[ p. 198 ]
THE relative features of the ethical life go naturally with life as a process of discovery, but implicit in the relative ethic is the absolute ethic. This absolute ethic is in that very principle that controls the changing ethic and is the real reason for the change. Evaluation is inseparable from life, because life necessarily creates situation whence emerge conflicting claims of higher and lower, and the claims must be settled. The necessity of the evaluation witnesses to a reality which exists independently of the situation, and but for which the situation itself could not be. The evaluation may ignore the claim of the higher, since it is of the nature of a moral absolute that it shall be freely chosen. To ignore it, however, is not to destroy it. Man cannot destroy what he does not create. The evaluating impulse, therefore, witnesses to an Eternal Moral Order which man exists to illustrate, confirm, and obey. Moral progress is that order becoming more and more fully embodied in human history. The order in its turn involves God. Moral evaluation is metaphysical revelation. Religion seeks that God whose nature and will are revealed in the moral order. It is in his will that we are to find our peace.
[ p. 199 ]
WE have been saying that mind consists in a power of interpretation and a power of fellowship. To this is now to be added a power of evaluation. It is of the very nature of human experience that conflicting claims shall be encountered. A choice becomes inevitable, and a choice means that one claim is held to have a higher sanction than another. Holding’s much-discussed axiom concerning religion and the conservation of value is nothing at all but a way of saying that man is a creature who recognizes experiences as higher and lower, and who believes that the principle of the higher has permanence and that his own obligation is to this principle. Amid all the difference of opinion as to what constitutes a high and a low in a given situation, the conviction that there are real highs and real lows remains, and with it the conviction that the recognized high should have the right of way. Ethics may be relative to changing situations, but presupposed in the changing ethic is an absolute ethic. It is clear that ethical progress means the substitution, as a basis for human action, of a traditional conception by another conception believed to be “better,” and the substitution is made because the better is recognized as authoritative. The better carries the quality of “oughtness.” Here is the absolute element in ethics, and it is present in all ethical judgments. [1] To make relativity universal is [ p. 200 ] as impossible in the realm of value as it is in the realm of fact. A universe of relativities would mean a universe in which were no dependabilities, and in such a universe it could not be known that there were even relativities. Parts may be relative to other parts of the given whole, but eventually we come to the ultimate whole, and the ultimate whole cannot be relative. It is an absolute -absolute as a fact, absolute in its essential nature, absolute in the law of its acting. There must, therefore, be absolute features to human experience. The “ideas” of Plato and the “forms” of Aristotle and the “categories” of Kant are more than mere empty abstractions. Even thinkers of the type of Durant Drake, Whitehead, and Wieman recognize that the order of experience is under some kind of absolute control the control of “patterns.” [2] Whatever be the nature of that which exerts the control, the control itself is so palpable that even the most confirmed dreamer cannot but recognize it. The reference here is not only to the concrete actualities with which we are surrounded, but also to those “molds” within which, entirely apart from our choice and volition, experience is necessarily cast.
It is necessary to distinguish, however, between absolutes that control our action in this more automatic fashion and absolutes that may or may not control our total life-attitudes. The existence of the first is indisputable enough. The second is open to the charge of being more or less arbitrary and imaginary. To try to treat “things,” practically or theoretically, other than as their essential nature permits, is to invite speedy disaster. “Pain” is an effective teacher, [ p. 201 ] perhaps more so even than "pleasure/’ and pain is an instrument for securing obedience to absolutes. [3] But there are other absolutes which manifest themselves only as they are permitted to do so : or at least, their effective action depends upon something besides themselves. It is the height of paradox to talk about dependent absolutes, and yet it is the paradox of great truth. In any usual sense of the word, there is nothing conditional about the laws of gravity or the laws of sound or the laws of nutrition or the laws of any of the other manifold natural processes.
“And with joy the stars perform their shining, And the sea its long moon-silvered roll; For self -poised they live, nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul.” [4]
The operation of “the natural” is independent of human wills. These stabilities have therefore nothing to do, except by indirection, with “judgments of value.” The most we can say of them is that they help provide the conditions within which values may be manifested or from which they may be won. The terms, “manifested” and “won,” as here used, are significant. They suggest a wide rift in modern thought. There are those who claim that values are a purely human creation, in that they depend wholly upon man and have no meaning, even no existence, apart from him. This would seem to be at least implied in Dewey’s theory of “experimental empiricism.” [5] On the other hand, Sorley and A. E. Taylor regard values not as human creations but as human discoveries. [6] These men stand squarely on the fact that there are certain great realities which condition human experi [ p. 202 ] ence, and that the quality of a man’s experience is determined by his attitude toward these realities. These realities exist in their own right. They would still be realities even if there were no creation. Men exist with reference to them, and are constituted so as to be able to lay hold upon them and make them their own. They cannot be seen or touched, but invisibility does not mean unreality. “The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” The most potent forces in human experience are those which operate from within the veil, but whose operation calls for our consent at least, in some measure. We learn of their existence by the very process and experience of life itself. This, of course, is the way in which all absolutes [5:1] are learned; but there is an element of freedom and choice respecting some of them which does not hold respecting some others. The absolutes which control the physical organism, and those which control certain forms of mental judgment, are not the same as those which control what we call character, or the inner spiritual experience, or the relations of men within the social grouping. Men are neither as “the pieces on a chessboard” nor as the helpless ball which must go “as strikes the player.” They are subjects of other than external forces. They may act “in view 6f” and the implications of that fact may not be ignored in any attempt to read life truly. These absolutes that work from within and with our cooperation are just as absolute as any others. Indeed, it may appear in the end that these are the only actual absolutes, and that the absolutes that determine nature and mental judgments have been devised [ p. 203 ] for the sake of the moral absolutes, and to provide an arena for their manifestation. The existence of the moral absolutes is learned much more slowly, however, than that of the others ; the results of ignoring them are much less immediately evident; and whether they shall be obeyed even when they are recognized is much more a question for the will to determine.
