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WHEN Xenophanes, in a passage now almost too familiar for quotation, first brought the charge of what is called anthropomorphism against religion, he initiated a mode of criticism which has not yet grown old. Again and again in subsequent history the same charge has been made and met; yet it survives, and in the present day is being continually urged, as a plea for the adoption of agnostic opinions. ‘The lions, if they could have pictured a god,’ says the old Greek thinker, ‘ would have pictured him in fashion like a lion; the horses like a horse; the oxen like an ox’; and man, it is implied, with no more justification, as inevitably considers him a magnified man. In our own day Matthew Arnold has employed his graceful pen to the same effect, though with less [ p. 2 ] than his usual grace; and still more recent critics have reiterated the complaint. Meanwhile, as the phenomena of savage belief, with which we are now so well acquainted, may be easily adduced in favour of a similar conclusion, the reflections of Caliban upon Setebos have come to be regarded in many minds as at once an adequate illustration and complete condemnation of all theology.
Now the plausibility, and therefore the malignity, of this fallacy consists in the fact that it is half a truth; and as there can be no question of its immense prevalence in contemporary thought, nor of its disintegrating effect upon religion, and through religion upon society, an apology will hardly be needed for one more attempt to reconsider the argument from human to divine personality. This can, of course, only be done in outline, if it is to be done within moderate compass: but outlines—mere outlines—are not infrequently of use, as enabling us to estimate in a single survey the number, the variety, the proportion, the reciprocal interdependence of the diverse elements in a cumulative proof. They supply that synoptic view which, while immersed in the controversial pursuit of details, we are apt to lose, and which is nevertheless essential to our judging the details aright, as parts of one articulate whole.
Accordingly, the object of the following pages is to review our reasons for believing in a Personal [ p. 3 ] God; reasons in which, from the nature of the case, there is no novelty, and which have been stated and restated time out of mind; but which each generation, as it passes, needs to see exhibited afresh, in their relation to its own peculiar modes of thought[1]. This will involve a brief analysis of what we mean by personality ; and as the present fulness of that meaning has only been acquired by slow degrees, we shall need first to cast a glance over the principal stages of its development.
Man lives first, and thinks afterwards. Not only asan infant does he breathe and take nourishment and grow, long before the dawn of conscious reason; but his reason, even when developed, can only act upon experience, that is upon something which has already been lived through. He makes history by his actions, before he can reflect upon it and write it. He takes notice of the facts of nature before he can compare and criticize and shape them into science ; while history and science in their turn supply material for further thinking, and are examined and sifted and generalized and gathered up into philosophy. And though, of course, reason has an eye to the future, and works with the view of preparing for fresh developments of life, its foresight must spring from insight ; it can only predict what is to come by discovering the law of the phenomena, the formula of the [ p. 4 ] curve, the lie of the strata in the past. It follows from this that thought is always in arrear of life; for life is in perpetual progress, and, while we are reflecting on what happened yesterday, some further thing is happening to-day. ‘When philosophy,’ says Hegel, with a touch of sadness— when philosophy paints its grey in grey, some one shape of life has meanwhile grown old: and grey in grey, though it brings it into knowledge, cannot make it young again. The owl of Minerva does not start upon its flight until the evening twilight has begun to fall.” Consequently no system of philosophy, no intellectual explanation of things, can ever become adequate or final, Reason is incessantly at work, to render more and more explicit the implicit principles, or principles which are implied in life; but there is always an unexplained residuum, an unfathomed abyss in the background, from which new and unforeseen developments may at any moment, and do from time to time, arise.
