[ p. 266 ]
FAITH is not the denial of reason, but its completion at the point where the questions are most insistent. What is not logically impeccable may still be valid as a means of reaching the goal. Eeality is distinguishable as Fact, Idea, and Eelation, and there is that in human nature which answers to all three. The world is truthful, and man is qualified to find its truth. Much of this truth, however, is learned by a process of inference from the facts of experience and the ideas they irresistibly force, and the inferences are held to be valid if they fit into the world of fact and promote defensible experience. Such inferences involve faith. The step from the “It” of logic to the “He” of religion is admittedly a step of faith, but in view of its total concomitants it is every way justifiable. Convictions born of the faith-experience may have the same evidential character as to truth and reality as convictions born of sense-experience. The faith-object is not so immediate as the faith-experience, but considering all that the faith-experience involves, it would be to surrender reason itself if something of the certainty of the experience could not be transferred to the reality of the object.
CHAPTER IX THE JUSTIFICATION OF FAITH
[ p. 267 ]
THE processes of rational reflection have led to such conclusions as that if there is the finite, there must be the infinite; if there is the contingent, there must be the necessary; if there is the relative, there must be the absolute, and so on. Conclusions of this sort have been common enough in the history of human thought. They make a good enough case logically, otherwise minds of the caliber of Plato, Augustine, Anselm, Spinoza, Hegel, and Royce would hardly have defended them. Hoffding’s objection, that to close “the series of concepts” or “the series of causes” with the assertion of an Uncaused Cause, involves a logical violence, is theoretically sound, but the alternative is that there is no resting place for thought, and that is intellectually much more baffling than the assertion in question. [1] Most men, however, have not been satisfied with the rather barren fare yielded by “the speculative reason.” They have seen that the very nature of things the range of man’s needs on the one hand, and the severe limitations of reason on the other hand “makes room for faith,” to borrow the famous saying of Kant. They have therefore attempted to put into the “conclusion” to which their reflection has led them a wealth of content to which they have always realized that objections could be offered. The most striking and suggestive result of this attempt has been the substitution of “He” for [ p. 268 ] “It” as a characterization of the ultimate fact. Logic will give you the “It” plainly enough : some sort of “first,” logical and temporal, there must be if we have a series of events. But logic does not give you the “He.” This is not to discount the value of the many elaborate “theistic systems” which endeavor to make reasonable the personality of God. There is probably no question to which men have devoted more prolonged and earnest thought than just this question of the ultimate fact and how to construe it more simply, the question of what God is as to his essential nature. It is no exaggeration to say that the majority of the world’s greatest intellects, at least in the West, have found sufficient reasons to convince them that God may properly be referred to as “He.” The brains of the world have been on the side of theism if that fact has any significance. The Western world can show no “nontheist,” even no “agnostic,” who in sheer power of intellect was the equal of Augustine ; and it has recently been demonstrated by W. P. Tolley that Augustine had arrived at the main features of his conception of God an Eternal and Creative Spirit at once omnipotent and good before he came noticeably under Christian intellectual influences. [2] Nevertheless, according as men pass from “It” to “He,” they began to supplement their logic by considerations which may or may not justify the significance given to them. Logic may cut a direct enough path to God conceived impersonally, as an “Eternal and Absolute Somewhat.” The only assumption that needs to be made is that what the mind sees to be of the very nature of the case will find support in reality: the laws of thought reflect the [ p. 269 ] laws of existence. Since, therefore, we cannot but think that something must be, we conclude that something actually and necessarily is. It is not necessary that we shall be able to say what this is : it suffices that we simply affirm the fact because reason leaves us no alternative. As a matter of fact, so substantial a thinker as Pringle-Pattison characterizes Locke’s proposition, “Something must be from eternity,” as “jejune,” and he compares it with the “being is” of Parmenides and Spinoza. [3] But this is hardly fair. Locke did not say, “Whatever is, is,” which would be jejune enough. What he said was that among the things that are is something that must be and therefore always has been and always will be. This may be held to be too obvious to need saying, yet just there is the point, namely, that what the mind must think, must be. The assumption here cannot be challenged, since to challenge the reliability of the mind’s necessary processes would be to render the challenge itself an irrational act. All criticism of mind must necessarily be made by mind : the critic is at least sure of himself as he engages in his criticizing activity.
Nevertheless, the logical understanding is< perfectly within its right in declaring that the reasons which men give for predicating of God the qualities of personality may be very good reasons without being absolutely convincing reasons. This logical weakness of the so-called “theistie proofs” made up much of the burden of Kant’s first Critique* Even Kant’s own positive argument from the standpoint of “the practical reason” still leaves many people with the feeling that the devastating result of the original criticism can never be quite offset. Kant took away that [ p. 270 ] he might restore but did he wholly restore ? At the same time, a good reason, while it may not be logically impeccable, may still be true. 'There are more ways of getting at truth than by pure reason: at least, it cannot be proved that there are not. A reason that is plainly enough false can only be rejected. A reason that, because it is good, may be either true or false, may be either rejected or accepted. The rejection of a good reason, especially in such a case as we are considering, is a serious matter. It may, of course, be conscientiously rejected on the ground that while it is good it is not good enough. Doubtless this is what often happens. There are many men who fain would believe, but they are captured by the mood that meets us so often in the poetry of Matthew Arnold as, for example, in his poem entitled “SelfDeception” :
“And on earth we wander, groping; reeling;
Powers stir in us, stir and disappear ;
Ah! and he who placed our master-feeling
Failed to place that master-feeling clear.”
