[ p. 172 ]
MIND consists in the power to convey and to apprehend meaning. The conveyance and apprehension is not mediate but immediate : it takes place through symbols. Mind can reveal its presence only by acting, and the acting calls for interpretation. The environment of mind is therefore symbolic. Some of these symbols are directly traceable to the action of other minds like our own. Others, however, are the preconditions of such action: in the environment of mind, as in its very nature, are certain stabilities that provide the framework within which meaning is set. Mind needs the “given” if it is itself to give. If these stabilities may be used to produce symbols whereby mind conveys meaning, then they are themselves symbolic apart from that use. Just as we find within our experience, therefore, bridges to other minds like our own, so we find bridges to Another Mind, also like our own, but infinitely greater. The thinker cannot make his own mind intelligible except as he believes in other minds with which he holds commerce. But neither can he make intelligible this commerce of mind with mind by means of what is “given” unless in that “given” and in all it makes possible he sees the action of a Mind wholly original. Symbols are words denoting minds, and the symbolism of the whole is the language of God.
[ p. 173 ]
UNDERLYING all that is being said of a theological character in this book is the philosophy which regards one mind as necessarily implying another. Mind cannot be self -explaining. Whatever explanation is offered of mind, the explanation is itself the act of mind, and therefore assumes the ‘very thing that is to be explained. On the other hand, to account for mind by something less than itself can hardly be defended as a rational proceeding. Men often mistake mere prejudices for good reasons, although it is a little difficult to understand why they should have such strong prejudices against themselves. They seem determined to rule mind as a real entity out of the universe, both as their own most characteristic possession, and as the Final Reality which makes the universe possible. In most cases, however, all that they really do is to express dissatisfaction with some theory as to the origin, nature, structure, or operation of mind. Such dissatisfaction is legitimate enough: it is, indeed, one of the finest evidences to the reality of the very mind whose nature sets the problem. But it is altogether another matter to want to deny the reality of that which men mean when they say “mind.” If there is a function, there is obviously that which functions. Sellars, for example, while he accepts whole-heartedly “the functional notion of mind,” nevertheless recognizes that [ p. 174 ] a “function” calls for “a living organism” of some sort. [1] Whether we could accept his description of the organism as adequate is, of course, another question. The law is universal: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” Mind is known by its working. There are, however, those who would disagree with this putting of the case: they would prefer to say that the mind is the working. Psychology, it is claimed, does not need the hypothesis of “soul” any more than the physical sciences “need the hypothesis of God.” The concern of the first is with “behavior,” and of the second with “pointer readings,” as Eddington would say. [2] But a final explanation of the behavior and the readings can be given only as both are seen to be related to a back-lying fact whose nature is given in the behavior and in the readings. The old distinction between essence and manifestation, or between substance and qualities, does not need to be rejected just because it is old. [3] The most obvious of all facts is that man knows himself as a thinking creature. He can call back that which once was but no longer is; he can anticipate that which is not yet, but some day may be or will be. He can make past and future as though they were present. No psychological theory can change facts such as these: reflex arcs, brainpaths, energy discharges, psychoses, neuroses, and the like, are but terms teased out of modern man as he faces the sheer stark mystery of himself. However he accounts for his thinking capacity, he has it ; and the more elaborate his attempts to rob it of all cosmic significance, the more that significance is made apparent. What else but mind could be at the pains of denying mind? and the question is perti [ p. 175 ] nent irrespective of the word that may be used for describing mental activity. Bridges’ criticism is very much to the point when he draws attention to the surreptitious way in which the behaviorist and the mechanist make use of the very concepts, ideas, and presuppositions of the personalistic and spiritualistic theory which they have set themselves to destroy. [4] How can there be any judgment passed on anything except as there is free intelligence; and if free intelligence is the precondition of all criticism, how can we operate with exclusively behavioristic and mechanistic categories?
