Author: Charles Hartshorne
He knew, “I indeed am this creation, for I created all this.” Hence he became the creation, and he who knows this lives in this his creation.
The Upanishads
There are as many arguments for God as there are conceptions of absolute generality, that is, conceptions with a costnic range of application, relevant to “all time and all existence.” Such conceptions are “actuality,” “possibility,” “knowledge,” “value,” the conception of God itself, Since these conceptions are more or less arbitrarily divisible into aspects or nuances, there is no one final list of arguments. There is also no simple answer to the question, Are the arguments independent of one another? For the more one explains the conception upon which an argument turns, the more one must elucidate the conceptions central to the other arguments, and such elucidation will bring out more or less distinctly the point of the other proofs, while still not developing them perhaps to the full. It is indeed meaningless to speak of independence, in the sense in which this term is used in science, when the question at issue is as to the necessary being, arguments for which must involve necessity not probability. Any one argument for God is either fallacious or proves God to be necessary. No number of arguments can add to necessity. And necessary truths mutually imply one another, are really aspects of one and the same necessity, namely, God. The only value of a multiplicity of arguments is that it [p. 252] diminishes the probability that we have overlooked fallacies in the reasoning, somewhat as performing a mathematical operation by several methods helps to insure that no blunder has been committed; but the value of varying methods holds to a greater degree in the theological case, since philosophical ideas are less clear than mathematical, and acquire their maximum clearness only when developed into a system. The various proofs are, then, only ways of focusing such a system. In the inductive sciences independent proofs serve not merely to clarify, or show up blunders in reasoning, but to establish degrees of probability where no necessity could be established by any evidence, however correctly estimated. If there is no such distinction between truths of contingent existence and truths of necessary existence, then there is equally no distinction between God and not-God. Theological proofs are all fallacious, or else they have only relative and subjective independence from one another.
The premise of the argument from existence is: something exists (or, the term existence has a referent). The premise of the argument from possibility is: something is possible; of the argument from knowledge: something is known; of the argument from value: something is in some sense valuable; while the argument from the idea of deity itself has this as premise: “God” is a symbol which as defined in some specified way is neither simply without meaning nor is its meaning self-contradictory (or, in positivist phrase, merely “emotive”). Of these premises, only the last would ordinarily be contested by non-theists; although a question might be raised concerning the meaning of the term “possible.” The premises state no mere facts, their denials are not genuinely conceivable, which is the reason they can lead to the assertion of a necessary being.
[p. 253] There is one common form of argumentation omitted from the above list, the argument from the empirically observed order and goodness of the world. The reason for omitting it is that the very form of such an argument seems questionable. It reasons from the difference between the world as we find it and worlds which we imagine and by comparison with the real world find less admirable. The objection is that God, if he exists, is the ground not only of this actual world but of any possible world, so that the imaginary worlds with which we have compared the real one either are impossible, and hence not really imaginable, or else they involve God no less than the real world, and the comparative merits of the latter are irrelevant. If we could consistently conceive a world so bad that it could not be “God’s world,” then this alone would suffice to disprove God! Of course one can vaguely imagine something apparently corresponding to “a Godless world,” a world without order or beauty or goodness; but that this is a distinct and self-consistent conception, that, for instance, “world,” or even “existence,” retains any consistent meaning in such a case, is not to be taken for granted. The various remaining arguments for God, indeed, maintain precisely the contrary.
The foregoing considerations lead to the conclusion that even apart from the existence of evil in the world it would be absurd to try to prove God from the observed goodness of the world. However, this conclusion follows only for one convinced of the soundness of the argument which bases all possibility upon the existence of God. And yet, who could believe in God (unless a wholly imperfect one) while denying this relationship?
It is true that one who finds the world in the large to be bad (or valueless) rather than good cannot, without abandoning this persuasion, consistently believe in God. In so [p. 254] far there is logic in the attempts of skeptics to make believers aware of the evil in existence. Yet they would have to go further than they usually do if they wished really to refute theism; for they would have to prove that no possible world could be appropriate to a Creator. If the would-be theist is led from the evil of the world to doubt God’s existence, he must, if he is logical, equally doubt even the possibility of a God, for, as we shall see in the next chapter, nothing can be the “potentiality of deity,” the phrase being self-contradictory. ‘The theist who finds the world on the whole good can rightly feel that this fits the implications of his faith, but not that it proves it, nor that, if the world seemed to him bad, faith would be disproved. Nothing could be decisive here but the insight into the impossibility of a world embodying spiritual perfection. It must be shown that the very idea of value contradicts the idea of perfection; but to show this would simply be to accept the argument from the concept of value — though in inverted form — as an argument against God. There is no way to escape the necessity of arguing philosophically or from general categories, rather than inductively, pseudoscientifically, from particulars, if one wishes to make out anything concerning the existence of God.
There is a further weakness in the “argument from design ” which has often been pointed out, notably by Hume and Kant; namely, that while the evil in the world may, for all we can prove, be consistent with the belief in God (as these men are too careful and candid to deny), it is even more obviously consistent with the atheistic doctrine that perfection is impossible, since good is essentially relative and limited, so that in the absence of evidence drawn from categories we could not decide the question at all.
Another familiar argument seems to be lacking in our list: the argument from motion and causality. It is, however, [p. 255] not really omitted, since it may be regarded as a way of combining the arguments from actuality and possibility. The premise, “something exists,” can be experientially established only in the form, “something exists in space and time.” Existence, at least as an indubitable datum, is spatio-temporal, that is, it is motion and change. That something not actual is “* possible” can also be established only in connection with change and the experience of open alternatives with respect to the future. The limits of such possibility are identical with the scope of causality. Thus even in a pure argument from categories we cannot avoid dealing with the old argument for a First Mover and a First Cause. But we must not take “First” to mean temporally first, in the sense of a beginning in (or of) time, nor must we assume that the Divine as Mover must be unmoved, or that the First or Supreme Cause must be immutable. What we must assume (hypothetically, as the conclusion whose truth is to be decided one way or the other) is that perhaps it can be proved that there is and must be a Mover or Cause which is perfect in the way and only in the way required by the religious idea. The question is whether there is a real cause which is ideal in its degree and kind of power. What such perfection can mean in terms of causality and motion must be deduced from our analysis of these categories, not assumed from traditional analyses whose results are in doubtful harmony with the religious idea they are alleged to support, and in doubtful harmony with logic as refined and purified and generalized during the last hundred and fifty years.
In outline the argument from existence is: Temporal existence implies everlasting (not timeless) existence; everlasting existence can belong to but one individual, which can only be conceived as God. Everlasting or “‘ eternal” existence is not the negation of temporal existence, [p. 256] but its perfection. It is the negation of existence having a beginning or an end in time, the negation of birth or death, not necessarily of change.
If temporal existence is characterized as “changing,” then it will hardly be denied that the meaning of this concept includes the idea of something which changes. Change involves a diversity of states, which, in spite of their diversity, belong to one and the same thing, the subject of the change. The subject of the change is not at all the unchanging, but the changing; it is that which alters, and in altering remains itself. Alteration and permanence are the two aspects of change, each implying the other. It is the changing which endures and in so far escapes the “ravages” of time. It is the thing in so far as it does not endure but perishes that is ravaged.
There is, however, one kind of change which we may be tempted to think an exception to the foregoing. This is the change involved in the generation or destruction of a subject of change. The generation of an entity cannot be conceived as a change occurring to that entity. For the passage from non-existence to existence is not a shift from one state of the thing which is to exist to another; rather is non-existence the absence of the thing with all its states. It is not the generated thing which changes in coming to exist, but “existence” or “the world” which comes to acquire a new member, and thus a new state. The changing subject of that change which consists in generation is always a pre-existent subject, which through the generation acquires the new subject as, with all of its predicates, a state of itself (though not a “mere” state, or not the kind of state which would prevent the new subject from being really a subject, an individual on its own account).
The only way to avoid this conclusion is to hold that before actually existing the thing is not a mere non-entity [p. 257] but a potentiality, which passes in generation from the potential to the actual state. But the potential is discoverable, has definite meaning for us, only as a power characterizing something actual. A man is something which may exist in so far as there are human beings capable of being his parents —or his grandparents. The potential is an aspect of the existent, or it is nothing identifiable. And so our proposition stands: The fact of generation consists in (and does not merely imply as its “cause”) a change in something which exists before the generation.