For such men, the reasons against “the God of the Great Tradition” seem more cogent than the reasons for him. One can have nothing but respect for this conscientious agnosticism, or even for the mental temper that issues in a flat denial of God. On the other hand, it is possible that in certain cases the rejection of good reasons for believing in God proceeds not so much from honest intellectual difficulty as from moral unwillingness. Some men may very well prefer disbelief. They do not want it to be true that there should be such a being as God is said to be. [ p. 271 ] The possibility of him confronts them with a moral challenge that they are not willing to face. It throws over life a meaning they would rather not have to consider. It puts an inevitable and disturbing question mark after many of their habits and purposes.
“ ‘There is no God,’ the wicked saith,
‘And truly it’s a blessing,
For what he might have done wfth us
It’s better only guessing.’” [4]
Such judgments can hardly be called unfair when one considers how much sheer godlessness there is in the world practical godlessness the utter disregard of the possibility of any moral order. This moral indifference is man’s most deadly menace, for it in effect precludes the question of God and his meaning from finding a place at the bar of reason. There is nothing uncharitable in the statement that it is possible for a man not to want something to be true which yet he knows may be true, and then for Mm to act in agreement with his desire. The idea of God may be so treated. If there is a will to believe, there is just as truly a will not to believe. But the will either to believe or not to believe could exist only in the presence of a situation that yields an alternative. It could hardly be said of a man surrounded by total darkness that he willed to believe it was dark or that he willed not to believe it was light. He is under the coercion of an absolute fact that leaves him no alternative if he be in his right mind. One wills to believe only when there is a certain amount of evidence which seems to look in two different directions, but not quite equally so. Or if one wills not to believe, it is be [ p. 272 ] cause one deliberately chooses as was once charged to be done by Socrates to “make the worse reason the better reason.” In other words, neither belief nor unbelief if we use the terms correctly is possible except where there is a set of facts whose probable significance requires to be estimated. [5]
We are not called upon to believe in God without good reasons, and what some of those reasons are we have been concerned to ascertain. Nor are we called upon to submit ourselves unquestioningly at the behest of some alleged authority, documentary or ecclesiastical. Belief in God necessarily antedates all books and all institutions in which the belief is expressed or by which it is spread: it therefore has a certain independence of these alleged external authorities. [6] In order that either the refusal or the acceptance may have moral significance, they must represent a measure of free personal decision. Affirming that two and two equal four is not a morally significant act for a normal mind, but manipulating figures with intent to deceive another person is. In respect of a good deal of reality, therefore, man may be regarded as a mechanism. He is under a coercion that he cannot withstand without surrendering his claim to be rational.
Reality is constructed of both ponderables and imponderables, of both visibles and invisibles. There may be theoretical difficulties in the way of the distinction, but they are no more than theoretical : practically, the distinction is inescapable. In fact, a convinced dualist like J. B. Pratt can show that the theoretical difficulties of denying the distinction are much more serious than those that go with affirming [ p. 273 ] it. Pratt would, indeed, argue this against all comers against the idealist who would make the “physical” itself “psychical” ; against the neo-realist who would make the “psychical” merely “a form of neural energy”; and against the self-styled critical realist who would make the “physical” and “psychical” alike derivatives of a “neutral stuff” which may assume either of the two forms. [7] For Plato, the seen world is but the shadow of an unseen world, and it is the unseen world that is “real.” The claim may always be met by the counter-claim that the real world is the seen, and that the unseen world is the shadow. That is why one’s final philosophy must embody a faith. But whether Idea gives rise to Fact, or whether Fact gives rise to Idea, or whether Fact and Idea are two aspects of the same “event,” it still remains that the two are to be distinguished. No account of reality could possibly be called complete which held that there was nothing but Fact in the crude sense of the visible and the ponderable, or nothing but Idea in the sense of the invisible and the imponderable.