Nor are we able to debase mind by the simple device of calling attention to the long and slow processes by which it has come to be. An account of the history of a fact cannot change the fundamental character of the fact itself. It is a curious temper that supposes that because mind, speaking with respect to its historical appearance, is an “emergent,” it loses caste. Is mind that comes by way of a process any less impressive than mind that should come by sudden but inexplicable fiat if, indeed, mind could come that way at all ! We simply have to affirm that the history of mind no more degrades mind than the completed cathedral is degraded by the fact that it was a century or more in the building. Mind is like every other perfected organism, in that it wonderfully illuminates its own history : it invests the blind gropings of the almost insensate forms of long-distant ages with the character of genuine premonition. That was for this, and so this explains and interprets that. The principle holds, the principle of teleological continuity, whether we are considering the evolution of [ p. 176 ] mind throughout long ages, or whether we are considering its development in a given life at the present time. [5]
We have said that mind can be accounted for only by other mind. Mind at the human stage needs a twofold environment: it needs the environment of nature, and it needs the environment of society. It bears in itself the unmistakable stamp of this twofold environment: it is not only a part of all the other minds it has ever met, but it is also a part of every place where it has ever been. Mind cannot meet a mind and it cannot meet a fact using for the time being a quite arbitrary distinction without being to some extent affected thereby. That gives to every individual mind a certain universal significance, causing it to suggest a world greater than itself, to reveal more than it actually is. But one of the most serious mistakes made in the consideration of this fact is the inference that mind is therefore nothing at all but a growing deposit of experience, an increasing accumulation of impressions, a mere passive echo of voices calling from without, having no independent existence of its own. [6] The error here is the- more insidious because the surface facts seem to support it. To a superficial view it is clear enough that a mind is simply something that goes with a body : no bodies, no minds. The problem is therefore entirely one of understanding how bodies are produced and how they function. But because the condition to the development of a mind is first the production of a human infant, and then the surrounding of the infant with nature and society, it by no means follows that a mind is thereby being created. The presupposition [ p. 177 ] of mental development is something to develop. No appeal of nature and no appeal of society could ever evoke a response if there were not already existent that which had the power to make the response. It is not to be denied that mind appears to have beginnings inchoate and inarticulate, but lowly beginnings do not yield the standard for estimating their own outcomes. Human minds obviously go with human bodies, but our ascertaining that this is the natural order and connection still leaves us with the fact that the prius of mind must still be mind, and not something called “matter.” [7] To admit that there is in the universe to-day a reality called mind the power of thought and all that that implies and then to affirm that once upon a time there was no such thing as mind anywhere, is incredible merely as a philosophical doctrine. No one who was not the victim of a violent prejudice could claim that such a doctrine was more reasonable than that of theism, which affirms an eternal Mind as the ground and cause of all lesser minds. The theory of mind held by Durant Drake is admittedly “realistic,” and in a way even “materialistic,” in that it asserts that mind is made “of the same matter” as everything else, but Drake himself admits that the “sting” is taken out of the theory by the claim that the original matter or “stuff” is in both cases “psychic.” He accounts for “the physical aspect” of the “stuff” as being merely “the pattern according to which it is arranged.” [8] And just as the prius of mind is other mind which ought easily to be allowed by any man who makes the basic reality “psychic” so mind is the prius of mental action in a given case. The processes whereby [ p. 178 ] we awaken mind, as we say, or stimulate it, all assume the possibility of the activity we desire to see. We desire a result which we believe we are able to bring about. All experience may be regarded as education, and education involves the educatee. It needs to be categorically affirmed that we do not make minds : we simply give minds a chance to grow. But growth is a co-operative enterprise. Even the behaviorist admits, as was mentioned above, that reflexes could no^ be “conditioned” unless they were already possessed of “prepotency.” [9] The term, like the “patterns” of the neo-realists, bears a meaning suspiciously like that of the “native forms” of the so-called a priori philosophers. In each case it is at least implied that growth calls for a working together of a subject and certain supplied conditions. This in turn involves the fact of a certain mutuality: the conditions are such as the subject mind can respond to ; mind is such as to be able to respond to the conditions.
