[ p. 202 ]
WE have been led by the course of our argument to attach great importance to the idea of creation. We have concluded that religion is deeply concerned to maintain that there is a response of a personal kind to the aspirations and longings of the human spirit, and hence to hold fast to a belief in the personality of God. But our reflection upon the nature of personality in ourselves and in God brought us to the thought of creation in two ways, -,First, we found that creative power was a salient quality of those persons who are open to our direct observation, of beings like ourselves, and consequently we were compelled to attribute a supreme degree of creativeness to the Most High. Secondly, we saw reason to hold that personal life was indissolubly connected with the pursuit of ideal ends, and hence that this condition must, in some way, be present in the experience of the personal God. But this in turn implied that there must exist a sphere of being within which those ends could be realized. Thus on these two grounds, we must conclude that the personality of God implies that there is a created order, and further, it would seem, that this order, taken at any moment, must be imperfect.
Apart from these considerations, which may perhaps be thought to arise from our method of approach to the question and from some special presuppositions which are [ p. 203 ] open to dispute, it is obvious enough that the Christian doctrine of God must contain a doctrine of God as Creator. On the conception of creation rests the characteristic Christian view of the relation of the human soul with God. That relation is one admittedly of dependence, but one also which includes the possibility of free communion and fellowship with God. Through its continual emphasis on the fact of creation Christian theology has kept itself clear of the abyss of pantheism, and has maintained that moral distinctions are not mere seeming and the moral struggle is a real conflict. We are not parts of God, but His creatures ; not phases or aspects of the Absolute, but spirits with some limited but genuine freedom to seek God or to turn away from Him, The belief in creation then safeguards the truth that all beings depend upon God as their Source and Sustainer, but, at the same time, preserves the dignity of personal spirits as selfdetermining agents, who are capable of receiving, in their development, the power of a “new creation” which proceeds from the same God who called them into existence.
Though the importance of the idea of creation will be readily admitted, its precise meaning is not without obscurity. Probably much of the difficulty which is felt by reflective men on the subject is duo to the presence in the traditional doctrine of creation of images which are really mythological survivals ; and it is important, therefore, to free the essential idea from unessential accretions. Two notions in particular which have been associated with the belief in creation give rise to quite irrelevant perplexities. It has been supposed that the creation means a beginning of “the world” in time, and that it must be one temporal act, done once for all. Both these ideas occur almost inevitably in poetical descriptions of [ p. 204 ] creation such as those in Genesis. The imagination must represent to itself the truth under dramatic forms. “ He spake the word and they were made, He commanded and they were created.” “ He saw that it was very good and rested onthe seventh day.”[1] That the pictorial element is present in such utterances will be generally agreed, but we do not always realize how far the merely symbolical extends in them.
That creation is a continuous process has become almost a commonplace with enlightened theologians since the coming of evolutionary theories ; and we need not dwell upon the obvious fact that there is no special difficulty in holding that the creative act of God is, so to speak, spread out through time. Not only is this view more in harmony with evolutionary presuppositions, it is the conception which would flow most naturally from the idea of the divine Personality which we have adopted. If creation is an essential work of personal life, we should expect that the personal God would be creative, not at one moment only, but always. There is perhaps a danger that the doctrine of continuous creation may give some support to the belief that God Himself developes. But this is by no means a necessary consequence, as we shall try to show when we consider the relation of God with time.
The closely related idea that creation implies a beginning in time or, to adopt St. Augustine’s emendation, a beginning “ with time ” is of greater importance, because it has seemed to guard a really essential element in the doctrine of creation. The theology of Christianity has developed its doctrine of creation in opposition to every kind of dualism. It explicitly taught that God created the world ex nihilo in order to avoid the suggestion of any existence, such as matter, which did not depend upon the [ p. 205 ] Creator. In what is probably the earliest explicit statement of the doctrine of creation out of nothing, Irenaeus, writing against the Gnostics, remarks that they do not: understand how much a spiritual and divine Being can accomplish. “To attribute the substance of created things to the power and will of Him who is God of all, is worthy of both credit and acceptance. It is also agreeable to reason, and there may well be said, regarding such a belief, that the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.’ While men indeed cannot make anything out of nothing, but only out of matter already existing, yet God is in this point pre-eminently superior to men, that He Himself called into being the substance of His creation, when previously it had no existence.”[2] St. Augustine again, in whose theology the idea of creation out of nothing plays an important part in connection with the problem of evil, thought out the conception with reference to the dualistic theories of the Manicheans.[3] It might seem then that, if we gave up the idea of a definite beginning of creation, we should be committed to a belief in the eternity of the universe, and thus return to a dualism of God and universe which the doctrine of creation is intended to deny.
