| LECTURE: II. ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTION OF HUMAN PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE IV. ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY |
[ p. 54 ]
MAN’S belief in a personal God, from whatever source it is derived, must ‘obviously wbe interpreted through his consciousness of his own personality. We should naturally expect to find, therefore, that it has gradually, like the latter, grown articulate from an implicit and unreflective stage. And before we can fairly criticize, or allow it to be criticized, we must be familiar with the steps of its historic evolution. For the inference on which it rests, or by which, at least, it must be justified when called in question, is of that highly complex kind in which a multitude of probable arguments converge and corroborate each other. And foremost among these arguments is the fact of the universality, or at least the extreme generality of the belief, in an elementary form. This is a fact of primary importance, not only for its intrinsic value as an argument, but for the light which it throws upon all subsequent arguments by [ p. 55 ] showing that they are not to be regarded as the premisses of a conclusion, but as the analytical explanations of a pre-established conviction. As we live first and think afterwards, so we are religious first and theological afterwards. Our religion anticipates all argument. And it may be remarked in passing that this effectively disposes of the superficial objections which are often urged against the evidences of religion, on the ground of their subtle and complex character; for these evidences are plainly seen, in the light of history, to be afterthoughts—ways of explaining, put not of attaining, religious life.
‘The statement,’ says Tiele, ‘that there are nations or tribes which possess no religion rests either on inaccurate observation or on a confusion of ideas. No tribe or nation has yet been met with, destitute of belief in any higher beings; and travellers who asserted their existence have been afterwards refuted by the facts. It is legitimate, therefore, to call religion in its most general sense an universal phenomenon of humanity[1].’ Tylor fully endorses this view ; while De Quatrefages, approaching the subject from a totally different direction, as a naturalist, is equally emphatic: ‘We nowhere meet,’ he says, ‘with atheism, except in an erratic condition. In every place, and at all times, the mass of populations have escaped it ; we [ p. 56 ] nowhere find either a great human race, or even a division, however unimportant, of that race, professing atheism … A belief in beings superior to man, and capable of exercising a good or evil influence upon his destiny; and the conviction that the existence of man is not limited to the present life, but that there remains for him a future beyond the grave. . . . every people, every man believing these two things is religious, and observation shows more and more clearly every day the universality of this character[2].’
Whether or not the beliefs of modern savages are the nearest analogue of primitive religion is, from the scientific point of view, an open question. We must remember that moral and religious degeneracy is undoubtedly a vera causa, a process that has operated widely and deeply in human history; and that modern Savages may, therefore, have declined from a once higher level. Still there is tolerably clear evidence that the religious belief of our race has passed through a stage which, if short of the extreme of savagery, was very rudimentary. Of course this may have been preceded by a primitive monotheism, and there are distinguished specialists who still maintain that the earlier forms of Egyptian and Indian religion were more monotheistic than the later. But the general tendency of the evidence is the other way, [ p. 57 ] and seems to point to a very gradual awakening of the religious consciousness, though by no means through such a definite series of stages as some systematizers would have us suppose. Fetichism, Totemism, Atavism, Polydaemonism, Polytheism, Henotheism cannot really be arranged in a serial order ; nor need we now pause upon the attempts made so to arrange them. For our present purpose it is sufficient to notice the primitive philosophy which underlies them all—that is, animism, Animism is the belief in souls or spirits animating the external world, the first and most obvious method of accounting for its various phenomena. It is not in itself a religion, but in alliance with the religious instinct gives birth to various forms of religion according to the variety of objects in which spirits are supposed to dwell—stones, trees, beasts, winds, rivers, mountains, stars—being all in their turn conceived of as the homes or bodies of spiritual agents; and this by no ‘pathetic fallacy’ or poetic transference of attributes, but by an intellectual necessity. Man’s only certain knowledge was of himself, and he was obliged to interpret the outside world, therefore, in terms of that self, while language in its earlier stages inevitably carried on the process.
‘We always find the myth-constructing beginnings of religion busied in transforming natural to spiritual reality, but never find them actuated by [ p. 58 ] any desire to trace back living spiritual activity to unintelligent Realness as a firmer foundation.[3]’
‘Whatever had to be called and conceived had to be conceived as active, had to be called by means of roots which expressed originally the consciousness of our own acts[4].’