Similar remarks apply to destruction or death. The decease of a man is not a change in the man as a personality (except as the latter may survive death in a manner of which all the details are hidden from us) ; for the state of a thing’s no longer existing is not the positive presence of a certain state in that thing but the complete absence of the thing along with its states. Death seems indeed a state of the man’s body, as a system of molecules which after the event is no longer vivified and guided by human thoughts and feelings as it was before the event. Similarly, birth (or the formation of the embryo at least) is something which happens, not to the new mind emerging but, apparently, to the physical particles which begin to achieve a new organization, expressive of the informing power of mind. We have now reached our decisive question: Is “ matter,” conceived as only accidentally infused with mind, or if you prefer, only accidentally functioning in thinking and feeling organisms, a sufficient subject of the generative, destructive, and all other changes in the world?
It is clear that no subject or subjects of change are sufficient unless at least one of them is eternal, that is, ungenerated and undying. For a generated subject can appear as a new state only of a subject not at that moment generated, and if this pre-existent subject were itself generated earlier, [p. 258] then it could itself only constitute a state of a still earlier subject, which must still endure, and thus there must always be at least one subject to whom no beginning or end can be assigned. This is not the usual argument against a regress of causes. For the subject of change must endure through all the changes of which it is the subject. If a “changes into” b, losing its identity as a, then the subject of this change must be c, and if something has changed into c, then the subject of this change must be d, and d must endure still as the subject of all the changes to date, unless d itself is only something into which a more fundamental subject has changed while retaining its identity. For when c came into being, its entire being was a state of d, or of whatever changed so as to constitute this coming into being.
It is notable that a man does not fully possess his changes. Not only do his beginning and ending escape him as such, but falling asleep is a process which he does not fully experience, since it is (apparently) the cessation of experience.
Materialists, seeking to make matter ultimate, have generally recognized the force of the foregoing argument, and have claimed that matter is indeed eternal, and the subject of all change. Man’s birth, living, and death, the very life of any gods there may be, according to Epicurus, are nothing but the adventures of the everlasting and ungenerated atoms.
In another form Aristotle upholds the same view, except that his eternal matter, materia prima, is formless and without definite number, a mere abstract aspect of things, but an everlasting one. However, Aristotle did not believe that this mere abstraction could constitute the sufficient explanation of change. A second eternal principle, God, was also required. But this second principle was not [p. 259] the subject, but merely the “ formal cause,” of change. In itself it did not change. Thus if we ask Aristotle what it is that permanently, everlastingly changes, and of which all generations and destructions are states, he answers only with two mysterious words, “matter” and “potency.” And if we ask him to identify such an everlasting entity in experience, he can, I suspect, give us no very helpful answer. Matter is that utterly flexible something which can assume all forms, but if we ask what its identity through these transformations may be, he can only answer, its unique flexibility. But the flexibility means only that identity is preserved; identity is presupposed rather than clarified. Is it not really God in whom the identity of the final subject of change consists? It is, am about to argue, God who can be all things to all things, whose all-sympathetic teleology assumes all the changing states of the universal striving. Hence David of Dinant did well to identify matter with God, even though Aquinas regarded this view as “crazy.”
The medieval Aristotelians rejected Aristotle’s view of the eternity of matter (on supposedly biblical grounds), but refused to make God the subject of change, with the result that the generation of the world is either a change without a subject, or else not a change, and hence — it would seem — not a generation.
The main question is whether either the Epicurean or the Aristotelian view of matter can furnish a sufficient subject of change. Both have for this purpose a defect in common, and each has in addition a defect peculiar to itself. The common defect is that in both cases the identity through change is asserted, not positively conceived. The atom is ever the same wherever it may wander, but what positively remains the same about it? Perhaps its shape and size and weight? But these are purely relational properties, [p. 260] and relations require terms. The atom can possess shape only because there is in it something which distinguishes its boundaries from the empty space surrounding it. What is this something which fills certain parts of space? The Epicurean can only answer, “being,” or “stuff,” or “matter.” But we want to know what it is that distinguishes the filled being of the atom from the empty being, or “‘ not-being,” of space, the “void”! It will not do to say that since we have here an ultimate conception no explanation is possible. For conceptions, however ultimate, have to be identified somehow and by more than a mere word, and it is perfectly plain how we identify the being in question in experience. We identify it by qualities, and by the similarities which qualities, in spite of all their diversity, present to our feeling. A certain shape is given to us visually as the boundaries of a given color, meeting some other color. But the atoms were said to be without color or quality of any kind in their eternal being. Even a blind man does not in fact so represent them, but rather he thinks of them more or less consciously in terms of the qualities of tactual sensations which things give him. Apart from quality nothing positive can be thought under the term being or matter. And the purely negative is nothing and the definition of nothing. Hence if being must have identity-in-change, it must have this identity in qualitative as well as structural terms.
Now we do have direct experience of identity in the midst of, and even by virtue of, qualitative contrast.“Beauty” is something unitary which exists not in spite of, but even thanks to, qualitative contrast. Feeling is a positive unity of which various qualities may be integral aspects. Through memory, this unity spans past as well as present. Here is the only experiential clue whatever to the qual tative side of permanence in change. The alternative to [p. 261] the merely negative, or at least the merely structural, view of being is an aesthetic-psychological interpretation of change. Aristotle, in his insistence that everything has its end and value, vaguely and rather crudely hints at such an interpretation, but it is flattery to say that he furnishes it.
The defect peculiar to Epicurean materialism is that it makes logically contingent characters, such as the shapes and sizes of atoms, pervasive of all time, and therefore temporally indistinguishable from necessary factors, although, as we have seen, time alone is the concrete embodiment of categories such as possibility and necessity. What need not have existed at all, exists not only in one of the infinite periods of history, but in all periods. What need not have happened at all, goes on happening forever. This creates a dilemma. Either the eternal factors are constitutive of being as such, and so ontologically necessary; or they are ontologically, as they certainly are logically, contingent (any particular shape or size can be conceived as nonexistent). If ontologically necessary, then their conceivable non-existence is a paradox; if ontologically contingent, then their temporal universality is a paradox. It must also be unknowable, for the only way to know that something always exists is to know that it must exist… (To run through all the moments of time to see what they happen to contain is impossible by the nature of time, since future moments do not exist in determinate detail.) Thus the everlasting atoms with fixed forms would constitute arbitrary limitations upon being coincident with being as knowable, and so, it would seem, not arbitrary. If, on the other hand, the atoms have no fixed forms, then their identity through change vanishes, unless there is a pattern in the succession of forms, and then we would want to know how this pattern can be really in the atoms as at any one moment with any one form, just as we want to know how [p. 262] “having been at point a” can belong to an atom as at point b, how matter can constitute the being of motion. Whitehead has, I think unanswerably, expounded these paradoxes as appearing in modern physics so far as taken to imply the notion of mere matter.[1]
The defect peculiar to Aristotelian materialism, or “hylo-morphism” if you prefer, is simply that it escapes the defect of Epicureanism (endowing eternal matter with logically contingent properties) only by the desperate expedient of depriving matter as eternal of any form, even structural, of any positive identity, thus aggravating the common defect of all materialism — insufficient provision for identity in change — to the highest possible degree.
It is true that Aristotle, as anti-evolutionist, apparently believes that the specific forms of things are also eternal, along with matter and God. But ifso, that only means that he has fallen into the error of eternalizing, necessitizing so to speak, the logically contingent; that is, into the same error in principle as that of which we have accused Epicurus. In any case he has no real, positive subject of change, inclusive of generation and destruction.
As for modern scientific materialism, taken as a philosophy and not merely as a legitimate methodological limitation, it is merely a compromise between Epicurean and Aristotelian doctrines, a compromise which does nothing to remove the fundamental defects of the two. If atoms are no longer eternal, are electrons? Apparently not. If they were, we would again have the logically arbitrary exalted into temporal absoluteness; if not, then matter as eternal has no identifiable characters, even structural, except perhaps the fundamental laws of quantum and relativity physics, But these laws are logically as contingent as the shapes of atoms (in both cases there are constants, magnitudes to which there are an infinity of mathematically conceivable [p. 263] alternatives) ; and there is certainly no evidence of their eternal validity. No experiment can show that something will always happen, since the experiment tests only what happens in the present era of cosmic development. It is true that unless there were aspects of nature which change at most very slowly we could learn nothing from experiment; and hence it is an obligatory assumption that some features of the world are stable within the limits of our imperative practical and scientific needs; but it is the merest dogma that some features of the world, in themselves logically arbitrary, are absolutely changeless for all time. Every evidence from analogy supports the view that, just as the more complex biological species change, though more slowly than the simpler ones, so those still simpler species with which physics deals change, but far more slowly still, and since laws are merely the ways of behaving of various classes of things, the non-eternity of these classes means the non-eternity of these laws.