The reluctance of Christian theologians to part with the conception of a beginning of creation is thus due to an intelligible and respectable motive, and the danger which they have discerned would really exist on certain interpretations of the word “universe”. If we took the universe to be a completed whole of being apart from God, we should have on our hands a dualism of God and universe which would be not only a stumbling-block to [ p. 206 ] Christian faith, but a singularly unstable intellectual position. The mind would be driven to resolve this dualism either by denying the existence of the universe or, more probably, by denying the existence of God. But this conception of the universe is not ours. We refuse to admit that any “whole” can be more than a relative one : considered apart from God it is necessarily incomplete. The sum of created things existing at any moment is neither identical with God nor is it complete, self-explanatory and consistent in itself. When we assert, therefore, that it is of the nature of God to be creative and infer that every moment of time must be filled with the exercise of His creative power, we do not equate the product of creative activity with the Creator.
It may be objected further, that we seem to be suggest ing the dependence of God on creation, and hence to be denying His supreme and unapproachable sovereignty. There is, of course, some truth in this. It certainly is implied in our argument that the being of God as personal is dependent upon the existence of a created order,and that we see no way of holding the personality of a Deity “ prior to creation”, But we must make two remarks upon this which will remove the real weight of the objection. Our argument most emphatically does not imply the eternity of this physical universe in which we are, nor of any universe ; it will be satisfied by the admission that, in any possible time, there must be created being of some kind. And further, we do not suggest, nor can it be inferred from our position, that God depends on creation in the same manner as the creation depends upon Him. Created being depends upon God in an absolute sense. It derives its existence wholly from Him. God depends on creation only in the sense that, being what He is, it is a necessity of His nature to create.
[ p. 207 ]
When we have eliminated unessential and mythological elements which have clothed the conception of creation in the historical religions, it appears to consist of a few ideas which are simple enough in themselves but difficult to combine into one thought. The primary intention of the doctrine of creation is to affirm the dependence-of all things upon God. But this dependence is quite different from that which is exemplified in the case of the relation of parts to a whole, so that, according to the doctrine of creation, God is not to be regarded as the sum of existing things nor as the system which they compose. Creation represents God, not as the Absolute, but as the Ground of the world. Nor again, according to the doctrine of creation, is the relation of Creator and creature to be understood as implying the ultimate unreality of creatures, or that they have a merely illusory existence. Creation excludes every form of the theory of “ Maya”. And here, in the assertion of the genuine reality of created things, the real difficulty of the conception of creation comes to light. At first sight, it may appear to bring together two contradictory beliefs—the belief that God is all, and the belief that created beings have some relatively independent reality, some being for self. The idea of creation may be dismissed as a muddle-headed compromise between a clear-sighted monism and a definite pluralism. Before, however, we take the easy line of summary rejection, we may reasonably reflect that neither monism nor pluralism has ever been thought out to the end without destroying some permanent and valuable aspect of our experience ; a fact which is at the root of the strange see-saw of the history of philosophy. Monism is always the parent, by reaction, of pluralism, and pluralism prepares the way for monism. We should consider the possibility that some doctrine of creation may be the [ p. 208 ] synthesis which would reconcile our need for unification with our obstinate prepossession that finite existence is real and freedom true.
One further remark must be made on the meaning of creation. The assertion that God is the “ ground” of the “world” may be taken in a logical sense, as in the philosophy of Spinoza. It may be held that temporal things and events follow from the nature of God by mere necessity, much as the conclusion of a syllogism follows from the premises. This is not a doctrine of creation : it is indeed almost its antithesis. The creation of God is the act of a personal Being and analogous, therefore, to our own acts of will and choice. Though it may be a necessity of God’s nature that He should create something, what He creates is the result of a free act.