Fact and Idea, however, do not exhaust reality. The picture is complete only as we add what wemean by the word “Eelation.” Keality isi characterized by a certain “togetherness” which has led to the recognition of the fundamental place held by the law of interrelation and interdependence. We speak of the truth of things : by it we mean that orderly functioning of the whole which makes the whole dependable. What we have proved to hold good at one time we confidently expect will hold good at another. We are not forever being baffled as we should be by an untruthful, that is, an unreliable world. Not only so [ p. 274 ] and here we come to the heart of the matter but by virtue of this internal connectedness of things, we are able to pass judgments beyond the range of our actual experience and then find that further experience approves the judgment. Neither a mere medley of facts nor a mere medley of ideas would make a universe: there must be order in addition, and order is constituted in relationship. In the words of Lotze, nature is above all “internally consistent an organism, a great economy.” [8] It is true that further experience repeatedly requires us to revise a preformed judgment, but that does not change the significance of our original faith in the essential rationality of the universe : rather, it confirms it, for we have been taught to see our own error. “Put the question to nature: she will never answer you falsely.” All such forms of mental behavior as that of accepting the word of another, or of making deductions, or of planning for the future, are but so many indications of our belief in the universal regularity. “What is all science,” asks Schleiermacher, with his accustomed insight, “if not the existence of things in you, in your reason ? What is all art and culture if not your existence in the things to which you give measure, form, and order ? And how can both come to life in you except in so far as there lives immediately in you the eternal unity of Eeason and Nature, the universal existence of all finite things in the Infinite?” [9] It is this intimacy of relation between reason and nature that philosophers have in mind when they speak of reality as having a logical structure, or when they say that the basic law of every natural fact may be expressed by a mathematical formula although when we think [ p. 275 ] of such a book as Whitehead’s Process and Reality it is just as well to bear in mind Eddington’s warning against the assumption that mathematics is “flawless,” or that the mathematician could be “unreservedly intrusted with the Creation.” [10] Lotze’s principle, “To exist is to stand in relations,” states an absolute truth if it means as it does that there is no existence which is not related and no relation which does not involve existences. [11]
Fact, Idea, and Belation, then, are the characteristics of reality. What now needs to be seen is that man himself is constituted with reference to all three. In a way this is palpable enough, since the discovery that reality is so characterized is necessarily a human discovery, and man can only discover that for which he already possesses the equipment. Yet the significance of what is so palpable may easily be overlooked: hence the emphasis on the present point. Man is an organ of the larger whole which, speaking superficially, has produced him. The capacities he is endowed with are therefore to be conceived as means whereby that larger whole reveals itself to him and through him. The only possible way by which we can interpret reality is through our experience of it, and, as shown elsewhere, our experience is under the control at one and the same time of our own nature, considered subjectively, and of the nature of reality, considered objectively. Every man has an equipment which lays him under the absolute coercion of what we are calling Fact. It is the region of the so-called sensible qualities of reality. He has no choice in the matter. If he fails, whether willingly or unwillingly, to be determined by it, the inevitable [ p. 276 ] result is some sort of confusion, it may even be death. There is a steady movement of the cosmos conceived as a manifold of physical forces, or as an expression of forces under physical terms, and man, like every other organism, must adjust himself to the movement, or suffer. He has the power to make this adjustment, and he has it more than any other living thing. No organism has the power to maintain itself in such a wide variety of circumstances as man. Yet even with him, the power of self -adjustment to the physical universe is under strict limitations. “Obey me or be crushed,” is the warning he hears continually. He is able to heed the warning on a wide scale, and he is able to develop habitual responses which release his attention for other tasks, yet he is never free from the domination of the factual side of existence and some day it will overwhelm him, and “to the ancient order of the dead” he will “take the tongueless vows.” But man’s capacities are not exhausted in his adjustments to the factual or physical. While these adjustments are necessarily fundamental to all else that he may do, if he confined himself to them, he would be little more than an animal. Overstreet has made much of the fact that what differentiates man from the animal is just man’s power to advance beyond the satisfaction of the merely physical and “wonder what life is about” rising to the challenge of “the great unknowns of life.” [12] What Benjamin Kidd calls “the individual efficient in his own behalf” is well enough, but if the efficiency ends there, then certain of the individual’s most distinctive capacities remain unused. It may be difficult to describe these in language that all would agree on, but to deny that they [ p. 277 ] are there would be to render quite meaningless the whole of moral and religious history. The moment that a man allows a physical adjustment to be determined by some other consideration than the bare necessity he is under to make adjustments as a physical organism in order to remain alive, that moment he shows that there exists more than the merely factual : there is Idea as well, and there belongs to it determining power. Physical situations are not everything. Man has reference to the factual that is plain enough. But he also has reference to what we may call the overfactual. He is the seat of Idea, and that Idea has its correlative in the very nature of existence. There is that about reality which answers to man’s power to be determined by purely ideal considerations. Let us say it again that man respecting his physical equipment is to be regarded as an organ of reality conceived for this purpose as a system of physical actualities. In this respect he is like every other living organism. But his physical equipment does not exhaust him. He can on occasion act from considerations which involve the subordination of the physical to an end conceived to be of higher worth. If this be so, then why may we not believe in the existence, independent of man and apart from his thinking, of a form of reality with which this other side of man call it his higher side likewise is organic ? It is suggestive that many of the modern “value” philosophers, even when they are nontheistic, still feel that values must be regarded as intrinsic to reality. This is really tantamount to making the values themselves Grod. The procedure is illogical enough, as Ward has shown, but it at least [ p. 278 ] has the merit of treating values not as human creations but as human discoveries. [13]