These considerations set our problem. How shall we characterize honesty, truthfulness, generosity, sympathy, justice, love, self-sacrifice, purity, humility, holiness, and similar graces and virtues which have come to light as mankind has pursued its way, and which increasingly point the direction of its future ? Are they, as was intimated above, merely human creations? Are they just so many devices which men have worked out to ease the friction of living together? There is not one of them that can enforce itself with the same drastic suddenness and completeness that, say, gravity can, or in a different way even “the laws of thought.” Fire burns; falls injure; water drowns; but dishonesty may “pay,” and even when it does not it may still be scoffed. No man is compelled to be honest or truthful or generous or sympathetic or loving in the same sense that he is compelled to breathe or to eat or to drink or to avoid falling bodies or to have always something under him or to treat four as the equal of two and two. One experience of the burning power of fire or of the suffocating power of water or of the sense of utter helplessness in falling from a height is a lesson which, if it be survived, the human mind never forgets. But not so readily does it learn those other laws whose sanctions depend not so much on the working of the [ p. 204 ] objective order although sooner or later they may have these sanctions also as upon a court whose seat is in the innermost shrine of the soul. A merely prudent and pragmatic morality, crudely expressed in the modern saying that “anything is right if you can get away with it,” is aimed directly at the fundamental virtue of sincerity. As to this, Walter Lippmann’s observations on “Love in the Great Society” are very much to the point : knowing how to avoid the “social consequences” of unrestrained passion does not mean that all consequences are avoided. [7] Nor if they were entirely avoided, we shall add, would it mean that license was thereby justified. That man is to be pitied indeed to whom honesty is merely a policy, and generosity merely a road to influence, and justice merely a social gesture, and purity merely a regard for prudence. Not in this way does life attain its true stature. It belongs to the very nature of mind to find itself sooner or later aware of a claim. All moral philosophies, all ethical codes, yes ! and all religions, low or high, have reference to the nature and the significance of this claim. These things are very much more than the evidence to man’s need of a “defense mechanism” against the stark and irresponsive impersonality of the universe that momentarily threatens him. They bear witness to man that is evident ; but they also bear witness to that larger whole of which man is a part. The moral order is as real as any other order : as was suggested above, it may even be the fundamental order, and all other orders simply its derivatives. Be that as it may, a man knows that in escaping the judgment of his fellows he does not escape self -judgment ; and he knows [ p. 205 ] that when he turns a deaf ear to that self-judgment as he may and does the judgment still stands. The moral judgment is not rendered invalid by its apparent inability on occasion to enforce itself. There are no permanent “cities of refuge” in the moral order. The right that one appears to have escaped by turning down another path is quite likely to be met on the new path, even although it be under a new form. There are moral inescapabilities, and evasion of them is only postponement. Jonah took ship for Tarshish in the west because he would not go to Nineveh in the east, but he found that there were no straight lines, and though he sailed due west the pull of the east was there and it eventually brought him to Nineveh. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” Still the unwearying “Hound” follows follows “with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace,” with “deliberate speed, majestic instancy.” That particular judgments as to right and wrong, high and low, desirable and undesirable, are always open to investigation and revision, is, of course, plain enough. There could be no moral history otherwise. This, indeed, is of the very essence of moral value that it can preserve itself only by a steady and drastic criticism of its own detailed manifestations. Growth involves at once a surrender of something that is old and the acceptance of something that is new, but both the surrender and the acceptance result from one and the same principle.