In any case, even were the physical laws eternal, it still would not be possible to see in them the identity of matter as the sufficient eternal subject of change. For qualitative changes are not identical with structural ones, and cannot be exhaustively expressed in terms of the laws of physics. And, once more, no materialism can escape the dilemma: either its conception of the eternal is purely negative, or it is a conception some of whose positive aspects are logically arbitrary and therefore cannot be eternal.
The most plausible evasion of the dilemma seems to be that of S. Alexander. Pure space-time is the eternal stuff, the permanently changing subject. There is nothing logically arbitrary in this conception of the everlasting. But is there anything positive in it? Certainly there is nothing positive on the qualitative side. Even on the structural, is not pure space-time, apart from anything further, merely [p. 264] a system of potential shapes and sizes and changes rather than anything actual? Have we not here the inversion of the true conception of possibility, which is that it is identi fiable only as a capacity of the actual? Space-time is said to be equivalent to pure motion, but is motion anything unless something not just motion either moves or at least exists with a capacity for moving?
Alexander himself seems really to concede the case when he describes time as the mind of space, and also when he grants that even electrons have some to us unknown qualities of feeling.? The issue can be put in this way: Granting that space-time is eternal and the everlasting subject of change, are the relational aspects of space-time sufficient to characterize it, and, particularly, how are we to distinguish between spatio-temporal relations as mere mathematical possibilities, and shapes and sizes and changes really happening? Space-time is after all only a four-dimensional version of the indeterminate “void” of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius; we still want to know what the “being ” is which fills this void in definite ways to furnish definite configurations. Space-time may very well be conceived as eternal, since beginnings and endings seem to fall within it, and to affect it not as beginnings and endings, but as changes in its own being. But mere space-time as such cannot be more than the structural aspect of the eternal; indeed, not even all of that, for qualities involve structures in their relations of similarity and dissimilarity, which mere space-time does not include. To add “matter” to space-time is merely to say that a required something is added to it, it is not to say what the required something is.
What then is the sufficient subject of all change? What is it which is so flexible that it can preserve its identity through all the variety of real predicates in the world? Surely the most flexible positively known thing is mind in [p. 265] so far as it is sensitive, and broad and quick in its sympathies. True, there are inflexible minds, but we know this precisely because we know or can conceive of minds not inflexible. All predicates of which we have definite knowledge express possible forms of mind. The identity of a man’s mind, in spite of the variety of sensory, emotional, volitional, and intellectual qualities which his experience includes, is the obvious clue to the cosmic identity we are seeking. But equally obvious is it that no merely human mind will serve. Every man has his prejudices, in such fashion that there are qualities of experience in the lives of other men that he would not allow himself to realize, even given the opportunity. And the limits of our attention span preclude our embracing all actual predicates together (all possible predicates could not, except as indeterminates, mere possibles, be combined by any mind). Only a mind completely free of selfish prejudice, ready to enter with instant sympathy into all existent forms of experience, to participate without reserve in every last fragment of feeling and thought anywhere, and able to harmonize all this variety of experience into one tolerable aesthetic whole, can constitute the subject of all change. Precisely this is also the religious idea of God, to whom all hearts are completely open because his sensitive sympathy is absolute in flexibility.
Nor is this a merely negative conception. It does not mean that God has no positive character, that he simply tolerates everything. He tolerates variety up to the point beyond which it would mean chaos and not a world; but his intolerance of what would lie beyond that excludes nothing real from his fullest participation, but rather prevents the “beyond” from becoming real, that is, prevents reality from losing all definite character. What God ignores he equally, and thereby, destroys or prevents from occurring. [p. 266] Another way of putting the difference is that we human beings are never entire and single-minded about our sympathies; we always remain more or less deliberately unconscious of the full content even of those lives with which we most intensely sympathize; while God relegates nothing of other lives to the dim background, the subconscious of his life, but is either fully aware of things or dismisses them from his awareness and (it is the same thing) from reality. Of course God opposes some of our desires, but not by imperfect participation in these desires, as though he did not distinctly feel them, but by balancing them against the main desire-mass of the world of creatures, somewhat as we may check some among our wishes by force of other opposing ones. We men are not strong enough, not catholicly sensitive enough, to trust to such balance alone to resist the desires of our immediate neighbors; and therefore we must resort to the inferior device of unconsciousness, of insensitiveness. We control in the negative way, God in the positive. But the difference is not in every respect absolute, since the best men are distinguished by something of this very positivity of control. There is therefore nothing absurd, or contradictory of the nature of mind, in the idea of divine sympathy.
The idea of love is a positive idea of flexibility in still other respects. However the content of love may be conceived to vary, certain identical dimensions must persist throughout, and these dimensions serve both as the measure of the variety and as aspects of the self-identity of the love. Love is always feeling, whatever else it may be, and feeling has at least the universal dimension of intensity. But equally universal is the dimension of good and bad, of enjoyment and suffering. Further, there is the dimension of self-and-other, and also the dimension of complexity, due to the number and kinds of other beings loved. [p. 167] The variety of qualities in sensory and emotional experience seems to be derivative from these dimensions of love.* At any rate, no one could fully love all minds and not fully realize, participate in, all qualities enjoyed by those minds. And that would be all the qualities we know or can conceive.
The conclusion is that when it is said that nothing can have all predicates (all actual predicates as actual, all possible as possible) and yet have distinctive character of its ‘own, the statement may be accepted upon the one condition that the idea of love is excluded from the debate. From the moment this idea is considered, the negation appearsno longer convincing. The “being” which all qualities embody is either nothing further describable, or it is cosmic love. And conversely, cosmic love is either nothing conceivable or it is the distinctive character of “being” itself.
Of course even divine love cannot embody all qualities without regard to any distinction between actual and possible ones, or those completely and those incompletely determined. It is by neglecting this distinction that men convince themselves that “being” can have no character. The character of being is expressed in the process of choos- @ ing possibilities to be actualized. Unactualized possibilities are also in being, in God, but in a deficient way; they constitute the less determined aspects of God as being.
The foregoing distinction is made paradoxical if not useless by philosophies which deny change to God. For in changeless eternity things are either present once for all, or absent once for all; there is no function for the possibly present or absent. Since we are speaking of God as the subject of change, not as the unchanging, we can escape these (and many other) paradoxes. There is another important respect in which mind [p. 268] rather than mere matter answers the requirements of the final subject of change. Mind involves memory, memory is the presence of “past” qualities in present experience. If past meant simply not present, this would be a contradiction. That it does not mean this is shown by the difference between events known to have occurred in the past and events which have not occurred at all as yet. The latter are certainly not present; the former, in a manner, precisely are present. Memory is the making of them palpably present. They form the old, the familiar part of the content of the present; as distinguished from the new, the just occurring part. They are there, but also they “have been” there; the others are there, but have not also been there. The identity of personality is this union of more or less consciously remembered past with the merely presented or new. (Psychoanalysis is here a better metaphysician than some metaphysicians.)
The identity, the personality of the world (I use the phrase with care), is the supreme example of the same union. The world memory is sufficiently conscious fully to realize forevermore all past qualities whatsoever. In this stupendous sense God is literally infinite. He is not, however, infinite in the self-contradictory sense of realizing determinately all future (that is, partially undetermined) qualities as well.
If there is no such world memory, then all truth about the past isa blind mystery; if there is, it is an open or intelligible mystery, that is, something we can grasp in principle though it infinitely eludes us in detail.
The argument from time to God as the eternally enduring unity of the world can be stated even apart from the concepts of change and the changing. Suppose we assume, not change, but simply events “following” each other, It still has to be considered what the relation of following [p. 269] identifiably is. In experience this relation is directly given in this manner, and in no other, that a is experienced to follow b when a is given as influenced by b but b is given as independent of a. The first note of a melody is given as a quality which is what it is whatever is to follow, but the succeeding note is given from the outset as in relation to the preceding, and cannot be completely abstracted from this relation. Later notes receive part of their musical character from the earlier, not the other way around. More precisely, by memory, immediate or remote, earlier events, as particulars, modify later; by anticipation later events, not as individual realities, but only as more or less generalized outlines, modify the earlier. This difference is the identifiable meaning of before and after. Develop this truth into full explicitness and you will arrive again at the conception of divine (sympathetic) memory and anticipation, that is, cosmic love. There is no dependence of the argument upon “substance,” as an assumption which may be discarded; and indeed two of the greatest critics of the old idea of substance, Whitehead and Bergson, are temporalistic theists. It is time and not thinghood that leads us to God as the self-identity of process.