On the other hand, it must not rashly be concluded from this, that thought is an impotent abstraction, a pale imitation of the full-blooded reality of life, like a faded flower, or sad memory of pleasure past and gone. We do indeed in the course of our thinking often deal with abstractions, isolated aspects of things—such as quantity, quality, ‘and the like; but only as a means to an end, a subordinate phase in an organic process. Thought [ p. 5 ] as a whole does not tend towards the abstract, but towards the concrete. It issues, as we have seen,. from the lesser to reissue in larger forms of life, as fruit issues from a flower to reissue in fresh seed of flowers. It penetrates the dull mass of life till the whole becomes luminous ‘and glows. It is an inseparable element of the highest life; or rather it is life raised to its highest power. Thus a man lives, and as he lives reflects upon his life; with the result that he comes by degrees to understand what is within him; his capacities, his powers, the meaning of his actions; and as he does so he ceases to be the creature of mere outward circumstance, or mete inward instinct: he knows what he is about, and can direct and concentrate his energies. his life becomes fuller, richer, more real, more concrete, because more conscious; his thought is not a mirror which passively reflects his life, but, - on the contrary, his life is the image, the picture, the music, the more or less adequate language of his thoughts. Or again, a great historical movement, in religion or in politics, will often begin blindly; stuttering, stammering, striking at random; till in process of time it gradually awakes to its own true meaning, and grows intelligent, articulate, effective, the recognized expression of a grand idea. Thus in a sense we may say truly that thought realizes or invests things with more complete reality, and so that only what is rational is real.
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Now in nothing, perhaps, is this order of development from life to thought, from fact to explanation, better exhibited, than in the process by which man has come to recognize what we call his personality, all that is potentially or actually contained within himself—in a word what it means to bea man. Uneducated races, as we know, tend to personify or animate external nature; and though this, of course, implies some consciousness of their own personality, it is obviously an incomplete and unreflective consciousness ; for it has not yet reached that essential stage in definition which consists in separating a thing from what it is not. This distinction of the personal from the impersonal region, or, in other language, of persons from things, would appear to have been a gradual process. And even when we reach the climax of ancient civilization, in Greece and Rome, there is no adequate sense, either in theory or practice, of human personality as such. This may be seen, without at present pausing to define the term, by looking at two of its obvious characteristics. Per- sonality, as we understand it, is universal in its extension or scope—that is, it must pertain to every human being as such, making him man; and it is one in its intention or meaning—that is, it is the unifying principle, or, to use a more guarded expression, the name of the unity in which all a man’s attributes and functions meet, [ p. 7 ] making him an individual self. And on both these points the theory and practice of the ancient world was deficient. Aristotle, its best exponent, views some men as born to be savages (φύσει βάβαροι), and others as destined by nature to be slaves (φύσει δουλοι), whom he further regards as living machines (έμψυχα όρανα), and women, apparently in all seriousness, as nature’s failures in the attempt to produce men. And Plato before him, despite of those flashes of insight which are beyond his own and most subsequent ages, had, on the whole, taught much to the same effect. And this is an accurate philosophical summary of the practice of pre-Christian society. On the other hand, in his psychology and ethics Aristotle fails to unify human nature. In the former he leaves an unsolved dualism between the soul and its organism, the active and receptive faculties (νους ποιητικός and νους παθητικός) ; while in the latter he has no clear conception of the will, and hardly any of the conscience—the two faculties or functions which alone identify our various scattered emotions and activities with our real self. And here too he is only reflecting the facts of contemporary society, which was characterized by a fatal divorce between the various departments of life, the public and the private, the moral and the religious, the intellectual and the sensual; excellence in one region being easily allowed to compensate for [ p. 8 ] licence or failure in another. Here and there may be found sporadic exceptions to this as to all other historic generalizations; but they are few and far between, and nowhere rarer than in the class where we should most naturally have expected to meet them—the professed teachers of philosophy. As a rule it is beyond dispute that neither the universality nor the unity of human personality, its two most obviously essential features, were adequately understood in pre-Christian ages; though stoicism was beginning to pave the way for their recognition, But the advent of Christianity created a new epoch both in the development and recognition of human personality, Its Founder lived a life and exercised a personal attraction, but is expressly reported to have told His followers that the full meaning of that life and its attraction would not be understood till He was gone: ‘ When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, … He shall glorify me, for He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you.’ ‘He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you. The fact of the unique life came first, the new personality ; and then the gradual explanation of the fact, in the doctrine of the person of Christ; an order which is already observable in the contrast that we see between the synoptic and the fourth gospels. In the same way the early Christians began by feeling a new [ p. 9 ] life within them, due, as they believed, to their being in spiritual contact with the living person of their Lord; and enabling them to say ‘I live, yet not I, Christ liveth in me.’ ‘Let us therefore do all things as becomes those who have God dwelling — in them[2]” Then they went on, according to their. capacity and the necessities of the time, to give a reason for the hope that was in them. And even in so doing we notice that the first apologists chiefly appeal to the striking contrast between the life which Christians led and that of the cruel, immoral, superstitious, sad, suicidal world around them. Only as time went on, and Christianity came to assume a place of prominence in the great intellectual centres of the world—Antioch, Athens, Ephesus, Alexandria and Rome—were the intellectual presuppositions of this life unfolded ; and the Christian theology—that is, the authorized explanation of the Christian facts which had begun with the writings of St. Paul and of St. John—was thus by slow degrees developed.