Such intangibilities as principles, ideals, ends, and purposes therefore appear as part of the very stuff of being. This is the position of Urban, in his claim that a satisfactory concept of totality must include not only “things,” but also “the meaning and value of things.” [12:1] In the nature of the case, man must construe reality in the light of his own powers. What other approach can he possibly have to it? Any demand made on a man must be a demand which his own nature makes possible and intelligible. When we affirm that man is a rational creature, we state an obvious fact, yet it is a fact whose implications for a philosophical view of the whole of things are often curiously overlooked. For a rational creature is one who sees meanings in or through those concrete actualities which are borne in upon him from all sides by reason of his sense equipment. In the “given” he has the power to see the “implied.” He may do many things with that “implied.” He may track it down to its last lair in an ultimate fact or thought. He may treat it as being just as real as the “given” by which it was suggested. Or he may treat the “given” in the light of the “implied,” seeing the immediate present as the nexus around which swings a vast invisible universe. These are evidences of man’s rationality. The exercise of it leads him into a type of experience that grows ever richer and more satisfying. Things are to him as doors, by which “he goes in and out and finds pasture.” The experience is of a type that in nowise ignores the given, or treats it dishonestly. Indeed, as we are saying, but for the given [ p. 279 ] it would not be possible at all. The peak of the loftiest mountain presupposes, as Coleridge said of Mont Blanc, “sunless pillars sunk deep in earth.” The pyramid consummates in the apex, but there were no apex were there no base. Only he is safe who while his head may be in the clouds has his feet on the solid ground. There is no valuable that does not root in the factual. The free is based on the coercive. The spiritual makes its impact by way of the material. All this is allowed. It is still claimed, however, that experience of the sort we are considering, rooted and grounded as it is in the factual yet immeasurably transcending it, supplies a clew to the nature of reality just as reliable as the clew which is supplied by experience of the more primary or factual type. A book is certainly a fact, recognizable as such by anyone who has learned what a book is. It belongs in the realm of sensible things so called, but there is much more to be said about the book than just that. Its descriptive features do not exhaust it. In addition to what is admittedly its factual aspect, which is coercive and restricted, it has a secondary aspect shall we say a value-bearing aspect? which is free, potential, and practically unlimited. A person picks up a book, but he finds it is in a language that he cannot read. Immediately the book in his hand becomes a mere book, and no more. He cannot make it mean to himself all that it is able to mean. The power to call a book a book is one thing; the power to “read” a book, and thereby enter into a realm of experience, imaginative, aesthetic, spiritual, something infinitely more comprehensive than the book per se, is another and a quite different thing. The attempt [ p. 280 ] to reduce the two types of experience to the same category would seem to spring from nothing but unreasonable prejudice against the idea of suprasensible reality and suprasensible experience. Even if Durant Drake, attempting to analyze the nature of “objects,” is right in his “identification” of mental states with cerebral states, the combination being precisely the “sense datum,” he still has the problem of such mental acts as comparison, interpretation, and appreciation, for which there is [1:1] obviously no counterpart, as such, in “the external world.” In ascribing these, as he does, to “consciousness,” and in. admitting that “consciousness involves transcendence,” he makes a concession that would seem to be fatal to his general realistic theory. [14] Sellars too, who is^quite out of sympathy with anything approaching theistic idealism, admits a problem at the point of “the ontological linkage of consciousness with the being of the cerebral processes,” as he puts it [15] a concession made long enough ago by Tyndall in the famous statement that “the passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is inconceivable as a result of mechanics.” [16] Let there be all the emphasis possible on the primary (and in that sense fundamental) character of the tactile and the visible and the audible not forgetting, however, that even such experiences involve a degree of “interpretation.” The need of a secure anchorage to Fact has already been stressed. Even let it be supposed that things “out there” are exactly what they seem to be to eye and ear, and that the purpose of the eye is that they might be seen and that the purpose of the ear is that they might be heard. But having granted [ p. 281 ] that much, to “common-sense realism,” we certainly have the right to go on and say that eye and ear suggest more than they actually find. What is it but this that makes possible the poet, the artist, the musician? We have referred before to Bossetti’s lines:
“A sonnet is a moment’s monument,
Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
To one dead deathless hour.”
How could the lines be true as they are true if mental states are exactly to be equated with sensedata ? An experience that is “dead” because it is past is rendered “deathless” by being enshrined in the sonnet : the sonnet becomes the sign and symbol of the experience for him who has the mind to understand. The rigid schemata of fourteen lines exists not for the sake of the form itself, but for the sake of what can be captured and held in it, first for the author, and then for the possible reader. The mind glows even at the bare thought that so much can be suggested by so little. It finds even more wonderful the fact that another mind than that of the poet can by means of the form grasp, understand, and appreciate what is suggested.