But what is this principle? How may we characterize it ? What is the living core of these diverse manifestations ? This claim that stands over against [ p. 206 ] the awakened mind, the claim that life should be pitched according to the highest, the claim that the accepted highest shall continually be replaced by a discovered higher what does it signify? The fact of it is as patent as any fact in human experience. It registers itself in life in a thousand ways. Its province is the realm of the inner assents, and a man’s inner assents in the end make him what he is. Much that he does and much that he has contact with will be quite incidental. What will not be incidental is why he does it the motive, the spirit, the purpose and what he takes away from the contact. For these incidentals provide the field for the operation of the permanents and the absolutes. There is no situation in which a man may not maintain and reveal his fundamental attitudes, and these attitudes necessarily involve either an indorsement or a rejection of an inescapable claim. It is with reference to that claim that he exists at all. His power to recognize it is his distinctive characteristic. What he does about it becomes determinative of his entire being. It constitutes an a priori which rules over him from the beginning, independent of his will for its existence, in nowise destroyed because he may choose to ignore it, but calling to his will for co-operation. It is not an a posteriori which he painfully builds up, and which has no other significance than that it is his creation. Though he learn of it by experience, the learning is a discovery of a reality already existent even eternally existent. The conception arrived at by Aristotle, that the end is the fulfillment of the meaning of the beginning, and is therefore present as immanent principle throughout the whole process of [ p. 207 ] its historical development this conception still registers an insight which mere empiricism has not been able to invalidate. [8] It is hardly possible to imagine a more shallow philosophy than that which sees in moral values nothing more than useful social devices. It is as shallow as the science which takes the “pointer readings” and the measurements as themselves ultimates instead of as expressions of a reality still more profound. Values, whether we characterize them as social, or as moral, or as religious, may properly enough be required to have temporal sanctions, but not to have temporal origins. And even the sanctions must eventually be seen to be more than temporal. Why should a man make one choice rather than another when the choice he refuses has attached to it every desirable consideration esocept one and the choice he accepts has attached to it no desirable consideration except one? In being swayed by this one consideration, namely, the purpose to be true to an insistent claim that arises from within, and which nobody else in the world but himself need know how he treated in being thus swayed the man becomes the evidence to the existence of a moral absolute, which because it is moral is conditioned on his will in order to become positively effective in his life, but which because it is moral is also inescapable if the man would come to his true self. Kant’s “categorical imperative” does not lose its categorical character because it goes unheeded, and it would still be rightful lord even although it were universally disobeyed, but an absolute lord with some obedient subjects is after all more impressive than an absolute lord without subjects of any kind. [9] Then if man cannot escape [ p. 208 ] the moral absolute, that is to say, if he can never reach the place where he will not know that an authoritative Voice is speaking to him, that absolute, that Voice, cannot be held to be his own creation. What man makes man can destroy. But there are indestructibilities not only in the realm of nature but also in the realm of spirit. Man must learn to subject himself to whatever is indestructible. Even in seeming to use it for his own good he must still obey it. And the correlate of obedience is lordship. Whatever conditions man’s well-being is man’s overlord. There exists a principle, a law, an order, or whatever else we like to call it, and man is intended to be its subject. Every “conscientious scruple” is the proof of it. We have even the paradox that the denial of the existence of an objective moral law, when made for reasons held in all good faith and sincerity, will be the clearest evidence of that which is being denied. Denials may be emphatic affirmations, and none the less emphatic because indirect. In these considerations we find the answer to the question whether values are of the real stuff of the universe or whether they are protective devices which man himself has arbitrarily hit upon in order to make his existence temporarily tolerable. Every choice of a higher against a lower is made in a definite situation. To say that the situation is “real,” falling, as Hoffding would say, within “the manifold of existence,” but that the principle of the choice is only “ideal,” perhaps nothing but a fiction of the imagination this looks very much like sheer philosophical stubbornness. Perhaps it will turn out that if we believe some things “just because we want to,” we [ p. 209 ] may not believe some other things “just because we do not want to.” Why does it not follow that if a “real” situation can be controlled by an “ideal” principle, the principle is at least no less existential than the situation ? Byron may have “taught us little” in some respects, as Matthew Arnold seemed to think, but he understood the power of an idea :
“Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art, For there thy habitation is the heart The heart which love of thee alone can bind ; And when thy sons to fetters are consigned To fetters, and the damp vault’s dayless gloom, Their country conquers with their martyrdom, And Freedom’s fame finds wings on every wind.” [10]
Were the “fetters” real, but the “spirit” which led the prisoner to endure them unreal? Without that spirit there would have been no fetters. The unseen was giving meaning to the seen, as it always does. So that what is said to be “only ideal” appears to be more truly existential than the situation in which it is operative, since the situation may utterly pass away while yet the ideal principle remains. When in a situation calling for honesty a man chooses to be dishonest, has he thereby destroyed honesty? If there were not a single honest man in the whole world not even Diogenes being left! would there then be no honesty anywhere f Does justice depend upon men being just, or love depend upon men loving, or purity depend upon men being pure ? There was a time when there was no race of men. Then men appeared, and history began to be made. >Was that history entirely “hit and miss,” or was it under the [ p. 210 ] influence of something pre-existent a pre-existent of which the history was so much revelation and illustration? Plato’s argument in the Symposium for Absolute Beauty is as nearly valid as philosophical argument can ever hope to be; [11] and the argument is just as valid for Truth and Goodness. As a statement of empiric fact, it would be true enough to say that to have justice we must have just men; but since the demand for justice is a demand growing out of the process of life itself, we must say that life is rooted in the principle of justice, and therefore that the principle antedates particular lives. But in that case, it must also be said that values are intrinsic to reality : they are of the very stuff of existence. [12] When that first evolving man stayed his hand as he was about to steal the meal of another, that was not the absolute origination of justice in the universe : rather it was the beginning of the revelation of justice as a force to be reckoned with in human life and history. Morals have plainly enough undergone a historical evolution, but the evolution has been only the more complete recognition and operation of the moral principle. If it comes to that, evolution of any sort is not creation but revelation. Such popular phrases as “creative evolution” and “emergent evolution” are, as a matter of fact, philosophically misleading, whatever may have been the original intention of Bergson and Lloyd Morgan. This point has been stressed by both MacWilliam and Harris. [13] The theist would better use the phrase “revelational evolution.” Nothing can appear in time but it has antecedents out of time. The fact that man can and does evaluate, giving some things the right of way over others; the fact [ p. 211 ] that he can “swear to his own hurt and change not” ; the fact that he can recognize an invisible authority and bow to it ; the fact that he can order his life with reference to realities whose effectiveness for his life depends on his own co-operation all this calls for explanation. What is being said here is nothing at all original it has been said thousands of times before, and it is to be hoped that it will be said many thousand times again namely, that all this is most fairly explained as being the evidence to a moral order whose constituents are not only “just as absolute” as the constituents of the so-called natural order, but in a sense more so, since the final reason for the natural order is in the moral order.