Our present object, it must be remembered, is purely historical, and we need not therefore pause either to defend or criticize the precise form which the development of Christian doctrine assumed. Some development or other must have taken place; for the world cannot stand still. Thoughtful men must meditate upon the things [ p. 10 ] which they believe, and endeavour to give articulate expression to what is implicitly contained in the principles by which they live ; while the missionary desire to commend their creed to other minds, and the consequent encounter with intellectual opposition, will naturally increase the need of theological definition. Questions must be asked and answers given; and sooner or later a great religious movement must be philosophically explained. But the philosophical explanation of Christianity, despite of all that has been crudely urged against its metaphysical subtlety, was eminently conservative, sober-minded, slow. The air was full of wild and seductive systems of speculation ; and individual Christians were diverging into strange opinions upon all sides. And when the general councils were called together, to correct them, there was indeed much to be deplored in the historical circumstances of their assembling, as well as the tone and temper of many of their members. Yet all this does but emphasize the comparative moderation of their collective voice. Their undoubted purpose, as viewed by themselves, was to define and guard, and to define only in order to guard, what they conceived to be the essence of Christianity, the divine humanity of Jesus Christ, and that with a strictly practical aim. For personal union with the living Christ was felt to be the secret of the Christian life. And had Christ been a mere man as with [ p. 11 ] the Ebionites, or a mere appearance as with the Docetes, or a Gnostic emanation, or an Arian demigod, the reality of that union would have vanished. ‘Our all is at stake,’ Athanasius truly said, in justification of his lifelong conflict. This was the real contribution of the general councils to human history; the more and more explicit reassertion of the Incarnation, as a mystery indeed, but as a fact. The various heresies which attempted to make the Incarnation more intelligible, in reality explained it away; while council after council, though freely adopting new phraseology and new conceptions, never claimed to do more than give explicit expression to what the Church from the beginning had implicitly believed. And we may fairly maintain that modern research has made the historic accuracy of this claim even more apparent, than when Bull defended it against Petavius, or Waterland against Clarke. Thus, then, Christian theology arose, like all other human thought, in meditation upon a fact | of experience—the life and teaching of Jesus Christ ; and having arisen, reacted, also like other human thought, upon the fact which it explained, illuminating, intensifying, realizing the significance of that fact. Opinions, of course, differ upon the value of this result, according as men believe or deny that it was due to the guidance of the Spirit of God. But our present concern is with a point of history, which admits of no denial, an inevitable but indirect [ p. 12 ] and incidental consequence of the theological ferment of the first Christian centuries, viz. the introduction into the world of a deeper if not an altogether new conception of human personality. God had become man, according to the Christian creed, and the theological interpretation and application of this fact threw a new light upon the whole of human nature. Men may deny its right to have done so, but they cannot deny the fact that it did so, which’ is all with which we are now concerned. Not only had human nature in an unique instance been personally united to God; but the whole human race, whether male or female, barbarian or Scythian, bond or free, were declared capable of a communicated participation in that union ; and this at once threw a new light upon the depth of latent possibility, not only in the favoured few, but in man as such. Again, the holiness which this union demanded,and which was emphatically a new standard in the world, admitted of no dualism. Men were bidden to bring their entire nature into harmony with the law of conscience, focussing thereby their various and divergent faculties and thoughts and feelings in a central unity. The heterogeneous elements were forced into coherence. Man was unified. And further, the sense of responsibility and accountability, which all this implied, led to more elaborate examination of the will and its freedom (τό αύτεξούσιον), while the clearer conviction [ p. 13 ] of immortality and judgement emphasized the personal identity of man. Here, then, were the various factors of what we call personality, being gradually thought out. Nor was it only a work of thought. Man’s personality was being actually developed. It was becoming deeper and more intense. A new type was appearing, and attempting to explain itself as it appeared. And meanwhile the Trinitarian controversies were ventilating the question of the relation of subject to object, the question upon which the nature of self-consciousness, and therefore of personality, depends. This took place mainly indeed in the ontological region, as was inevitable from the state of philosophy at the time, but still not without a sense that man was, metaphysically as well as otherwise, made in the image and likeness of God (είκών καί όμοίωσις). And though it was not till a later age that the results of this analysis were at all fully transferred from theology to psychology, yet the real foundations of our subsequent thought upon the point were undoubt“edly laid in the first Christian centuries, and chiefly by Christian hands.