Personification, then, was the beginning of philosophy and theology alike, and that by a psychological necessity ; for in all thinking we work from the known to the unknown, and the ‘ known’ to primitive man was himself. But we have already seen that uncivilized man has a very dim and obscure sense both of the limits and the content of his own personality: his morality is limited, his character impulsive, the elements of his nature loosely coherent, and not yet welded together into unity. And all this was naturally reflected in his view of the outside world, with the result that his gods were indefinite in number and in outline, and their character ‘ yengeful, partial, passionate, unjust.’ But as time went on, and man learned to distinguish between animate and inanimate, persons and things and again between what was essential and accidental, good and bad in his own nature, higher conceptions of divine personality and character arose; culminating in what has been called Henotheism, or monarchical polytheism—that is, in a [ p. 59 ] polytheism of which some one chief member, like Varuna or Indra, Zeus or Apollo, Woden or Thor, assumes such prominence in a given period or neighbourhood as to overshadow all his compeers and virtually initiate a monotheism. ‘ For the slumbering faith in a highest God might, as Grimm says, ‘wake up at any moment’; and
‘The beings so contrarious that seemed gods,
Prove just His operation manifold
And multiform, translated, as must be,
Into intelligible shape so far
As suits our sense and sets us free to feel[5].’
This purifying process of criticism is fully exhibited in Plato and the Greek tragedians, and with . an intenser accompaniment of moral indignation in the Hebrew prophets; and there are traces of it to be found in all religious literature—efforts to
“Correct the portrait by the living face,
Man’s God by God’s God in the mind of man[5:1].’
while, as worthier_conceptions of. God came_to.be entertained, they in turn_reacted_upon and raised the standard of human character, and thereby prepared the way for their own further purification, yet still under the form of personality.
The process thus summarized is a long one, and modern anthropology has made its details so familiar to us that they need not be repeated. But its significance is often misrepresented. It [ p. 60 ] is often supposed that the early tendency to personification was gradually outgrown with the ’ growth of enlightenment. But this is not the case ; it was only rectified. Man finds the world outside him to be intensely, unquestionably real. It warms, cheers, supports, sustains, helps, hinders, obstructs, hurts, terrifies, destroys him. And he personifies it because it is so real, and personality is, as we have already seen, his supreme canon of reality. These external influences which so affect him are not less real than himself ; therefore they must be personal. Consequently, when on further reflection he finds that his immediate environment is largely impersonal, he only relegates personality to the background, without ceasing to regard it as the source of reality. His own personality acts daily through inanimate instruments—the mill, the hammer, the arrow, the spear; and he has no difficulty in conceiving a similar process to be at work in the outer world. Thus, however much the conceptions of them may be rectified and refined, the God or gods of the religious consciousness remain ultimately personal. But there comes a time when the religious consciousness demands intellectual justification; and this demand may arise either from the scientific or the speculative side. As the processes of physical nature come to be better understood, their apparent independence of all spiritual influence may suggest the thought, [ p. 61 ] that perhaps after all there is no such thing as a personality behind them. On the other hand, the contrast between God and man may seem so complete as entirely to preclude the possibility of including both under a common predicate or, in other words, of knowing God at all. We have ample evidence of this stage of development in ancient India and elsewhere; but it is nowhere so compactly summarized, so adequately examined, or so essentially related to ourselves, as in the history of Greek philosophy—the lineal ancestor of all European and Western thought. Greek philosophy begins with the distinct, though naturally crude expression of both the above-mentioned tendencies of thought—the physical speculations of the JIonians and Atomists rendering a God superfluous, and the metaphysical and _ logical reasoning of the Eleatics declaring Him to be unknowable, as having no resemblance to humanity either in body or in mind; so that we can only conjecture about Him, whether we say ‘Him’ or ‘It. Matthew Arnold has applied the term ‘modern’ to Greek civilization; and nothing can be more ‘modern’ than the pre-Socratic expression of the negative stage. in philosophic thought. It is significant, therefore, to notice the historical position of this negative stage. It was the naive beginning, not the mature end, of Greek speculation, and led inevitably to the [ p. 62 ] more positive and constructive work of Plato and of Aristotle.