So far we have neglected the question of the number of ultimate, that is, everlasting, subjects of change. Atomistic materialism believed in an infinite number of such subjects. The objections to this are two: first, to fulfill its functions each subject must have properties which would make it equivalent to and indistinguishable from every other; and second, atomism implies that the ultimate subjects of change have less unity than the temporary subjects, which is absurd. To take the latter point first: according to materialism a man is, in terms of ultimate subjects, numerous atoms and their interrelations. But the atoms are many and the man is one. To ascribe the man’s thoughts [p. 270] to the atoms as subjects in the plural would be to deny the man’s unity, though this unity is a primary datum for philosophy compared to which atoms are secondary (though overwhelmingly secure) inferences. The man’s nature, which is one thing, would be parceled out among the atoms, or ascribed in toto to each and every one, both these alternatives being absurd. You can say it is ascribed to the whole interconnected group of atoms, but the question is precisely, To what final changing subject is the change consisting in the generation of this group as a unitary entity to be ascribed? “Emergent wholeness” must, after its emergence, belong to some subject of change which both antedates the emergence and survives to possess it as its new state. This required subject cannot be the atoms, for they remain many, not one. Surely a man’s atoms do not adequately possess his thoughts! What subject, like the atoms pre-existent to the man, does so possess them?
You may try to make the problem very simple by saying that it is “the world” or “nature” which possesses the new whole constituted by the emergent man or animal. Against this answer I have no objection, provided the world or nature be admitted to have the character required for the assigned function. The world as the final subject of change cannot be a mere aggregate or collection. The appearance of the man is not simply his addition to the world, as a set of items, for only after he has appeared and belongs to the world is he anything real to be added to the sum of things. “Reality” cannot be a mere external relation to other real things, a further item of an aggregation, since the relation in question constitutes the reality of the thing related. The world may be the final subject of change only on condition that it have a unity in some sense maximal, absolute, and exceeding the unity of any of its parts. For the world unity is the ground of all plurality [p. 271] as well as of all unity in the world parts, No “real” aspect of anything can be omitted from the final unitary subject of change.
A plurality of eternal subjects seems excluded by the mere consideration that all must “exist,” and that the unity implied by the common factor of existence must finally override the alleged plurality. But apart from this per haps seemingly too verbal argument, there is the necessity that every eternal subject possess properties identical with every other. Each must be able effectively and absolutely to possess some share at least of the new predicates continually arising. But absolute participation in the predicates of even a part of the world is inseparable, because of the interconnections of things, as assumed for instance by science, from participation in the predicates of every other part of the world. In terms of mind —and we have seen that it is in any case impossible to meet the requirements apart from mind —omniscience of even one thing is indistinguishable from omniscience pure and simple. Nor has anyone ever, so far as I know, tried explicitly to conceive a localized omniscience (though some philosophical doctrines may have unwittingly implied such a notion) .
(The temporal concept of God might be accused of localizing omniscience in the present. The answer, of course, is that it is only by “ spatializing,” detemporalizing time that the present is made to seem a locus, a mere part, of time. It becomes such a part when it is no longer present but past, but then omniscience is no longer limited to it but enjoys a new present which is the whole of actual existence in time precisely while it is present and not past. This is the “modal” structure of time, its metaphysical ultimacy as the unity of actuality and potentiality, that “existence as a whole ” has a partly new meaning each time the phrase is uttered. “Existence” in this sense is a demonstrative [p. 272] pronoun, meaning “ this whole of things,” the one to which the act of using the term belongs, and which will as a whole be identical with a part of all the wholes that ever come into existence, and is already identical in a part of itself with any preceding whole. Thus the whole, the one that is the same for all references, the ever identical universe, is constituted by such actual and potential identities with past and future. To argue that a growing whole is an incomplete complete and thus absurd is to commit sophistry. The whole is “all that exists” when this “all” is referred to, and that is the only completeness it claims or needs. He begs the question who insists that “the totality of existence” must include as actually existent all that ever will or may exist, for that is the question: Does the “may exist” or the “ will exist” actually exist, is its existence as such full and complete —and determinate? Why should not “existence ” be a demonstrative pronoun? Pointing is prior to naming and describing. Different acts of pointing may reach different total referents, if the acts belong to different non-coactual states, rather than coactual parts, of existence. To reject this distinction is to spatialize time and falsify all our categories. If it be said we must do this to talk about God, I reply that the contention seems to me the perfect affirmation of atheism. It is non-sense to say that non-sense may be true, and the concepts by which we inevitably think are the concepts by which we always do think —no less so when we insincerely or self-delusively pretend to do “better.”)
Plurality of eternal subjects could not be conceived in terms of time, since temporally all eternal subjects as such are identical. The distinction could be made definitely only in terms of space. But space has its unity no less than time. We say things in different places are outside each other; but this outsidedness cannot be absolute, for there [p. 273] are no degrees of absoluteness, while there certainly are degrees of separation in space. The minimal degree is given if two things almost completely coincide in spatial area, the maximal degree if they are at opposite ends, so to speak, of the world. There are all gradations between these extremes. The relativity of spatial outsidedness is palpable enough from these considerations.
When Newton, impressed with the obvious unity of space, called the latter “the sensorium of God,” he expressed a thought to which his own age could not possibly do justice, but which our own may well take to heart. So long as anything that would possibly be suggested by the term pantheism was considered beyond the pale of respectable theology, there could be no serious analysis of the relations of God to the world. Leibniz objected (in his letters to Clarke) that to make the unity of space an aspect of God meant to make God dependent upon happenings in space, as the human mind depends upon happenings in the human body. It meant to make God “passive” to material forces. But contemporary theology ascribes to God, with full deliberateness, supreme sensitivity, that is, passivity, not as contradictory of supreme activity, but as a necessary aspect of it. To act upon something spiritually, one must be sensitive to it; for that to which a mind is totally insensitive is non-existent to that mind. God is the perfection of action-and-passion, who escapes the defectiveness of our passivity not by impassivity but by the all-inclusiveness, the catholicity, of his sensitiveness, which gives him the balance, the all-sidedness, the fairness, the justice, which are precisely what our passivity lacks and the only ground for its appearing to us as a defect.
The upshot of the argument so far is then: if anything exists in time and space, God exists as the eternal and [p. 274] omnipresent unity of space-time, without which that unity is not positively conceivable. By God is here meant an eternal, omnipresent being, “ flexible” enough to possess the infinity of qualities which the whole of process up to now has brought forth, this “whole” being simply the life of God in which we, the speakers, now share. Only mind as love makes the flexibility in question identifiable as a positive characteristic. There is always and everywhere just one alternative to theism, the contentment with negation, that is, nothingness, emptiness, as the final meaning, at some point, of universal conceptions.
A shrewd objection to our whole argumentation might be that the allegedly quite negative conceptions to which theism is the alternative cannot be purely negative after all, since we have drawn positive conclusions from them. Thus the “flexibility” of being as such must have some positive content or we could not say that matter, for instance, is inadequate to this content. But we must distinguish between purely intuitive meaning, such as words like " unity” possess, and “identifiable” meaning, that is, relation to some aspect of direct experience which particularly clearly illustrates and makes explicit what we really, though more or less subconsciously (from memory of previous more or less vague identifications) , intend by our words. The identifiable positive meaning of general conceptions turns out, when made as vivid and distinct as possible, to be some aspect or application of the intuition of deity which is the secular or universal element in the mystical awareness. All proofs for God depend upon conceptions which derive their meaning from God himself. They are merely ways of making clear that we already and once for all believe in God, though not always with clearness and consistency. With no belief in God no belief could be arrived at; but the question at issue is as to the comparative self-knowledge of [p. 275] “believers” and “unbelievers.” Both employ ultimate conceptions which unbelievers tend (or so it seems to believers) to leave unanalyzed.