The difficulty of harmonizing the ideas which are included within the conception of creation is illustrated by the history of thought on the subject. Within Christianity itself the Platonic account of creation has been of almost equal importance with the Biblical narratives. That the Divine is creative is a prominent thought in the Timaeus: the absence of “ envy” in God leads Him to bring into existence as much good as possible.[4] But from the Christian standpoint, the Platonic idea of creation suffered from two defects. It fell short of the assertion of an absolutely creative God. The agent in creation is not, it would appear, for Platonism the Supreme Being ; for the Demiurge, contemplating the Ideas and their harmonious unity in relation with the Idea of the Good, reproduces this heavenly pattern, as far as is possible, in time and space. The highest value is not the Creator. There is also doubt in the Platonic teaching concerning the dependence of all the elements of the created world upon the Creator, for in [ p. 209 ] the Republic we are told that God cannot be the cause of all things or indeed of many things, since He is the cause only of good.[5] It seems to be an essentual part of the Platonic view of creation that the creative act is limited by “necessity” or by matter.
The Christian philosophy of creation has sought to remedy these defects in the Platonic theory by two amendments. First, it has abolished the distinction between the Divine Mind and the Eternal Forms or patterns and has conceived the latter as thoughts of God, thus giving a subjective turn to Platonism. In this departure, we may observe, Christian thought was anticipated by the Jewish Platonist, Philo, Secondly, it has striven to abolish altogether the idea of any limiting necessity or matter which may appear to be independent of God. This denial is embodied in the epigram that God creates the world “ out of nothing.”
Here as in other respects the philosophy of Leibniz states the essentials of the traditional Christian view in the most plausible manner. There are, according to Leibniz, “ eternal verities ” or principles in accordance with which this world, or indeed any possible world, must be created. But these “eternal verities” are not “ outside ” or independent of the mind of God; on the contrary, they are the content of that mind, and in respecting them the Creator is being true to His own nature. Nor again in the philosophy of Leibniz is there any independent “stuff” or matter, out of which the world is fashioned and which externally limits the creative act. Even the material world is not in its nature different from life and spirit, for the “ monads” of which it is composed are “ spirit”, though at the lowest level of development.
[ p. 210 ]
If we are in search of a complete philosophy of the universe which is in general agreement with Christian doctrine, probably we shall not easily find one which can compete with Leibniz. That in its main principles it can still be defended is shown by the writings of Dr. Wildon Carr.[6] But there are, of course, grave difficulties into which we need not enter here. Historically the philosophy of Leibniz gave birth to the Deistic conception of God, that is of a Deity who is wholly transcendent, standing outside the world. But on the other hand, if we attempt to remove this danger and give up the idea of created “ monads ” which are distinct from God, it may be that we are upon an inclined plane which will not permit us to stop short of monism. Mr. Bertrand Russell has laid down that pluralism must end in atheism and monism in pantheism, with the implication that, since we must be either pluralists or monists, we cannot logically be Theists.[7] We may confess at least that the doctrine of creation, which would save us from this dilemma has not been worked out so clearly as to provide a genuine via media, and we shall often find that specula~ tive conceptions of creation are either pantheism or deism in disguise.
II
Dr. Inge has told us that, “ as to the motive and manner of creation we cannot be expected to know much.”[8] We may agree that the demand to have all our difficulties resolved is unreasonable, and perhaps the ambition to have a completely articulated ground-plan of the universe is an ambition which we ought not to indulge. It is precisely in connexion with this problem of the [ p. 211 ] relation of the creatures to the Creator that we should expect the inadequacy of the human reason to be most evident. To know fully how and why creation takes place we should have to be the Creator. The inability to harmonize two truths, which we are led to believe by adequate reasons, is not sufficient justification for rejecting either, though it is an indication that our apprehension of the truths is imperfect. We must admit that the complete understanding of creation is beyond our power, but we may hope to find some hints in our human experience of the possibility of an ultimate answer to our questions, and of the direction in which it may be sought.
