The Conception of God/Chapter 4

by Josiah Royce

THE CITY OF GOD, AND THE TRUE GOD AS ITS HEAD

COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON

A task now falls to me, ladies and gentlemen, and fellow-members of the Union, which for its difficulty I would gladly decline, but which the Union will expect me at least to undertake. As younger students of philosophy, you my associates in the Union have called upon me to be your elder adviser; and on such an occasion as the present, which marks an epoch in your philosophical intercourse, you naturally look for me to put at your service any larger experience than your own that I may chance to possess in these fields, however insufficient it may prove when compared with the wide and deep reaches over which your speakers have carried you to-night.

The impressive close of the argument by the venerated man who has but just now ceased addressing you is such as must awaken a deep response in every human heart not touched with apathy. It is one of those rare outbreaks of accumulated expectation, hope, and longing, into which, at the contemplation of the reason that is apparently struggling to get a footing in the world, human nature pours forth all its commingled doubt and faith. Such is the impassioned force of the argument from analogy, fortified, as it can be in these later days, by the doctrine of evolution. As Dr. Le Conte has so eloquently and so forcibly shown, it does seem clear, through the long and agonising path of evolution, — through struggle, and death, and survival, — that a rational, a moral, a self-active being is on the way toward realised existence; and it is true that, unless there is immortality awaiting it, this long and hard advance through Nature will be balked, and the whole process of evolution turn futile. As surely as there is a God, — as surely as eternal Reason and Justice is really at the heart of things, — it is certain, on this showing, that there is everlasting continuance for the being, whatever it may be, that forms the goal toward which evolution is pressing. If in very deed and truth there is a God, then that he “shall be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with him, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness” is indeed incredible, — nay, it is impossible. And I doubt not that your undulled human hearts are so roused by the pathos-laden question with which Dr. Le Conte closed his reasonings — a question almost appalling in its outcry to Justice and to Pity — that it will require all your poise of philosophic will to bring yourselves back into the region of collected thought once more, and look the great problem of to-night steadily in the face again, with what Professor Royce has so fitly named “the calmer piety and gentleness of the serious reason.”

For, in sober truth, the central awe of all such faith-compelling questions and analogies is just this: that we see the whole matter hangs on the slender thread of the query whether there is indeed a God. If there is, then immortality — yes, the immortality of each particular soul — is certain, by God’s own immutable nature; and evolution, though it cannot ascertain it, nevertheless gives premonition of it then, and supports the real proof. But — what if there is not? The goal of evolution, as really verifiable by observation, is unfortunately not the preservation and completion of any single life, but only of a kind, — only of a human family, — ever made up, I beg you will notice, of new and wholly different members; a family, moreover, whose abode is only on this globe, and on this side of the grave, with no indication whatever that this its home will or can last forever; nay, with all the observed indications steadily against this, and all the metaphysical necessities of physical existence declaring it impossible.

And so we are brought back, perhaps somewhat sternly, to the great questions of our meeting. We have had, from men of such eminence as to command serious attention everywhere, two high efforts to set forth the conception of God and the proofs of his existence; and we have listened to a keen criticism of the first of them by the young but highly qualified pupil of all three of us, — a criticism fascinating by its speculative and almost dreamy subtlety. Now let us gather our calmness and our wits together as best we may, and, during the short period that is left to us, try to discover what abiding store we ought to set by these endeavours. What I say must be, I fear, all too brief — too brief, that is, to do these arguments the justice that their intricacy, their remoteness, and the long and deep studies which have gone to their making, would in reason demand. But I will set before you, as clearly as I can, the main points on which I think the evening’s discussion turns, adding such comments on the conceptions and arguments as my own way of thinking suggests.

I

THE CRITERION OF REALITY IN A CONCEPTION

I am glad I can tell you, first of all, that there is a profound agreement among all the previous speakers in the important matter of the foundation on which all of this evening’s reasonings rest; yes, I am confident I may go farther, and say that we are all agreed upon this, and, further, as to the entire foundation of philosophy itself. I agree with all three of the previous speakers in the great tenet that evidently underlies their whole way of thinking. Our common philosophy is Idealism — that explanation of the world which maintains that the only thing absolutely real is mind; that all material and all temporal existences take their being from mind, from consciousness that thinks and experiences; that out of consciousness they all issue, to consciousness are presented, and that presence to consciousness constitutes their entire reality and entire existence. But this great foundation-theme may be uttered in very various ways; and your other speakers, while they go on in agreement with each other very far, at length diverge; and they diverge at a very early point from the way of interpreting idealistic philosophy that I have myself learned to use.

And, if I am not unaccountably mistaken, you have already had presented here to-night two considerably varying systems of Idealism, albeit they still go on together far above the foundations common to all idealistic philosophy. I say two; for, unless I mistake Professor Mezes, his view accords so nearly with that of Professor Royce as to permit us to neglect the differences and count the pair as one, setting it in contrast to the system of Dr. Le Conte. I speak here with hesitancy, however, and only with such positive evidences as our evening’s work has afforded; and I accordingly leave room for the supposition that Professor Mezes covers in his thinking a further variety of Monistic Idealism, though holding with Professor Royce to Monism. For the Professor has exercised such a fine reserve as to speak without much exposure of what his own philosophy is; he has confined himself very rigorously to a criticism of Professor Royce’s apparatus of argument, and has said next to nothing that tells what is his own conception of the Absolute Reality. Still, when he freely admits that Professor Royce’s argument inevitably proves an Ultimate Reality, and employs as an engine of criticism the premise that the inner life of our fellow-men — their aggregate of inner experiences, their feelings, thoughts, puzzles, aspirations; in short, their successive or simultaneous states of mind — “exhausts and fathoms what we mean by our fellow-being,” we naturally put this and that together, and conclude that he, too, holds the central doctrine of his latest teacher, — the doctrine that all existence is summed and resumed into the enfolding consciousness of one single Inclusive Self; that human selves, and other selves, if others there be, are not selves in at all the same sense that the Inclusive Self is, nor in the meaning that moral common-sense attaches to the word. They are mutually exclusive groups of empirical feelings — merely summaries, more or less partial and fragmentary, of separate items of experience, at best only partially organised. It is He that gives vital unity and real life to all. He alone that embraces all, penetrates and pervades all, and is genuinely organic; He alone is integral and one. Yet He is just as unquestionably all and many; his unity is not in the least excludent, not in the least repellent, but, on the contrary, is infinitely inclusive, absolutely all-embracing. Literally, “His tender mercies are over all his works”; and whatever is at all, is his work, his act, directly. His being encompasses alike perfection and imperfection, evil and good, joy and anguish, the just and the unjust. His is the Harmony of discords actually present, but also actually dissolved; the Peace of conflicts at once raging and stilled; the Love that bears in the bosom of its utterly infinite benignity even malice itself, and atones for it with infinite Pity and by infinite Benevolence; his, finally, is the Eternal Penitence that repents of his sin in its very act, — nay, in its very germination, — and provides the Expiation as the very condition on which alone his offence is possible and actual. Such is the conception of Absolute Reality that has been set forth to us this evening with such resources of subtlety, of acuteness, of comprehensiveness, of possessions in weighty material, of almost boundlessly flexible expression; and we are asked to receive it as the philosophic account, the only account genuine and authentic, of the conception of God. God, we are told, is that one and sole Absolute Experience, the utter union of Absolute Thought and Absolute Perception, of ideal and fact, in which all relative and partial experiences are directly taken up and included, though indeed reduced and dissolved, and to be some part of which is all that existence or reality means, or can mean, for anything else that claims to be, whether it be called material or mental. And that the God thus conceived is the only authentic God of philosophy is declared on the ground — or, rather, on the claim — that upon this conception alone can God be proved real. The conception — so our chief speaker’s implication runs — may indeed be far different from what under an experience less organised than the philosophic, less brought to coherence, we had fancied the name “God” to mean; but what that name does mean must be exactly this, no more and no less: That which rigorous thought, penetrating to its inevitable and final implications, can and does make out to be not merely Idea but Reality. Our master-question about it, Professor Royce would say, must not be whether we like it, nor whether it agrees with something we had supposed, but whether it is demonstrably true, and alone so demonstrable.

