| LECTURE III. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE. V. MORAL AFFINITY NEEDFUL FOR THE KNOWLEDGE OF A PERSON |
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OUR belief in a Personal God is, as we have seen, based upon an instinct, or instinctive judgement, whose universal or practically universal existence is a fact of historical experience, and which we do not find that adverse criticism is adequate to explain away. Consequently, when we come to consider the various evidences, arguments, proofs[1] by which this belief is commonly supported, we must remember that these are all attempts to account for, and_explain, and justify something which already exists[2]; to decompose a highly complex, though immediate, judgement into its constituent elements, none of which when isolated can have the completeness or the cogency of the original conviction taken as a whole. ‘The truth of our religion, like the truth of common matters, says Bishop Butler, ‘is to be judged by the whole evidence taken together; for probable [ p. 82 ] proofs, by being added, not only increase the evidence but multiply it[3]’—a thought which is insisted upon at great Jength by Dr. Newman. ‘Formal logical sequence,’ he says, ‘is not in fact the method by which we are enabled to become certain of what ‘is concrete. . . .-The real and necessary method … . is the cumulation of probabilities, independent of each other, arising out of the nature and circumstances of the particular case which is under review—probabilities too fine to avail separately, too subtle and circuitous to be convertible into syllogisms, too numerous and various for such conversion, even were they convertible. ‘Thought is too keen and manifold, its sources are too remote and hidden, its path too personal, delicate and circuitous, its subject-matter too various and intricate to admit of the trammels of any language, of whatever subtlety and whatever compass[4].’ Bacon had the same idea before him, though in another context, when he said, ‘ The subtlety of nature far surpasses that of the senses or the intellect’; and again, ‘Syllogistic reasoning is utterly inadequate to the subtlety of nature[5].’ Now, nowhere will all this be so true as in the study of a person. We have already seen that our own personality is a synthesis, an organic unity of attributes, faculties, functions, which presuppose [ p. 83 ] and involve and qualify each other, and never exist or operate apart ; and this may suggest to us how inadequate all argumentative proof must be of the existence, or the nature, or the attributes of a Personal God.
There are a certain number of recognized proofs or lines of argument upon the question, which have been differently emphasized in different ages, and by different classes of mind, but none of which can be said to have lost general credit before the time of Kant. And Kant has been compared by Heine, in a shallow moment, to Robespierre, on the ground that he disproved Theism, as completely as the latter abolished royalty, by finally disposing of these time-honoured proofs. No one, of course, would now endorse such a comparison ; but it is worth noting for its forcible expression of the extreme view which might be taken of the negative aspect of Kant’s work. For Kant confessedly created an epoch in apology by showing, at least more exhaustively than had ever been done before, the entire inadequacy of the purely intellectual arguments for Theism, considered as attempts at logical demonstration. But he admitted the need of retaining, as ae idea of the reason or working hypothesis for thought, this very conception, which could not be logically proved ; and, further, subordinated the intellectual to the moral arguments, by which he was himself [ p. 84 ] convinced. Moreover, negations in thought are never final; they are only stages leading on to some new form of affirmation. The persistence of a belief, whose argumentative supports have been removed, is an additional evidence of its inherent strength ; and in the case before us the critical modification of its so-called evidences has led to a fuller recognition of the implicit necessity of our belief in a Personal God. ‘For these proofs,’ as Dr. John Caird says, ‘…are simply expressions of that impossibility of resting in the finite and of that implicit reference to an Infinite and Absolute mind…seen to be involved in our nature as rational and spiritual beings. Considered as proofs, in the ordinary sense of the word, they are open to the objections which have been frequently urged against them; but viewed as an analysis of the unconscious or implicit logic of religion, as tracing the steps of the process by which the human spirit tises to the knowledge of God, and finds therein the fulfilment of its own highest nature, these proofs possess great value [6].’