We have said that to understand creation it would be necessary to be the Creator; and it may follow from this that our nearest approach to the comprehension of how creation is possible will be through a consideration of the human mind in its creative aspect. All the higher functions of mind are, in some degree, creative, and we ought not to deny the word to the achievements of scientific and mathematical discovery; but the word “creative ” has been reserved primarily for works of the imagination, and justifiably, sinco the labour of the poet or musician brings into existence products which were not in any sense there already. The law of nature which the scientific researcher formulates may have been, for his mind, the result of a leap of creative imagination, but the law itself was already in existence. Someone else would have found it out if he had not. But the poems of Shelley and the sonatas of Mozart would never have been at all but for the creative genius of two individual minds.
The doctrine of creation has suffered because it has generally been approached with two mistaken presuppositions, Philosophers and theologians have assumed that the [ p. 212 ] simplest analogy is the best, and have tended to think of God under the image of a celestial Artisan ; or they have given way to the intellectualist illusion and supposed that they were bound to conceive of God as “pure thought”. But the world is at least a highly complex system, and the mést complex activity of the human mind is more likely to be a clue to its ground than the more elementary; nor will those who have adopted the “personalist ” standpoint, from which this book is written, be willing to allow an exclusive right in the term “ mind ” to the intellect in the narrower sense. Perhaps the conception of creation as a work of imagination, and God the Creator as the Poet whose works are universes, may take us further into the mystery than any other guide.
The imagination is the Cinderella of psychology, as it was in the past the bogy of philosophers. The psychological text-books are lamentably meagre in their accounts of this function of mind, on which so much that is valuable depends. They show embarrassment even in dealing with the problem of its distinction from recollection. We ought not to be surprised that analytical psychology should be unable to deal with that aspect of mind in which it manifests most clearly its originality and spontaneity. If we are right, however, the imagination is of the essence of mind and unanalysable, in the last resort, into anything else. The mind is no tabula rasa waiting to be impressed from outside; but from the earliest moment of its existence, leaps out to meet the “sense impressions ”, and from the first is a collaborator in the making of its world.
We must, of course, admit that all imagination, upon remembered previous ties of any given human [ p. 213 ] imagination are limited by the experiences which the person has enjoyed. The imagination is a power by which we are able to combine remembered experiences into new wholes ; but if this were all, there would be nothing mysterious or significant about the faculty. It would be a kind of mental kaleidoscope in which, if we knew the pieces, we could predict all the possible combinations. But the highest works of the creative imagination are far more than this. Though they are rooted in provious experience, they are not mere rearrangements of it: they are genuinely new. The reason for this appears to be that the elements drawn from experience form, in the creative imagination, organic wholes, such that each element is modified by its position within the whole. If we take such a creation as Hamlet we can sce the meaning of this. To the building up of the character of Hamlet there contributed, doubtless, observations of other men and inner experiences of Shakespeare’s own, but Hamlet is not any of those men, nor is he Shakespeare, nor is he a collection of qualities put together. He is a living unity; and the materials out of which he is composed have become fused together, so that no one of them is the same as it was in its original condition as a mere observation or experience. Hero is the creative force of the imagination : from the matter of experience it brings forth objects of contemplation and enjoyment which have never been in experience before.
Nothing could be more misleading than to oppose imagination to reason, even though the opposition may seem to have the authority of Plato. We must be careful to avoid the suggestion that to think of the creation as the product of something analogous to imagination is to preclude ourselves from holding that it is rational. The imagination and the reason cannot, in fact, be separated [ p. 214 ] one from the other without reducing both to impotent abstractions. The higher the quality of the imagination the more “ fundamental brainwork” may be discerned in it. Bosanquet has spoken of the “ logic” which may be said to be implicit in a poem ;[9] but equally we may speak of the imaginative power which is exhibited in the most complex mathematical demonstrations. Indeed, it may be suggested that the most rigidly rational systems, such as those of geometry and the game of chess, depend upon certain conditions which are “posited” by the imagination. Given the postulates which the imagination has invented, the whole closely determined structure follows.[10] No one probably would be prepared to deny that the greatest works of the poetical genius are monuments of intellect. But wo must not pursue the subject of the relation of intellect and imagination into its remote implications ; our purpose here is simply to maintain that the creative imagination is not irrational.