In the preceding chapter, we spoke of the relation between “mind” and “word.” Things, we said, are symbols, proving the fact of thought. Man is under the control of stabilities which provide the setting for his own purposeful activity. These stabilities, we said, become in their turn intelligible according as they also are viewed as the work of a Universal Mind. Can we say less than this concerning those moral stabilities which hem us round about just as truly as we are hemmed around by natural forces and natural facts? If “dead spirits rule us from their urns,” is it not by virtue of some great reality which these spirits once represented, and whose appeal we cannot resist ? Mind, we say, is revealed in its action : then the highest action is the highest revelation. [14] Man worships only the best ; where he obeys, there he worships; and his worshiped and obeyed best is for him divine. He throws it back into the eternities: it is supreme, an absolute. But in all this there is [ p. 212 ] choice, and choice involves an evaluation. Whatever is really chosen is chosen for reasons : a good of some sort is desired. Who desires a good until he has first judged it to be a good? Such a judgment means an evaluation. What we evaluate as a good it becomes “right” for us to seek or to serve. We are held by “oughtness.” Whether or not we shall actually seek and serve the right is for us to determine, but it is not for us to determine the right of the right to rule. The right rules us, and in one way or another we prove it every day.
God is in that right. The legislation we cannot escape bespeaks the Legislator. It is the utterance of his own thought, determined by that thought as surely as the thought is determined by his own essential nature. Because it proceeds most deeply from within himself it is therefore his most majestic, most revealing, most authentic utterance. It is the veritable Word of God. If man is most truly himself according as he evaluates and according as he submits himself to the control of the value that he deems the highest, and if in all this he is but discovering the deeper meaning of the world and of his own existence, then the fact of God is given in the fact of value as nearly as any fact can be said to be given in another. No; men’s conviction that the voice of conscience is the voice of God has not misled them. The moral coward is condemned because men feel that somehow he is traitor to the cause of the universe itself. A deliberate lie disgraces even the very stars. We shame the universe when we shame that for which the universe was created. As in the ancient prophecy, “the mountains and the hills break forth into sing [ p. 213 ] ing, and all the trees of the field clap their hands,” when men “incline their ear unto the Lord,” and “walk in his ways” ; but when men are indifferent in the presence of the divine, and treat with scorn those who cry “Hosanna!” then “the very stones cry out against them.” Water is always as wine to those who know the secret of the Lord, and who, like the astonished group at Cana of Galilee, “do whatever he saith unto them.” We speak in parables. More plainly, what we mean is that the realization of the purpose at the same time glorifies the process. The natural is the means to the moral ; the moral attained is the natural consummated. And if we go so far in our philosophy as to say that “nature” is mind’s interpretation of Other Mind, then we shall also say that in men’s recognition of moral value, or of the moral order, or of spiritual law call it what you will there is at the same time the recognition of a reality which can no more be explained without reference to a Universal Mind than any social experience can be explained without reference to at least two minds under a relation of reciprocity. Of all signs, the most significant are those which are the least arresting because they are the least obvious, a fact urged with telling effect by Turner against the mechanists’ denial of Creative Mind. [15] Who ever saw a machine that did not require a mind to account for it? The historical process, the natural process, the universe itself all are mechanistic, but they are, we are told, the expression of no Thought, the utterance of no Mind. The only machine that explains itself is the machine within which many other machines are being made by minds! This is our [ p. 214 ] boasted humanistic logic. Verily, while the gnat is strained out, the camel is swallowed, humps and all ! The sacramental can always be profaned, and that is most easily profaned that is most sacred. What must struggle harder than the moral ? what defeat may be more easily concealed for the time being than a moral defeat? yet what gain can ultimately compensate for a moral loss ?