With this last statement every mind sufficiently disciplined in philosophy to appreciate its true nature will of course agree. The philosophical conception of anything is the conception of it that thought attains when it takes utter counsel of its own utmost deep. For philosophy, accordingly, utter ideality and utter reality are reciprocal conceptions; complete and final agreement with thought, as thought sees itself whole, is the only test of reality, and reciprocally, that alone is sanely and soundly ideal which can be proved, — that is, to the total insight turns real. But in another and still more important reference, the definitive question is still to come; in fact, arises directly out of that great first question about every conception. That first, controlling question undoubtedly is: Can we prove the conception real, and thus alone show it is the right conception? But the all-important question beyond will be: Are we now at length certain that we take the ideal view of the conception — that the light in which we see it is indeed the light of the whole, the final unit-vision under which alone our ideal can turn real? Not until we are able to aver securely that this is so, have we a right to assert the conception as philosophic, and the only philosophic conception. Above all must they who have come to the insight that philosophy means Idealism — that mind is the measure of all things, and complete ideality the only sure sign of reality — hold themselves rigorously to this criterion.

II
THE CRITERION CONDEMNS THE MONISTIC CONCEPTION OF GOD

And, now, what I have to say about the conception of God that we have had so imposingly set forth this evening, — a conception in which all the previous speakers, varying as they do, seem largely to agree, — what I have to say, at a stroke, is this: It does not seem to me to meet this criterion. As professed idealists, its advocates have come short of their calling. The doctrine is not idealistic enough. No doubt it has long gone by the name of Absolute Idealism, the name conferred upon it by Hegel, the weighty and justly celebrated thinker who first gave it a well-organised exposition. But I venture to contest the propriety of the name, and maintain, rather, that an Idealism of this character is not Absolute Idealism at all; that its exact fault is, not waiting for thought to take the fruitful roundness of its entire Ideal before declaring its equivalence to the Real.

In short, greatly as I admire all that has been said here to-night, gladly and gratefully as I recognise the genuinely philosophic temper and the authentic philosophic place it all most certainly has, I am still moved to say that my honoured colleagues, in this their common underlying conception, have to my mind all “missed the mark and come short of the glory of God.” They have not seized nor expressed the complete Ideal of the Reason. I agree with them that this Ideal is the sole measure and the certain sign of what reality is; I agree with Professor Royce, and with Hegel before him, that reality, in its turn, must be the test of the genuine Ideal, — that “whatever is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real.” I agree that the Ideal is ipso facto the Real; but I insist that the vital question is: Have we stated the Ideal? I insist, further, that the conception of God expounded with such lucid fulness by Professor Royce, and in various implications accepted by Professor Mezes and Dr. Le Conte, in its fundamental aspect at least, — that of the immanence of God in the world, — I insist that this falls fatally short of our rational Ideal, and is therefore, happily, only so far real as its limitations permit it to be; for, by every idealist of course, some truth, some reality, must be accorded to all genuine thought, — it is all true, all real, as far as it goes. But the great concern is, just how far such a thought as has been offered us this evening does go on the lofty way to the Ideal; just what relative truth, what measure of partial reality, we shall assign it. And so I may restate my comment on this conception of God by saying that, while on the one hand I see it come as far short of God’s verity and God’s existence as earth comes short of heaven, as the creation comes short of the Creator, nevertheless, on the other hand, when expressed as Professor Royce expresses it, it does attain to the real nature of the real creation, and, when expressed as Dr. Le Conte would express it, to the real nature of the phenomenal aspect in the real creation, besides.

In other words, the conception is a philosophical and real account of the nature of an isolated human being, or created spirit, the numerical unit in the created universe, viewed as such a spirit appears in what has well been called its natural aspect; viewed, that is, as the organising subject of a natural-scientific experience, marked by fragmentariness that is forever being tentatively overcome and enwholed, — if I may coin a word to match the excellent German one ergänzt. The supernatural, that is to say, the completely rational aspect of this being is left out of the conception we are discussing, — the aspect under which it is seen as the subject and co-operating cause of a moral i.e. completely rational or metaphysical experience. In this last context, the word “experience” has suddenly changed its meaning in kind,^[1] and the human consciousness is seen to have, in its total unity, the all-encompassing form of a Conscience, — that Complete Reason, of a truly infinite sphere, in which the primal self-consciousness of the creature actively posits the Ideal which is its real world of being. In this complete reason, or Conscience, the single spirit sees itself as indeed a person — a self-active member of a manifold system of persons, all alike self-active in the inclusive unit of their being; all independent centres of origination, so far as efficient causation is concerned; all moving from “within,” i.e. each from its own thought, and harmonised in a society of accordant free-agents, not by any efficient causation, but by the operation of what has been called, since Aristotle, final causation—the attraction of an Ideal Vision, the vision of that City of God which they constitute, and in which, reciprocally, they have their being; a vision immortalised by Dante as the Vision Beatific, by which no one is driven, but by which, to borrow the meaning of Goethe’s famous line, the Eternal, womanlike, draws us onward,—

“Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.”

Now, it is greatly worth your notice, that this ideal is not merely the passing vision or phrased fancy of some poet, nor of some group of human beings in an accidental mood of rapt imagination. On the contrary, it is a great and solid matter of fact, of no less compass of reality than to deserve and require the name of historic. It constitutes the key-conception of historical progress, and is the very life of that highest stage of this which we designate and praise by the name of Western Civilisation. It is at the mental summons of this ideal, that the West as a stadium in historic progress emerges from the hoary and impassive East; and the entire history of the West as divergent from the oriental spirit, as the scene of energetic human improvement, the scene of the victory of man over Nature and over his merely natural self, has its controlling and explanatory motive in this ideal alone. It is the very life-blood of that more vigorous moral order which is the manifest distinction of the West from the Orient. Personal responsibility and its correlate of free reality, or real freedom, are the whole foundation on which our enlightened civilisation stands; and the voice of aspiring and successful man, as he lives and acts in Europe and in America, speaks ever more and more plainly the two magic words of enthusiasm and of stability — Duty and Rights. But these are really the signals of his citizenship in the ideal City of God. By them he proclaims: We are many, though indeed one; there is one nature, in manifold persons; personality alone is the measure, the sufficing establishment, of reality; unconditional reality alone is sufficient to the being of persons; for that alone is sufficient to a Moral Order, since a moral order is possible for none but beings who are mutually responsible, and no beings can be responsible but those who originate their own acts. The entire political history of the West is accordingly a perpetual progress of struggle toward a system of law establishing liberty, and of liberty habilitated and filled with stable contents by law. The emergence, too, of western religion from oriental is similarly marked by the rise of this consciousness of individual and unconditional reality; we hear its presaging voice in that Hebrew prophet who declares: “Ye have said, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge; but I say unto you, The soul that sinneth, it shall die.” And the whole history of western theology, broken and incomplete and apparently tragic as it looks in the stage whither it has now at length come, is but the sincere and devout response of the human spirit to that inward voice of this ideal, which announces the supremacy of reason and declares the unconditional reality and majesty of human nature as possessing it. Remove this supreme vision of this Republic of God, and western civilisation — nay, the whole of human history, which but culminates in it, is without intelligibility, having neither explanatory source nor goal. The central and real meaning of the Christian Religion, in which the self-consciousness of the West finds its true expression, and which thus far has found no home except in the West, lies exactly in the faith that the Creator and the creature are reciprocally and equally real, not identical; that there is Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of men; that God recognises rights in the creature and acknowledges duties toward him; and that men are accordingly both unreservedly and also indestructibly real, — both free and immortal. In that religion alone, I venture to assert, is the union of this triad of faiths to be found — in God, in freedom, in immortality — faiths that, while three, are inseparably one, since neither can be stated except in terms of the other two.