First, there is the cosmological argument[7], or argument from the contingency of the world. This may be stated in various ways, but is, perhaps, most popularly known as the argument for a First Cause. Man cannot rest content with the mere spectacle of things, or procession of events, without [ p. 85 ] wanting to know how they were made, and why they happen, or, in other words, their cause. And this instinctive craving for a cause is as active in the savage as the sage, being a necessary form of human thought, a way in which we are compelled to think by our very mental constitution. In primitive ages men tend to satisfy this instinct, by attributing natural phenomena to the immediate action of personal beings like themselves—spirits of the air, and the woods, and the waters, smiling through the sunrise, and frowning in the storm. And it is the usual thing to say that the progress of knowledge has consisted in the substitution of natural for personal agencies, of scientific fact for mythological fancy; so that, for instance, we no longer regard thunder as the voice of God, or stormclouds as His armies, or lightnings as His arrows, but as necessary results of an electrical disturbance, which in its turn is due to previous atmospheric conditions, that in their turn can be traced still further back in endless causal sequence. Now, of course it is perfectly true that science has effected this change of view, and owes the whole of its progressive existence to the fact. But we beg a very large question, if we describe this change as a substitution of material for spiritual causation, rather than an interpolation of stages, or secondary causes, between an effect and its first cause. For scientific or secondary causes, are not causes at all, [ p. 86 ] of the kind which our causal instinct demands; and, though it is the continuous pressure of the causal instinct which has led to their discovery, they only postpone but do not satisfy its need. For secondary causes are only antecedents, or previous. states, of the phenomenon in question, pointing us back to more remote antecedents, or previous states: they have been sometimes called the ‘sum of the conditions’ of the phenomenon, which is obviously only another name for the phenomenon itself. Thus they call for explanation as much as the thing which they profess to explain, and are not answers but only extensions and enlargements of the original question. For the original demands of the causal instinct is, for a first cause, in the sense of something which shall account for the given effect without needing itself to be accounted for; something which is not moved from without, and is consequently self-moved or self-determined from within. Now we have a real though limited experience of such a cause within ourselves, and there alone. We are conscious of being able to originate action, to initiate events, even ina measure to modify the processes of nature, in virtue of our free-will or power of self-determination. ‘We are,’ as Zeller says, ‘the only cause of whose. mode of action we have immediate knowledge through inner intuition.’ And what we demand, therefore, in a first cause is analogous to what we find within [ p. 87 ] ourselves and nowhere else. Thus primitive man, however unscientific, was not altogether unphilosophical. Being ignorant of the world’s organic pach unity, he assumed for it a plurality of personal causes, and as a natural consequence confused what we now call first and secondary causation—that is, the immediate action of personality with the means through which it acts. But, though sub sequent science has corrected both these errors—and in so doing has been often thought to relegate personality into the background—it has not affected, and cannot affect, our demand for a personal first cause. If we pick a flower, and ask a ourselves how it came into existence, to be told’7 ee that it has been in making for a million ages, and once existed as nebular dust, enormously increases the interest of our question, but in no way supplies us with its answer. A vast history is unrolled before us, of which the flower is an inseparable part; but we are obliged by our causal instinct to view the whole of this as one effect, and to ask what was its ultimate or uncaused cause. And this brings us to the common objection, that a first bate cause, and an infinite series of antecedents, or secondary causes, are equally inconceivable ; or, as it is sometimes stated, that a first cause is a mere negation of thought, a mere result of our inability to go on thinking indefinitely backward—the point at which we stop in our impotence, but which [ p. 88 ] involves no positive idea. It will follow from what rae : t : . has gone before that this is a mistake. An infinite series of antecedents is not only inconceivable, in the sense that it cannot be pictured by the mind— it is actually unthinkable, for it violates the very nature of thought, which is to demand a cause that shall have no antecedent. Whereas a first cause, in the sense of a self-moved mover, has been recognized by philosophers, from Plato to Hegel, as a positive notion, not an impotence of thought, and is illustrated by the analogy of our personal self-determination, the thing of all others in the whole world which we know best. The case stands, therefore, thus: we are, by universal admission, we obliged to think a first cause ; we have ample authority for asserting the thought to convey a positive meaning; and we can only interpret that meaning as involving personality. It is, perhaps, unfortunate, that we should have to use the word ‘first’ at all in this connexion; fora ‘first ’ cause easily suggests the earliest member of a series, and thus gives colour to the above-mentioned fallacy ; whereas the cause in question is not merely a first cause but the first cause—wholly different, that is, in kind from others—supreme, independent, unique ; the only cause which our causal instinct can recognize as such; the necessary correlative of any and every effect ; so that we cannot think of anything as an effect, or derived mode of being, without [ p. 89 ] necessarily thinking of its original, underived cause. This cause may or may not act through an intermediate series of agents; but the thought of it is as immediately presented to the mind, when we pick a daisy, as when we contemplate the ageless evolution of the stars. The same argument may be otherwise presented, as from relative to absolute, or finite to infinite being. The empirical school maintain that we have no positive conception of the infinite. The infinite, they say, can only mean the indefinite, the et-cetera beyond the finite, which merely serves to symbolize our inability to go on thinking any further—as when the savage counts ‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘three, ‘a great many’: and, moreover, as the infinite is the negation of the finite, it must obviously be limited by the finite, and cannot, therefore, be infinite at all. This would be all very plausible if the finite and the infinite were only different in quantity, and not in quality or kind; if, in short, they were mere abstractions from which all but quantity had been taken away, But this is not, in fact; the meaning of the terms as employed in the argument with which we are concerned. For when we speak of inferring the infinite from the finite, this finite, from which our reasoning starts, is no abstraction, but the real, visible, substantial, concrete world around us, quick with all its palpitating life. Consequently, when we argue that this finite implies an infinite, we [ p. 90 ] do not mean that it implies an abstract fringe of emptiness outside it ; but, on the contrary, that it implies something infinitely more comprehensive, and concrete than itself, something which underlies, and includes, and sustains it, an infinite reality, an infinite fulness, a totality of which it is a part. For finite objects are unstable and have no permanent identity ; indeed, in a sense they have no identity at all, since they are determined by, and therefore dependent on other finite objects, situations, surroundings, atmospheres, contexts and the like; all of which are incessantly changing and involving others in their change. Water evaporates, air is decomposed, plants and animals die daily, and are resolved into their dust: everything is in process of becoming something other than itself. Yet all the while we regard the world as real, and substantial, and recognize a method and a system in it all. And this could not be the case if its dependency or relativity were endless, if all things were dependent for their being upon other things outside themselves, and these in their turn upon others in literally limitless extent. Such a world would not be a cosmos, but a chaos,
‘ruining along the illimitable inane.’
The very thought, therefore, of the world’s dependence involves, as its correlative, the thought of an independent being undetermined from without. [ p. 91 ] There is no question of the inevitableness of this conclusion ; we cannot avoid it, we cannot unthink it. In Kant’s phrase, it regulates all our thought. The only question is whether it merely regulates us as a boundary where thought is baffled, or whether it stands for something that we can in a measure conceive, or, in other words, for a positive idea. Can we positively think of an independent being, which shall sustain all finite and dependent things, without thereby becoming dependent upon them and so losing its identity? Here again personality, and that alone, assists us. As persons we are identical in the midst of change, and on account of our identity we are potentially infinite ; for we can progressively appropriate the things and influences outside us, and so transform them, from being limits, into manifestations of ourselves. Thus we are surrounded by other persons, who interfere with and impede our actions; but can win them by affection to become friends, who shall transmit and multiply our own activity. We are imprisoned by foreign languages; but can acquire and thereby transform them from obstacles into instruments of wider access to our kind. We are restrained by laws; but through obedience can make them the means of our development, by making their principles our own. We can even guide the elemental forces, like heat and electricity, from opposing to subserve our will. And in each [ p. 92 ] of these cases the process is the same. We enter spiritually into the alien forms of being that surround us, without losing our identity the while; and so, instead of melting away into modes of them, we make them additional modes of us. While we can even go further in the same direction, by freely creating external objects— statues, pictures, books, machines—for the sole purpose of giving expression and extension to the inner content of ourselves, our feelings and thoughts and wills. Thus though, as finite beings, we too are limited by the outer world, as persons, we can gradually make that world into our own ; abolish, as it were, its externality, and make it internal to ourselves; a world within us instead of without us, in which we are no longer slaves, but free. And while we thus reduce alien things into depéndence upon our personality, our own independence is not alienated, but intensified by the fact; since, as the things whereon we depend become internal to ourselves, we are increasingly self-dependent. Following this analogy, then, we can conceive of an Infinite Being as One whose only limit is Himself, and who is, therefore, selfdetermined, self-dependent, self-identical ; including the finite, not as a necessary mode, but as a free manifestation of Himself, and thus, while constituting its reality, unaffected by its change —in other words, as an Infinite Person.