Man, then, is most truly man when he is most consciously under the control of that whose appeal is purely moral. The deepest meaning of the universe is revealed in a moral victory, in religious experience. The final revelation of the being and the character of God is in the inner sanctuary of man. There dwells the true Shekinah. Eeligion consists in the discovery of that Shekinah. That is to say, religion is man finding “the Beyond that is Within.” The very far is the very near. “Immanuel : God-with-us,” most truly expresses the religious ideal, and for uncounted numbers of people it describes the experiential religious fact. Others profess adherence to a religion in which this element is lacking, and to which it is not even necessary. The reflections on the significance of evaluation which have been indulged in above point, however, toward the theistic conclusion as given in the very fact of value. Religion, which is inseparable from the evaluating process, confirms that conclusion on an empirical basis. Value, religion, God these belong together. Either one involves the other two. Eeligion is a persistent accompaniment of human life. No difficulty in defining religion, and no range of diversity in beliefs and practices held to be religious, can destroy the fact that religion is universal.
[ p. 215 ]
Attempts to minimize the significance of the fact have been frequent enough, and they will probably continue. Religion has more than, once been classified among the superstitions of the race, and the conclusion has been drawn that like all other superstitions it will eventually be outgrown. But because superstitions have been connected with religion does not make religion a superstition in its basic idea and purpose. If it did, many other human interests would be in the same case, even science itself. Religion, as such, is one of the major concerns of mankind, and it will continue to be so because its real roots are in human nature itself. Its excesses are granted, but these are always remediable. Lucretius in his attack on religion, “our enemy,” as he calls it, has had numerous successors, who, like him, have charged up to religion “deeds sinful and impious.” [16] How there could be sinfulness and impiety in a world in which there was no God and no independent, objective, eternal Moral Law, does not appear! One of the amazing developments of our time, however, is the fact that a large number of men who have surrendered the theistic faith are still insisting that they may keep a religion. A reputable thinker like Schmidt can look into the future and be quite sure that theism is to go but equally sure that religion is to stay. Another like Joad can write very dolefully of the present state of religion but is astonishingly cheerful about its future. It seems that the chief handicap for religion to-day is God : get rid of God, and religion will go forward with a bound. Haydon, for example, says that “What God meant he can no longer mean,” and he talks of a God whose “reality” [ p. 216 ] lies in the far future; yet for all that no “humanist” has written a more moving plea for religion than Haydon has. [17] These men justify their position, at least in part, on the ground that there are major religions which are nontheistic. They argue that this means that theism is not essential to religion. [16:1] One wonders if it has ever occurred to them to compare the highest theistic religion, which is Christianity, with the highest nontheistic religion, say Confucianism; or, if one follows Legge in regarding “Heaven” as a personal Deity, [18] then with Buddhism, Jainism, and certain of the classical forms of Brahmanism. The comparison made by Hoffding between Buddha and Jesus becomes the more significant when the differences of the two teachers respecting God is borne in mind. [19] Moreover, if theistic religion is to be reminded that there is nontheistic religion, it is only fair that nontheistic religion should be reminded that there is theistic religion. Taking a majority vote as settling this question would, of course, be absurd. In fact, in matters religious a few men have usually had to carry the banner. The question of God or no God is a question of fact, and in so far as it can be settled at all it must be in the light of reason and reasons. We can hardly conclude, therefore, that because many people have had no God or thought they had none therefore there is no God. If the argument from the fact of belief in God to the fact of God himself is fallacious, the same would have to be said of the argument from no belief to no God. That one man should believe in God is in a way much more significant than that a thousand men should not believe. Besides, what is meant by calling cer [ p. 217 ] tain religions nontheistic ? These religious have not so much flatly denied God as that they have failed to arrive at the full conception. They certainly believe in that reality at which the theistic faith likewise is aimed. That is, they believe in the meaningfulness of life; they believe in a great invisible control ; they believe in that which should have the right of way ; in a word, they evaluate ; and if they have not been led by their evaluations to a clear-cut idea of God, that fact may very well be due to limitations and uncertainties which in a thorough-going theism have been overcome. Does not the moral and intellectual courage which leads a man to affirm God merit as much consideration as that much more hesitant attitude which recognizes and considers the facts but cannot reach the theistic conclusion ? In either case there is a choice : for which choice can the more be said? God is hardly a demonstrable fact, if by demonstration is meant that we have no alternative but to believe. To Wieman’s claim that we have “sense experience” of God as we have of other “objects,” the obvious reply is that that is true only of what Wieman takes God to be. [20] God is “behind the veil, behind the veil,” and we reach beyond that veil by faith. Faith means choosing, and the choice here is not made once and for always, but needs continually to be re-affirmed. Even for the most convinced, oubt is always near by. It "coucheth at the door’ [5:2] like a wild beast.
“With me faith means perpetual unbelief Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael’s foot Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.” [21]
[ p. 218 ]
It is always possible that the veil does not conceal what it is believed to. Denial is therefore easier than affirmation. Or at least, doubt is easier than faith. But the easy is not necessarily the true. The exact opposite may on occasion be the case. Truth is often difficult difficult to arrive at, difficult to accept, difficult to live by. Very many things may be said against the idea of the .reality of God. That there are those who take more account of what can be said against the idea than of what can be said for it is no matter of deep surprise.