The precise theology of Plato and Aristotle is exceedingly difficult to define; and the problem has been rendered harder, by the fact that so many subsequent philosophers have appropriated their doctrines, and unconsciously modified them in the process. But this difficulty must not be exaggerated, and lies rather in their details than their principles. The complete conception of a personal God, in our sense, they did not, and probably could not reach, for the simple reason that they had not, as we have seen, a clear conception of human personality. But we find in them the essential elements of such a conception, and elements so treated as almost to necessitate their subsequent development in this direction—‘ scattered fragments asking to be combined.’ Plato, as is well known, regards the world as an embodiment of eternal, architypal ideas which, though reached in human knowledge by a process of abstraction, are in themselves more substantially real than any of their partial and therefore perishable manifestations in the world of sense. Living in an age whose forms of thought must have been largely influenced by its plastic art, he speaks at first of these ideas as immutable, stationary types. But later on—and he lived to be old—he conceives these ideas to have energy and movement, and relationship one with [ p. 63 ] another. Further, he groups these ideas under one supreme central idea, variously described as the Good, or the idea of Good, or Goodness Itself, which, he says, is the cause of all things right and fair, of light and its parent, of truth and of reason, and which is in one place identified with divine reason, and possibly in another with the divine beauty. This ideal theory is his philosophic answer to materialism, and is deduced from the evidence of reason, goodness, and beauty in the world. But side by side with it he uses the ordinary religious language of his day, speaking dogmatically of God and the gods, without any attempt at their demonstration. And in the Timaeus, the treatise with which Raphael paints him, but which has since been too much neglected, he speaks of the Maker and Father of the universe, whom it is hard to discover and still harder to describe, as fashioning the world in imitation of an eternal pattern— and that because he was good and in him was no envy at all. Now Plato’s whole religious tone is too earnest and enthusiastic to allow for a moment of our regarding this theological way of speaking as a mere accommodation to the popular mind, a mythical presentation of abstract thought. Nor is there any trace in him of the later distinction between philosophic and religious truth (veritas secundum fidem, and veritas secundum philosophiam), which is only a disguise for unbelief in [ p. 64 ] one or other of the two. Consequently, we must suppose that he either identified the idea of Good with the personal God, or that he viewed both conceptions as true, without seeing how they should be reconciled. In either case he substantially teaches the personality of God, for which we must remember there was as yet no precise terminology existing; and in the latter he is on the verge of the profounder doctrine of eternal distinctions in the Godhead, for which he unquestionably, as a fact of history, paved the way.
Aristotle exhibits far less nace hating than Plato ; but his theology is more scientifically worked out, and not without traces of a suppressed enthusiasm which has been compared to that of Bishop Butler. He criticizes Plato for separating his ideas so completely from the material world, and himself regards the ideas or rational principles of things as immanent in nature, like the order in am army, while only the highest idea is wholly immaterial, and exists apart, like the general of an army. This highest idea or form is God, who is pure reason, and whose eternal and continuous activity consists in contemplative thought. And as this reason can have no adequate object outside itself, it must be its own object and contemplate itself. Hence the divine life consists in self-contemplation. And though God, therefore, does not actively influence the world, He is the cause of all its life and movement, [ p. 65 ] as being the universal object of desire— ‘Himself unmoved, all motion’s source.’ Plato bridges the intellectual gaps in his system by his enthusiastic faith; and for want of this the Aristotelian theology is more obviously defective; but it represents a distinct advance in thinking, and, further, leaves the subject in a form which almost necessitates its subsequent development. Plato and Aristotle were succeeded by an age of philosophizing, but not of philosophers, an age of archaeological revivals in thought, in which much was done to popularize, but little to advance speculation, except in an ethical direction. For our present purpose they stand alone, and their significance is this: they answered materialism and agnosticism, as far as it had then appeared, on the ground that the world exhibits a rational order, and must, therefore, have a tational cause; and this was really a more important contribution to theology than the fact, that probably the former, and possibly the latter of them regarded this rational cause as what we should now call personal. But, before the conception of divine personality could be more adequately developed, another influence was needed, and one with truer