If then we may think of the world as the product of the imagination of God, we have some faint indication of an ultimate reconciliation of those ideas, at first sight hopelessly discordant, which the doctrine of creation holds together. The work of art, the poem or the musical composition, while it exists only in the mind of the artist, is wholly dependent upon him. If he were suddenly annihilated, the work of art would be annihilated too. But the work of art has also a relative independence. Once it has begun to take shape the creator has not absolute power over it; it has a character of its own, and that inherent character must limit the possible continuations which the mind of the creator may conceive. Could [ p. 215 ] Shakespeare have turned Macheth after the second act into a farce or transformed its central figures into the characters of an harlequinade ? Only by destroying the play and creating an entirely different one.
This relative independence of the products of the creative imagination is perhaps most plainly seen in the works of great novelists and dramatists. The interest of the novel or play consists largely in the introduction of characters and the results which they produce. But the interest fails if the persone dramatis are merely types and their relations determined by the lines of a well-contrived plot. Itis in proportion as they are really individuals that the true effect of drama is produced ; and we do not gain the full esthetic satisfaction if we feel that the plot comes from the dramatist and not from the characters. Indeod it is a commonplace that the characters have often, during the process of composition, taken on so much independence that they have refused to conform to the plan which the author had devised. I suppose, for instance, it is one of the defects of Dickens that his characters are often too large and too vital for the somewhat conventional plots of his stories.
The line of thought which we are pursuing is easily open to misinterpretation and even toridicule, It may be misrepresented as being the thesis that we are all characters in a cosmic novel. But this would be a gratuitous error. We are not arguing that God’s creation of the world is precisely like a poetical creation of the human mind. We are applying, in a somewhat unusual sphere, the old method of the via eminentie. If the creative imagination is a power of human mind, and, as we hold, fundamental in the activity of mind, then we must conceive this power to be represented, though perfectly and not in a partial form, in the divine Mind. We shall expect, therefore, that the [ p. 216 ] tendencies which can be but imperfectly discerned in human imagination will be completely realized in God. But we discover some indication, even in the very limited achievements of human art, that dependence and distinctive being are on the way to reconciliation.
Perhaps we may without presumption pursue our analogy still further. The thought of the divine Artist will lead us to a somewhat different conception of the continuity of creation than that which would naturally follow from the thought of God as the supreme Thinker or the Artificer. The two latter analogies suggest the conception of a completed whole. The mere maker hastens to the end in order that the finished work, which is the sole purpose of his labours, may be possessed. The ideal of mere thought is the coherent and perfect system. Creative work, however, is its own end, and there is a value in its exercise as well as in its products. The artist, qua artist, would wish always to be creating. And we may suppose that the creative activity of God likewise is without limit or desire of cessation. The tireless fertility of the Divine can know no bounds.
It may be suggested, however, that we have allowed no place for the order of nature, and that to think of creation as analogous to a poom is to ignore the scientific assumption, justified by results, that nature exhibits a system of orderly sequences. The objection is mistaken. Obviously the whole of reality, as we experience it, cannot be summed up in “laws” or expressed in equations. No array of laws of nature can include the aspects of reality which constitute its value for us, its beauty, and its individuality. The scientific statements of the regularity of nature’s operations are an abstraction from its concrete being. Nor can we “ explain ” the world, as we experience it, by such formulas, What then is the relation of the “ laws ” [ p. 217 ] to the individual existences, to the full and varied individualities which are the stuff of living experience ? Are we to suppose that these regularities are the mould into which concrete being is poured, and that they exist somehow apart from the instances from which they are known ?