A favorite practice of some students of the subject is to endeavor to find what they regard as the element common to all religions, and then define religion in terms of this common element. The first result registered by this practice is, of course, negative. For example, since some religions have no God, therefore belief in God is not essential to religion; since some religions show no interest in the ethical, therefore the ethical is not essential to religion ; since some religions make no provision for worship, therefore worship is not essential to religion, and so on. If all these alleged nonessentials were omitted from religion in a given case, the religion would hardly be recognized as such. Schmidt adopts this method of exclusion, and he is thereupon led to define religion as “devotion to the highest.” He sets forth the various forms this “highest” has taken personal wellbeing, a beloved personality, an institution, a cause, the search for facts, the quest for beauty, technical perfection, expertness in one’s field, patriotism, prosperity, social idealism, and the like. [22] To all these, different men have given themselves with a complete [ p. 219 ] abandon, and this abandon Schmidt describes as a manifestation of the religious impulse. He does admit, however, that it is a question whether such objects of devotion are adequate to meet the deeper spiritual needs of those who engage in them. When one considers what happens to men for whom the “highest” is some of the things mentioned, the admission seems wise. The patriotism of Edith Cavell was beyond dispute, but her last words as she stood before the firing squad, and paid for her love with her life, still ring in the ears of the world : “Patriotism is not enough.” Schmidt also admits that devotion to one or other of the objects mentioned may have quite undesirable results. The admission is suggestive. If devotion to what one conceives to be the highest may degrade rather than exalt the life, a radical criticism of the so-called “highest” will properly be called for. On Schmidt’s own showing, therefore, devotion to the highest is not in itself necessarily justifiable. The devotion may spring and does spring from some deep need of human nature, but the direction it takes may be a sad perversion. What is needed, therefore, is not simply devotion to the highest, but also a highest that is worthy of the devotion. The values of life must be under the control of a supreme value, and the supreme value must be one that can make life the best that it can be. Whatever puts a check on the fullest development of the life is thereby shown to be not worthy of the first place. A devotion that makes a man narrow, or selfish, or unjust, or materialistic, cannot be defended. The purpose of religion, says Hadfield, is to “complete” the life a statement in which many others concur ; [23] and Hocking has shown, [ p. 220 ] in his accustomed penetrating way, how impossible it is to achieve “the integration of selfhood” on any mere method of picking and choosing, [24] If devotion to the highest has the significance that Schmidt attaches to it, then the highest cannot be made too high. Whether it really is the highest not the relative but the absolute highest will have to be determined to some extent by what the results would be if complete devotion to it were actually achieved. If it is the highest that you want, what is higher than God ? And how higher can God be conceived than as a being perfect in power, wisdom, and love ?
Schmidt further ventures to predict what “the religion of the future” will be. He finds that it will be scientific; that it will be concerned with the. emotions ; that it will be aesthetic ; and that it will involve fellowship. [25] One may very well hope that this will be the case, but why the apparent assumption that it has not been so already, or that it is not largely so at the present time ? Let all the charges be granted that the most unrelenting critic can bring against historical religion, in particular against Christianity, as in the classical case of Hume’s Natural History and Lecky’s more recent History its superstitions, its traditionalism, its narrowness, its dogmatism, its crudities, and all the rest of it. [26] Yet certainly no informed student can suggest that this is the whole story, and if Samson’s recent vicious diatribe, reminiscent of Mencken and Barnes, against Christianity, represents his sober judgment, one can only be amazed that a man who knows so little about Christianity should feel that he was qualified to discuss it. [27] That the religion of the future may be more [ p. 221 ] effective than the religion of the past is every way likely, and is devoutly to be wished. But why will it be so ? Not because men will ever find a higher or more worthy object of devotion than any man has found hitherto. We have that highest now that Perfect Being whose we are, and in whose will alone is our peace. If religion advances, it will be because men will come to see more and more clearly what that highest essentially is, and what complete devotion to such a highest properly involves. [28]