It is, of course, impossible to trace minutely the development of an idea whose elements gradually coalesced, as floating things are drawn together in ‘the vortex of a stream. Many minds and many anfluences contributed to the result, while the monasteries provided homes for introspective [ p. 14 ] meditation. But for convenience of summary and memory three names may perhaps be singled out, as at least typical, if not actually creative, of the chief epochs, through which the conception of personality has passed—Augustine, Luther, Kant.
Augustine had his predecessors, especially Origen and Tertullian, in their very different ways; but in introspective power he far surpasses them, as, for instance, when in the Confessions he sounds the abyss of his own being :
‘I come to the spacious fields and palaces of memory, wherein are treasured unnumbered images of things of sense, and all our thoughts about them… There in that vast court of memory are present to me heaven, earth, sea, and all that I can think upon, all that I have forgotten therein. There too I meet myself, and whatever I have felt and done, my experiences, my beliefs, my hopes and plans for the years to come… Great is this power of memory, exceeding great, O God. Who has ever fathomed its abyss? And yet this power is mine, a part of my very nature, nor can I comprehend all that I myself really am… Great is this power of memory, a wondrous thing, O my God, in all its depth and manifold immensity, and this thing is my mind, and this mind is myself… Fear and amazement overcome me when I think of it. And yet men go abroad to gaze upon the mountains and the waves, the broad rivers, the wide [ p. 15 ] ocean, the courses of the stars, and pass themselves, the crowning wonder, by[3].’ If we compare such a passage with the famous Greek chorus in which the wonder of man’s nature is described, wholly in terms of his external works, his stemming of the tides, his taming of the horse, his inventions, his contrivances, his arts, it may help us to realize the change which had passed over men’s thoughts. But Augustine is no mere rhetorician; and elsewhere he speaks with more philosophical accuracy : ‘Go not abroad, retire into thyself, for truth dwells in the inner man?[4] ‘The mind knows best what is nearest to it, and nothing is nearer to the mind than itself [5],’ ‘We exist, and know that we exist, and love the existence and the knowledge; and on these three points no specious falsehood can deceive us… for without any misleading fallacies or fancies of the imagination, I am absolutely certain that I exist, and that I know and desire my own existence [6]. ‘In knowing itself, the mind knows its own substantial existence (substantiam suam novit), and in its certainty of itself, it is certain of its own substantiality (de substantia sua) [7].’