Experience, therefore, as we have said before, appears as interpretation. It is the discovery of meaning by that which is able to make the discovery. Neither the process nor the result is a mere “as if.” The process is a process of reality; the result is a real and true result. Human experience is not one long-drawn-out self-delusion. Mind expresses reality and it discovers reality. If we cannot say that, why waste our time reflecting on life ? If mind itself has no final significance, then neither have any of its conclusions. If we are to treat everything f acts, events, experiences, ideas simply “as if,” then we have to treat the “as if” philosophy also simply “as if” it [ p. 179 ] were true! The circle would be as vicious as any ever constructed by David Hume although a mind less acute than that of Immanuel Kant could point out where the fallacy lay. [10]
Now, a discovered meaning implies not only a mind that discovers it but also the action of mind in that in which or by which meaning is discovered. Here we meet the central claim in the idealism of “the Great Tradition.” The claim can hardly be questioned so far as social experience is concerned. Social experience means the intercourse of mind with mind, and it is carried on not directly and immediately, but by means of mutually understandable instrumentalities. Immediate knowledge of mind by mind is impossible. For one mind to reach another mind it must act, and the mind to be reached must respond to the action. The ensuing “understanding” of the one mind by the other is an interpretation an interpretation of the meaning of certain “signs.” A mind purely passive if there could be such would be a mind entirely unknowable and unknowing. Meaning may be conveyed by the most trivial acts a motion of the head, a shrug of the shoulders, a gesture with the hand, a glance of the eye, a frown, a smile. But such acts may also be employed to convey a false meaning SL meaning opposite to that which they are usually understood to bear. Even a false meaning, however, is a meaning, and it implies a mind just as much as a true meaning does. All this being so, it becomes impossible that the actor shall be entirely equated with the act. [11] How can mind be nothing but behavior when every bit of behavior bears a meaning, and when behavior may be simulated so that the [ p. 180 ] meaning it appears to have and is taken to have is not at all its real meaning ? There is more to any act than the act itself: any human act bears a message, and it bears that message because it is more or less the expression of a mind. The act is the actor manifested, but it is not the actor himself. Were it not for something in the actor, the act and its meaning could not be. We are therefore justified in saying that every act by which it is intended to express and convey meaning is an “incarnation.” Even the act that is merely reflexive or that has become habitual has the same significance. A deed is a word ; it is the utterance of mind. [12]
But such “words,” such “utterances,” usually have reference to other minds. It could not, however, be maintained that this reference is always there. Doubtless there are forms of human action which have meaning for the actor alone. He is not thinking of anybody else. He is expressing his own thought or fancy or necessity under an inward urge ajid primarily for his own sake. His deed, shall we say, is a pure monologue : he is “talking to himself.” Doubtless too there are times when mind bodies forth itself in form for the sheer satisfaction of beholding its own handiwork. It wants to clothe its own ideas so that it may see them. It does something, or it makes something, and in the deed or in the production it sees itself. This too is monologue. The familiar illustration is that of the medieval cathedral builders who spent years on intricate details of carving with no reason for supposing that their work would ever be seen by human eyes. Yet even here, if the legends are true, there was the thought of the [ p. 181 ] work as a service offered to God : that is to say, the piece of carving represented the effort of a human mind to hold commerce with the divine. Hence the medieval doctrine: laborare est orare, a theme expressed in moving verse by Arthur Hugh Clough. [13] And certainly the builder’s satisfaction in his work would not have been decreased, but, rather, increased, had he learned of another mind to whom it had conveyed its message. Any piece of self-expression, therefore, be it never so subjective in its original reason, is always a possible datum for another mind. It may turn out to be a word which, although not meant to be heard, was heard, and conveyed a meaning. The “Song” of Pippa, as she passed by first one and then another on her brief but glorious holiday, was the spontaneous utterance of her own sheer joy in the fortune that gave her such a day: in no case was it intended for the ears of those it fell on, yet falling as it did on these various ears, it spoke a message that was understood. Even Sebald, borne along on the strength of an unhallowed passion, is suddenly halted in his tracks as he hears it : “God’s in his heaven.” He can rise to his feet, and turn his back upon his temptress, as he cries, “That little peasant’s voice has righted all again.” No one would have been more surprised than Pippa herself, as she lay down that night, weary but happy, in her little room, to know what her song had meant to so many human lives, yet the meaning it had for them it had legitimately. Nor did Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” suppose that her “plaintive numbers” were being overheard, or that the music of her song would linger in another’s heart “long after it was heard no [ p. 182 ] more.” Allowing therefore, as we must, that there may be human activity which has significance only for the actor, and in which there is no intention to convey a meaning to another, it still remains that the activity may become the medium for the fellowship of mind with mind.