Furthermore, it is too often overlooked that criticism of the religion of the past is in the end nothing but a criticism of human nature. While criticism of the crudities of historical religion is being so freely offered, why not be fair and criticize also the crudities in other realms of human life contemporary with the religious ? Much of the criticism of religion seems to proceed on the assumption that men were perfect in all respects except tfre religious, or would have been perfect but for the heavy handicap of the religious imperfection. As a matter of fact, religious crudity can in general be quite closely paralleled by medical crudity and pedagogic crudity and sanitary crudity and agricultural crudity, and so on. Human life is all of a piece. There is necessarily a profound congruity between religion and the prevailing culture. If the religion influences the culture, it is just as certain that the culture influences the religion. It is to be expected that in the West of the future there will be great advances in all realms of human thought and experience, and religion will share in the advance as much as anything else. But the principle works the other way. Why expect thirtieth-century reli [ p. 222 ] gious expression in sixteenth-century Europe? or for that matter, even in twentieth-century America? When the majority of people could neither read nor write, why be surprised at the authority and even the dogmatism of ecclesiastics? And why blame the ecclesiastics for all the illiteracy, in view of the fact that from the days of Charlemagne the church has been “the mother of educational institutions”? Or why blame the ecclesiastics for all the social backwardness, as though there were nowhere anybody else charged with social responsibility? It is a strange circumstance that critics who believe in social and moral “evolution,” as one application of an absolutely universal law, should become so fervid in their denunciation of historical religion, when on their own showing the facts they so deeply deplore were but “moments of the evolving process”! The only man who has a logical right to criticize the past is the man who, accepting the principle of freedom, believes the past could have been different; yet in actual fact, it is the determinists, economic, psychological, and philosophical, who are likely to be most drastic in their criticism of history. Historical criticism for the sake of the lessons it teaches is justifiable enough that makes experience profitable; but historical criticism that takes the form of denouncing men for conditions which, in the circumstances of the given age, were practically inevitable, shows heat rather than light. [29] Even our boasted twentieth century may look terribly crude to the critic of five hundred years hence! We shall hope that he will have discrimination enough to realize that masses of men move slowly, that all of us believe better than we do, [ p. 223 ] and that we tolerate some things in theology, in industry, in the social system generally because it is only by tolerating them for the time being that we can hope ultimately to improve them. You have to belong to what you want to reform. The most effective and constructive critics of a cause are the critics to whom the cause is most dear. Among the sum-total of life’s experienced values are those which fall definitely within the sphere of religion. They center in the belief in God. The more worthily God is conceived, and the more complete the effort to organize the whole of life and its activities about him, the more there will be realized those very values which men, whether they be religious humanists or whether they be socially-minded but wholly nonreligious, claim to be so desirable. The logic of the evaluating impulse is religion ; the logic of religion is God ; the logic of a religion that lays hold upon God is the discovery of richer and richer values. So that again we say of value, religion, God, that they belong together that either one involves or justifies the other two.
Cf. Sorley, Moral Values and the Idea of God, pp. 147-150; Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, vol. i, lect. ix; Hobhouse, The Rational Good, pp. 206-210. ↩︎
See Drake, Mind, and Its Place in Nature, pp. 218223 ; Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 174-176, cf . pp. 417-420 ; Wieman, The Wrestle of Religion With Truth, pp. 192-193. Wieman, expounding Whitehead, accepts his theory of “eternal and changeless forms.” ↩︎
Cf. Hocking, Human Nature and Its Remaking, rev. edit., pp. 180-182. ↩︎
Matthew Arnold, Self-Dependence, stanza vi. ↩︎
See Sorley, op. cit., chap, viii; Taylor, op. cit., vol. i, chap. ii. Taylor especially offers a pertinent criticism of the claim that the conjunction between reality and value is merely “accidental” (p. 31). ↩︎
See A Preface to Morals, chap. xiv. Cf . Garvie, The Christian Ideal for Human Society, pt. iv, chap, i; Streeter, ed., Adventure, sect. iii. ↩︎
Urban, The Intelligible World, pp. 352-368, contains a good discussion of “intelligible finality” and its relation to the classical philosophical tradition. ↩︎
Cf. the note on “The Kantian Conception of Free Will” in Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 6th edit., appendix. See, also, Eashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, vol. i, bk. i, chap. v. ↩︎
Byron, Sonnet on Chillon. ↩︎
Symposium, espec. pars. 210-212. Cf. Taylor, Plato, pp. 229-232. In the Symposium, Socrates is repeating to Phsedrus words once spoken to him by Diotima of Mantineia: “And the true order of going or being led by [ p. 225 ] another to the things of love, is to use the beauties of earth as steps along which he mounts upward for the sake of that other beauty, going from one to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair actions, and from fair actions to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is,” etc. Socrates adds: “Such were the words of Diotima; and I am persuaded of their truth” ↩︎
Cf. Sorley, op. tit., pp. 467-473. In all values, especially the ethical, we must see, says Sorley, “the manifestation of the divine purpose” (p. 473). ↩︎
See MacWilliam, Criticism of the Philosophy of Bergson, chap, x; Harris, Pro Fide, 4th edit., pp. xxxixxxix. Cf. Turner, A Theory of Direct Realism, pp. 292298; Personality and Reality, pp. 180-183 and The Nature of Deity, chap. v. The criticism of Lloyd Morgan, however, in Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism, p. 355, would seem to be difficult to maintain in view of Morgan’s own definite assertions in Life, Mind, and Spirit, p. 1, that while his view is a “most thoroughgoing naturalism,” he is yet himself “confirmed in his belief in God” assertions repeated at length in the closing chapter. ↩︎