All this is by way of saying that reality is more than thinghood and that man is more than body. If it be insisted that the body and the thinghood belong together, partaking of the same essential nature, controlled by one and the same fundamental law, the claim will be allowed. But the additional claim will be made that that in man which is “more-than-body” answers to something “outside” of him if spaceterms may be thus inappropriately used which is [ p. 282 ] “more-than-thinghood.” Man’s power to form ideas on the basis of things not forgetting, again, that socalled “things” have themselves a mental quality is intelligible only on the supposition that the ideas are as truly revelational as are the things themselves. Particular ideas are, indeed, often enough false, but the idea-process is as significant a clew to the nature and meaning of the whole of existence as any other aspect of human life. Are we not being told today that man has sprung out of nature that he is, in the most literal sense, the issue of a natural process ? But even so, the characteristics of the offspring will reveal something as to the nature of the parentage. Either we shall interpret man by nature or we shall interpret nature by man. If we follow the first procedure, we shall discount man’s most distinctive characteristics because we do not find them in nature. If we follow the second procedure, we shall find ourselves interpreting nature in such a way that these characteristics can be accounted for. Nature cannot be the dead and impersonal thing it is so often made out to be if man is nature’s child. Thus to Sellars’ judgment, “I am a child of the earth,” Pratt makes the only possible retort when the “I” is fully considered : “All too plain but a child of Starry Heaven too !” [17] The more that it is insisted on that man is organic to nature, the more it becomes necessary to read nature in the light of man ; and when nature is read in the light of man, it becomes necessary to believe that all that we mean when we speak of the rational and the moral in man capacities lying wholly in the realm of the imponderable and the invisible, although their expression may be concrete [ p. 283 ] enough that all this is but the correlative of a side of reality which is not less real because it cannot be measured and not less substantial because it cannot be weighed. If man as a natural organism involves a physical universe, then man as a rational and ethical being involves a moral universe. If the physical universe is not man’s creation but his discovery and this is allowed on any theory but the most flimsy “solipsism” then the moral universe is not his creation but his discovery: it should be no more unreasonable to assume a spiritual “givenness” than it is to assume a physical “givenness.” If, too, man is so endowed that through him the physical universe may reveal its qualities, then he is also so endowed that through him the qualities of the moral universe likewise may be revealed. And all this is true independently of the question whether the “stuff” of each universe is ultimately the same.
Man, however, with all his differences, is a unitary creature. We may carry the distinction between body and mind to the point that would satisfy Pratt and McDougall, yet we should still have to say that “man is one being.” The duality that characterizes him is one of the process of the experience, not one of the lundamental nature: it is impossible to conceive that forms of existence utterly disparate should influence each other or form a real unity. All the alleged differences and distinctions have one common center of reference, because in the end they all comprise the manifold of one and the same experience. There may be a difference between a broken leg and the knowledge that one’s leg is broken, but the fact and the knowledge are parts of one and the same ex [ p. 284 ] perience-process. There is no way whatever of making a complete separation between thought and its object, between, as Spinoza would say, the idea and the ideatum, between the experience and what is experienced. Any experience, whatever its character, is because of, and the experience is the result of the interaction of the cause and the self. “Mind is mixed with everything.” What we cannot separate completely in our own experience we have no right to try to separate completely anywhere else. That is to say, if man is one being, whether he stumble ignominiously over a rock or whether he read out of that same rock a millennium of cosmic history, then that whole system of reality to which he is organic is likewise one. What for convenience sake we describe as^the physical universe and the spiritual universe Fact and Idea, Thing and Meaning will be parts of one and the same whole of reality. That oneness and this is the point we were making necessarily involves Relation. The Idea that is given ^through Fact is related to that Fact, and if the Fact is as it is stated to be, then the Idea is “true” only as it is supported by the Fact : the Meaning is what the Thing permits. The relation here is not accidental or arbitrary, any more than is the relation of the various sides of man’s own nature. Instead, the relation is organic, vital, necessary. Lotze’s view carries the marks of deep philosophical reasonableness that the world of Fact is an operation of Universal Law for the purpose of realizing the world of Value, and that the intimacy of relation between the two worlds prevents us from regarding them as two except in a purely superficial way. [18]
[ p. 285 ]
But it is impossible to say this much and say no more. We have claimed that the diversities of human experience are rendered unitary by virtue of the fact that they belong to one and the same self. We shall also hold as the proper issue of this indisputable claim that the correlatives of these diversities, all that we mean by the things that we find but do not make, and the truth that we discover but do not create that these combine in a unitary system of reality because they too are the action of one and the same Self. That Self is God, in whose thought and will Fact, and Truth, and Meaning, and Value are finally constituted, each in its own order and for its own purpose, and all of them the instrumentalities by which the Creative Self and the created self God and man may share in a common experience. There is nothing new about such a view of divine-human relationships. It is traditional, but even so, the tradition is properly called “great.” If for the time being it is suffering obscurity by reason of the prevailing “retirement of the intellect,” as Hocking calls it, it will yet again come to its own. It cannot be otherwise since, in the words of Chrysostom, “The true Shekinah is Man.”