It is time to ask about the once so popular argument from “causality.” We have spoken of an ultimate subject, not an ultimate cause, of change. One reason for this choice of approach is that change is a more obvious and unmistakably identifiable factor in experience than causality. The latter indeed is so elusive that many philosophers can identify it only as a seemingly baseless demand or postulate of reason. Another ground for emphasizing change rather than causality is that it is more obvious that the ultimate subject of change must itself change than that the ultimate cause of change must itself undergo effects; and it is to me nearly self-evident that the religious idea whose truth we are seeking to test is not that of immutable activity (whatever that may be) or of purely one-sided causality, wholly non-social, non-mutual.
However, let us now consider the causal problem. By implication we have already done so. The subject of change is also the cause of change. The human person endures the changes in its experiences; it also, as a will, is a cause of them. It isnot the only or even the chief cause, but then neither is it the only or even the chief subject, of these changes. The chief subject as well as chief cause is always God, the eternal subject; and in addition to God and the human person there are also the subhuman individual factors in the person’s body, each of which in its ineffective, deficient, but real way, endures the changes in the person’s experience, and contributes causally to them. Also there are finite factors in the environment. The hierarchy of subjects and the hierarchy of causes of change is the same hierarchy; in the latter case it is considered from the standpoint of one of the two correlative aspects of activity and [p. 276] passivity, or in terms of the relation of earlier to later states so far as rendering them predictable. It is precisely the changing which causes change, both in itself and in others. The changing human person certainly does act upon his own experience, his own changes, and not even a Thomist wishes to deny it. The human person also, as evidently, acts upon changes in his body, thus producing changes in the environment. In support of the dogma that the cause of change must ultimately lie in the unchanging (except as abstract, as less than the entirety of an individual) there is no shred of evidence in experience.
The insufficiency of the changing causes of change, apart from God, to fully constitute the world process (which last phrase is simply a dim, “unidentified” reference to God in his concrete totality) lies not in their being changing causes, that is, subjects of change, but in their not being sufficiently catholic, flexible, or universal subjects. Each finite subject of change is the effective subject of only a narrow circle of changes, narrow both in space and in time; there must be a cosmic subject effectively enduring all changes in space and time, and the active aspect of the unity of this subject will constitute the ground of orderliness in the world. Things other than God change far too little, rather than too much, to constitute the comprehensive cause or active subject of all existence. How vastly much more change is found by physiology and physics to go on in the human body alone than the human mind clearly endures in its experiences! During a thousandth of a second practically no change is consciously experienced by us, yet myriads of bodily changes go on in that time.
The argument from “existence” is only a slight variant upon the argument from space and time. It can be made concrete to the reader if he ask himself what can be meant by the fact that he is a part of reality. It cannot be [p. 277] meant merely that the list of real things includes himself; for apart from belonging to the list he would be nothing, not even a “real” possibility. The world is a collection of items, membership in which entirely constitutes the items, measures all the difference between them and nothing. If the items are all of an accidental character, the situation is surely nonsensical. Evidently there is something, relationship to which is the universal measure of reality, and which itself is real by its own measure, is selfexistent. Now mere matter cannot possibly measure the difference between the existence and the non-existence of amind. Matter, as mere stuff which fills space, is indeed in itself a purely empty conception, so far as experiential meaning goes; but waiving that, it throws no light whatever on how mind also can fill space-time, that is, enter into existence. Matter may be thus and thus organized in the human body, but organization of shapes and sizes and motions (all that matter is positively) is only just that, organization, shapes, sizes, and motions; it is not quality of feeling, memory, fear, etc. Yet these too are real. Their reality must be clearly measured, recorded as an addition to the total reality, the whole of what has come into being, by more than matter. The fantastic notion that the ultimate subject of change is mere matter is given brilliant and perhaps ironic expression in E. D. Kennedy’s remarkable poem entitled, “To a Molecule.” I quote a few lines:
You are mankind and all its works . . . .
And men and gods are dust and dream
While your eternal seconds pass.The star and snail are one to you,
The snail and star alike must be,
And life and death are filtered through
Your idiot identity.
[p. 278] You are my death, for in you I
Admit myself a transient thing,
Behold what lingers when I die,
My end and your continuing.[2]
Of course, this is poetry not science. Today we do not regard any molecule as strictly “eternal.” And the abiding “identity” of electrons seems not to be involved in contemporary physical theory. Nothing, it seems, abides forever except the cosmos, space-time as a whole. And no characters of the cosmos are unalterable for physics except its basic mathematical structure as expressed in the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity physics. This unalterability, however, is a mere a priori assumption, not an experimental result. No experiment can show that nature will never change her pattern of behavior. But even granting the fixity of laws, this cannot possibly constitute the ultimate permanence in change. We should still have an empty, abstract, or “idiot identity,” for which the strange adventure of taking on the forms of a man’s thought and feeling, or an elephant’s, would subsequently become even less than a dream. Indeed, the mere adventure of motion, so far as past in time, would for the mere physical cosmos as ina given present be as nothing. Or else, the cosmos must be viewed as a single changeless entity inclusive of all past and future events, and thus change will be explained by denying its reality. Philosophers know just how thoroughly this “explanation” of time has been tried out, and how little it has in the end commended itself to the philosophic community.
Of course I shall be told that matter acquires in this case the “ emergent” property of feeling, etc. But there is not the least suspicion of an identifiable connection between dead matter and feeling matter, such as could give meaning to the notion that the former acquires the properties [p. 279] of the latter. All that can really be got from the materialist is that space, formerly filled (and thus shaped) with we know not what, has become filled with something we do know, namely, feeling and thought and volition. Space-time must be such that the presence of feeling makes a difference to space-time, which difference measures the whole difference between feeling and not feeling. What positive character in space and time furnishes this measure? Surely not their geometrical properties. Feeling is clearly more than geometry.
If space-time is, in Newton’s phrase, the “sensorium of God,” the unity of an all-sympathetic mind, then clearly every new feeling makes a difference to space-time which exactly measures the content of that feeling. It is this explanation or nothing! Whatever feeling is, space-time involves a measure of all feelings and values, for it distinguishes between them and non-existence. Therefore space-time involves an absolute standard of feeling and value; and such a standard can only be a perfect mind, the all-embracing and thus “righteous” love of God. If space-time is not a mind, or an aspect of one, then still less am I! Space-time is “merely physical” only in whatever sense you and I are so. Behaviorism does not touch the real point. If feeling is only matter, still the world whole must as a unity possess all the feeling there is, and that is just the idea of the supreme love.
God is thus more or less self-evidently contained in the mere idea of one’s own existence, the degree of self-evidence depending upon the degree of clarity attained by the latter idea. God is contained in our existence, not merely as cause of our “coming to be” but as constitutive of the very meaning of “coming to be.” It is also to be emphasized that the necessity for God is not due solely to our existence as minds, as though matter would explain the world were there no [p. 280] higher animals on the planet. Matter as dead, insentient, mindless, explains nothing whatever, not even itself, since it has no identifiable positive meaning. The moment we identify matter in experience it turns out not to be dead, but to be a part of our own aliveness, or of the aliveness of other subjects directly disclosed in ours or indirectly inferred from it by analogy. Otherwise matter remains a word whose meaning is assigned to the depths of unidentified intuition in which, for all the materialist knows, there is nothing but other finite minds or God, as dimly apprehended by us, to constitute its referent.
The reason we have come to use the term matter is easy to explain. There are entities identified as minds; there are entities of which we have only unidentified, that is vague, intuitions. To express this vagueness we can either say that what we are dealing with is mind of almost completely undetermined specific kind; or we can imagine that when determined it will reveal itself as having nothing in common with mind at all, or at least we may wish to leave the question open. The word matter was hit upon for this purpose. It stands for “being” where no determinate characters are known, or no characters except spatio-temporal configurations. The latter presuppose characters of a qualitative kind. To call these presupposed characters merely material, and to say they are we know not what, is all one.
It is true that one may try to give dead matter quality by ascribing the sensory qualities we experience to material things. It may be said that sulphur is really yellow, and that yellow is not necessarily subjective, or expressive of life and feeling. But the spatio-temporal unity of matter in the flux of qualities is not in the least identified by this type of view, whereas the mnemonic-social structure of mind illumines the whole structure of space and time. [p. 281] And there is the embarrassing problem of the microscopic and submicroscopic material things and their qualities. Surely the electrons of sulphur are not yellow. Have they no quality? Are they mere constructs? Then so are books and crystals. And there is the introspective fact, one of the best attested of experimental introspective facts, whatever one thinks of experiment in such matters, that color is given as a feeling-tone, something through and through subjective, emotional, alive.[3]
The argument may be summed up in this way: Try to understand how matter can serve as the ultimate subject of change, and you will find it distinguishable from an allsympathetic mind by just the extent to which you fail to understand its ability to perform the required function.