In regard, however, to actions that are definitely social and intended so to be, there can be no doubt about their mediatorial character. There is every purpose to share an idea. One mind would establish contact with another mind. Olin A. Curtis built his theology on the principle that personality is under a law of self-expression, but self-expression motivated by the purpose of self-sharing. [14] Mind expresses meaning through an act in order that the meaning might be seized by another mind. Such seizure is of the very essence of fellowship. Mind touches mind at the point of give and take. If it were not for this “point,” minds would be as blind and “windowless” as Leibniz’ monads and minds like that would be perfectly impotent in all other respects. A mind whose expressed meanings were never accepted and approved by others would eventually collapse under the burden of a dreadful isolation: it would die of “solitary confinement.” It is quite possible to describe a spoken sentence in terms of physics expended energy, sound waves of varying velocity, and the like. But when physics had said all it could say about the spoken sentence, it still would have gotten no farther than the machinery. It never could measure in its own distinctive terms the idea in the sentence. A .similar amount of energy and a similar combination of sound waves could carry an utterly [ p. 183 ] different idea, and the science of physics could never detect the difference. Not until an Italian sonnet can be reduced to the form within which it is so rigidly held can physics wholly explain any meaningful human action. In the words of D. G. Rossetti,
“A sonnet is a moment’s monument Memorial from the Soul’s eternity To one dead deathless hour. . . . A sonnet is a coin: its face reveals The Soul its converse, to what Power 'tis due.” [15]
Then how can a sonnet be simply so much form or sound? Forms or sounds in this sense are symbols. They are windows opening on vistas of varying characters and dimensions. They have a certain sacramental quality, being the visible signs of an invisible thought, the means whereby the thought signified may be shared with another mind. It is at this point that so-called “realistic” theories of knowledge are fatally weak: they fail to provide for/the essential difference between the apprehension of the printed page as datum and the apprehension of the printed page as symbolic of meaning beyond itself. “In the core of one pearl,” as Browning expressed it, lies “all the shade and the shine of the sea.” And in the heart of one word may lie a whole philosophy, garnered of the tears and the laughter of many generations of men. Let that word be “love,” and what more needs to be said? Love only a word? only so much sound ? only a -flatus vocis, as certain Scholastics would have said? Well, then, destroy the word utterly : let it be brought to pass that the word itself [ p. 184 ] shall never again be spoken or written, in the English language or in any other. Have you then destroyed love the thing itself? The question is self -answering. Thought is more than its forms of expression. Mind is more than its own activity.