In all this we have done little more than indicate the general philosophical point of view from which all the preceding chapters have been written. The view is reasonable enough its very persistence through a long tradition is proof of that but it is not unanswerable. It could be shown to involve a use of analogy which is itself open to criticism. By what right does a man construe final reality according to the process of his own experience? While we [ p. 286 ] have endeavored to give some reasons which would seem to justify the right, it must still be allowed that the reasons reveal a personal bias in the author as all reasoning does, even the nontheistic and the humanistic ! and that it is possible to make out a good case against the argument.
But the truth of a cause does not necessarily depend upon the validity of the argument adduced in its behalf. Truth may be defended by poor reasoning, and error may be defended by good reasoning. If what has been written above is not demonstrably true, nevertheless it may be true. What the argument is aimed at may be the truest of all facts. Considering what that is God as a conscious, creative, holy, and purposive Self the question of its trufch or error can hardly be looked upon as one of no deep moment. If God is, then God matters, and everything else matters accordingly ; but if God is not, then nothing else matters very much. We are in a manifest dilemma. The reality of Go4 would make all the difference in the world, but we do not know that God is real. But why may we not allow that difference to be the determining factor in the case? Why may we not say that anything that makes such a difference as God ought to be so, must be so, and, so far we are concerned, shall be so? For clearly enough, here is a place where we have to choose. We have evidence, but the evidence is not coercive. The final step must be taken by the mind as a venture. The step when made takes on an enormous moral significance. No other step a man takes is comparable with his choice for or against God. The choice reveals the chooser: more than that, it at once begins to [ p. 287 ] influence his whole life. To say that it makes no difference to a man whether or not he believes in God is sheer nonsense: if there is no difference, it is because there is no belief. Man is what he eats/’ was at once the brightest and the most stupid saying of a now defunct materialism. Let us, rather, say that man is what he most deeply wants to be. He is justified by faith. What he would fain have true yields his own measure. Profoundly speaking, for those who want no God there is [1:2] no God: God is an available and meaningful reality only for those who want him. He must be possessed if he is to be known and used, and he is possessed only of faith. It is easy enough to reply that wanting something to be true does not make it true, which is obvious. But it still remains that some truth is found only by way of venture by the venture that involves the use of the relational powers of the mind. All belief except that in the trustworthiness of the initial act of the mind is reached through some sort of knowledge, the advance from the knowledge to the belief being possible because of the ability of mind to make inferences, draw conclusions, discover meanings, which lie beyond the range of the absolutely indubitable, but still within the range of what is desirable, or credible, or probable. That mind should have this power, and that the power should be continually in use, and yet that the power is to be suspected at precisely that point where the issues are greatest this were a skepticism that even its advocates would not be willing to live by. It would condemn them should they practice it everywhere to a dungeon deeper and darker than any Chillon, but without even “the carol of a bird” to [ p. 288 ] break in as a light upon the brain, which Byron allowed to “the prisoner.” If the ear is that there might be sound-experience, and the eye that there might be light-experience, then shall we not also say that man’s power to believe beyond the range of physical evidence and experience is the intended means of creating knowledge of a super-sensible that is as real as the sensible.’ Why suppose purposiveness and reliability in the case of the one, but not in the case of the other? That is to say, if we may desire truth of a certain sort, the very desire may be the psychological avenue through which that truth must make itself known. The unprovable may, therefore, be just as true as the provable. What we freely choose may turn out to be as real as the sheet compulsions of brute fact. Convictions born of faith may have the support of total existence just as much as convictions born of sense. To borrow the paraphrase of B. W. Bacon, what enters into the heart of man to conceive may as faithfully reveal the nature of things as anything that the eye sees or the ear hears. Indeed, the truth that is chosen, while it may not have the same palpable immediacy and the same urgency as the truth that gives us no choice, may have a final significance that is vastly greater. A man deliberately giving his life for conscience’ sake is revealing something about both himself and the universe that could never be revealed by a death that came in the order of nature. Jesus endures the cross and Stephen submits to being stoned, because of a faith. To say that the faith simply reveals something about the man say the power of illusion, or at most the power of conviction is not sufficient. It also reveals some [ p. 289 ] thing about that total existence but for which the believing and enduring and self -giving man could not be at all.
Or if this is not so, what is the alternative? The alternative is that there appears within the structure of existence an essentially alien growth. Man has capacities for which there is no use. He has a reach beyond anything there is to grasp. He is so constituted that he can enter into what he believes is a fellowship with the Unseen, and find in that fellowship inspiration to high living, incentive to sacrificial service, power to hold steady though circumstance be never so cruel. Let those who say that this ability represents no purpose, that the exercize of it is simply a form of self-delusion, that the ensuing experience may be given a complete psychological explanation involving no objective reference of any kind let those who so say rest content in their negations and psychologisms. Only, let them not think that unfaith is more rational than faith, or that faith is a choice and unfaith is not. The refusal to believe is still a belief, except that it is a belief of a different sort. The refusal takes place in the same world of order as the assent. Unfaith has an entail just as certainly as faith. And if it be true that “by their fruits ye shall know them,” the achievements of faith must be reckoned with : they have an evidential value which it is the sheerest perversity to discount perversity as sheer as that which discounts the effects of unfaith.