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The cosmological argument, therefore, is the argument derived from the belief that we recognize in the universe without us certain qualities of infinitude, reality, causation, independence, and the like, which have no counterpart except in the region of our own personality, and can only, therefore, be interpreted as attributes of a person. It does not profess to be a demonstration, and would, of course, involve a fallacy if cast into syllogistic form—the fallacy of drawing a conclu sion wider than the premisses. It is rather the intellectual justification of an instinctive intuition, which, as Lotze says, ‘has its origin in the very nature of our being.” It is the analysis of the deep conviction which prompts and has prompted man, from immemorial ages, to appeal from the storms of earth to One who sitteth above the water-floods; from the slavery and transiency of earth to One who remaineth a King for ever.
‘Change and decay in all around I see:
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.’
And this leads us to the teleological argument [8], or argument from evidences of design in the world. ‘Do you not think,’ asks Socrates, ‘that man’s Maker must have given him eyes on purpose that he might see?’ with the suggested inference that the existence of eyes must be proof of a purposeful Creator. This argument, from the date of its first [ p. 94 ] appearance in Greek philosophy, has been one of the strongest supports of natural theology in the ordinary mind. It has had a long controversial history; but none of the objections raised against it have really differed from those which Aristotle saw and answered in his day. ‘E pur se muove.’ It still retains a weight and impressiveness which show that there is more in it than logical analysis can either detect or refute. The modern doctrine of natural selection, however, has led to the reopening of the question once again. Nature is full of instances of adaptation, and especially adaptation to the future, too numerous, intricate, and various to be the result of chance, and therefore implies a mind. That has been the time-honoured form of the argument; and, consequently, the doctrine of natural selection has been thought to discredit it, by showing that adaptation may, after all, be due to chance. For if a hundred varying organisms came by chance into existence, and ninety-nine of them, being ill-adapted to their surrounding circumstances, perish and are forgotten, the single one which is better adapted to its environment, and therefore survives, will appear to owe to purposeful design what is really due to accidental variation. And if we could conceive this process of natural selection, by survival of the fittest, to have operated exclusively throughout the universe, the result would be an appearance [ p. 95 ] of design without its reality, and the argument from final causes would vanish. Now, natural selection is, of course, a vera causa, a principle which undoubtedly obtains throughout the organic world, and the discovery of which has revolutionized our science. But of itself it does not touch the philosophical question of final causes. It has been borrowed for that purpose by materialism, and there is no necessary connexion whatever between its scientific use as an exhibition of nature’s method, and its materialistic misuse as a disproof of nature’s mind. To begin with, there are many difficulties in the way of our recognizing natural selection as the sole cause of even organic development; while the possibility of its ever accounting for the mechanical and chemical properties of inorganic matter, that already ‘ manufactured’ material, as it has been called, out of which organisms are developed, is, to say the least, extremely doubtful. And, even if all this ground should be one day occupied by natural selection, the original variability of matter, not to mention matter itself, would still remain to be explained. Natural selection acts by selecting variations, and the variations must exist before they can be selected. They cannot of themselves be due to the operation of a principle, of which they are the necessary presupposition. Now, when we speak of chance variations we do not, of course, mean uncaused [ p. 96 ] variations, but merely variations of whose cause— that is, of whose antecedent conditions—we are ignorant. As a matter of fact, the variations of to-day have issued by necessity from those of yesterday, and those of yesterday again from others, carrying us eventually back to the original variability of matter. The present state of the world, therefore, is a necessary consequence of that variability ; and, if the present state of the world is full of adaptations which suggest design, the primitive variability from which those adaptations have ensued must suggest it in no less degree. But the materialist conceals this conclusion by shuffling with the word chance, and speaking of ‘chance’ variations as if they were really accidental. In fact, all variations are rigorously determined ; and, if the brains of Plato or St. Paul were results of natural selection, they must none the less have been potentially present in the first condition of the material world. Chance, in the sense of accident, can only have operated before the present system began to be; for there is no room for it inside that system, or it would not be a system. In which case, as Professor Mozley remarks, ‘it must have acted up to a certain time, and then issued in its. own opposite’; or, in other words, ceased to act. But this is only a popular and pictorial way of saying that chance is unthinkable. Our causal instinct excludes it. And with the exclusion of [ p. 97 ] chance the illegitimate use of natural selection vanishes. For when once we realize that adaptation implies adaptability, and that definite adaptations involve definite determinations of that adaptability, or, in other words, that natural selection can only act upon prepared material, the evidence of design resumes its sway. Materialism in all ages has borrowed its instruments from the physical science of the day; and the present is only one of many similar attempts which have failed in like manner —not from the unsoundness of the scientific instrument, but from the untenable nature of the materialistic position.