The principle we are considering, that deeds are conveyers of ideas, holds equally of the more objective and permanent achievements of man. Civilization is embodied thought. History is idea at work. All art, all music, all drama, all architecture- what are all these but mind giving itself form, form which alone makes possible the spread of idea. An unembodied thought is as impotent as unconfined and undirected energy. Energy is effective in the degree in which it is confined and directed, and thought is effective in the degree in which it submits to bondage the bondage of form. Any institution, any organization, is an idea thrown into a more or less stable mold, but it is at the same time the means whereby the idea becomes shared by many minds. Hocking calls attention to the suggestive fact that ideas are forms of reality with the unique quality of not growing less, but increasing, according as they are shared. [16] Even processes that appear to be destructive are under the control of idea. When men undertake to destroy an institution or to disrupt an organization, it is always in the interests of an idea which they desire to see take the place of another idea with which they have ceased to agree. All criticism resolves itself into a conflict of ideas. Whenever one thing is replaced by another be it a tool, a method, a product, a building the moving force in the change is an idea of the thing aimed at. Even when change [ p. 185 ] represents no specific human will, but appears as resulting impersonally from “the law of change,” it will still be true that the change embodies if we may again use Eucken’s terms “over-historical” and “over-personal” norms, which in their turn bespeak a Universal Spiritual Life. 1T Even ^relics, whatever their character, are relics bearing an idea, and they would be quite without significance were the idea not able, through them, to reach the contemporary mind. Gray in a country churchyard, Keats with a Grecian urn, Eossetti before a Ninevite god in the British Museum, Francis Thompson looking at “her portrait,” anybody at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Washington, or London, or Paris what goes on here but the commerce of mind with mind? Deep is calling unto deep. The gravestone, the urn, the god, the portrait, the tomb what are they but so many “words” (logoi) ideas and thoughts given some semblance of permanence lest they should perish from among men. The past can speak to the present only as the past can clothe itself in symbols: there is no other way. The past, as past, is always dead. If it is to continue to exist at all, it must exist as present, and it can exist as present only as there are minds in which or for which it can exist. The past can be effective, therefore, only as it is captured in idea. This is, in effect, the meaning of von Hugel when he says that our experience involves duration, while yet the elements of the experience interpenetrate each other in a certain “simultaneity.” [17] Here too we find the reason for Lotze’s insistence that the law of the “physical” is not applicable to the “psychical.” [18] As forms of being, the [ p. 186 ] “physical” and the “psychical” are alike real, but what holds good of the one does not hold good of the other. What matter “the poet’s teeming brain,” the artist’s lovely dreams, the musician’s rhapsodies, unless they can be translated into the language of sound or color or form, and through that medium fulfill their larger destiny in becoming the possession of other minds? “Spirit with spirit can meet” so we are assured by Tennyson, who also bids the meeting spirits to speak. But the speaking is necessarily “by means of,” as we have already said. In Greek fashion, therefore, we shall regard mind as involving alike the power to understand and the power to express. Reason (nous) and utterance (logos) go together. The unexpressed thought this has been our argument is incomplete and unshared. The expressed thought is complete; it has uttered itself, and may be both shared and multiplied. The forth-going mind meets a response, and the response is the evidence that the mind is not alone “a pin-point rock” in a shoreless ocean but is surrounded by realities like itself.
Here, then, is the basis of all social fellowship. Idea can become incarnate. Mind can build a bridge to mind. But have we not here the philosophy also of a Universal Mind ? There are features of our experience which are to us the evidence of minds like ourselves. But what about those other features of our experience the cause of which we cannot so explain ? You read a poem, and by means of the poem your mind and the poet’s mind share the same idea. Then you look at a tree. Is the poem the work of mind, and the tree not? That is perhaps one of the [ p. 187 ] greatest questions we can ask. In the works of man we see the works of mind, but in the works that are not man’s but which are the indispensable bases for all of man’s works we too often suppose that no mind is present and active. Is that good logic ? Why should the picture of a landscape be held to bear witness to mind, but not the landscape but for which there could have been no picture at all? Are the copies more significant than the originals ? We infer the creative human mind from all that it brings to pass. But what the human mind brings to pass it does so by means of material that is supplied to it and under conditions and within limitations that it cannot ignore. Why is not the environment within which man does that creative work which is mind in action just as much the action of mind as any adaptations and adjustments made within the environment? [19]