But if God is the subject of all changes, does this not mean that he is the only real individual, the one substance of which all things are mere modes? Have we not arrived atasheer monism? If we depend for existence wholly upon God, how can God depend even for some of his accidents (as second-type theism asserts) upon us? Or how, as Maritain asks, can we contribute to his being when even our being is purely derivative from his? Now let us note carefully in what sense we have shown that God’s assumption of our changing states constitutes their occurrence. We have not said that our states are merely his states; but that their occurrence to him is necessary to their occurrence to us, and that this applies to every item in the states, so that in that sense they are completely and nothing but his states. On the other hand, every item in our states also belongs to us. This is mutuality, the shared nature of existence. But individuals other than God (1) do not effectively or with full awareness realize even their own qualities, still less those of other individuals, and (2) do not last through all time in order to constitute all the changes preceding and [p. 282] following their states of a given time. Thus all being is God in that only God participates adequately in all lives, and in that without this participation “being” would have no definite or public character, and “I am” (or, “there is a man of a certain type”) would have meaning only for the speaker, that is, no meaning. But there is nothing in all this to make the dependence of others upon God a purely and in every sense one-sided relation.
Without God we should be nothing at all, for to be would be nothing. (It is not true that there is no strict refutation of solipsism; for if everything were nothing but my dream, then even the real possibility of other individuals would be only my dream, and thus either I should be not simply the only actual but the only possible individual, or else I should be the very ground of actuality and possibility, that is, God himself, In either case “I” in “I alone exist ” would lose its meaning as referring to a finite, contingently existing self, and the very terms “exist” or “real” would be no more meaningful than nonsense syllables.)
But also without us God would not be the same as he is. He would exist, and existence would be generically what it is now, namely, the self-identity of his all-participating life. But it is obvious that the details of the participation would be different if the things to be participated in were different, and that thus the divine dependence and independence are inseparable aspects of one mutual relationship. The dependence of God is his “passivity,” and this passivity truly belongs to him, according to second-type theism, so that it is by virtue of his passive being, his sensitivity, that our activity can exist, and the divine passivity is the one passivity upon which all activity is unfailingly exercised, whatever other passivity may also from time to time enter into the mutualities of the world. Thus activity has [p. 283] as its only universal correlate the adequate, unstinted, unique sensitivity of God, just as passivity has as its only universal correlate the activity — equally unique in scope —of God. We “give” God his passive being in the sense that, by definition, this being, which is social, can receive determinate form, aesthetic realization, only in partial dependence upon others. But it really is his being we give him, since we do not “act” in a public sense (in the sense in which reality is not a solipsistic concept) , that is, we do not really act, except as we act upon God, no matter what else we act upon. It is his response to us that makes our act real, in the sense in which we can call the acts of others also real, and that is the sense of “reality.”[4]
The idea that it is God’s (partly passive) participation in our lives that makes them real is not without analogy to features in our experience. Does not the sense that one’s experiences are occurrences also to others, through their passive sympathy, contribute to our sense of reality? One can scarcely exaggerate the degree to which we actually live and feel as though we were nothing unless what we are becomes a part of what others are, and vice versa. One can exaggerate this, so far as human-to-human relations are concerned; for one does not quite believe that the appreciations of others are absolutely essential to and fully measure one’s own being. But the tendency is there to view ourselves as essentially participating and participated in. Only in relation to God can the tendency go the whole way. There we can say literally, we are as we love and are loved. (We can oppose the will of God, but only because we carry God passively with us, and secretly know that we do. He wishes us to do what we do not, but he willingly experiences what we do do as fully, though not so happily, as if it had been what he wished.) The almost completely social character of the finite mind in relation to its fellows [p. 284] (including subhuman minds) escapes being complete only because in another relation it is complete. We have selfreliance because we rely secretly upon one mind that is utterly reliable, that is, one mind that is always passive to the full measure of our potential activity, one mind that will listen no matter what we say, and thus lift our utterance above the merely private (which, as the positivists rightly say, is meaningless, is nothing) and make it relevant to other finite minds who also share in the same atmosphere of all-appreciation, that is, of “being.”
To look at a fly, or at a crystal, and say, “That too exists,” is to refer to “existence” as neither oneself nor the fly though common to both, and such that without it neither oneself nor the fly would be anything at all. What is that something? What could it be but God? Candidly, I cannot see another answer.
God, it should now be clear, is not, according to our one substance,” the sole real individual, e but simply the one substance or individual which is neces sary to reality, or which is constitutive of being as such, all other individuals being part-constitutive only of accidental aspects of being. Individuality and necessity of existence are not the same, nor is accidental reality unreal reality.
But if God is involved in everything, must he not be viewed as a part of each thing, thus making the inclusive reality also a part of its parts? We must here distinguish different meanings of part. If to be a part of means to be Jess than, then God is not less than one of his creatures, except perhaps in their own illusory estimation, as when the sinner takes God’s will to be of less import than his own, and as even the saint may at times relegate God to the background of his awareness, as though the principle of all things were a minor detail. Never can we escape wholly [p. 285] from this duality of attitudes; we can only find some adjustment between them which promotes harmony and growth. The problem of sin and radical perversity, the “diabolic” or “satanic,” lies in the necessity and difficulty of this adjustment and the sense of relief which follows a more or less unconscious determination to escape the issue by acting as though one really were, for practical purposes, the sum of existence, at least as intrinsically valuable or admirable.
The sense in which God is part of each thing is that generalized sense better expressed as “factor of,” meaning something in abstraction from which the thing would be less than it is. Now in abstraction from God, were such abstraction possible, we would be nothing, and that is certainly less than we are. So in that sense, God is a factor of everything, and he is precisely that one factor which alone sums up all that each thing is, and infinitely more besides. He is distinguished from his parts wholly by being more | than they, but this more is not simply outside the parts, » yet a factor of them, as a man is more than any of his cells; it isa factor of all of them. If this is a contradiction according to some modes of speech, so much the worse for these modes as applicable to philosophical problems. But indeed even physics seems to admit that the merest particle is essentially the whole universe from a certain standpoint.
If to be a substance meant by definition not to be a factor of any other thing, then indeed there could be but one substance or none. For all real relationship would be excluded, since the unity of a relation cannot belong to no term, and whatever term it belongs to, the other term or terms will also belong to this term, for they belong to the relation. There can indeed be external relations, but only as some one term is involved in without involving the other, and this is possible only if the involved but not involving term is more abstract than the other, for this is what is [p. 286] meant by abstract. But substances, so far as they are equally concrete, can be related only reciprocally. Note well that to “ involve” does not mean to possess as lesser part of an including whole, but merely to have as that without which the thing could not conceivably be itself.
There is only one condition under which a substance, an individual, related to another, can be more abstract than that other, and so fail to involve it. This is when the more abstract substance comes earlier in time. For time, as Peirce and Bergson seem to me to have discovered and the philosophic world may eventually come to realize, is in Peirce’s phrase “objective modality,” the way (Peirce said, I think misleadingly, a way) in which things can have both necessity and freedom in relation to each other. The present can influence the future, especially the near future, but it cannot necessitate its precise character. The world grows in determinations, that is, in concreteness; the futurity of the future is its mixture of abstract and concrete. If then a is related to b as in an earlier state, then this earlier state of b did not involve a’s relation to it, for the past contained the future only as a more or less abstract outline, that is, an entity tolerant of relations it does not include. This solves the problem of the infinite regress which has been urged against the idea of internal relations. (Ais related to b as related to as related to b’s relation to a as related to b, and soon.) This problem may seem to be involved in the simultaneous relations of substances. But since the two terms are simultaneous, we can say that there is no question of taking the terms in order, first a and then b as related to a, and so on; for it is only the weakness of thought that prevents us from seeing the two terms in their relations as aspects of one reality. In direct intuition this is just what we do see, a single Gestalt, of which the “elements” mutually involve each other, as Peirce and James [p. 287] and Bergson and Bradley and Whitehead and the Gestalt psychologists have been endeavoring to make clear. Such a one-in-many or many-in-one can be approximated to in thought by adding items and relations one by one, but never quite attained. God’s vision of the world at a given moment can only be of a single organic reality, the content of his unitary intuition. But there is no need that he should see all the moments of time past, present, and future as one mutually implicative whole, for the simple reason that the future moments do not exist, and hence need no relation, internal or external, to the present — except as outlines, which of course are internal (but being indeterminate do not make the details of the future internal) to the present. After the future becomes past, then we can say that earlier moments of time which are also past are involved in it, but not vice versa: for the earlier moments are abstract so far as they contain their futures in outline only, as boyhood contains even in retrospect a general plan only of maturity, while maturity contains the details of boyhood experience as remembered (mostly subconsciously).