The justification of faith, let it again be said, does not involve the necessity of justifying all that is said or done in its name. The faith-attitude is more sig [ p. 290 ] niflcant than the faith-findings. The validity of faith in God does not necessarily mean the validity of a given definition of God. Wright asks the question, “Does the objective system of values imply a Cosmic Intelligence?” and he answers his question affirmatively : what man is so obviously intended to realize or to bring to pass reflects another Mind than man’s. [19] We can agree with Wright in the answer, and yet still recognize that the answer may bear a variety of meanings. The general belief in a Creative Will or a Creative Mind express it how we will still leaves many questions unanswered. There is ample room for intellectual differences within the limits of the theistic faith. Definitions and descriptions of God are works of thought, and they are under tEfe influence of a person’s total culture. The pantheism of the East is nothing surprising: it is of a piece with the general Eastern tendency to minimize the significance of individual life. [20] The construction of the object of faith will always reflect something of the world- view of the believer. There is a certainty about the religious experience itself which can never be transferred to its alleged cause. God always stands “in the shadow.” We see him “through a glass, darkly.” The obscurity does not shake our confidence in his reality, but it does render the lineaments indistinct. We are willing to confess to some uncertainty as to this detail or that, while at the same time we are certain that God himself is there. It is a moral certainty in distinction from a logical certainty, but if we are to put an imposing and crippling interrogation mark after all our other moral certainties, leaving only our logical certainties to be [ p. 291 ] unchallenged, how extensive would the area of our confidence be ? The faith-experience itself is immediate and direct, and therefore self-sufficing for him who has it; the faith-object is mediate and derivative: for that reason there can never be quite the same certainty of the object as there is of the experience. Nevertheless, it may with good ground be urged that something of the certainty of the experience may properly be transferred to the object. We follow that procedure elsewhere : why not in religion ? In a word, the total concomitants of a faith may be expected to reveal something as to the nature of its object. Failing this, existence would have to be regarded, not simply as a mystery, but as a mockery. If logic is to be used to get rid of God, let it be used to get rid of other things as well. If these other things are to be retained, notwithstanding all that logically can be said against them, then let God be retained as well.
“. . . . Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven ;
We know her woof, her texture: she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine
Unweave a rainbow. . . ,” [21]
But do we actually get rid of the rainbow by reducing it to its ultimate mechanical structure, and then stating this according to a mathematical formula? Hardly. The logician and the mathematical philosopher may lay bare, so to speak, the very skeleton of [ p. 292 ] existence. That is their business. But when they say, “And there is nothing more,” well, there are some, “a few,” into whose ear God has whispered, who are certain that there is more, much more, than that. If the Browning-lover will forgive the parody :
“The logicians may reason and welcome: 'tis we believers know”
In these pages it has been contended that God is an Eternal Creative Spirit, infinite in wisdom, righteousness, and love, about whom something may be learned by reflective reasoning, and of whom much may be learned by religious faith, which in its own way is as revelational as reason. Faith and reason reach the goal only as they go hand-in-hand.
This being the case, the rights of faith become undeniable. It is those rights for which we have been pleading. The rationalist has no proper claim to all the stage. He has a claim to a share, and it has been recognized. But now in this final word it is being urged that religious faith, defined as a venture of belief and action in response to a felt need from the human side and an insistent call from the divine side, is not only of a piece with the whole life-process, but is a condition to its completion. The unbeliever is one-sided. Life, for all of its dependence, is always bigger than its own immediate world. In that fact lies the promise of all progress. The life in which there is neither desire nor power for more than it now enjoys has begun an inevitable decline. Life pushes, says Bergson: we accept his statement even if we [ p. 293 ] question much of his philosophy of it. It pushes because of an inward compulsion. But it pushes also because of the sheer necessity of saving itself from being overwhelmed by an alien force. Whether the force whose opposition compels life to its own selfpreservation is so alien as Bergson would have us believe is an open question. Do not the push and the resistance belong together in the same total experience? And the first hesitant effort of the lowliest form of life to make a little larger demand on its environment than it had hitherto done what was that but the birth of faith ? It has the significance of showing that life may cultivate expectations that seem not to be warranted, and then may enter upon an experience that amply justifies the expectation. This venture has always been of the very essence of life venture by which larger areas of reality were entered upon and possessed. If it be true that life originated in the water, there still was a different environment air and land in which also life could exist, if it only knew it and could learn how ! The advance of life into this different environment was an act of faith, shall we say? which an uninformed hypothetical spectator would certainly have declared unwarranted and yet which finally approved itself. The history of life is the history of these approved advances. Life can increase its range only as it is bigger potentially than it is actually.
“What groweth to its height demands no higher : The limit limits not, but the desire.” [22]
The use of the word “faith” to describe this feature of the life-movement of the past may be criticized, [ p. 294 ] but certainly the faith-principle is there the venture into the unknown in response to an inward impulse, and then the discovery that the unknown was but waiting to be possessed. Life is justified by faith and faith is justified of life. “Here we have no continuing city but we seek one to come,” and though we find one city only to be called to seek another that "we know not of/’ nevertheless each successive stage of the quest is its own evidence that the quest is not in vain.