III

THE MONISTIC CONCEPTION OF GOD NOT THE THEISM OF THE WEST, BUT THE PANTHEISM OF THE ORIENT

We are now led to notice Professor Royce’s interesting statement, marked by such candour, at the close of his address. He traces briefly the philosophical and theological genealogy of his view, and expresses his belief that this view is at heart the thought really intended by the faith of the fathers, and in due time formulated in the conception of God set forth by that greatest and most accredited doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas. This raises a nice question of exegesis, into which we cannot go with any fulness; but I will say, in passing, that if the statement is correct it only shows how far men’s efforts to analyse and to formulate their highest and deepest practical insights fall short of the facts. It is too true that much of the theology which professes and aims to be Christian is in reality only the clothing or wrapping of Christianity in the prechristian garments that have descended to the West as heirlooms from the East, or to the converted West as inheritances from its paganism. And we ought never to forget, therefore, that the real test of the faith of Christians is the implications in their religious conduct, and not at all their attempts, most likely unsuccessful, or at least unhappy, to analyse those implications and set them formally forth. In these attempts, transmitted beliefs quite below the Christian level, accepted and continued habits of ritual, and modes of feeling, that are nothing but survivals from the faiths which the new vision in Christ would forever put away, will inevitably play a large part. They have in fact played too large a part; a part so large that the thought which Jesus imparted to mankind, and which has survived and flourished in spite of them, has been almost buried from view in the wrappages compacted out of these prechristian materials, — materials for the most part drawn from the Orient, whence they came from the religions and philosophies the very remotest from the Glad Tidings proclaimed by Christ. The spirit of all these was pantheistic, in the really unchristian sense of that word: they were all preoccupied with the sovereign majesty of the Almighty, the mystery of the Impenetrable Source, and knew nothing of the truly infinite Graciousness or everlasting Love. Their monotonous theme was the ineffable greatness of the Supreme Being and the utter littleness of man. Their tradition lay like a pall upon the human spirit, — nay, it lies upon it to this day, — and it smothers now, as it smothered then, the voice that answers there to the call of Jesus: Son of Man, thou art the son of God. Rouse, heart! put on the garments of thy majesty, and realise thy equal, thy free, thy immortal membership in the Eternal Order! Under the suffocating burden of the old things that should have passed away, the Christian consciousness forgets, at least in part, that all things are become new, and that man is risen from the dead.

It is not enough, then, for vindicating as Christian the conception of God offered us to-night, to show, for instance, that St. Thomas held it, if so be he did. In my own opinion, which you must take for what you will, he quite escapes its objectionable traits in some regards, and, were he here to explain himself, would disclaim that interpretation of the Divine immanence in the world, and the reciprocal immanence of the world in God, which is characteristic of both the philosophies expounded here this evening. At the same time, his resting his own conception of God on the foundations of Aristotle, in the form which the great Greek succeeded in giving them, — a form which comes so short of Aristotle’s greatest philosophical hints, — is occasion enough for thinkers like Hegel and our chief speaker to see a great resemblance between St. Thomas’s view and theirs, and to overlook the contradiction between these aspects of his doctrine and those in which he reflects the Christian aperçu of genuine creation, and the consequent distinctness of the world from God. This ought to carry as a corollary the unqualified freedom of men in the City of God; and if St. Thomas fails to draw that corollary, the explanation must be sought in his prepossession by the older and prechristian tradition. Aristotle, after justifiable criticism of Plato’s course with the world of Ideas, unquestionably struck into a new path more thoroughly idealistic. Had he explored this far enough, and with close enough scrutiny, it must have led him beyond Pantheistic Idealism. But his doctrine that the criterion of deity is Omniscience, and that creation is simply the divine Still Vision — θεωρία — had its discussion arrested too early to admit of that achievement. The descent of the doctrine we have heard to-night is correctly traced from Aristotle’s; and the doctrine does not get essentially beyond his, nor attain any distinction between the Creator and the creation sufficient to make out creation as creation at all. Unless creators are created, nothing is really created.

I venture, you see, to dissent from Professor Royce when he claims that the conception of God — if God we may name it — afforded by his Monistic Idealism is distinctly theistic instead of pantheistic. Unquestionably, “it is not the conception of any Unconscious Reality, into which finite beings are absorbed; nor of a Universal Substance, in whose law our ethical independence is lost; nor of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore.” But we do not escape Pantheism, and attain to Theism, by the easy course of excluding the Unconscious, or the sole Substance, or an inscrutable Mystery, from the seat of the Absolute. We must go farther, and attain to the distinct reality, the full otherhood, of the creation; so that there shall be no confusion of the creature with the Creator, nor any interfusion of the Creator with the creature. Above all, we must attain to the moral reality of the creature, which means his self-determining freedom not merely with reference to the world of sense, but also with reference to the Creator, and must therefore include his imperishable existence. The conception set forth to-night is certainly not that of an Unconscious; it is certainly not that of a mere Substance, to which our independence is subjected by sheer physical law; and it is certainly not a Mystery, in the sense of having a nature made up of traits wholly strange to our human cognition. For its essence is intelligence, and that omniscient; and hence its activity is not by transmission in space; and, finally, consciousness — or, as Professor Royce apparently would prefer to say, experience — is the very thing we are most experienced in, and so best acquainted with. But if the Infinite Self includes us all, and all our experiences, — sensations and sins, as well as the rest, — in the unity of one life, and includes us and them directly; if there is but one and the same final Self for us each and all; then, with a literalness indeed appalling, He is we, and we are He; nay, He is I, and I am He. And I think it will appear later, from the nature of the argument by which the Absolute Reality as Absolute Experience is reached, that the exact and direct way of stating the case is baldly: I am He. Now, if we read the conception in the first way, what becomes of our ethical independence? — what, of our personal reality, our righteous i.e. reasonable responsibility — responsibility to which we ought to be held? Is not He the sole real agent? Are we anything but the steadfast and changeless modes of his eternal thinking and perceiving? Or, if we read the conception in the second way, what becomes of Him? Then, surely, He is but another name for me; or, for any one of you, if you will. And how can there be talk of a Moral Order, since there is but a single mind in the case? — we cannot legitimately call that mind a person. This vacancy of moral spirit in the Absolute Experience when read off from the end of the particular self, is what Professor Mezes pertinently strikes at in the first of his two points of criticism. Judging by experience alone, — the only point of view allotted by Professor Royce to the particular self, — judging merely by that, even when the experience is not direct and naïve but comparatively organised, there is no manifold of selves; the finite self and the Infinite Self are but two names at the opposite poles of one lonely reality, which from its isolation is without possible moral significance. This is doubtless a form of Idealism, for it states the Sole Reality in terms of a case of self-consciousness. When read off in the second way, it has been known in the history of philosophy as Solipsism.^[2] To read it so is a harsh reductio, and rather unfair, as it can equally well be read in the other way. But that other way is the only way of escape from what our moral common-sense pronounces an intolerable absurdity. It bears the more dignified name of Monistic Idealism, or Idealistic Monism. If it is to be called a conception of God at all, it is the conception that presents God as All and in all. If the syllables “theism” can be affixed to it at all, they can only be so as part of the correcter name Pantheism. And so it seems to me that we should by no means assent when Professor Royce is disposed to insist that every ethical predicate which the highest religious faith of the past has attributed to God is capable of exact interpretation in terms of his view. Where is the attribute of Grace, the source of that Life Eternal which alone, according to the Fourth Gospel, knows God as the true God, and which is freedom and immortality?

IV

WORTH OF MONISTIC IDEALISM AS AGAINST AGNOSTICISM: ITS FAILURE AS A RELIGIOUS METAPHYSIC

But, after all, what we have now for some minutes been saying amounts only to a contrast between different conceptions, and, at last, to a mere dispute over names. For philosophy, nothing is settled by settling any number of such things. The real question is, not whether we like or dislike the view before us; not whether it is Christian, or Thomistic, or Aristotelian; but, simply, Is it true? Professor Royce or Hegel might well turn on us and ask: “Is not ‘God’ a name for the Ultimate Reality; and is it not demonstrable that the conception in question is the Ultimate Reality? — has it not been so demonstrated here and to-night? If this is the conception of the Absolute; if the Absolute must be the Omniscient, or, in other words, the Absolute Experience, — has not this ideal of an Absolute Experience demonstrated itself to be real, by the clear showing that the supposition of its unreality, if affirmed real, commits us to its reality? — in short, that the real supposition of its unreality is a self-contradiction, and therefore impossible to be made?”