Suppose one were to say that individual entities neither past nor future to each other could be (mutually) externally related. Relativity physics does seem to say this (though Bergson seems to show that this is only a manner of speaking), and so does Whitehead in his metaphysics (though in conversation he appeared to suggest the need for mitigating the doctrine). But if this supposition be taken absolutely, the result is a vicious regress, pointed out by Bradley, and the one form of vicious regress emphasized by this author against which there is no defense. For if entities are mutually external and are both concrete, then their relations can belong to neither of them nor to anything more concrete which embraces them; and we can [p. 288] only say that the terms have to the relations the relation of being actually related by them, and this obviously involves an endless regress of the kind which is vicious because it must end if the terms are to be related. And there is no chance this time of escaping, as we have done in the case of internal relations, by adducing intuition as capable of seeing the terms and their relations as one simultaneous unitary reality, for just this unity is contradicted by the externality alleged of the relations. Nor does it help at all to urge, as has been done,[5] that the error is in trying to analyze “relation,” a conception which, as ultimate, should, it is thought, be accepted as “not further analyzable.” For the notion of purely external relations is precisely an attempt to analyze a situation into terms and relations, the whole being taken as absolutely without inclusive unity. As we have said, a relation between two things is itself one entity, and in this oneness both terms must be included. It does not follow, Bradley and absolute idealists to the contrary notwithstanding, that the relation must be internal to both terms; but it does follow that it must be internal to one of them as embracing the other, which is more abstract, or else to some third thing embracing both, in which case both terms must be abstractions.
This reconciliation of organic unity with an open future is the solution of the problem which agonized William James and is in itself a proof of God. For only a divine intuition could really know such a unity, or render it conceivable except as an empty logical demand. And the demand is inescapable on pain of a vicious regress.
The foregoing treatment of the problem of relations is by no means complete, and may not do justice to the arguments of Whitehead, James, or Bradley. I shall return to this subject in The Universal Orthodoxy (in the chapter on “The Meeting of Extremes in Second-type Theis”).
[p. 289] It has been frequently maintained that an omniscient mind could not contain lesser minds as parts of itself since, knowing what these minds do not know, it could not entertain their partly erroneous beliefs.[6] This assumes that the only way to contain a belief is actively to believe it. But perhaps one can passively suffer it. Belief has been defined as readiness to act. The omniscient would not be ready to act upon our erroneous ideas, and so would not believe them, but it could feel our readiness to act, and so this readiness would become part of its content.
It must be remembered that, whatever problems seem to be solved by putting lesser minds “outside” the supreme mind, the essential problem, that of throwing at least some remote, dim light upon how the lesser minds are yet perfectly known in spite of their externality, is not exactly helped by this procedure. The external, it appears, is known by signs which are internal, that is, it is known imperfectly, abstractly, partially. God infers his objects! If, on the contrary, he enjoys these objects as one with an aspect of himself in this enjoyment, then we have in principle a clue to the perfection of his knowledge. We ourselves seem to have immediate awareness of the feelings of our own cells, which enter into the content of our own experience, but without this making what they do not feel, their ignorance, identically our ignorance. The positive aspects of false belief (and even pain is positive, unlike ignorance as such) become positive predicates of the including mind, the negative aspects become predicates of that mind only so far as constituted by the part or included mind which has the negative property in question, while as constituted by other parts, the including mind is without just those negations. To regard this as contradictory might only mean that to have parts at all must be seen as contradictory. For the properties of the parts belong somehow to a whole which in its wholeness does not have these properties [p. 290] so far as they express deficiencies of the parts in their distinction from each other and from the whole as more than they. The whole is the parts and more, it is their positive content, not their negative (their partialness) , except as this contributes to or defines the positive. It does not prevent God from experiencing dramatic value in the clash of more or less ignorant wills that he does not share in this ignorance by being ignorant. He experiences the full positive feeling and meaning of the state of ignorance, even though in contrast to the experience which he also has of the things of which lesser wills are ignorant. I suggest that when the reasons for denying that other minds are parts of God are examined it will be found that they fail to conform to the conditions by which alone parts and wholes are possible at all. One might as well say that a whole with parts moving in opposite directions could not really contain these parts, for then it must move in opposite directions at the same time, as say that a mind could not contain the false belief of a together with the true knowledge of the object of this belief. The property of the part is the property of the whole with a systematic qualification.
We should not assume that we know offhand what is meant by part, and from this assumed knowledge deduce the status of the idea that we are parts of God. It is just as problematic what part and whole are as what God is. All the problems of metaphysics are on the same level. The world whole is made such by the divine inclusiveness, it is love that explains cosmic structure, or the two are aspects of the same thing. What binds many into one is social realization.
The notion that if we are within God our activity cannot be really ours but must be only his supposes that God has nothing that is his but his activity. For if passivity is also his, then the part’s activity can be also the whole’s [p. 291] suffering of this activity, its feeling that and how the part is active. Passivity seems definable as the activity of one individual so far as possessed or enjoyed by another, and this holds even where the first individual is part and the second is whole, provided the “ whole” has some unity of its own and is not a mere sum whose oneness depends upon the mind of some external spectator. (In the latter case the whole is not an individual as either active or passive, it is not a primary unit of reality.)
I should like to pay tribute again to the genius of Fechner, who was perhaps the first to see clearly that the choices of lesser minds, the voluntary acts, must appear in the highest or all-inclusive mind as involuntary “impulses” upon which the choices of the highest mind, its volitions, will operate. By sympathetic union with our volitions God wants, not by choice, what we choose to want. Though it is his choice — or rather, his willingness, for he considers no alternative — to be thus open to influence from us (or from some creatures or other), it is not his choice that we give this influence just this or that direction; for, if it were, then we could not really choose at all. God’s choice (and not simply his willingness, but his moment-to-moment decisions among rival possibilities) comes in deciding at what point to check or encourage or redirect this or that among the impulses or involuntary movements which we set up in his life. (He does not choose between good and bad ways of doing this, for no bad way is possible to him, yet there is no one predetermined or uniquely right solution to the problem posed by the conflict of interests, but only a general class of valid solutions, no one of which — at least as I conceive it —is wholly definite except the one brought into actualization. The determinate right solution adopted belongs perhaps to no set of equally determinate alternatives, but it does express a “determinable” [p. 292] which could have been determined otherwise and equally well. This is the nature of creation and of time and of all determinate existence, that no “sufficient reason” why it must or ought to be just as it is, is possible. The particular cannot be deduced, even by God. It has to be decided by fiat, the “play” of creation of which the Hindus speak. The “righteousness” of this play consists not in its deducibility from any rules, but in its conformity with the rule—to which an infinity of other possible solutions would also have conformed —that whatever is decided should be with a view to all interests, fully appreciated as they are, and with a view to the principle of combining unity with contrast, of achieving beauty.)
I suggest that this neo-Fechnerian view of the passivity of the inclusive mind to the activity of the included mind is (a) an exact and concrete way of saying what religion has been trying for centuries to affirm, and (b) a philosophically more defensible view than any conception incompatible with it. Activity, volition, cannot work upon nothing or merely upon itself; and that upon which it is exerted will not be there for it unless it is accepted with some appropriate degree and kind of passivity. Choice is among impulses or desires, not among “ideas,” mere inert pictures or forms. God has a definite problem to solve only because he actually wants conflicting things through his participation in conflicting desires and volitions. He wishes that others should have their wish; it is their wishings that furnish the matter for his choice by becoming a set of desires within his life. Love makes control self-control by communicating desires. Every orthodox theologian admits that wickedness consists not in having impulses, but in consciously and wrongly encouraging or discouraging impulses. So the holiness of God’s will is not in his freedom from desires, but in the certainty that none [p. 293] of his desires will be unduly encouraged or discouraged, that is, treated without adequate regard to all other competing desires in the universe. God passively wishes with and for the creatures what they wish for themselves, but his activity lies in deciding how to resolve the conflict of interests which he has thus taken into himself. Our problem of conflict with each other is thus through the divine sympathy made God’s problem of self-harmonization. This is Fechner’s anticipation of the “patience,” the “fellow suffering,” the “tenderness” which Whitehead ascribes to#* God. It may be no accident that just such personalities — themselves full of gracious sensitivity — should recognize the divine responsiveness which thinkers generally cannot easily understand or admit.