“Hope evermore and believe, O man, for e’en as thy
thought So are the things that thou see’st, e’en as thy hope
and belief. … Go with the sun and the stars, and yet evermore in thy spirit
Say to thyself : ‘It is good, yet is there better than it ;
This that I see is not all, and this that I do is but little;
Nevertheless it is good, though there is better than it.’ ” [23]
The religious experience is a real experience. It cannot be made so objectively convincing to the onlooker as the advance from lower to higher in the organic realm, although even the onlooker, if he be not blinded by prejudice, should be able to see certain of its concomitants. A real saint at least needs to be explained. But in the religious experience, man is by way of finding both himself and God, and the discovery is of faith. Man is meant for God because without God there is a vacancy in his life that remains unoccupied. Whether the rightful Occupant shall be admitted depends upon the key being turned from within. “I stand at the door, and knock.” The [ p. 295 ] supreme religious act, man’s submission to God, is consummated in solitude. [^28] On that consummation the ages wait, because for that consummation the ages were made.
“ ‘What think ye of Christ,’ friend? when all’s done and said,
Like you this Christianity or not?
It may be false, but will you wish it true?
Has it your vote to be so if it can?
Trust you an instinct silenced long ago
That will break silence and enjoin you love
What mortified philosophy is hoarse,
And all in vain, with bidding you despise?
If you desire faith then you’ve faith enough.
What else seeks God? nay, what else seeks ourselves?” [24]
Do you vote for God? A vote one way or the other is inevitable. You vote not merely viva voce or with the upraised hand, but with life itself. “As for me, the vote is ‘Aye.’” And “the ‘Ayes’ have it.”
See The Idea of God in the Philosophy of Augustine f espec. chap, i, on “The Development of Augustine’s Idea of God.” ↩︎
The Idea of God, p. 6. ↩︎
Clough, Dipsychus, pt. i, scene 5, spoken by “The Spirit.” ↩︎
Of. James, The Will to Believe, passim. ↩︎
Cf . Oman, Vision and Authority, second edit., bks. i and ii; Grubb, Authority in Religion, passim. ↩︎
See Matter and Spirit, and Adventures in Philosophy and Religion. To what extent the critical realists may or may not be dualists, see Durant Drake’s note on p. 4 of Essays in Critical Realism. In his later book, Mind, and Its Place in Nature, Drake appears very definitely to lift himself out of any suspicion of the kind of dualism represented in Pratt. He argues for “an identification of the two sets of events” the so-called physical and mental. See above, Chapter VI, note 24. ↩︎
Microcosmus, Eng. trans., vol. i, p. 418. Cf. the description in vol. ii, p. 680, of the power of mind to start from some perceived fact, apply to it universal laws, and arrive at a conclusion which exactly agrees with some other perceived .fact. Thought and event traveled by different routes to the same goal, evidence that both were controlled by the same ultimate truthfulness. [ p. 296 ] ↩︎
Discourses on Religion, Oman’s trans, of the Reden, p. 39. ↩︎
The Nature of the Physical World, pp. 337, 209. ↩︎
Op. tit., vol. ii, bk. ix, chap, i, espec. pp. 578-587. ↩︎
See Philosophy of Values, espec. chap. iv. ↩︎
Cf. Mind, and Its Place in Nature, chaps, vii, viii, and xiv. Drake, in true realistic fashion, defines consciousness as “a function of the organism,” the function consisting in “the use of psycho-neural states as cues for bodily adjustment” (p. 173). But if the psycho-neural states consist of, say, series of sounds, is the process by which consciousness becomes “aware of” a meaning in these sounds always carried over into bodily adjustment? Are not some of the highest reaches of consciousness quite independent of any situation calling for physical activity? ↩︎
Evolutionary Naturalism, p. 310. See the whole of chap, xiv, on “The Mind-Body Problem.” ↩︎
See Fragments of Science, the lecture on “Scientific Materialism,” pp. 86-87 (Appleton, 1896). ↩︎
Matter and Spirit, p. 230. ↩︎
Op. cit., vol. i, bk. iv, chap, i, espec. pp. 417-418. ↩︎
See The Religious Response, chap. x. Wright, considering the Buddhistic refusal to ascribe any definite characteristics, especially the moral and the social, to that Eeality “which makes the gods,” properly says that at least by indirection these characteristics are ascribed, since the ideals of the religion will be a reflection of what it is supposed the Highest really is. ↩︎
Cf. Urquhart, Pantheism and the Value of Life, bk. iii, chaps, i-v. ↩︎
Keats, Lamia. [ p. 298 ] ↩︎
Francis Thompson, “To the Poet’s Sitter” (Epilogue to Her Portrait) . ↩︎
Arthur Hugh Clough, Hope Evermore, and Believe! ↩︎
Browning, Bishop Blougram’s Apology. ↩︎