To this, I will venture to say, as the first step in a reply: The gist of the proof is the proposition, that a supposition which turns out to be impossible, or, in other words, which cannot really be made, — and hence never is really made, — affords no footing for a dispute; in such case, the opposite supposition is the only one tenable; we are in presence of a thought which our mind thinks in only one way, so that it cannot, and in reality does not, have any alternative or opposed thought at all. Such a thought is sometimes called “necessary”; and then the question will inevitably arise: Is the necessity objective, or is it merely subjective? — is such a thought the infallible witness of how reality has to be, or merely the unimpeachable witness of how the thinker has to think? — is it the sign of real power and genuine knowledge, or only of limitation and impenetrable ignorance? Here, the agnostic says it is the latter; the idealist, it is the former; and then the idealist undertakes to show, once more, that the supposition of thought being really limited and merely subjective is a flat self-contradiction, a proposition inevitably withdrawn in the very act of putting it. Then, to clinch the case finally, if his Idealism is only of the type here emerging, he makes haste to add: The fact is, you see, the thinker, to think at all, unavoidably asserts his thinking to be the exhaustive and all-embracing Reality, the Unconditioned that founds all conditions and imparts to things conditioned whatever reality they have, the Absolute in and through which things relative are really relative and relatively real, the immutable IS that is implied in every if. In short, reality turns out to be, exactly, the thinker plus presentation to the thinker; but then, and let us not forget it, says this species of idealist, the thinker is reciprocally in immutable relation to this presentation, this detail, this fragmentary serial experience, these contents of sense. Thus we come to what Hegel called the Absolute Idea, as the absolute identity of Subject and Object, and the inseparable synthesis of the single Omniscient Mind, and its system of ideas, with its multiplicity of fragmentary i.e. sensible objects. And so the inevitable and everlasting truth is, not Agnosticism, but Absolute Idealism — the ism of the Absolute Idea; not the Unknowable Power, but the Self-knowing Mind who is at once One and All, the One Creator inclusive of the manifold creation.

And now let me continue such reply to this as I would make, by saying, next, how altogether acute and sound I think it is as a supplement to that phase of merely subjective Idealism which now goes by the name of Agnosticism — a supplement exposing the misnomer in virtue of which such agnostic Idealism calls the Ultimate Reality the Unknowable, when yet it has no footing upon which to affirm the reality of the Inscrutable Power except the self-asserted authority of thought, — the “inconceivability of the opposite,” as Mr. Spencer calls it, — by which he undoubtedly means, as we all see after his famous discussion of this Axiom with Mr. Mill, the unthinkableness of the opposite. The real meaning of the situation is, — as I believe Professor Royce to have shown unanswerably, and more pointedly than anybody else has shown it, — that the thinker is just unavoidably affirming his own all-conditioning reality as critic, as judge, as organiser, and as appraiser of values, in and over the field of his possible experience; the thinking self is seen to be the very condition of the possibility of even a fragmentary and seemingly incoherent or isolated experience, and the all-coherent unity of its inevitable reality passes ceaseless sentence on the mere phenomenon, declares the isolation and fragmentariness of this to be only apparent, supplants the incoherence of its immediate aspect by coherence that marches ever wider and higher, and so places the phenomenon in a real system that takes it out of the category of illusion by giving it a continual and endlessly ascending approximation to unqualified reality. Thus the Ultimate Reality actually posited and possibly positable by this procedure is, indeed, the Unconditioned Conditioner with reference to a possible experience, but is unwittingly miscalled when called the Unknowable, for it is in precise fact just the Self-knowing Knower, — the comprehensive and active Supreme Judgment in whose light alone the things of experience are as they are; since they are, as they are, only as they are presented at its bar and there get ever more and more known.

But now I ask you to notice, next, how this argument, unanswerable as it is for displacing the phantom of the Unknowable and discovering the Idealism concealed in the philosophy that calls itself Agnosticism, nevertheless leaves us unrescued from an Idealism still merely subjective, though subjective in another and a somewhat higher sense. I mean, that the argument, taken strictly in itself, supplies no reason for reading off the resulting Reality from the point of view of its infinite inclusiveness, its supposed universal Publicity, rather than from that of its finite exclusiveness, its undeniable particular Privacy. Here I agree, as I have already once indicated, with the brunt of the first criticism made by Professor Mezes, and with his ground for the criticism: the argument of Professor Royce is so cast and based that no provision is made for a public of thinkers. In terms of this form of Idealism, no manifold of selves is provided for or can be provided for; and this I would conclude, not only as Professor Mezes does, from the limited scope assigned by Monistic Idealism to the illative principle of Causality, but also from the incompatibility of Self-Completeness, as Professor Royce by his argument has to conceive of this, with the Goodness that he would vindicate for his Absolute. In short, I agree with Professor Mezes again, in his second criticism, — that the Self-Completeness reached by this argument cannot amount to Goodness; though I may say, in passing, that I would not argue this on that fascinating but dreamy ground of the illusion declared inherent in time, the validity of which I very much doubt, but on the ground, once more, that such Self-Completeness fails to provide for any manifold of selves either phenomenal or noumenal, and that the very meaning of Goodness, if Goodness is moral, depends on the reality of such a public of selves. While I should dissent, too, from Professor Mezes in his implication that absolute Goodness must have the trait of progressive improvement, I hold that its very meaning is lost unless there is a society of selves, to every one of whom Goodness, to be Divine, must allot an unconditional reality and maintain it with all the resources of infinite wisdom. I repeat: My point against Professor Royce’s argument, and against the whole post-Kantian method of construing Idealism, summed up by Hegel and supplied by him with organising logic, is this: By the argument, — as by many another form of stating Hegel’s view, — reading off its result as Idealistic Monism (or Cosmic Theism, if that name be preferred) rather than as Solipsism, is left without logical justification. The preference for the more imposing reading, it seems to me, rests on no principle that the argument can furnish, but on an instinctive response to the warnings of moral common-sense. No matter what show of logic may drive us into the corner, our instinctive moral sense prohibits us from entertaining the theorem that the single self who conducts the argument, albeit he is its cause, its designer, its engineer, and its authority, is the sole and absolute Reality, — the only being in existence having such compass, such sovereign judgment, such self-determining causality. By spontaneous moral sense we doubtless believe, indeed, that we are each entirely real, and a seat of inalienable rights; but this feeling of rights, though it be no more than a resentment at invasion, points directly to our belief that there are other beings as unreservedly real as we, with rights alike inalienable, who lay us under duty. Still, this uncomprehended instinct, ethical though it be, is not philosophy. Until we shall have learned how to give it in some way the authority of rational insight, we have no right to its effects when we are proceeding as thinkers; so far as we merely accept them, we do not think, we only feel.

Moved by this feeling, I say, we evade reading the result of this strange but striking dialectic as Solipsism, and, reading it from the reverse direction, we are fain to call it Cosmic Theism, under the silent assumption that its real contents are thus enlarged so that its embrace enfolds a universe of minds, or persons. And yet these so-called persons are rightly designated as only finite selves, mutually relative and phenomenal merely, since the reality of the unifying Organic Experience, as reached by the argument, requires that it shall be strictly one and indivisible, and that the supposed manifold of finite selves shall none of them have any real and changeless Self but this. One single Infinite Self, the identical and sole active centre of all these quasi-selves, which are severally made up of specific groups of experiences more or less fragmentary, as the case may be, none of them with any inner organic unity of its own,—this is the theory; and even for this hollow shell of a personal and moral order we have no logical warrant, but have silently carried it in, over our argument, on the hint of moral sense that of course there are manifold centres—or, at any rate, manifold groups—of experience besides our own.