Our present purpose is not critical but historical, and we need not, therefore, pause upon these statements except to point out the distinct development of self-analysis which they imply, and their natural [ p. 16 ] tendency to bear further fruit, in the congenial soil of those countless kindred minds which were to throng the cloister for the next thousand years, and issue at length in German mysticism and Luther. The French mystics of the twelfth century and their followers, in reaction from the somewhat thin rationalism of their day, developed an emotional rather than an intellectual type of mysticism— which, with all its fervour and beauty, was not widely influential on the progress of thought. But with the German mystics, Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, the case was different. To begin with, the time was more fully ripe for their effective appearance. And further, they sprang from the great preaching order, and laboured, under the exigencies of the pulpit, to bring their meaning home to the mass of ‘men; while the fact, that both preachers and hearers were of the subjective Teutonic race, gave that intellectual cast to their teaching which enabled it to influence all subsequent thought. We are only concerned here with their contribution to the development of personality; which consisted in emphasizing the intimacy and immediacy of the union between the soul and God. This was no more than had been taught in the earlier ages of Christianity, or than was justified in the philosophy of Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas. But practically the tendency of the mediaeval church, with its over-use of sacerdotal and saintly [ p. 17 ] mediation, had been to exaggerate the distance between God and man. Hence the significance of the mystical movement. But mysticism has always had its attendant danger—the danger of seeking union with God by obliteration of human limitations and human attributes on the one hand, and on the other of underestimating the human sense of guilt, that awful guardian of our personal identity. Hence, though it begins by deepening our sense of individuality, it often ends by drifting, both morally.and intellectually, towards a Pantheism in which all individuality is lost. From this danger, with all their merits, the German mystics were not wholly free. And consequently Luther, who was profoundly influenced by them, without falling into their error, became the most effectual exponent of their central thought.
In saying this we are not concerned with his theology in general, but with the central thought which lay at the root of it all; a thought which he expressed in a more intelligible and, perhaps, on the whole a more guarded way than Eckhart, and for which he consequently secured a popularity such as Eckhart could never have attained. That thought was the natural affinity of the human ‘soul, through all its sin, for God; and of God for the human soul; and the consequent possibility of an immediate relation between the two. He turned, as Dorner puts it, from the metaphysical [ p. 18 ] to the moral attributes of God and man, culminating as they do in love; and proclaimed that here was the only ground for an intimate and in a measure intelligible union of the two. For it is the nature of a God whose essence is love to communicate Himself, and the nature of a man whose essence is the desire for love to be receptive of that communication (capax deitatis). The famous phrase ‘justification by faith’ is an attempt to express this thought. ‘Faith, he says in one place, ‘is, if I may use the expression, creative of divinity; not, of course, in the substance of God, but in ourselves!’[8] ‘Faith has, strictly speaking, no object but Christ … and it is this faith which lays hold of Christ and is clothed with Him (ornatur) which justifies?[9] ‘Christ lives in me, He is my formal cause (is est mea forma) clothing my faith’[10] ‘I am wont, in order to understand this better, to picture myself as having no quality in my heart that can be called faith or love, but in place of this I put Christ Himself, and say, “This is my righteousness.”’ This intimacy and immediacy of possible union between the soul and God was, of course, no theological novelty; but it had long vanished from the popular religion.
Luther re-emphasized it, with a vehemence to which the circumstances of the age contributed yet [ p. 19 ] further emphasis; and, above all, he proclaimed it the basis of spiritual independence ; the soul, which is the slave of God, being thereby free from all other slavery, to religious or philosophic authority, and external means of grace. The freedom of the human spirit through union with God became thus a familiar thought, a recognized principle, a controversial commonplace, in the mouths of many who had no inner experience of its truth. But, however paradoxically stated, abused, exaggerated, misapplied, its publication made an epoch in the world. It had previously been an esoteric doctrine. Luther proclaimed it from the housetop; and in so doing dignified and deepened the whole sense of personality in man.
So far, then, the development of the sense of personality was due to religious influence, ‘monastic meditation continttiig what the age of the great councils had begun. Man had viewed himself in the light of the Incarnation and all that the Incarnation implied ; and as a consequence had come to have deeper conceptions of his own nature and its capacities; his unity, his indestructible identity, his inherent dignity, his wonderful possibilities and consequent worth. But the time came when the dogmatic basis upon which all this rested was cast into the crucible of criticism; for the question which in the middle ages had been seldom asked, and if asked suppressed, forced itself at last [ p. 20 ] to the front, with an importunate insistence—the question, ‘Can man know God?’ To meet this by reasoning, in any sort or form, from the personality of man to the personality of God, would be obviously impossible if the former Conception itself had been chiefly derived from an illegitimate belief in the latter; and therefore a critical review of our faculties became necessary, which should discard all traditional authority, whether philosophic or religious, and examine human nature, by itself, to see what was really in it, what essential capabilities it possessed, and what were their inevitable and necessary limits. It was a fresh instance on a large scale of the universal order of development from life to thought, from fact to theory. The personality of man had been putting out new powers, and making for itself new claims, throughout the Christian ages; and now the time for afterthought had come, to see how far the result was justified.