These are deep matters, and we may not easily dismiss them. Perhaps it begins to appear that man must deny mind to himself if he is not willing to see everywhere the marks of a greater Mind than his own. Social experience requires instrumentalities. These instrumentalities not only include other minds and their various activities and creations, but they require also “nature.” Man does nothing de novo or in vacuo. He is helpless, indeed, would be nonexistent, except as there is more than himself so much “given.” The experience of any given mind is concerned with facts, events, and processes which cannot be traced exclusively either to itself or to the action of other minds like itself. Other minds may and must, on occasion, employ these facts, events, and [ p. 188 ] processes, but they cannot wholly account for them. The mind that is helpless without conditions can hardly account for the conditions that so absolutely command it. Mind deals with the conditioning environment, learns how more or less to control it, but the dealing and the controlling must proceed according to the nature of the “given.” No man may “do what he likes.” This is the truth in the mechanistic theory of life, and in a “neo-mechanist” as he prefers to call himself like Joseph Needham, the truth can be harmonized with the present position after the method of Lotze, namely, by the claim that the mechanism that is universal in extent is yet subordinate in significance. [20]
How shall we explain these fixed and independent features of our environment independent in the sense that their being and their nature are not to be traced to any human will, while yet they dictate to any and every human will the conditions on which alone they can be controlled ? Whether we speak of them as things or as laws or as relationships, they confront us as so many absolutes, preventing us from living lives of mere phantasy, begetting in us the conviction of independent reality, making us creatures of law and order, disciplining both our thought and our will, prescribing to us the way in which alone we can walk securely. To attempt to ignore these absolute and coercive elements of experience is simply to invite disaster. This is why the world is a cosmos, characterized by orderliness and dependabilities dependabilities which seem often to work against us, but which will work with us if we will work with them. Even those who deny an omnipotent God will [ p. 189 ] at least allow that the concept of omnipotence is valid. There is omnipotence although there is no God. Indeed, the nontheists like Bertrand Eussell dwell at length on the heartlessness of the “unconscious power” to whose “trampling march” life is hopelessly subject. [21] We lift up our eyes to the hills : they are there to-day as they were in our childhood. Matthew Arnold wrote of “the tree, the tree,” standing “bare on its lonely ridge” in the distance, as he and “Thyrsis” had seen it so often “in old days.” Mind, with its vast capacity of memory, and imagination, and creativity, and anticipation, would be indeed “an ineffectual angel, beating in the void its luminous wings in vain,” but for the constraints it can never escape the constraints of reality. It is because there are stabilities round about us and beneath us like “everlasting arms” that we can think rationally, live ethically, lay our plans, achieve our purposes. We look out upon a world and there is working within us a world which, with all its changes, is forever the same: the stars, the sunsets, the mountains, the tides, the seasons, fail not. Grass grows and water flows. Mind is environed by permanence. What are these stabilities, we ask again these laws, these processes, these relationships, or whatever else we choose to call them, which prescribe the limits within which we live, move, and have our being? The “common-sense realist” would make short work of the question. He would say that things are exactly what they seem to be, and there is no problem. “Nature, there it stands!” Colors are colors, sounds are sounds, solids are solids, laws are laws, distances are distances. If he chance to have [ p. 190 ] heard of William of Occam, he will call into use his famous “razor,” and will declare that this prying into what is so obviously the simple facts of the case to find some “deeper” meaning was an altogether “unnecessary multiplication of principles,” leading to dire confusion of the mind of “the plain man.” [22] But the matter is