You will not, I hope, mistake my point. Like Professor Mezes, I am by no means saying that Professor Royce may not have, somewhere in the rich and crowded arsenal of his thinking, some other means of dealing with this question of the moral contents of the Absolute than the means presented in his address and his books. I am only saying that, so far as I can see, the required means is not provided anywhere in the books or the address. Especially is it not furnished in the curiously impressive argument which he has now restated so lucidly for us, and which makes, one may say, the very life of the philosophy that he sets forth in print.

In this last assertion, I reach the gravamen of all I have to say, in the way of criticism, about that very interesting and exceedingly hitting piece of dialectic. So I feel that I am in duty bound to support the assertion by an analysis of the argument as exact and close as I am able to make.

 

V

PRECISE ANALYSIS OF PROFESSOR ROYCE'S ARGUMENT:
ITS MYSTIC AND ANTI-ETHICAL TENDENCY

Accordingly, let us look for a moment at the exact structure of that argument, and determine, if we can, precisely what it does make out. It may be put in two different ways, each brief and telling:

(1) Our human ignorance, once confessed to be real, brings with it the reality of an Absolute Wisdom, since nothing less than that can possibly declare the ignorance real; if the ignorance is real, then Omniscience is real.

(2) Our human knowledge, that indirect and organised experience which constitutes science, once admitted to be real, brings with it the reality of an Absolute Experience, since nothing less than that can possibly give sentence that one experience when compared with another is really fallacious, and this is exactly what science does; if the “verdict of science” is real, then an Absolute Experience is real.

Now, the question that unavoidably arises, on exactly considering these two unusual reasonings, is this: Whose omniscience is it that judges the ignorance to be real? — whose absolute experience pronounces the less organised experience to be really fallacious? Well, — whosesoever it may be, it is certainly acting in and through my judgment, if I am the thinker of that argument; and in every case it is I who pronounce sentence on myself as really ignorant, or on my limited experience as fallacious. Yes, — and it is I who am the authority, and the only direct authority, for the connexion put between the reality of the ignorance or of the fallacious experience on the one hand and the reality of the implicated omniscience on the other. We can perhaps see the case more clearly as it is, if we notice that the argument is cast in the form of a conditional syllogism, and runs in this wise: If my ignorance is real, then Omniscience is real: but my ignorance assuredly is real; and, therefore, so also is Omniscience. Now we ask: Who is the authority for the truth of the hypothetical major premise, and who is the authority for the truth of the categorical minor? Who conjoins, in that clutch of adamant, the reality of the ignorance with the reality of the omniscience? And whose omniscience makes the assertion valid that my ignorance is real? Is it not plain that I, who am convincing myself by that syllogism, am the sole authority for both the premises? Though there were a myriad other omnisciences, they were of no avail to me, in the lone inward struggle to my own conviction through that argumentative form, unless they interpenetrated my judgment, and so became literally mine; or, if you prefer, unless my judgment vanished upward and was annulled into that Infinite Judgment. In using either premise as proof of the conclusion, and a fortiori in using both, I implicate myself in actual omniscience; I am verily guilty of that effrontery, if effrontery it really be. So must the great argument of this evening be read, it seems to me, or else it must mean nothing. In short, it is the introversive act of a reasoning being, discovering the real infinity that lies implicit in his seeming finitude. It is just I in my counter aspect — my reverse instead of my obverse, my other-side of infinite judicialness — coming forward to execute my proper act of infallible certainty. In such an “affectation of omniscience,” unquestionably, does any and every least assumption of certainty in a judgment involve the thinker who makes it. This, to my mind, is the exact and whole meaning of Professor Royce’s proof, unless we grant him the gratuitous assumption of an indefinite multitude of simultaneous or successive thinkers; and this, surely, we must not do when we are professing the philosophical temper of “proving all things.”

There are those, no doubt, who would see in the phase that the argument is now made to assume, only a fine occasion for very knowing smiles. Chief among such, of course, are the agnostics in whose especial behoof the argument was contrived out of their own chosen materials, with the benign intent of disciplining them out of their scepticism, through chastening supplied by exposed self-contradiction. They are likely now saying to themselves: “The argument has proved a little too much; it reinforces our point very happily: he who would not cut the absurd figure of claiming omniscience must take the lowly rôle of our humble philosophy — the rôle of confessed ignorance and incurable uncertainty.” But such is not the way in which I would read the lesson. Indeed, I hear in fancy, even now, the author of this singular argument saying to these jubilant doubters: “Well, — confessed ignorance, and uncertainty really incurable it is, is it? Here’s at you again, then! And there you go round in the resistless dialectical whirligig once more! And so will your cheerfully obdurate negative send you whirling on perpetually!” And in that saying I should quite agree, and I am sure that you would, also. It is not to the force or validity of the argument that I object, but to the misinterpretation of its scope. It is a clinching dialectical thumbscrew for the torture of agnostics; yes, with reference to them and their unavoidable stadium of thinking, it is even a step of value in the struggle of the soul toward a conviction of its really infinite powers and prospects; but I cannot see in it any full proof of the real being of God. Strictly construed, it is, as I have just endeavoured to show, simply the vindication of that active sovereign judgment which is the light of every mind, which organises even the most elementary perceptions, and which goes on in its ceaseless critical work of reorganisation after reorganisation, building all the successive stages of science, and finally mastering those ultimate implications of science that constitute the insights of philosophy. If I call that active all-illumining judgment, — which is indeed my life and my light, and which shines, and will shine, unto my perfect day, and is for me in all the emergencies of experience an ever-present and practicable omniscience, or fountain of unfailing certainty, — if I call that God, then assuredly I am employing the mood of the mystic; nay, I am taking literally what he took only mystically; I am translating into the cold forms of logic, where it becomes meaningless, what his religious poesy and enthusiasm made a practical medium of exalted religious feeling, though philosophically it was nought. This light within may indeed prove to be the witness of God in my being, but it is not God himself.

It is often said of the mystics, whether within Christendom or in Egypt or in the elder Orient which was and still remains their proper home, that they have the high religious merit of bringing God near to us, — as if they met the saying of St. Paul: Though He be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being. But nearness may become too near. When it is made to mean absolute identity, then all the worth of true nearness is gone, — the openness of access, the freedom of converse, the joy of true reciprocity. These precious things all draw their meaning from the distinct reality of ourselves and Him who is really other than we. When mysticism plays in high poesy on the theme of the Divine Nearness, in the mood that “sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind,” it quickens religious emotion, but affords no genuine illumination in theology. When we turn that mood into literal philosophy, and cause our centre of selfhood to vanish into God’s, or God’s to vanish into ours, we lose the tone of religion that is true and wholesome. For true religion is built only on the firm foundations of duty and responsibility; and these, again, rest only on the footing of freedom. Hence the passing remark of Dr. Le Conte on the nature of religion, though indeed beautiful and noble, is yet, I think, neither noble enough nor beautiful enough. It certainly ascends beyond the famous saying by Matthew Arnold, of which as a ladder it makes happy use, — that “religion is morality touched with emotion”; for Dr. Le Conte rightly reminds us that the emotion which is religious must not merely touch and kindle but must vivify, and must be not simply emotion but noble emotion. But it seems to me that his saying, like Arnold’s, still leaves the true relations inverted. Yes, as much as inverted; because, in truth, religion is not morality touched and vivified by noble emotion, but, rather, religion is emotion touched by morality, and at that wondrous touch not merely ennobled but actually raised from the dead — uplifted from the grave of sense into the life eternal of reason. For life eternal is life germinating in that true and only Inclusive Reason, the supreme consciousness of the reality of the City of God, — the Ideal that seats the central reality of each human being in an eternal circle of Persons, and establishes each as a free citizen in the all-founding, all-governing Realm of Spirits. So is it that religion can only draw its breath in the quickening air of moral freedom, and our great poet’s word comes strictly true, —

“So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.”

And thus I am led to repeat, that the main argument of this evening, striking as it is, does not establish any Reality sufficingly religious, — does not establish the being of God. This will continue true of it, for the reasons just pointed out, even if we grant that the Infinite Self is a unity inclusive of an indefinite multitude of quasi-selves. Accordingly, for the sake of argument, this grant shall be made during the rest of the discussion.