To say that activity is inferior to passivity is rather like saying that right is inferior to left, for there is as much activity as passivity in any being and vice versa. What is inferior is activity-and-passivity on a mean rather than a grand scale. Nothing and no aspect of anything can be acted upon except by precisely the passivity which is required to adjust the activity of the one to the activity of the other; and to nothing can one be passive save by possessing precisely the activity which is required to make the passive adjustment one’s own, part of that unity of self which is always a creative self-synthesis, and which not even God could do for one. We are passive toward the entire universe, yet we act on a cosmic scale too after a fashion; but both the influence we receive from, and that we exert upon, the whole of things (and God as the individual unity of that whole) are deficient. There is as much that God cannot make us do or be as there is that we cannot make him do or be, and the former “cannot” expresses our deficiency, not God’s. He can change us, from our point of view radically, but by his or the cosmic standard the change [p. 294] will be slight. We can change him, by our standards greatly, for we can make him think our thoughts sympathetically with us.
That God cannot “make us do” certain things does not “limit” his power, for there is no such thing as power to make nonsense true, and “power over us” would not be power over us if our natures and actions counted for nothing. No conceivable being could do more with us than God can (if theism of the AR type is true) , and so by definition his power is perfect, unsurpassable. But it is a power unique in its ability to adjust to others, to yield with infinite versatility of sympathetic desire to all that has desire, and to set limits to the fulfillment of desire not as to something merely alien to himself but as to what he himself would like to enjoy in and with the subjects of the desire.
Does this not introduce the tragedy of unfulfilled desire into God? Yes, it does just that. And no less a theologian than Berdyaev, not to mention others, tells us that God suffers, that existence is tragic for God. It is tragic for any being that loves those involved in tragedy. And this is why men can literally love God, because he even more literally loves them “as he loves himself,” since by direct sympathetic union they are parts of his internal life. Spinoza’s saying that we love God with the love with which he loves himself has thus a truth which he did not quite intend. Not that God loves exclusively himself and no other individual, but that God through loving all individuals for their own sakes makes them one with himself, with phases of his own life. Gonsequently, when we for our part love God this love is a factor in God’s enjoyment of himself, that is, in his self-love. Spinoza and the orthodox theologians seem to have divided the truth between them here. God is neither the whole in which all parts lose their value as distinct individuals — so that there is only the one loving [p. 295] the one — nor is God so exalted that he is not a whole at all, and so that our feelings and conflicts are not his feelings and conflicts, but rather God is the socially differentiated whole of all things which only love of all things can explain. God is not in every sense “beyond tragedy,” but he is beyond, utterly beyond, the evasion of tragedy, wherever and for whomever it be.
To deny that we are parts of God implies that God as a unity in variety contains less variety than exists, or it implies that an exact duplicate of every item of existence is part of God. Either way is not promising, the first alternative having no point unless first-type theism is accepted, with its denial of variety to God, or unless God be conceived as very “imperfect” indeed, and the second alternative being a reduction to absurdity.
In general, once the essentially negative theology of first-type doctrine has been renounced, it is alone consistent to follow systematically the procedure of regarding every positive conception as applicable in some sense to God, searching for the sense in which it is applicable, rather than cutting off discussion by asserting its inapplicability in any and every sense.
Also, if we deny the inclusiveness of the divine unity, we will either have to admit that relations between God and the lesser minds belong to no individual, no real substance, or have to admit a superdivine individual to which they belong. (It would be nonsense to suppose that God embraces his relations but not the terms of these relations, for however “external” relations may sometimes be to terms, no term can be external to its relation. A “relation to" is just nothing.) The paradox of the world-and-God as more than the supreme being should be left to firsttype theism, which glories in such contradictions. For the Aristotelian view that substances are not factors [p. 296] in each other, there was a legitimate motive. There is a sense in which no “subject of predicates” is itself a predicate. If by predicate is meant an abstraction, such as can be known by an image serving as its model or “icon,” that is, as a sample of the predicate, then no substance is ever such a predicate. The total personal quality by which each of us qualifies God, or the cosmic life, is knowable only by direct, though for us vague, intuition, and identifiable only by pointing, never by description or abstract imagination. In the terminology of Peirce, substances are indexically, not just iconically, known; and the full nature or quality of things is known only by intuition, which is icon and index in one. Neither the full what nor that anything is can be known by mere abstract description. In their abstract or more or less general predicates things do not contain particular other things; but in their concrete being things qualify each other reciprocally; and this is the social nature of reality. To point to a thing is to point to its neighbors as factors of that thing, and vice versa; for things are irreducibly social, “members one of another.” If under “predicate of” we include “concrete factor of,” then things are certainly predicates of other things.
Since even God is “factor of” other things, there is no denial of the reality of finite subjects in calling them “states” of the eternal subject. God appears in us as an aspect of our states. This makes him passive as well as active, and we are active as well as passive as parts of him. Substantiality is mutuality, not simply independence. It is love, the synthesis of the categories.
It is an ancient contention that the number of substances can neither increase nor diminish. This is true only if by substance is meant not merely a real subject of change but the one universal and necessary subject of change, which indeed can neither come into nor go out of [p. 297] being, for it is being. In any other sense the contention seems merely the denial that change is real, that anything can come to be which previously is not, and this denial is an arbitrary limitation of change. What has been overlooked by many (for example, by Kant) is that there is no need whatever and even no room for more than one necessary substance, substance as furnishing identity through all change. Contingent substances furnish relative identities through limited changes (though even this identity must be measured by the alone fully effective and public selfidentity of the necessary substance) , but the changes of the coming to be or ceasing of these substances require a subject of change which always changes, and which is therefore not contingent. Failing to make these distinctions, thinkers naturally also failed to see that the one necessary subject of change is God. There is even a certain comic element in the unconscious ascription of the characters of deity to alleged mere matter, at the bottom of the scale of being.
Men do not easily see the superiority of that “being” with which they can do anything that they can do at all —save only deprive him of the will and power to treat others with similar compliance and to integrate all into the one conscious life — because in human relations a certain stubbornness must atone for the finiteness of human sensitivity, for man’s inability to be passive to more than a small portion of the active agents in existence. We worship that second-best form of power which puts influences in balance by deficient, lukewarm response and do not readily recognize the superior power which, more humbly than the humblest of men, even perhaps than the one born in a manger, yields with exact adequacy to every pressure of creaturely activity. The most trivial of physical particles will go where we push it, but will it feel our joy or sorrow, echo our pp 298 thoughts, assume the qualitative forms we wish some fellow being to share with us? Not to any noticeable extent. It resists with superhuman “ power ” of self-sufficiency, with admirable persistence, in its own course of activity. None but God, the opposite extreme from the particle, can be infinitely passive, the endurer of all change, the adventurer through all novelty, the companion through all. vicissitudes. He is the auditor of all speech who should be heard because he has heard, and who should change our hearts because in every iota of our history we have changed his. Unchangeably right and adequate is his manner of changing in and with all things, and unchangeably immortal are all changes, once they have occurred, in the never darkened expanse of his memory, the treasure house of all fact and attained value.
See especially Whitehead, Modes of Thought and Science and the Modern World. ↩︎
E. D. Kennedy in the New Republic, CI, 139. ↩︎
See C. Spearman, The Nature of Intelligence (London, 192g; end ed., ‘The Macmillan Co., 1927), chap. 14 and pp. 241-50, 354; also Spearman, Greative Mind (London and Cambridge, 1930), chap. 11. On the emotional quality of sensations, see also F. R. Bichowsky, “ The Mechanism of Consciousness: Pre-sensation,” American Journal of Psychology, XXXVI, 1586-96. ↩︎
See Whitehead, Modes of Thought, p. 140. ↩︎
See Ralph Barton Perry, in The New Realism, edited by Edwin B. Holt (The Macmillan Co., 1922), pp. 106 ff. For an admirable discussion of internal relations see Dewitt H. Parker, The Self and Nature (Harvard University Press, 1917) , pp. 212-73. ↩︎
See E. S, Brightman, Philosophy of Religion (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1940) , pp. 219-20. ↩︎