Meanwhile, the argument from design has rather gained than lost through modern science. For in its older form it was wont to compare nature, and the various things in nature, to machines or works of art—that is, to objects created for a special purpose, and whose constituent parts are meaningless except in their relation to the whole. This involved an undue separation between nature’s means and ends, and often led to strained and artificial conclusions, such as that fruits were designed to feed bird or insect life, when in so doing their more obvious function was destroyed. It was this form of the doctrine that Bacon and Spinoza especially attacked. But we have now come to regard nature as an organic unity, an organism, composed of organisms, [ p. 98 ] and therefore essentially alive. Now it is the characteristic of life, that its every phase and moment is, in a sense, complete in itself, and may be regarded as an end, however much it may conduce to further, fuller, fairer ends to come. Consequently, the absoluteness of the old distinction between means and ends has disappeared. All nature’s ‘means’ are, relatively speaking, ends, and as such havea value of their own. The leaf, and the flower, and the fruit, and the animal’s joy in existence, are at the same time ends in themselves, and yet minister to other ends. On the other hand, all nature’s ends are, relatively speaking, means. The human eye, for example, considered as an instrument of vision, may be called one of nature’s ends—the point where a long line of complex evolution finds its limit; since the very optical defects, with which it has been rashly charged, are now admitted to improve its actual utility. But the eye not only sees, it shines and it speaks—and thus in turn becomes a means of emotional attraction and spiritual intercourse, fairer than the sapphire, more expressive than the tongue; while neither of these qualities can by any possibility be connected with its physical evolution as an instrument of sight. Now a system whose every phase and part, while existing for its own sake, exists also for the sake of the whole, is, if possible, more suggestive of rational design than [ p. 99 ] even a machine would be, especially when it is a progressive system which culminates in the production of a rational being. And thus we may fairly say that modern science, while correcting, has enriched and emphasized the evidence for design. That evidence may not amount to demonstration ; and, indeed, logically considered, it is only a section of an argument, for it looks back, for its major premiss, to the previous argument for a first cause, and forward, for its strongest confirmation, to the moral argument, which exhibits the material world as subservient to moral purposes in man. But, taken by itself, the mere spectacle of nature creates an impression upon the imagination which it is difficult to resist. We can often trace purpose in a human creation—a picture or machine —without adequately comprehending what that purpose is. Andsowith nature. We are conscious of living in the presence of innumerable, exquisite, admirable adaptations, too complex to disentangle, too curious and beautiful to disregard, too infinitely various for any single mind to grasp; which irresistibly suggest the presence of a directing, informing, indwelling reason, that obviously transcends and yet incessantly appeals to our own. And the nearest human analogue for this is to be found, not in the isolated act of reason which creates a work of art, or performs a definite piece of work once for all, but in the continuous consciousness [ p. 100 ] which co-ordinates all the functions of our being, manifesting itself in every momentary thought or word or deed, and thus investing each passing hour with a value of its own, while still controlling and subordinating all, as means, to the attainment of its ultimate end. In other words, we see in nature, not merely an artist or designer, but a person.