and deeper ethical insight than the Greek. The Hebrew prophets, from Moses onwards, with their superior hold upon morality, which is the very nerve of personality, purified their popular religion, but without losing themselves [ p. 66 ] in abstractions ; and it is a mere travesty of criticism to speak of their God as an impersonal tendency. From beginning to end He is essentially personal. And to whatever extent Persian influence affected later Jewish thought, and thereby flowed into the general history of the world, it must have . been to the same effect. For the religion of the Avesta comes nearest to the Hebrew, both in its intense sense of righteousness, and its consequent conviction of a righteous and therefore a Personal God. Now the Christian conception of God was, of course, the legitimate and lineal descendant of the Hebrew; it took up, that is, the religious tradition of humanity, in the purest form which it had yet attained. It came from the side of religion and not of philosophy. But the belief in the Incarnation, while it intensified and emphasized the notion of divine personality, necessitated a further intellectual analysis of what that notion meant, and issued in the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity—a doctrine which, plainly implied, as we believe it to be, in the New Testament and earlier fathers of the Church, did not attain its finally explicit formulation till the fourth century. And in this process Greek philosophy played an important part. We may now dismiss as wholly untenable the notion that the doctrine of the Trinity was borrowed either from Plato or any other ethnic source. It was implicit in the Christian creed. [ p. 67 ] That creed could not be thought out without reaching it. And it became explicit in the Christian consciousness, under the double necessity for explaining the creed to philosophic minds, and defending its integrity against philosophic opposition. But the men who conducted the process of this development were trained in the philosophy of Alexandria and Athens. Their language and ‘its connotation, their categories, their modes’ of thought were Greek, The facts on which they worked, the material they had to fashion was Christian. But the instrument with which they fashioned it, and the skill to use the instrument, had come to them from Plato, Aristotle, Zeno and their schools. And we may fairly say that Greek philosophy only reached its goal when it thus passed, under Christian influence, into the service of a Personal God. And in this sense the doctrine of the Trinity was the synthesis, and summary, of all that was highest in the Hebrew and Hellenic conceptions of God, fused into union by the electric couch of the Incarnation.
Now the doctrine of the Trinity, as dogmatically elaborated, is, in fact, the most philosophical attempt to conceive of God as Personal. Not that it arose from any mere processes of thinking. These, as we have seen, all stopped short of it. It was suggested by the Incarnation, considered as a new revelation about God, and thought out upon the lines indicated [ p. 68 ] in the New Testament. Upon this the evidence of the Fathers is plain. They felt that they were in presence of a fact which, so far from being the creation of any theory of the day, was a mystery— a thing which could be apprehended when revealed, but could neither be comprehended nor discovered ; and their reasoning upon the. subject is always qualified by a profound sense of this mysteriousness. Athanasius often figures in popular controversy as the typical dogmatist. Yet it is Athanasius who says, ‘Nor must we ask why the Word of God is not such as our word, considering God is not such as we, as has been before said ; nor, again; is it right to seek how the Word is from God, or how He is God’s radiance, or how God begets, and what is the manner of His begetting. For a man must be beside himself to venture on such points: since a thing ineffable and proper to God’s nature, and known to Him alone and to the Son, this he demands to have explained in meee It is all one as if they sought where God is, and how God is, and of what nature the Father is. But as to ask such questions is impious, and argues an ignorance of God, so it is not permitted to venture such questions concerning the generation of the Son of God, nor to measure God and His wisdom by our own nature and infirmity[6].’ Such passages might be multiplied indefinitely ; and St. John of Damascus, [ p. 69 ] who on many points sums up the Patristic teaching, says, (What God is is incomprehensible and unknowable[7].’) Now this language, which was afterwards developed into the negative theology (via negationis) of pseudo-Dionysius, Erigena, and the mystics, and which led the Fathers to protest against the Gnostics, Arians and Sabellians, for rationalizing mysteries, shows a thorough consciousness of the true element in Agnosticism; and teachers who thus carefully qualify their statements cannot certainly be accused of undue anthropomorphism. But, on the other hand, they lay much stress on the thought of man’s being created in the image of God, and upon the illuminating presence of the Spirit of God in the Christian intellect, at times even describing His operation as ‘deifying’ . And, starting from these premises, they freely apply human analogies to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity.[8]
