. S., Lancaster, Pa.) points out the serious educational disadvantages of the two alternatives to the view outlined: that is, in either sheer immanence or sheer transcendence (only verbally qualified by an immanence with no definite experiential meaning). The quotation is from “Three Ways to Think of God,” Religious Education, XXXIV, 217.
Since writing this chapter I have discovered that the relations of God to the world are discussed by the great German psychologist and philosopher, G. T. Fechner, in a manner in most respects superior to anything Known to me in theological literature. Doubtless Fechner’s seemingly fantastic notion of plant souls and souls of the heavenly bodies distracted attention from his strictly theological discussions. If theologians did read the latter, then I am tempted to say, in the words of the title of a recent best seller, that they could not have known “how to read a book.” The ‘combination of logical strictness with sense for the realities of experience in all its more spiritual aspects has seldom been so excellently exhibited. See especially Fechner’s Zend-Avesta (1851), Vol. I, chap. 11. ↩︎