Now both the above arguments rest upon the underlying assumption that thought itself is valid, and not a mere chimerical dream; a position which the ordinary Western mind, at least, is perfectly ready to take for granted, but which carries with it an important consequence that is neither so easily accepted nor understood. To think is to know, and the desire for knowledge, which prompts me to think, is part of the very constitution of my mind, But such a desire presupposes a conviction, on my part, that there is something capable of being known—that is, something intelligible. If I come across a children’s alphabet, piled up on a table, I do not expect to gain any knowledge from it, because the letters are not arranged; they spell nothing, and are, therefore, unintelligible. But, if I find a book lying open, I at once expect to learn something from it, because its letters are intelligibly arranged and convey a meaning. Now this is the same kind of expectation which underlies all our desire to know the outer world—a conviction that [ p. 101 ] it is intelligible, and therefore can be known. And as we put our desire into operation we find this conviction justified. We find the universe to be a system of mathematical, mechanical, organic, vital, moral relations, which are intelligible and not chaotic. Its letters are arranged. But intelligible relations can only exist through thought, and as the relations in question are certainly independent of all individual human thinkers, they must exist through an universal thought; of which we may say that the individual thinker enters into it, or it into the individual thinker, as we might say in reading a book that we enter into the spirit of the author, or the spirit of the author into us. And as we cannot conceive thought without a thinker, universal thought must mean an absolute or universal mind. Our constitution, as thinking beings, therefore, necessitates our assuming that our thought will correspond with things; which can only be the case if things are intelligible; which, again, can only be the case if they proceed from a mind—and a mind which must be the source of everything that is intelligible, (including all our ideals,) and therefore be the highest which we can think, and therefore, at least, be personal. This initial conviction is, in fact, the beginning of our contact with such a mind, or the beginning of its self-revelation to us, a contact and revelation which increase, as we proceed forward on the path of [ p. 102 ] knowledge. This is the line of thought which is commonly called the ontological proof [9], and which, though often associated exclusively with the names of Anselm and of Descartes, underlies the Platonic ideology, and is developed by Augustine. ‘ The true meaning of the ontological proof is this,’ says Dr. J. Caird—‘that as spiritual beings our whole conscious life is based on a universal self-consciousness, an absolute spiritual life, which is not a mere subjective notion or conception, but which carries with it the proof of its necessary existence or reality [10].’
Such, in outline, are the intellectual proofs of the existence of God; suggestions of a probability, which to many minds seem all the more weighty, for their inability to be expressed in syllogistic form. And as the severest criticism of them is associated with the name of Kant (though it has been much qualified by his successors), it is important to remember the object which Kant had in view. It is quite untrue to say that he was inconsistent in his two critiques of the Pure and Practical Reason, feebly attempting to reconstruct in the one what he had successfully destroyed in the other. He definitely regarded the twofold work as one whole, whose final issue was to vindicate the reality of freedom, and through it of God and Immortality. And this work he sought to [ p. 103 ] accomplish, by first showing that our speculative reason could not act beyond the limits of sensible experience, and could not, therefore, ever either prove or disprove the existence of a God ; and then by going on to show that our practical reason, moving in a region beyond phenomenal experience, and consequently beyond the reach of criticism from that region, contains in itself the conscicusness of freedom and a moral law; whose realization in the world is the strongest and sufficient evidence of the reality of God, a thing which he never ‘for a moment denied or even only doubted.’ And whatever view, therefore, we may take of Kant’s philosophy, we must not allow the authority of his name to be claimed in favour of an ultimate agnosticism.
This naturally leads us to the crowning argument for the existence of God, and that is the moral argument[11]. It may be stated in a sentence, but cannot be exhausted in a varus consists in the fact that we are conscious of Being free, and yet under the obligation of a moral law, which can only be conceived of as emanating from a personal author.