If we recur to our previous analysis of human personality we shall see that it is essentially triune, not because its chief functions are three—hought, desire, and will—for they might perhaps conceivably be more, but because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. A person is, as we have seen, a subject who can become an object to himself, and the relation of these two terms is necessarily a third term. I cannot think, or desire, or will, [ p. 70 ] without an object, which is either simply myself, or something associated with myself, or dissociated from myself considered as an object, in either case involving my objectivity to myself. When I say ‘I think this, ‘I like that,’ ‘I will do the other,’ I am considering myself as an object quite as much as ‘this,’ ‘that’ and ‘the other.’ And I cannot think of the world I live in, without thinking of it negatively as outside me, or positively as including me, in either case related to myself. We may ignore this association for practical purposes, or we may be entirely unconscious of it, but on analysis it can always be detected. And it is through this power of becoming an object to myself that all my subsequent knowledge is attained. However various and extended my objective world may become, it is still one object in relation to me; and however complex my relations to it, they are still my own, or one totality of relationship to that object. And thus my personality is essentially and necessarily triune. Further, we have seen that our personality is at first a mere potentiality, which gradually develops or realizes itself, and that in this process of realization it seeks association with other persons. It needs to include other persons within the sphere of its own objectivity, to fill, so to say, its blank form of objectivity with personal objects, its blank form of relationship with personal relations. And the first shape which this association takes is the [ p. 71 ] family, the unit of society. The family is the first stage in the development and completion of our personality; its abstract triunity being therein being adequately, because personally, realized in father, mother, and child.
Of course this concrete social trinity is much more obvious than its psychological counterpart and cause, and could not fail from an early period to mould men’s forms of thought. Hence we find the gods of polytheism continually grouped in triads, sometimes as triumvirates, sometimes as families— especially in India and Egypt—a fact which would naturally familiarize men’s minds with trinitarian modes of thinking in theology. But as the sense of human personality grew deeper, particularly, as we have seen, under Christian influence, its triune character was gradually recognized. Augustine marks an epoch in the subject and is its best exponent. ‘I exist,’ he says, ‘ and I am conscious that I exist, and I love the existence and the consciousness; and all this independently of any external influence.’ And again, ‘I exist, I am conscious, I will. I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and to be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence.’ Neo-Platonism is full of kindred thoughts; but they were implicit in the philosophic and religious consciousness long before Augustine [ p. 72 ] or the Neo-Platonists. And though Trinitarian formulae were explicitly employed in theology sooner than in psychology, applied to God sooner than to man, it was, of course, from the latter that they were really derived. The instrument was, in fact, being fashioned in the using; and human personality was coming gradually to a clearer conception of itself, by the very act of using its own processes to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity.
Now the doctrine of the Trinity is often crudely attacked, as being simply derived from the analogy of the family, which, as we have seen, played an important part in pre-Christian mythology and theology. It should be remembered, therefore, that since the family is an essential outcome of our personality under its present conditions of existence, this attack is only a restatement of the general objection against arguing from our personality at all —that is, against using what we have seen to be the only argument that we possess. But, as a matter of fact, the Christian Church did not press the family analogy, at any rate further than the doctrine of the Son. It probably saw early exhibited, among the Gnostic sects, the dangerous practical consequences which might ensue, ftom the introduction of a feminine principle into our thoughts about the Godhead ; and therefore, while freely admitting feminine attributes, declined all thought of a feminine hypostasis, though possibly this may have involved some [ p. 73 ] underestimate of an aspect of truth, which avenged itself in the subsequent development of Mariolatry. It is, therefore, under the more fundamental psychological analogy that we find the doctrine of the Trinity slowly defined, with the natural consequence that the conception of the Word is completed sooner than that of the Spirit, since a personal object is easier to imagine than a personal relation. For the former conception the ground had been’ prepared, by the Platonic ideas, the Aristotelian view of God as His own necessary object, the seminal reason of the Stoics, the Apocryphal Wisdom, the Philonian Word—all