VI
CRITICISM OF THE SYSTEM OF PROFESSOR LE CONTE

And now, in view of the phase last assumed by our question, we naturally turn to the other system of Idealism offered us — that of Dr. Le Conte; for its very object seems to be, to provide for the desired world of freedom. It certainly accepts one aspect of the theory from which we have just parted — the immanence of God in Nature; interpreted, too, pretty much in the way that Professor Royce and other Hegelians interpret it. But, this accepted. Dr. Le Conte’s view is apparently an attempt to supplement it by such a use of the theory of evolution as shall establish a conception of the Ultimate Reality which will thoroughly answer to the Vision Beatific — the conception of a World of Spirits, all immortal, and all genuinely real because themselves centres of origination and thus really free; not that they now are so, in the present order of Nature where we see them, but that the evolutional account of their origin clearly indicates that they will become so. Characteristic of this new form of Idealism, is its effort to unite the Hegelian form with the form that I have been trying to set before you, — the monistic form with the pluralistic. Its means for this union is, the method it takes to prove the coming reality of the City of God — the Realm of Ends. This is presented as the goal toward which cosmic evolution is seen unmistakably to tend; and its reality is argued partly by induction, partly by appeal to that moral reason which would pronounce evolution futile, should its indicated goal not be fulfilled in an endless life whereby the self-activity only presaged here could be realised in the hereafter. This large reconciling office is what I suppose Dr. Le Conte to intend; and before taking our final look at the theory of Professor Royce, we must pause to see whether this attractive new scheme may not have supplanted it; or whether, perchance, this too is to prove disappointing.

I confess that by the lucid force of Dr. Le Conte’s reasonings, and the great beauty of his conclusions, I am constantly tempted to yield him my entire assent. It is only by the low murmurs of half-suppressed conviction, that I am roused from that state of fascination, to take up again the task of rigid thought. But if I may venture at all upon criticism of a thinker so justly distinguished, whose mind I sincerely revere, then I will say that the stability of his system depends, I think, on two things: (1) Whether it provides a sufficient proof that the Immanent Energy which is the cause of evolution is indeed a Cosmic Consciousness; (2) whether a Cosmic Consciousness, even if real, having — as it must have — the attribute of immanence in Nature, is compatible with the freedom and the personal immortality at which the system aims.

Regarding the first of these, I feel bound to say that the proof offered for the Cosmic Consciousness seems to me insufficient. All I am able to make of it is this: The analogy in the case of each of us, who knows that he is conscious, though to the outside observer there is nothing of him discernible but phenomena purely physical; still more, the analogy of the reasoning by which each extends this assurance of his own reality, to interpret similar physical phenomena into the existence of other persons, animating bodies like his own, — these analogies would, in all reason, lead us to say that there might well be a Cosmic Mind animating all Nature, but by no means that there is such a Mind. True enough, there is the same kind of reason for believing in such a Mind as for believing in the minds of our fellow-men, — if, indeed, the real warrant for this belief be only the warrant of analogy. But, even on that warrant, the value of the analogy will finally depend on the degree to which we can match, in Nature as a whole, the test-phenomena that prompt us to conclude the existence of human minds besides our own. The chief of these tests are speech and purposive movement; and Bishop Berkeley’s captivating metaphors about them notwithstanding, the literal fact is that Nature answers to neither; or, rather, we have no means of ascertaining, from her, whether she does or not.

Coming to the second question, I find myself in still greater difficulties. I cannot see how a Cosmic Consciousness, with its intrinsic immanence in Nature, can be reconciled with real freedom at all; and its consistency with an immortality truly personal is to me beset with obscure alternatives, between which either the certainty, or else the value, of the life to come vanishes away. Whether we take the immanence of God in Nature to mean his omnipresence in and throughout Nature, — which is something unintelligible, — or whether we say, in consonance with Idealism, that Nature is immanent in God, the doctrine implies that God operates evolution, including the evolution of man in every aspect of his being, by direct causation — by his own immediate efficiency. Any secondary causes that may operate — though according to the theory of evolution these are indeed real and infinitely complex — are only mediate or transmissive, and are not true causes; God must ever remain the only real agent. In short, we have again a system of Monism; and all the hostilities to the strict personality of created minds that we found in the doctrine of Professor Royce are on our hands once more. And if it be said that just here it is that the philosophic virtue of evolution displays itself, by showing us that the world of efficient causation is only a means to an end coming beyond it, to whose realisation it surely points, — showing us that full self-activity, real freedom, is the plain goal, which moreover can only be won through immortality, — then I am led to ask: How will the goal be attained? I ask myself: So long as man remains a term in Nature, how can he ever escape from that causal embrace in which Nature is held immanent in God? This very immanence in God will no doubt maintain in existence some form of Nature, as long as God himself exists; and thus I can easily conceive of the human spirit as going on in its share of the everlasting existence of Nature. But I also see that this must be at the cost of its freedom. For in the one and only life of the Cosmic Consciousness, brooding upon Nature and upon all her offspring alike, there is after all but one real agent, and that is the Consciousness itself. On the other hand, were I to suppose — as some of Dr. Le Conte’s writings have at times seemed to mean — were I to suppose that death is the sublime moment in which our connexion with Nature at length comes to a close, and is thus in its truth the moment of birth for the freed spirit, so that by death the long toil of spirit-creation is completed, I should indeed be at first rapt away by this surprising suggestion; especially by the Platonic afterthought, that now the soul, set forth in her self-sufficing independence, is proof against all assaults forever, and has become indeed imperishable. But a second afterthought would follow, and I should ask: What must be the nature of this life dissevered from Nature, — bodiless, void of all sense-perception? What would be left in it except the pure elements of reason, the pure elements of perception, the pure formularies of science, and pure imagination? But what are these, altogether, but the common equipment, not of my mind or of some other individual mind, but of the universal human nature? And what is that universal nature but just the nature of the eternal Cosmic Consciousness? Yes, my personality has vanished; and death, in dissolving the tie to Nature under the alluring prospect of an existence for me wholly self-referred and self-sustaining, has resolved me back into the infinite Vague of the Cosmic Mind, as this might, perchance, be fancied to be in itself, apart from Nature and creation, —

“that which came from out the boundless Deep
Turns again home.”

Shall I ever issue forth again from that Inane? Will that unfathomable Void ever create again? — ever again enfold an embosomed Nature, to repeat again through her fertility the stupendous drama of evolution? To ask such questions is to realise how utterly we have left the native regions of our occidental thinking; how lost we are among the most shadowy conceptions of the Orient. And no matter which alternative we take; no matter whether we maintain Nature everlastingly, and as parts of Nature win an endless continuance, but remain forever destitute of freedom, mere aggregates of “inherited tendency” organised and moved by some new and heightened touch from the ever-immanent God; or, on the other hand, by severance from Nature win the empty name of freedom, and vanish in a nominal immortality that only means absorption into the Eternal Inane; — in either case the so-called God is not a Personal God, since in neither does he stand in any relations of mutual responsibility and duty with other real agents. Thus I cannot see that this Evolutional Idealism makes any secure advance beyond the Monism which it seeks to amend. We appear to be left to that, after all; and for proof of it, to some such argument as that of our evening’s chief speaker. Let us return, then, to that argument once more.

VII
THE FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION IN PROFESSOR ROYCE’S ARGUMENT: ITS KANTIAN BASIS

What, now, are we to say of this argument, finally? What are we to say to the claim that the surprising but in some sort irresistible conception reached by it must be accepted as the philosophical conception of God, be our spontaneously religious conception of that Being as different from this as it may? This claim is rested on the two premises, (1) that no conception of God can have any philosophical value unless it can be proved real, or, in other words, unless it is the conception that of itself proves God to exist; and (2) that the conception discussed before us is the only conception that can thus prove its reality. The first of these, as I have already said to you earlier, nobody with a proper training in philosophy would deny. The second has a very different standing, and I take but little risk, I am sure, when I question its truth entirely.