This is an argument which comes too intimately home to us to need much explanation. ‘Our great internal teacher of religion, says Dr. Newman, ‘is our conscience.’ ‘Conscience is a personal [ p. 104 ] guide, and I use it because I must use myself… Conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge. . . . Conscience too teaches us not only that God is, but what He is[12]’ It is this practical familiarity that we all have with conscience which makes the appeal of the moral argument so strong. But clouds of controversy have gathered round it and confused its outline: battle has been - joined upon irrelevant issues; and the ill-advised retention of obsolete forms of defence has often given its opponents an apparent advantage. There may be some use, therefore, in a brief statement of the case. The argument in question starts from two facts of consciousness—freedom and obligation. We have already referred to the fact that freedom is rooted in our self-consciousness, but it will be well to return for a moment to this point. I find myself in a world whose events and phases are causally connected in one indissoluble chain, and my bodily organism is an inseparable part of that world. I do not, therefore, profess to be capriciously independent of what is called the universal reign of law. But I possess this peculiarity—that, whereas all other things in the world are necessarily determined by external agencies or causes, I have the power to make the external influences which affect my conduct my own, before allowing them to do so, thereby converting them from alien forces [ p. 105 ] into inner laws; so that when determined by them I am not determined from without but from within. This process is best exhibited in the case of bodily appetites and desires ; because they so obviously connect us with the material world and its inevitable order, that there, if anywhere, I shall find myself a slave. What,then, is the process of acting from such a desire? We feel a desire and act accordingly. But something intervenes between our feeling the desire and initiating the act. The desire does not draw the action after it as one physical event draws on another. We must first say to ourselves, however implicitly and halfunconsciously, ‘The satisfaction of this desire will gratify me, and therefore I will satisfy it. In other words, I represent the satisfaction of the desire, in imagination, as an ideal or end or object to myself. I represent myself satisfied to myself desiring, I picture myself to myself, myself as object to myself as subject. And it is not the physical effect of the desire, the mere pathological feeling, but the metaphysical action of the mental image that ultimately determines my action or is my motive. Now it is impossible to maintain that during this process the mind is only a passive spectator of what is going on within it. It consciously takes up the raw material of desire into its own spiritual machinery, and there manufactures it into motives. And this it can only do [ p. 106 ] through its self-consciousness, or power of turning round upon itself, and looking itself in the face, thus distinguishing itself into subject and object ; since this enables it to transform its various subjective feelings and affections into objects; transferring them, as it were, with a change of sign, from the subjective to the objective side of the equation, where, as being objects, they can be discussed, compared, rejected or pursued. In other words, we must cut our physical feelings out of their physical context before we act upon them, and cannot, therefore, be governed by the necessity attaching to them; since they only retain this necessity while continuing in their context as part of the material world. The truth of this analysis will obviously not be affected by the nature of the feeling in question. It applies equally to all the materials out of which motives can be made—bodily appetite, altruistic sympathies and sentiments, and the sanctions of positive law. For the rewards and penalties of positive law can no more constrain us than our physical desires. They cannot begin to act till there is a self-consciousness which can present them as objects to itself, and thus translate them into motives, however incapable the savage mind may be of analyzing such a process. In the very fact of saying ‘This is the law’ I separate myself from it; I put it outside myself; I stand aloof from it, and thereby break the inevitable necessity with [ p. 107 ] which it may appear at first sight to enchain me. If I then proceed to reunite myself with it by obedience, or make it my motive, I do so of my own accord. I act, as Kant says, not from the law, but from the consciousness of the law. However strongly, therefore, positive law may urge me to act, I must appropriate it and make it my law before it can do so. It is in this capacity for creating, or co-operating in the creation of my own motives, with the selective power which it inevitably implies, that my freedom consists—being, in fact, a conditioned or constitutional freedom. It rests on the guarantee of my own self-consciousness, of which, in truth, it is a necessary property; and in the nature of the case it can never be criticized or explained by any science; for science can only deal with objects; and freedom can never become an object, being an inalienable function of my subjectivity or self.
Freedom, then, is a point upon which we can allow no shuffling or juggling in argument. It is unique, but it is self-evident; and every attempt to explain it away can be shown to involve a petitio principii or begging of the question.
It is otherwise with our next point—the sense of duty or moral obligation; for this has a history behind it, whose early stages are obscure and consequently leave room for conjecture. Still it will simplify this history to bear carefully in mind [ p. 108 ] the distinction between the form and the matter or contents of the moral law. The latter—that is to say the sum total of particular duties which constitute the morality of a nation or a man—varies, and has always varied, in different places and times. But the very fact of these variations only throws into stronger relief the constancy of the formal element, or sense of obligation, which is common to them all. For if a thousand people think themselves to have a thousand different duties, their divergence in detail does but emphasize the general sense of duty wherein they agree.