The suggestion lies near at hand which would fuse the regularities and the diversities, the laws and the “ brute facts ”, the equations and the qualities, together. Imaginative creation is not lawless or incoherent. The most inspired imagination exprosses itsclf through rhythm ; and falls, by an impulse which is part of its nature, into the most complex harmonies. But the poet does not construct his metrical outline and proceed to fill it with concrete material; though literary competitions may set this task as an exercise. The poet inevitably finds his rhythmical structure. It is not something imposed upon the poem, but the poem itself. The greatest pocts have often been ignorant of the laws of prosody. The liter critic and analyst finds the regularity and describes it. He may draw up elaborate systems of the rhythmic structure of the verse ; but the structure is not the poem. Thave seen a doctor’s thesis which consisted in a complete metrical analysis of the poems of Keats; a book which contained scarcely anything but the conventional marks for stressed and unstressed syllables and “longs and shorts”. Perhaps the student knew more at the end of his labour about Keats’s poetry, but the skeleton was not the living body of the poetry. Much the same may be said of the laws of nature. They are the abstract and largely conventional statements of uniformitics and rhythms which the creation displays ; they are not the foundation of the quality, value, and meaning of that creation, The creation is not rational because it is a system of natural [ p. 218 ] law: natural law may be discovered within it because it has the higher rationality of a work of art.
While keeping steadily before us the necessary inadequacy of our analogy, we may pursue it a little further and apply it to the problem of divine immanence. The Christian doctrine of God has always asserted in terms the complete immanence of the Divine in creation, at Jeast since the doctrine became formulated in philosophical order and the attribute of “ omnipresence ” became recognized as one of the fundamental qualities of God. But in practic and in detail, the conception of immanence has been treated with little consistency, and modern theistic philosophies have been embarrassed by the difficulty of preventing a genuine doctrine of immanence from degenerating into a pantheism. We have already seen that the analogy of human creation goes some way to reconcile the dependence of all things upon God with a real being-forself of the creation. In the same way, the illustration will hint at a reconciliation of immanence and transcendence. If we think of a poem or a dramatic composition while it is, though completely fashioned, still in the mind of the author, it is plain that the relation is one of complete immanence, while at the same time, the author transcends his poem, distinguishing himself from it, and indeed is only immanent in it through the act of distinguishing it from himself. The immanence of God in the world cannot be thought of as partial or restricted to certain parts or aspects of creation. We must affirm an immanence complete and definite, such that no element or portion of the creation is not upheld and permeated by the divine Thought ; but this need not mean, and indeed cannot mean, that the divine Mind is identical with, or exhaustively contained in, that in which it is immanent any more than the mind of the poet is identical with the poem.
[ p. 219 ]
There is no doubt a true thought behind the statement which is sometimes made, that there are degrees of divine immanence, but the expression is misleading. We are certainly constrained to hold that some aspects of creation, human personality, for example, are in some way nearer to the Divine than others; but we could not without absurdity say that only a small part of God was present in the stone and a much larger part in the human persons. As Augustine pointed out, the introduction of quantitative conceptions into the interpretation of God’s omnipresence might lead us to the conclusion that there was more of God in the elephant than in the other animals.[11] The orthodox doctrine of the Divine omnipresence is the only one which can stand criticism—the doctrine that God is present in the fullness of His being at every point of space and in every moment of time. The truth which the conception of degrees of immanenco attempts to guard is better stated in the form, “there are degrees of significance ”. Some elements in the dramas of Shakespeare are more fully indicative of the intention and mind of the author than others. It would be a strange criticism which found as much matter for reflection on the poet’s intellect in Feste as in Hamlet. So the personalities of human beings are indefinitely more indicative of the purpose and nature of the Creator than the dead world of matter, even though He be present in the latter no less than in the former.
III
Can we attain to an adequate conception of the general purpose and end of creation ? Does the Christian doctrine of God furnish us with any answer to the question which most philosophers have given up as insoluble—why there [ p. 220 ] should be any finite being at all? We have already answered this question in part when we argued that the nature of God is such that it must, being supreme personality, manifest itself in creation. But we may go further ; the created order exists that it may be the sphere in which free moral personalities arise and develop, attaining, through struggle and aspiration, the Kingdom of God, of which the essential character is the communion in unrestricted intercourse of the created persons with the supreme Father of Spirits. From the standpoint of this purpose, the creation in general has a meaning and a justification. It exists for an end which we can regard as good, one which would realize the highest aspirations of which we are capable and crown the partial goods for which we strive when we labour for social justice and brotherhood in the present order. In so far as the creation is the necessary condition of the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God, it has a raison d’étre.