This brings us to the critical philosophy of Kant. He too had his predecessors ; notably, two in this particular inquiry, Descartes and Leibniz. Descartes, whether consciously or unconsciously, following out the thought of Augustine, had enunciated his famous maxim, ‘ Cogito ergo sum,’ I think, therefore I am—Thought, that is to say, is the evidence of its own reality, and of the real existence of its thinker, the individual man. And [ p. 21 ] Leibniz, in his Monadology, had further emphasized the notion of individuality as involving both isolation from and relation to the whole outside universe; the isolation of separate, self-identical existence; the relation of sensitive and mental intercourse, as we should now say, though he himself used the very different and much less adequate term reflection, as in a mirror. But it was Kant who inaugurated the modern epoch in the treatment of personality. In the first place he analyzed self-consciousness, the power of separating oneself as a subject from oneself as an object, or, in other words, oneself as thinking from oneself as ° thought about ; and showed how all knowledge is due to the activity of the subject, or ego, or self, in bringing the multiplicity of external facts or internal feelings into relation with its own central unity, and thereby into correlation with one another; with the important corollary that what the ego has no means of thus relating to itself cannot become an object of knowledge. And then in the moral region he went on to show how the ego, or self, has not only the power of making objects for its own understanding, but also the power of making objects for its own pursuit, motives for its own conduct; and is thus self-determining, or able to become a law to itself, and in this sense free. Further, despite of much subsequent controversy upon the point, it may be affirmed, without doubt, [ p. 22 ] that he viewed these two aspects of personality as united by the inherent primacy of the practical over the speculative reason; denying to the latter the right of prosecuting its own exclusive interests, or trusting its own conclusions, in independence or contradiction of the interests and conclusions of the former. And, finally, he pointed out that all persons, in virtue of their inherent freedom, are ends in themselves, and never merely means to other ends. Their power of self-determination, of becoming a law to themselves, is inalienable; irresistibly compelling them to regard themselves as ends, ultimate objects of endeavour or development, and entitling them to such consideration from others. However much, therefore, they may minister to or sacrifice themselves for others, of their own free-will, they may never be degraded into passive instruments of another’s power or pleasure, as if they were impersonal things. A person, then, for Kant, was a self-conscious and self-determining individual, and as such an end in -himself—the source from which thought and conduct radiate, and the end whose realization thought and conduct seek. Subsequent thinkers have thrown further light upon personality. But they are at once too numerous and too various to be briefly reviewed. Moreover, while differing widely from each other, they have all agreed in accepting Kant as: their necessary point of departure. [ p. 23 ] They have developed him both critically and constructively; but they have not gone back behind him. It will be sufficient, therefore, for our present purpose to pause with Kant.