Why, then, should such an assumption be made? I answer: Because of a still deeper assumption; namely, that, since the thinking of Kant, the sole terms on which thought can be objectively valid are settled beyond revision. The thinking being, it is here said, cannot possibly get beyond itself; there is no way, therefore, by which thought can reach reality, — unless, indeed, reality is something within the whole and true compass of the thinker’s own being, as contrasted with its merely apparent and partial compass. Thought, this view goes on to say, must either surrender all claims to establish reality and to know it, or else it must cease to regard reality as a “thing in itself”; so “things in themselves” are dismissed from critical philosophy, and henceforth thought and reality must be conceived as inseparably conjoined. But how alone is such a conjunction conceivable? — how alone is the validity of thought specifically possible? To this it is answered: There is no way of having the required conjunction but by presupposing the unity of the thinker’s self-consciousness to be intrinsically a synthetical unity — a unity, that is, conjoining in itself two correlated streams of consciousness. These are, the abstractly ideal and the abstractly real, mere thought and mere sense, mere idea and dead “fact.” Torn from the life-giving embrace of this true unity of self-consciousness, neither of these correlates has any true reality at all, — any meaning, any growth, any being. And, reciprocally, there can be no real unity of self-consciousness apart from its living expression in this pair of correlates. No knowledge — no objective certainty — is possible, if once this magic bond be broken. The price of knowledge, the price of certitude, is this inseparable union of concept with percept, of thought with sense. Sever the idea from its sensory complement, and it vanishes in the inane. The only true Ideal is the Real-Ideal, is the unity presupposed in this correlation, and embracing it, — the unity implied in every item of experience, which is always just a case of this synthesis, — the unity still more profoundly implicated in every colligated group of experiences and in that progressively organised experience which ascends the pathway of science by perpetual criticism of experience less organised, and perpetual detection of ignorance. The Real-Ideal thus turns out to be that Omniscience which is the eternal clutch holding together the two sides of experience, and holding all possible forms and stages of experience in its life-giving, knowledge-assuring, reality-building grasp. Grant the accuracy and the necessity of the fundamental premise, — grant the truth of this inseparable union of pure thought with sense, of this interdependence of the rational and the sensory, — and the case is closed. The immanent Omniscience is then shown “real,” in this overspanning meaning of that word, and nothing but such an immanent Omniscience can be made out real.

There is the whole anatomy of the argument, in brief. If its fundamental premise is true, it is certainly unanswerable; and we shall be compelled to put up with this as the true account of the Absolute, whether we choose to give it the title of God or not; nay, we shall have perforce to call it God, or else confess that this name has nothing answering to it but a baseless figment of fantasy. And yet I think it not too much to say, that, while this conception is thus made to appear as the only sound result of reason, its real meaning is no sooner realised than reason disowns it. By some slip, through some oversight, a changeling has been put into the cradle of Reason, but Reason, when she sees it, knows that it is none of hers. Professor Royce rightly says that it is not the conception of an Ineffable Mystery, which we can only silently adore. For, in very fact, it is not the conception of a being that we can adore at all. The fault of it at the bar of the religious reason is, that by force of the argument leading to it all the turmoil and all the contradictions and tragic discords belonging to experience must be taken up directly into the life of the Absolute; they are his experiences as well as ours, and must be left in him at once both dissolved and undissolved, unharmonised as well as harmonised, stilled and yet raging, atoned for and yet all unatoned. Contradiction is thus not only introduced into the very being of the Eternal, and left there, but its dialectic back-and-forth throb is made the very quickening heart of that being. It is impossible for the religious reason to accept this, no matter what the apparently philosophical reason may say in its behalf. In that fealty which is the true “substance of things hoped for,” the religious reason firmly avers there must be some flaw in such philosophising, and in the name of all reason, protests against the claim that this conception of God is “the inevitable outcome of a reflective philosophy.”

VIII
SUGGESTIONS TOWARDS TRANSCENDING THIS KANTIAN ASSUMPTION

Is there really, then, an impassable chasm between the logical consciousness and the religious consciousness? Can the ought to be ever yield its autonomous authority to the mere is? — can the mere is, simply because it is, — nay, can the must be, simply because it must be, — ever amount to the ought to be? Is the religious judgment, Whatever is, is right, a merely analytical judgment, so that what is is right merely because it is, and the predicate “right” is merely an idle other name for what is already named by its true and best name “is”? Or is it a synthetic judgment, whose whole meaning lies in the complete transcending of the subject by the predicate, of the “is” by the “right,” and in the shining of the Right by its own unborrowed radiance? There can be no question how the religious reason will answer. And there will be, and will ever remain, an impassable gulf between the religious consciousness and the logical, unless the logical consciousness reaches up to embrace the religious, and learns to state the absolute Is in terms of the absolute Ought.

And whether this upward and all-embracing reach can be made by the logical consciousness depends entirely — as I said a few moments ago — upon whether that fundamental premise brought into philosophy by Kant is true or not. If it is true, — if there is no knowledge transcendent of sense, and can be none, — then the absolute Is is tied up in the Being that Professor Royce has described to us, and no refuge is left to the unsatisfied Conscience but the refuge of faith: the religious consciousness will fain still believe though it cannot know, and will maintain a stainless allegiance to the City of God though this be a city without foundations. It was in this attitude of faith as pure fealty to the moral ideal, that Kant left the human spirit at the close of his great labours. It was the only solution left him, after his thesis of the absolute limitation of knowledge to objects of sense. But surely that thesis has a strange sound, coming from the same lips that utter with equal emphasis the lesson of our really having cognitions that are independent of all experience. This is neither the place nor the time to expose the oversight and confusion by which Kant fell into this self-contradiction; I must content myself with saying that the contradiction exists, and that I think the oversight is exactly designable, and entirely avoidable. There is a truth concealed in Kant’s thesis of the immutable conjunction of thought and sense, but there is a greater falsehood conveyed by it. And there is a stranger contradiction still, between his two main philosophical doctrines — between his Primacy of the Practical Reason and his Transcendental Ideality of Reason as an account of Nature and of science. Let it be as true as it may — and I suppose it is demonstrably true — that a predictive science of Nature is impossible unless Nature is construed as strictly phenomenal to the cognising mind, and is consequently taken entirely out of the region of “things in themselves,” it by no means follows that such a science becomes possible by that supposition alone. The withholding of the supposition prevents science; but the greatest question is: Can the granting of it establish science? May not far other conditions have to be met, besides the required synthesis of sense with Space and Time and the Categories, before we can declare science to be a real possibility? Or, again, because a concentration of reason upon its pure sense-forms and their sense-contents is prerequisite to science, does it follow that this is sufficient for science? May not the non-limited use of the Categories be requisite before science is made out, — requisite quite as unquestionably as their concentration upon perceptions, and even more significantly?

Suppose they do have to be “schematised” in Time, or else be useless for science: does it follow that they will produce science just by being schematised? — may not a conjoined use of them in an utterly unrestricted meaning be needed, in order to establish judgments of absolutely universal and necessary scope, over even the course of Nature? But what are the Categories, taken thus without restriction, but just the elements of the moral and religious consciousness? Kant himself can find no better name for the moral reason than “Causality with Freedom,” nor any fitter name for primary creativeness. In short, the question really is: Can science be shown in secure possibility, can the logical consciousness ever reach objective reality even in the natural world, without the direct aid of the moral and religious consciousness? — without this consciousness adding itself into the very circuit of logic, as the completing term by which alone the circuit becomes solid, self-sustaining, and incapable of disruption? For if it can, then the asserted primacy of moral reason is merely nominal, and only means that moral reason has an ideal province of its own, out of all organic connexion with any world determinably real. But if it cannot, then moral reason is really primate, the reality of the scientific thinker as a moral being becomes the supreme condition and the demonstrating basis of science and of Nature itself, the world of the Vision Beatific becomes the one inclusive all-grounding Fact, and a real God amid his realm of real Persons becomes the absolute reality. Kant, in his provisory “thing in itself,” — set aside as a problem for further determination, on the solid psychological evidence that we have not within ourselves a complete explanation of sensation, — left open the door for answering this question of the total conditions essential to science. But he did not use that door. Yet, of course, he could not aver that the reality of science was made out, and the order of Nature securely predictable, so long as the nature of that co-agent “thing in itself” was undetermined. He also warned the philosophical world that there was no secure path to the realm of religion, his Realm of Ends, the realm of God and souls, of freedom and immortality, except by the way of the moral reason. But he made no further use of that warning than to declare the absolute autonomy of that reason. He should have followed the path he indicated, and he would have found in its course the solution for the unknown nature of his “thing in itself.” This would have been found as soon as he had noted the gap still remaining in the logic of science, and had seen, as he might have seen, that nothing but filling the void of the “thing in itself” with the World of Spirits, the sum of the postulates of the Practical Reason, could close that gap.