This consideration will take us further than might at first sight appear. Wo are often disturbed by the apparent contrast between the spiritual ideals, in the light of which we could give some account of the purpose of creation, and the actual conditions of the world. On the one hand, we are compelled to regard the world as a sphere in which freedom is achieved; but, on the other hand, nature seems to be the sphere of necessity and determinism. The recent developments of physics appear to have brought with them a weakening of the hold of the idea of the “reign of law” on the scientific mind. It is at least no longer regarded as axiomatic that rigid necessity pervades the whole realm of nature. Mr, Bertrand Russell has told us that the principle of the uniformity of nature is not only incapable of proof but probably untrue, and Professor [ p. 221 ] Eddington has adopted the hypothesis that most, if not all, the “laws” of nature are “statistical averages, which maintain a uniformity for practical purposes on account of the vast number of individual events to which they refer—a suggestion which had been made already by Emile Boutroux.[12] There is no ground, therefore, for asserting that the uniformities which science finds are to be interpreted as meaning that there is a necessity pervading the universe in such a manner as to rule out a priori every possibility of freedom. We are confronted, so far as science is concerned, with regular sequences, but not with anything more. Necessity is the inference which some philosophers have drawn, illegitimately, from the more modest postulates and observations of science. Such uniformity as science properly requires is no contradiction of the insight that the creation is, beyond all else, the sphere in which spiritual beings exercise freedom and may aspire to the higher freedom of the service of God. On the contrary, the presence of uniform and regular working in the environment is a requisite condition for the activity of beings capable of moral and intellectual progress. A merely random world, if such could be conceived, would offer no possibilities to the mind and will. The education of man, which comes from the struggle for mastery over the environment, depends upon the fact that the environment can be, in some degree, understood. And this regularity, which is not the same as necessity, must needs extend to the mental life of man himself, That there are psychological laws is no more a proof of necessity than is the fact that there are physical laws, and it is equally a requisite condition for the reality and development of spiritual freedom. To master his environment is not the [ p. 222 ] whole duty of man nor the sole means of his progress ; even more important is his mastery over himself. It is only because there are uniformities within the psychical sphere that self-control becomes possible. Because habits can be formed and thoughts have their consequences and acts of will tend to repeat themselves, man may begin the more arduous task of mastering and even understanding himself.
But at the conclusion of this chapter, we will remember our ignorance. Though the purpose and even the mode of creation are not wholly dark to us, there is much which we cannot know. Those spiritual values which we sum up under the term the Kingdom of God, are part at least of the purpose of creation ; but we have no sufficient ground for believing that they are the whole purpose. Some Christian theology has been open to the charge of laying exclusive emphasis on human values and ethical ends. Itis difficult, when we contemplate the far-stretching distances of the physical universe, to convince ourselves that none of it has any meaning apart from beings like ourselves, or that the whole is the condition of our development, and exists for no other purpose. The frame seems too large for the picture. The purpose of creation, we may believe, isspiritual, and thatthe world has no meaning apart from personal spirit we must needs hold; but there are doubtless purposes which are in no immediate relation to us, and the stone and the star must have value for God which we cannot understand. In ways beyond our fathoming the Lord rejoices in all His works.
Psalm CXLVIII, 5; Genesis I. 31, ii. 2. ↩︎
Haer. I, x. 3 and 4. ↩︎
On this subject see further my Studies in Christian Philosophy, 2nd edition, pp. 206 ff. ↩︎
Timaeus, 29 D. ↩︎
Republic, 379 C. ↩︎
Cf. his Cogitans Cogitata. ↩︎
Phil. of Leibniz, p. 172. ↩︎
Plotinus, Vol. II, p. 119. ↩︎
B. Bosanquet, The Principle of Individually and Value, pp. 331, ff. ↩︎
Cf. D. Fawcett, Divine Imagining, Chap. III, and ef. also The World as Imagination, by the same author. ↩︎
Confessions, VII, 1. ↩︎
Analysis of Matter by B. Russell; Nature of the Physical World by Eddington ; Natural Law by E. Boutroux. ↩︎