obviously due to psychological analysis. And it was a comparatively easy transition from these to the Christian Logos, who is both ‘immanent and eminent ’ (Theophylus), ‘ideal and actual’ (Athenagoras), ‘a living though immaterial personality, as contrasted with the abstract images of human thought’ (Origen), ‘the reason and intelligence that is God’s counsellor’ (Theophylact), ‘and shares the solitude of God’ (Tertullian), and to which Irenaeus, with his dread of speculation, says men are too ready to apply analogies drawn from the processes of human thought. But for the doctrine of the Spirit, there had been but little, if any, speculative preparation, and its development was proportionately tentative andslow. St. Augustine, very possibly influenced by some hints of the Neo-Platonic Victorinus, is the first to draw out [ p. 74 ] the thought of the Holy Spirit as the bond of union, the coeternal Love, which unites the Father and the Son, thus preparing the way for the acceptance of the double procession, and for the specific designation of the Holy Ghost as Love (St. Thomas). Now all this was an attempt to make the divine nature, and life, to a certain extent intelligible. The Unitarian imagines his conception of God, as an undifferentiated unity, to be simpler than the Christian. But it cannot really be translated into thought. It cannot be thought out. Whereas the Christian doctrine, however mysterious, moves in the direction, at least, of conceivability, for the simple reason that it is the very thing towards which our own personality points. Our own personality is triune; but it is a potential, unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself, and must go beyond itself for completion, as, for example, in the family. If, therefore, we are to think of God as personal, it must be by what is called the method of eminence (via eminentiae)— the method, that is, which considers God as possessing, in transcendent perfection, the same attributes which are imperfectly possessed by man[9]. He must, therefore, be pictured as One whose triunity has nothing potential or unrealized about it ; whose triune elements are eternally actualized, by no outward influence, but from within; a Trinity in [ p. 75 ] Unity ; a social God, with all the conditions of personal existence internal to Himself.
Our present purpose is not to consider the doctrine of the Trinity as a reasonable revelation, for we are not now dealing with revelation at all, but simply to point out the fact that Christianity, which claimed to be the fulfilment of all that was true in previous religion, announced a docttine of God, which was only intelligible in the light of the analogy drawn from our consciousness of our own personality, and which was dogmatically defined by the assistance of that analogy; and thus emphatically reaffirmed the verdict of man’s primitive personifying instinct.
Looking back, then, upon history, we may say that a tendency to believe in divine personality (including polytheism as well as monotheism under the phrase) has been practically universal amongst the human race; that, among other influences, Greek philosophy, and Hebrew prophecy, the one working chiefly from the intellectual, the other from the moral side, strove to eliminate from this belief all that was unworthily anthropomorphic ; while in so doing the latter consciously, and the former implicitly, retained the essential attributes of personality, till finally the Christian Church united and developed their results, in the dogma of the Trinity in Unity ; which, however much it transcends intelligence, distinctly claims to be the most [ p. 76 ] intelligible mode of conceiving God as essentially personal.
Turning, then, from history to apology, we start from the fact that our belief in a Personal God is founded on an instinctive tendency, morally and philosophically developed. It cannot be called simply either an intuition or an instinct, for it has neither the clearness of the one nor the unerring action of the other, and it is best, therefore, deseribed as an instinctive tendency. Man has an instinctive tendency to believe in a God or gods. And it is this instinctive basis which gives its true character to our theology. Theology was no conscious invention, some of whose results have in the course of time become intuitive, but an attempt to unfold the significance of an already existing intuition or instinct. Men first felt themselves, even if vaguely, to be living in the presence of a God or gods, and afterwards came to reflect upon the nature and consequences of that relation. This fact is of primary importance for the theistic argument, for it at once puts Theism in possession of the field, and throws the onus probandi upon its opponents. When we leave the conjectures of hypothetical anthropology, and confine ourselves strictly to what historic science has observed, we find that man has always and everywhere tended to a religious belief. That is a fact of experience scientifically ascertained, and, in founding the external evidences of our faith on it, [ p. 77 ] we claim to build upon a solid foundation of fact. But we are at once met by the attempt to explain away this belief, as a natural delusion, due to the misinterpretation of dreams, to meteorological ignorance, to the dread of animals, or the love of ancestors, or a complex interaction of these various causes.