When we shall have gone back to where he paused, and completed the work which he left unfinished, then fealty will be translated into insight, our faith will have a logical support, our moral common-sense will receive its philosophic confirmation, and the reality of the World of Persons, and of God as its eternal Fount and Ground and Light, will be made out. Then genuine and inspiring religion — the religion not of submission but of aspiration, not of bondage but of freedom, of Love rather than of Faith and of Hope — will have passed from its present stage of anxious conjecture to the stage of settled fact, —

Now abideth Faith, Hope, Love, these three; but the greatest of these is Love.

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NOTE

THE DISCUSSION RECAPITULATED IN QUESTIONS

For the sake, particularly, of readers unfamiliar with philosophical technicalities, I may here recapitulate my criticisms of the evening’s addresses, suggest a few others, and hint a little more fully at my own answers to the problems discussed, by means of the following questions:

ON PROFESSOR ROYCE’S ADDRESS

1. Does a Supreme Being, or Ultimate Reality, no matter how assuredly proved, deserve the name of God, simply by virtue of its Reality and Supremacy? Is simple Supremacy divine, even if made out in idealistic terms — in terms, say, of Omniscience?

2. Can the attribute of Omniscience amount to a criterion of Deity until we determine the nature of the objects contained in the total sphere of its cognition, and find there real persons as the supreme and all-determining objects of its view?

3. To put the preceding question in another way, Can an Omniscient Being amount to a Divine Being unless the core and spring of this Omniscience be proved to be a Conscience?

4. Does the argument to an Omniscient Reality from human ignorance, taken in its precise reach, provide for persons as the prime objects of Omniscience, or for Conscience as its central spring? — does this argument make Omniscience involve Love in any other sense than that of Content with its own action, and with its self-produced objects, merely as forms of that action?

5. Is it reasonable to speak of God as having an experience, even an absolute experience? Or, if it is, what change in kind in the meaning of “experience” is involved? — is not “experience,” thus taken, a name for the self-consciousness of pure Thought and pure Creative Imagination? In the natural and unforced sense of the words, can there be an absolute experience? — an absolute feeling one’s way along tentatively, or any absolute, i.e. wholly self-supplied, contents received — facts of sense?

6. Is the reasoning to an Absolute Experience and an Absolute Thought by means of the implications inevitable in asserting our limitation to be real, capable (1) of making out an Ultimate Reality in any other sense than that of an Active Supreme Judgment as the grounding or inclusive being of the single thinker who frames the argument; (2) of combining this ultimate reality of this single thinker with that of other thinkers equally real?

7. To put the foregoing question in less cumbrous, though less explanatory terms: Can an argument like Professor Royce’s prove an Absolute Mind distinct from each thinker’s mind, or an Absolute Mind coexisting with other genuine minds, unquestionably as real as itself? What is the true test of reality? — and how alone can finitude coexist with unabated reality? Is not that test self-active intelligence? — and, in order to our being real notwithstanding our finitude, must not Nature be conceived as conditioned by human nature, instead of conditioning it?

8. To put the question in still another way: Must not the convincing force of every such method of reasoning to the Absolute be necessarily confined to a monistic view of existence? That is, will not the method of proof confine us to a single and sole Infinite Inclusive Self, and reduce all particular so-called selves merely to modes of his omniscient Perceptive Conception? Does the argument not require us to accept God, so called, as the one and only real agent — the vera causa sola?

9. Is such a view of existence compatible with the true personality of human beings, or with a true personality of God?

10. What is the real test of personality? Is it just self-consciousness, without further heightening of quality, or must it be self-consciousness as Conscience? What is Conscience? Is it not the immutable recognition of persons — the consciousness of self and of other selves as alike unconditional Ends, who thereby have (1) Rights, inalienable, and (2) Duties, absolutely binding?

ON PROFESSOR MEZES’S CRITICISM

1. Is it true that the relativity of pastness and futurity must be taken to mean that they are illusions? Is Cæsar really dead and turned to clay, and also really, in the one Eternal Moment, now conquering Gaul and Britain, and dominating the envious Senate?

2. Can Eternity be adequately stated in terms of time at all? Is there not an Eternal Order, and also a Temporal? — a Noumenal and a Phenomenal?

3. Must the ideal being answering to the moral conception contain the trait of progressive improvement? Is not this the characteristic of minds marked with finitude? — that is, having in their consciousness an aspect that is finite?

ON PROFESSOR LE CONTE’S REMARKS

1. Does Dr. Le Conte’s argument to God from the footing of science show that there is a Cosmic Consciousness, or only that there might well enough be such a Consciousness?

2. Is not a Cosmic Consciousness, reached by such an argument (if reached by it), necessarily to be taken as having a monistic relation to the Cosmos? Does not its Omnipresence, too, take the form of a universal pervasion of space as well as of time? — and is there any meaning in the statement, taken literally, that a Mind pervades space, and fills time? Besides, in the strict sense, has Space any extent to be pervaded, or Time any duration to be filled?

3. Is such a doctrine of the “Divine Immanence in Nature” compatible with the real freedom of human beings? If not, does it leave such beings truly real? Does it not make the so-called God the sole real agent? If so, does it not make a Moral Order impossible?

4. Can a Being without a Moral Order and a moral government — that is, without associates indestructibly free — be a person at all? — much more, an Infinite Person, a God?

5. Can God, the Ideal of the Reason, the Being whose essence is moral perfection, be adequately conceived as being immanent in the creation, or as having the creation immanent in him, if this be taken to mean, in the one case, pervasively present and directly active within the entire creation, and, in the other case, directly embracing or enfolding it in his own life?

6. In what sense, only, can God rightly be said to be immanent in his creation? — is it not in this, that his Image, his nature or kind, not his own Person, is ever present there, as the effective result of his Creative Omniscience, so that his creation, too, in its inclusive unity, proceeds of itself as well as he?

7. Can a process of evolution, through Nature and in time, possibly give rise to a being really free, and personally immortal? — to a creation indeed self-active, and therefore indestructible?

8. Is an evolutional origin of man, then, compatible with a Divine creation? If so, in what sense, only, of the word “man”? Is it not man the phenomenon merely — man the experience-contents, physical (governed by Space) on the one hand, and psychical (governed by Time) on the other, instead of man the noumenon — the completely real man who is the Inclusive Active Unit that embraces and grounds all its being in its own active self-consciousness? — in short, is not the field of human evolution just the human body and the human states of mind?

9. What can the fact be, that has caused so many of the prominent minds of our time to stumble at the notion of an Infinite Person, as involving a self-contradiction? — is it not the difficulty of reaching the true conception of the Real Infinite?

10. Ought we not to discriminate between two vitally different meanings of this ancient word “infinite”? — which is primary and determinative, and which only derivative? Is not every Person infinite in this first and profound sense?

Notes

1. The principle here involved is a signal one in language, of vast significance philologically as well as philosophically, and deserves a study which it has never received. By it, words have a power of coming to mean the very opposite of what they were first used to denote. I believe it to be a fundamental law of vocabulary, imbedded in the very nature of language.
2. From solus ipse (he himself alone), as the appropriate name for the theory that no being other than the thinker himself is real.