not so simple as all that. Probably the greatest shock the novice in philosophy gets is when he first comes to realize unless the fact prove to be to him a pons asinorum! that the things he has been wont to take for granted, that seem so obvious, so immediate, so self -sufficient, are in reality mental constructs, and therefore not immediate at all, but mediate. “Scientific materialism” would, of course, take the side of “the plain man” here which only shows how unscientific it is. Par more adequate, because explaining more, is the view that every recognized fact, every understood process, every stated law, everything, in short, that is not manifestly attributable to minds like our own, bears none the less that same symbolic character which we know is borne by whatever minds like our own have helped to produce. Using the previous illustration, we say that it takes a mind to account for a sentence, and it takes a mind to understand it. The sentence is a symbol by which meaning travels from mind to mind. And how otherwise can we finally describe those stabilities, whether of fact, of process, or of law, which we subsume under the word “nature” ? There is meaning in the printed page, and there is meaning in the star-strewn firmament : he who says that speaks more rationally than he who denies it. There is not a single thing that can be said, either scientifically or psychologically, [ p. 191 ] about a printed page or a marble statue or a painted canvas or a Gothic arch that cannot be said about those natural stabilities and unchangeable laws and co-operating processes without which neither the page nor the statue nor the picture nor the arch would be possible. Intelligence may mold “the given” to its own purposes: this is freely admitted on every side. Yet many who admit this refuse to see in “the given” anything but a mere “neutrality.” [23] Mind is under control, yes, but of what ? Of something that is not mind and that in nowise resembles mind this is the alleged conclusion. But if a cathedral is a work of mind, why are not all those forces which set the possibilities of the architect and the builder, and but for which there could be no cathedral at all why are these not the work of mind too? Minds appear at this point and that in what has been called a “manifold” or a “continuum.” It is clearly impossible to separate the mind from its setting: has not mind “emerged” from this very setting ? Then are not the mind and the setting organic to each other ? Shall we not understand the setting from the nature of the mind it has fostered and sent forth? In which case the setting cannot be a mere neutrality, a blind mechanism, a self-sufficing somewhat, “indifferent to the fate of the values” which its own product, rational mind, cherishes.
We shall say, then, that the being, nature, and action of minds such as we know our own to be are utterly inexplicable except as there be a Universal Mind God who is as truly manifested in what we “find” as we are in what we do with this “found” or by means of it. Our fellowship with each other is a [ p. 192 ] perpetual discovery of mind to mind through symbols. The condition to these symbols is that there shall be still other realities which are quite independent, for their existence and nature, of the symbol-making and symbol-using mind. If the lesser is symbolic, why is not the greater ? If the contingent is meaningful, why is not the absolute? An Eternal Mind an Eternal Word revealing the thought of Eternal Mind in an endless variety of lesser words or symbols are we not in good right led to this as the final explanation of our own minds, their experience of each other through mutual action, and the dependence of both the minds and the experience on the stabilities of nature?
Difficult to 'believe in God ? Perhaps. But he who disbelieves has never completely considered his own alternative. Or if he has done so, and if he still insists on it, he ought not to charge against belief in God that it is difficult, seeing that he accepts something which, when its implications are thought through, is seen to labor under the difficulty of being profoundly irrational.
See Religion Coming of Age, p. 138. Sellars, of course, denies the existence of mind except as a “function” of the “physical” organism. Of. Patrick, The World and Its Meaning, chap, xvii, and the same author’s later book, What is the Mind? the second representing a semi-behavioristic view which, however, may be given an idealistic interpretation. The author expressly says (p. 181) that the view is not intended in any way to lessen the powers of the mind, whether intellectual, moral, religious, or a3sthetie. ↩︎
See The Nature of the Physical World, chap. xii. These “readings” are, as a matter of fact, says Eddington, not the final reality, at all: they are so many “symbols,” still awaiting deeper insight (pp. 268-272). ↩︎