Turning then to history, with this distinction in mind, we find the sense of duty or obligation in every civilized race. It has never been more powerfully expressed than by the pre-Christian moralists of Greece and Rome, and modern research has found it clearly recognized in the most remote antiquity—of India, Persia, and China, of Babylon and Egypt. Men may not have acted up to it any more than they do now; still there it always was, explicitly accepted by the higher minds, and capable of being addressed as implicitly present in the lower. But it is suggested that the case is different in what may be called hypothetical history—that is, the history of primitive man as reconstructed on the analogy of the modern savage. The fact that the modern savage is still a savage might fairly be urged as a considerable qualification [ p. 109 ] of his claim to represent primitive man, who, ex hypothesi, must have been the parent of all the progressive peoples. His condition is far more suggestive of degradation than of primitive integrity. Nor, even if this point be waived, is there any sufficient evidence that uncivilized races are unmoral. Their morality is not indeed the morality of civilization—that is to say, its content is different from ours. But it by no means follows, as is often far too readily assumed, that they have no latent moral faculty or sense of obligation. On the contrary, there is a world-wide institution which points in the opposite direction—namely, the system of taboo. Taboo includes the twofold notion of religious reverence and religious abhorrence—awe of trespassing upon certain places, and things, and persons that are sacred, and fear of contact with cettain others which are profane. Now, if we separate the content of this law of taboo—that is to say, the details which it prescribes or proscribes —from the sanctions on which it rests, we find the latter to be closely analogous to, if not identical with, the moral sanctions of civilization; either religious hope and fear, or an unaccountable sense of obligation, so strong that its violation sometimes issues in death, And, in face of this fact, it may be fairly asserted, that uncivilized races give no support to the theory of an unmoral condition of humanity. Quatrefages goes so far as to say that [ p. 110 ] ‘the fundamental identity of human nature is nowhere more strikingly displayed’ than in the moral region [13].
There is really no necessity, however, in defending our argument, to follow its opponents into this obscure region. The verdict of authentic history is enough. For ‘things are what they are’ quite irrespectively of how they came to be. The truth of astronomical discoveries is not affected by the fact, that the faculty which makes them could not formerly count four. Neither is the inference from the moral sense to be discredited, because the process of its evolution has been gradual.
The inference is this: man is conscious of an imperative obligation upon his conduct. It is not a physical necessity, disguised in any shape or form, for he is also conscious of being free either to accept or to decline it. It cannot originate within him, for he has no power to unmake it; and it accomplishes purposes which its agent does not at the time foresee—results to himself and others which he can recognize afterwards as rational, but which his own individual reason could never have designed. It cannot be the voice of other men, though human law may give it partial utterance; for it speaks to his motives, which no law can fathom, and calls him to attainments which no law can reach. Yet, with all its independence [ p. 111 ] of human authorship, it has the notes of personality about it. It commands our will with an authority which we can only attribute to a conscious will. It constrains us to modes of action which are not of our own seeking, yet which issue in results that only reason could have planned. It educates our character with a nicety of influence irresistibly suggestive of paternal care. The philosophers who have probed it, the saints and heroes who have obeyed and loved it, the sinners who have defied it, are agreed in this. And the inevitable inference must be that it is the voice of a Personal God.
Such is the moral argument in outline; and it must be viewed as a whole to feel its force. The authority of the moral law must not be severed from its rationality, for it is in their combination that its evidential significance consists. It commands us, and we obey it blindly, as regards any distinct foresight of its results; yet this blind obedience invariably issues in such personal development and social progress as imply providential design. And it is this teleological character of moral obligation that makes the mode of its first appearance unimportant. Freedom, its presupposition, we must and can successfully defend. But we are bound to no particular theory of the historic emergence of the moral sense. For its evolution is its vindication ; what it is proves what [ p. 112 ] it was. The spiritual results which it has realized show the spiritual nature of its cause.
This argument obviously corroborates those which have gone before, for it resumes them all upon a higher plane. It increases our necessity for believing in a free first cause; it shows the reason in the world to be, moreover, a righteous reason; and it intensifies the evidence of design. It thus crowns the convergence of probable arguments which spring from the very centre of our personal consciousness, and can only be even plausibly refuted on the assumption that that consciousness itself is fundamentally untrue.
| LECTURE III. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONCEPTION OF DIVINE PERSONALITY | Title page | LECTURE. V. MORAL AFFINITY NEEDFUL FOR THE KNOWLEDGE OF A PERSON |