Our reason for dwelling upon this process, by which man has gradually arrived at the knowledge of his own personality, its range, its limits and its scope, is twofold. In the first place it is a ‘needful prelude to the description of personality itself. Personality cannot be exhaustively analyzed, and cannot, therefore, be accurately defined. It can only be described from observation. And in describing anything which has a history, that history must be taken into account as constituting part of the full meaning of the thing. And in the second place the appeal to history is especially necessitated by the character of the inquiry which we have in hand, since the fact that human personality has been a thing of slow development, and its conscious recognition of itself slower still, must have an important bearing upon the inference from the nature of man to the nature of God. For, however instinctive and immediate that inference may at times have been, it is plain that the personality attributed to God can at no period have been more distinctly conceived than was its human analogue; and we shall not be surprised to find the former conception gradually modified as the latter has grown more clear. In a word, [ p. 24 ] since man himself has been progressive, his notion. of God must have been progressive also, and we must neither expect to find its later in its earlier, nor be content with its earlier in its later stages. Man, then, is a person or a being of a particular constitution, which he has come to denote by the term personality. He has made some progress in self-analysis, yet is still far from understanding all that his own personality implies. But one thing is certain, that he cannot transcend his personality, he cannot get outside himself. All his knowledge is personal knowledge, and is qualified and coloured by the fact. ‘ Our being,’ as Dr. Newman forcibly expresses it—“our being, with its faculties, mind and body, is a fact not admitting of question, all things being of necessity referred to it, not it to other things. If I may not assume that I exist, and in a particular way—that is, with a particular mental constitution—I have nothing to speculate about, and had better leave speculation alone. Such as I am, it is my all; this is my essential standpoint, and must be taken for granted ; otherwise, thought is but an idle amusement not worth the trouble.’ There is no medium between using my faculties as I have them and flinging myself upon the external world, according to the random impulse of the moment, as spray upon the surface of the waves, and simply forgetting that I am. I am what I am, or I am nothing… . If I do [ p. 25 ] not use myself I have no other self to use. My only business is to ascertain what I am, in order to put it to use. It is enough for the proof of the value and authority of any function which I possess to be able to pronounce that it is natural[11].’ Personality is thus the gateway through which all knowledge must inevitably pass. Matter, force, energy, ideas, time, space, law, freedom, cause, and the like, are absolutely meaningless phrases except in the light of our personal experience, They represent different departments of that experience, which may be isolated for the purposes of special study, as we separate a word from its context to trace its linguistic affinities, or pluck a flower from its root to examine the texture of its tissues. But when we come to discuss their ultimate relations to ourselves and to one another, or,!in other words, to philosophize about them, we must remember that they are only known to us in the last resort, through the categories of our own personality, and can never be understood exhaustively till we know all that our personality implies. It follows that philosophy 2 and science are, in the strict sense of the word, precisely as anthropomorphic as theology[12], since they are alike limited by the conditions of human personality, and controlled by the forms of thought which human personality provides. [ p. 26 ] The fact that man is thus, in the phrase of Protagoras, the measure of all things, has been urged as a ground for scepticism from very ancient days; but such scepticism to be logical must also be universal, and apply equally to all regions of thought. Seeing, however, that science and / common-sense ate both agreed.to! reject this extreme conclusion, and to~maintain that personal experience conveys true knowledge in their respective spheres, no antecedent objection can be raised against theology, on the ground that it rests on personal experience, and is therefore anthropomorphic. In all cases the experience in question must be critically tested; but in none is it invalidated by the mere fact that it is personal. Fof, in the words of an English Kantian of the older school, ‘It is from the intense consciousness of our own real existence as persons that the conception of reality ‘takes its rise in our minds: it is through that consciousness alone that we can raise ourselves to the faintest image of the supreme reality of God. What is reality, and what is appearance? is the riddle which philosophy has put forth, from the birthday of human thought ; and the only approach to an answer has been a voice from the depths of the personal consciousness: “I think, therefore I am.” In the antithesis between the thinker and the object of his thought—between myself and that which is related to me—we find the type [ p. 27 ] and the source of the universal contrast between the one and the many, the permanent and the changeable, the real and the apparent. That which I see, that which I hear, that which I think, that which I feel, changes and passes away with each moment of my varied existence. I, who see and hear and think and feel, am the one continuous self, whose existence gives unity and connexion to the whole. Personality comprises all that we know of that which exists; relation to personality comprises all that we know of that which seems to exist. And when from the little world of man’s consciousness and its objects we would lift up our eyes to the inexhaustible universe beyond, and ask to whom all this is related, the highest existence is still the highest personality ; and the Source of all being reveals Himself by His name “I Am[13].”’
Ignat. Ep. ad Ephes. 15. ↩︎
Aug. Confessions. ↩︎
De ver. rel. 73. ↩︎
De Trin. 14. 7. ↩︎
De Civ. Dei. 11. 26. ↩︎
De Trin. 10. 16. ↩︎
Luther, in Gal. ii.16. ↩︎
Id. ii, 20. ↩︎
Id. ad Brent. Ep. (quoted by Newman, Lect. on Justification). ↩︎
Newman, Grammar of Assent, ix. § I. ↩︎
Mansel, Bampton Lectures, Lect. iii. ↩︎