Cf. Lewis, Jesus Christ and the Human Quest, chaps, xxiii and xxiv, where the principle is applied to the Incarnation. “Any creative act is to a degree an incarnation. What God makes he \thereby indwells: he may not separate himself from the work of his own hands. The degree of his manifestation is the degree in which what he makes is like unto himself. When God is confronted by an 'Other* in which he recognizes his own absolute self, and when that ‘Other’ appears under the form of a man, and therefore as part of God’s own creation, then we have Immanuel ‘God with us’ ” (p. 324) . ↩︎
See Personality and, Reality, chap, v, which deals with “Mechanism and the Supreme Self.” Turner’s [ p. 226 ] thesis, which deserves more attention than it seems to have received, is that the more perfect and the more complex a mechanism, the more it conceals its creator but the more a creator is needed. ↩︎
Cf. Schmidt, op. tit., p. 16; Huxley, Religion Without Revelation, p. 144. In Ames, Religion, pp. 176-178, where the reality of God is found in “the reality of a social process,” and Wieman, op. tit., chap, xi, where God is defined both as that order which pervades the universe and promotes its increasing concretion (p. 185) and as that in the world of events in adjustment to which we find our greatest good (cf. p. 14), it is difficult to see that theism in any proper sense is retained. See Lippmann, op. tit., pp. 27-30, for some pointed remarks, directed particularly to Kirsopp Lake, on the determination of a modern school to keep the word “God” although deliberately using it in a quite unhistorical sense. ↩︎ ↩︎
Schmidt, The Coming Religion, chap, xii ; Joad, The Present and Future of Religion, chaps, i and ii, which contain a good deal of acid, but the much finer spirit of chap, xi indicates that his polemic is primarily against creeds, dogmas, and institutions which, it is clear, are not themselves religion ; Haydon ? The Quest of the Ages, pp. 121-124, also chap, vii, on “The Eeligious Ideal,” and chap, ix, on “The Practical Program of Religion.” ↩︎
Quoted in Menzies, History of Religion, p. 113. ↩︎
Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans., par. 99. ↩︎
Op. cit., pp. 92-96. ↩︎
Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology. ↩︎
Op. Git., pp. 24-27, 248-249. ↩︎
See Psychology and Morals, chaps, viii-xiii. Cf. Streeter, Reality, pp. 274-284, the discussion on “The Projection of the Idea of God”; Binder, Religion as Man’s Completion, pp. 36-50; and Sockman, Morals of To-morrow, pp. 194-200. Sockman speaks of “the hunger of man’s spiritual nature for completion,” and says that [ p. 227 ] its only adequate satisfaction is in “spiritual cosmic comradeship” (p. 199). ↩︎
Op. tit., pp. 138-142. ↩︎
Op. tit., pp. 250-254. ↩︎
Hume, Natural History of Religion (Works, A. and C. Black edition, Edinburgh, 1854), vol. iv, pp. 418ff. In this Essay, Hume, quite possibly “with his tongue in his cheek,” offered a comparative study of the respective merits of polytheism and monotheism, which latter he practically identifies with Christianity. In regard to five points, (1) intolerance and persecution, (2) the virtues inculcated, (3) reason and absurdity, (4) the qualities attributed to divinity, and (5) the kind of service demanded from men, the advantage is claimed to rest with polytheism. Apart from the question of Hume’s motive in writing the Essay and on another occasion he referred to Christianity as “our most holy religion”it remains that few critics of historical Christianity have been able to add much to what Hume wrote. Lecky, History of Rationalism (1865), and History of European Morals (1869), attempted to show that both the rise and decay of moral and religious opinion in Europe much of which he deplored was explainable as due to natural causes. ↩︎
See The New Humanism, chap, xv, on “Our Keepers of the Soul.” Christianity, we are told by Samson, is a “dumb Colossus of clay.” It bids men “stand on their head.” The priest is a “pious hypocrite.” Christianity is “a policeman’s religion” ; it is “the religion of the prostitute,” and so on. ↩︎
Montague, Belief Unbound, shows on the whole an admirable temper in the discussion of the idea of God, and pleads earnestly for the retention of God though remade on the Promethean model as a needful “cosmic support” for goodness. But even Montague slips when he calls Zeus and Jehovah mere “nightmare dreams” of the worshipers, and declares that all along it was Prome [ p. 228 ] theus, not Zeus, who was “really God” (p. 91). This “real God,” whether he were Promethean or otherwise, was what both Israel and Greece were aiming at, and if they fell short, what else could they have done in their circumstances ? ↩︎
Huxley, Religion Without Revelation, makes only one direct quotation, so far as the present writer recalls, from Thomas Aquinas. He speaks of Aquinas as representing, more than any other one man, the spirit of the Christian theology of the Middle Ages. He then asks his readers not to forget that such a man, the leading Christian theologian, could write that “in order that the saints may enjoy their beatitude more richly, a perfect sight is granted them of the punishment of the damned” (p. 11) . That is simply not fair. Nobody would deny that the sentiment was horrible enough, but viewed in the light of that time it becomes at least understandable and it is very far indeed from representing the lofty ethical ideal which, in general, Aquinas set forth. See the discussion of the ethics of Aquinas in Wicksteed, Reactions Between Dogma and Philosophy, lect. vii. ↩︎