The Neo-Scholastics are contending vigorously for the validity of the concept of “substance.” See Me Williams, Cosmology^ chap, xviii; Sheen, Religion Without God, chap, vii, also pp. 151-155, 292-296 ; Mercier, A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, pt. ii, chap ii, arts. 14. Cf. Wicksteed, Reactions Between Dogma and Philosophy, lect. vi, on “The Doctrine of the Soul” an examination of the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. ↩︎
See Taking the Name of Science in Vain, p. 18. ↩︎
Cf. Pringle-Pattison, The Idea of God, lect. vi. No recent thinker has grasped more clearly and stated more persuasively the organic relation of mind to the whole nature-process while yet holding firmly to its deeper significance. Man as rational and ethical intelligence is conceived as culminating “a continuous process of immanent development” (p. 111). ↩︎
Dewey’s theory comes very close to this. He assumes on the part of the physical organism certain “biological aptitudes.” These, interacting with the environment, [ p. 194 ] give rise to "a system of beliefs, desires, and purposes/’ and individual concrete mind consists in just this formed system. See Human Nature and Conduct, preface, p. iii, for a concise statement. ↩︎
The principle implied here is substantially that of the older “Occasionalism,” developed by later Cartesians like Geulincx and Malebranche to deal with the problem of the relation between mind and body growing out of Descartes’ sixth Meditation. In its modern form, the principle appears as Epigenesis, and was adopted by Borden P. Bowne as congruous with “volitional causality.” Cf. Personalism, chap iv. Lotze, Microcosmus, vol. i, p. 280, accepted the principle, and states it as follows : “Our knowledge of nature is at best but an accurate study of the occasions on which by means of a mechanism whose inner moving springs we do not understand phenomena are manifested, each attached by universal laws to an occasion belonging exclusively to itself, and each with an equally constant regularity changing with a change in that occasion.” ↩︎
Mind, and Its Place in Nature, espec. p. 243. ↩︎
See above, Chapter IV, note 24. ↩︎
See Urban, The Intelligible World, for a brief judgment on the “as if” philosophy. He regards it as “essential sophistication” (p. 32), and declares that there could be no greater tragedy than that what we treated as most valuable we should at the same time know to be untrue and unreal (p. 74) . ↩︎
Of. Haldane, The Philosophy of Humanism, pp. 5253. Haldaiie argues that in any act of intelligence the intelligence itself necessarily transcends the act (p. 57). ↩︎
See E. Caird, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, vols. i and ii, for a consideration of the relation between “reason” (nous) and “word” (logos) in Greek and early Christian thought. For the theory in recent philosophy, see Haldar, Neo-Hegelianism, a study of the work of such men as T. H. Green, the Cairds, Wai [ p. 195 ] lace, Bitchie, Bradley, Bosanquet, John Watson, Henry Jones, Muirhead, J. S. MacKenzie, Haldane, and McTaggart. ↩︎
See Qui Laborat, Orat. ↩︎
See The Christian Faith, chaps, xviii and xxxiv. Curtis states his position concisely on pp. 507-508. ↩︎
The House of Life, “The Sonnet,” introduction. ↩︎
See Human Nature and Its Remaking, rev. edit., pp. 229-232. Hocking shows how one’s power increases according as one’s ideas prevail in other minds. ↩︎
See Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, first series, pp. 69-70. ↩︎
Op. tit., vol. i, bk. ii, chap, i, on “The Existence of the Soul.” ↩︎
See Vaughan, The Significance of Personality, chap, iii, on “The Humanity of God,” for a readable exposition of this whole point of view. Cf. Wilson, The Self and Its World, and Bell, Sharing in Creation, passim. ↩︎
See Needham’s article on “Mechanistic Biology and the Religious Consciousness” in the volume, Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. Needham ; also his Skeptical Biologist, espec. the chapter on “Materialism and Keligion,” pp. 217ff. ↩︎
Cf. Krutch, The Modern Temper, chap, i, on “The Genesis of a Mood.” This chapter sets the tone for the whole book, which comes to its climax in the definition of human life as “merely a physiological process with only a physiological meaning” (p. 235). ↩︎
Entia non multiplicands sunt prwter necessitate Occam’s “razor.” ↩︎
“Neutrality” here is not used in the v sense that meets us in certain modern realists like Durant Drake, namely, that our environment consists of so many “neutral en [ p. 196 ] tities,” which may be either “physical” or “psychical,” as occasion may require (see Mind, and Its Place in Nature, chap, viii, and cf. Patrick, The World and Its Meaning, pp. 366-372, and literature there cited) . It is used, rather, to describe the claim that although the world is “the home of values,” there is no teleological or purposive relation between these “values” and the conditions in which they may be won. These conditions, relative to the values, are simply “neutral.” Krutch is logical enough when he infers from this that the fundamental fact is “an unresolvable discord” (op. cit., p. 247). The nontheistic humanists who keep “meaning” while surrendering “purpose” are simply not logical. ↩︎