Now we may fully admit, that these various influences affect uncivilized man to a very considerable degree, and yet reasonably deny their adequacy to produce the persistent, irresistible, — practically universal belief in question. The impotence of philosophy to create a religion is a commonplace. Is it likely that savage philosophy succeeded, and that completely and for ever, in a work which civilized philosophy has been notoriously unable to accomplish? And yet it is precisely this that we are asked to believe. To which we answer that it is a very doubtful, and wholly unverified, hypothesis. And it is no reply to accumulate instances of these savage delusions. We neither doubt their existence, nor their influence on early thought, but only their causal connexion with the origin of religion.
But many of us are quite willing to go further than this, and grant that the phenomena of dreams, and storms, and sunshine, and animal activity, were the agencies, through which man’s spiritual sense was first consciously awakened, the first objects on [ p. 78 ] which, infant-like, it tentatively fixed; without in any way thereby compromising the authenticity and authority of such a sense. It would seem to be a necessity of human progress, that man should regard the immediate objects of his apprehension, or pursuit, as ends in themselves, ultimate ends; whereas, in fact, when once attained they turn out to be only relative ends, means to other objects, greater and grander than themselves, and, by contrast with those greater things, unreal. Hence, as has been often pointed out, man is always educated by illusions[10].
Now since this principle of development through illusion is thus a natural necessity, and pervades even the most civilized life, we should expect it to operate more powerfully still among ignorant and uncultured races, The method of evolution need not discredit the result evolved. And the feeling after God need be no less veracious a guide, for having first sought to find Him among the objects of His creation—sun, moon, stars, tempests, memories of the beloved dead.
But illusion of this kind is utterly distinct from delusion. An illusion is an inadequate conception ; a delusion is a false one. And we may reasonably argue that, if the sense in question was evolved at all, it must have followed the universal law of evolution, and survived because it corresponded [ p. 79 ] with environment, or, in other words, was founded on fact, and was therefore not a delusion. The strictly animal instincts have been perfected, and their possessors selected for survival, in exact proportion to the accuracy with which they were adjusted to external fact. ‘Can we believe,’ it has been well asked, that ‘at one point in the process of evolution (and that, mark, at the dawn of the very faculty which is now enabling us to criticize and explore the distortions which follow) that faculty suddenly goes wrong, not specifically in the moral, but in the more general mental sense, and its whole idea-world becomes untrustworthy [11]?’ Yet nothing less than this is involved in the attempt to explain the spiritual instinct as a delusion ; an alternative which becomes impossible almost to absurdity, when we remember the part which religion has played in the development of our race. When we have eliminated the evil done in the name of religion, which its opponents are somewhat too ready to identify with religion itself, the fact remains that religion has been the chief factor in the higher education of our race. No consistent evolutionist, therefore, can maintain that it is the outcome of an instinct, which never from the first had any real correspondence with external fact, and was untrue. Such paradoxes were common in the eighteenth century, with its tendency to base all [ p. 80 ] historic institutions upon fictions, but in the present day they are merely survivals of an obsolete philosophy, which our science of historic evolution has conclusively and finally exposed. Indeed, when we consider the weight of the superstructure which man’s religious instinct has borne, it becomes difficult to discuss with seriousness, for all their ingenuity, these attempts to explain it away. It remains, as it has ever been, the firm foundation of our belief in a Personal God.
In proceeding to examine the intellectual justification of this belief, we must remember that the instinctive nature of its origin reappears at every stage of its development. It is not, it never has been, a merely intellectual thing ; for it is the outcome of our entire personality acting as a whole. Our reason, our affections, our actions, all alike, feel about for contact with some supreme reality ; and when the mind, speaking for its companion faculties, names that reality a Person, it is giving voice also to the inarticulate conviction of the heart and will—an instinctive mystical conviction that is, in truth, ‘too deep for words.’ ‘For the heart,’ in Pascal’s language, ‘has reasons of its own, which the reason does not know.’
| LECTURE: II. ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTION OF HUMAN PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE IV. ANALYSIS OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY |