MODERN SCIENCE AND PANTHEISM
In response to your invitation,[1] I willingly take part in discussing the question, Is pantheism the legitimate outcome of modern science? While turning it over for some months past, I have become more and more convinced that any satisfactory answer to it depends upon clearing up the meaning of its terms. What is pantheism? And what actual features in modern science can give colour to the suspicion that pantheism is its proper result? Or if such a suspicion is well founded, what leads us to regard it with a certain aversion? If science establishes or clearly tends to establish the pantheistic view, why should this stir in us alarms? Is there some secret hostility to the interests of human nature in a pantheistic science? Can there be antagonism between the
truth and the real interests of man? — is not truth
our highest interest? Or, is truth of mere fact perchance
not our highest interest? — is there perhaps
such a thing as gradation in truths, and an inward
truth that must be supreme for us, but which yet
may be antagonised by the truths of Nature? And
if our nature looks both to truths of fact and to
truths of worth, is there some ghastly gulf in our
being? — are we the victims of a tragic chasm between
two indestructible wants of ours? Or if again not
so, if deeper knowledge harmonises these wants, what
is this rational path to our peace?
Your present question can hardly have for most minds the interest which so directly belongs to the question of Immortality, discussed by you last year; at least, not on its surface. Yet a study of it in the detail of the subsidiary questions just stated will not only secure the clearness needed for an intelligent answer, but will bring to view how really deep its interest is. It will show this to be no less profound, while far more inclusive, than that of your earlier problem. For this reason, I venture to offer you the reflexions that have passed in my mind in the endeavour to clear up these more detailed questions. These defining questions I will ask you to consider with me in their proper succession.
I
Of all the questions, perhaps none is surrounded with more vagueness than the first — What is pantheism? The recognised defenders of religion, the theologians who speak with the hoary authority and the presumptive weight that naturally belong to historic and instituted things, are indeed in the habit of drawing a sharp verbal distinction between theism and pantheism, as they also do between theism and deism; but when the unbiassed thinker, anxious for clearness and precision, inquires after the real distinction intended by these names, he hardly finds it in any sense at once intelligible and reasonable. We constantly hear that theism is contradicted by both deism and pantheism: by deism, through the assertion of God’s distinctness at the expense of divine revelation and providence; by pantheism, through the assertion of the divine omnipresence at the expense of the distinctness of God from the world. We hear constantly, too, that theism, to be real, must teach that there is a being who is truly God: that the Principle of existence is a Holy Person, who has revealed his nature and his will to his intelligent creatures, and who superintends their lives with a providence which aims to secure their obedience to his will as the only sufficient condition of their blessedness. Yet all this is but an abstract and very vague formula, after all. Of how the contradiction whose extremes are represented by deism and pantheism is to be transcended and reconciled, it has nothing to say. How the divine personality is to be thought consistently with the divine omnipresence, or how the omnipresent providence of God is to be reconciled with his distinctness from the world, this merely general proclamation of orthodox theism does not show, and in itself has no power to show. When we pass from the general formula to the attempted supply of the desired details, we are too often made aware that the doctrine professedly theistic is encumbered with a mass of particulars profoundly at variance with its own principle. We notice that confusion or contradiction reigns where consistent clearness ought to be; that faultily anthropomorphic or really mechanical conceptions usurp the place of the required divine and spiritual realities.
We too often discover, for instance, that every doctrine is construed as deism which refuses its assent to a discontinuous and special providence, or to an inconstant, localised, and miraculous revelation. On the other hand, we find every theory condemned as pantheism that denies the literal separation of God from the world and asserts instead his immanence in it.[2] We find that in the hands of such interpreters theism is identified with belief in artificial theories of the quomodo of atonement, or, as such writers are fond of calling it, “the plan of salvation,” — theories which in some way or other rest on the merely legal conception of ethics, involving the quid pro quo of a substitutive responsibility.
Into the place of the all-pervading providence and all-transforming grace that makes eternally for righteousness, are set hypothetical schemes of expiation by sacrifice, of appeasal by the suffering of the innocent, of ransom by blood, of federal covenant and imputation, of salvation by faith alone. Theories of the divine nature and administration which omit these details, or refuse to take them literally, are stamped as deism or as pantheism, even though the omission or refusal be dictated by a perception that the rejected schemes are incompatible with the fundamental principles of morals, and therefore with any divine revelation and government at all. Thus, by mere confusion of thought, or by inability to rise above conceptions couched in terms of space and time, the original theistic formula — which in its contrasting of theism against deism and pantheism is unobjectionable, and correct enough so far as it goes — is brought in the end to contradict its own essential idea.
Still it must never be forgotten that these ill-conceived efforts at the completer definition of theism are made in behalf of a real distinction. We shall find it true that there is a conception of the world, for which deism may be a very proper name; and another, for which pantheism is the only title really fitting. We shall see that they are both radically distinct from theism, which may be defined as the doctrine of a Personal God who reveals himself by such an immanence in the world as contributes to transform it into his own image through the agencies of moral freedom; a God indwelling, as the central guiding Light, in a realm of self-governing persons who immortally do his will in freely doing their own, and fulfil their own in doing his. Nor shall we fail to find that the doctrines named deism and pantheism are historic doctrines. They are not abstractions merely conceivable, but have been advocated by actual men of a very real persuasion and a very discernible influence. Neither can I doubt that these two doctrines, in their deviations from the theistic theory, will be recognised by our sound judgment as defective, and consequently be reckoned opinions injurious if taken as final.
But let us now ask in earnest what pantheism exactly is. In beginning our answer, we may avail ourselves of a useful clue in the structure of the name itself. The derivation of this from the two Greek words πᾶν (all) and θέος (God) would seem to make it mean either (1) that the All is God, or else (2) that God is all — that God alone really and actively exists. The name, then, hints at two quite different doctrines. It may signify either (1) that the total of particular existences is God, in other words, that the universe, as we commonly understand it, is itself the only real being; or (2) that God, the absolute Being, is the only actively real being — all particular existences are merely his forms of appearance, and so, in truth, are either illusions or have an aspect of illusion haunting such partial reality as they possess. Of these diverse doctrines we might convey now the one and now the other by the name, according as we pronounced it pantheism or pantheism. In either way the word unavoidably covers an absolute identification of God and other being. In the first way, God is merged in the universe; in the second, the universe is merged in God.
As a matter of history, too, pantheism has actually presented itself in these two forms. The doctrine has come forward in a great variety of expressions or schemes of exposition, such as those of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Stoics, in ancient times, — not to speak of the vast systems lying at the basis of the Hindu religions, — or as those of Bruno and Vanini, Schelling, Oken, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann, in our modern era.[3] But various as these schemes are, they may all be recognised as falling into one or other of the two forms suggested by the common name. The two forms, evidently, may be respectively styled the atheistic and the acosmic, as the one puts the sensible universe in the place of God, and thus cancels his being; while the other annuls the active reality of the cosmos, or world of existences other than God, by reducing these to modes of the one and only Universal Life.
Both forms are manifestly open to the criticism visited upon pantheism by the standard defenders of theism: they both contradict the essence of the divine nature by sacrificing the distinctness of the divine personality to a passion for the divine omnipresence. The sacrifice of the distinctness is obvious, at any rate, even if such a loss of distinct being is not so evidently incompatible with the true nature of godhead; though that this loss is incompatible with real deity will erelong appear.
Further, both forms are in the last analysis atheisms; the one openly, the other implicitly so. The one may be more exactly named a metaphysical or theoretical atheism, as it dispenses with the distinct existence of God in his office of Creator; the other may properly be called a moral or practical atheism, as in destroying the freedom and the moral immortality of the individual it cancels God in his greater office of Redeemer. Under either form the First Principle is emptied of attributes that are vital to deity. In the first, the entire distinct being of God disappears; in the second, all those attributes are lost that present God in his adorable characters of justice and love, and in the ultimate terms of his omniscience and omnipotence. For genuine omniscience and omnipotence are only to be realised in the control of free beings, and in inducing the divine image in them by moral influences instead of metaphysical and physical agencies: that is, by final instead of efficient causation.
II
It will help us toward an exacter understanding of pantheism to appreciate its relations to other anti-theistic forms of philosophy, particularly to materialism, and also to objective and to subjective idealism. With this appreciation, it will become clear that pantheism constitutes a synthesis of thought higher than either of these theories. The pantheistic conception of the world may indeed be read off in either materialistic or idealistic terms, but neither reading reaches its whole meaning. Besides, the twofold reading holds good whether we take pantheism in its atheistic or its acosmic form. On a first inspection, to be sure, this double interpretability hardly seems to be the fact. On the contrary, one is at first inclined to identify atheistic pantheism with materialism outright, and to recognise in acosmic pantheism a species of mysticism or exaggerated spiritualism;[4] hence, to contrast the two forms as the materialistic and the idealistic. Nor does further reflection at once disabuse us of this mistake; for the seeming identity of atheistic pantheism with materialism is very decided, and the only correction in our first judgment that we next feel impelled to make, is to recognise the ambiguous character of acosmic pantheism. The Universal Substance, we then say, in order to include an exhaustive summary of all the phenomena of experience, must of course be taken as both extending and being conscious; but is this Substance an extended being that thinks, or is it a thinking being that apprehends itself under a peculiar mode of consciousness called extension? In other words, is the thinking of the Substance grounded in its extended being, or has its extension existence in and through its thinking only? Which attribute is primary and essential, and makes the other its derivative and function? Under the conception of the all-embracing existence of the Absolute, this question is inevitable, irresistible — will not down. According as we answer it in the first or the second of the two suggested ways, we turn the pantheism into materialism or, as we shall see presently, into objective idealism.
It thus becomes plain that the acosmic form of pantheism may carry materialism as unquestionably as it carries idealism, though indeed not so naturally or coherently.[5] Still sharper inquiry at last makes it equally clear, too, that atheistic pantheism will carry idealism as consistently as it carries materialism, if doubtless less naturally. For although in the sum-total of the particular existences there must be recognised a gradation from such as are unconscious up to those that are completely conscious, and it would therefore be the more obvious step to read the series as a development upward from atoms to mind, still the mystery of the transit from the unconscious to the conscious cannot fail to suggest the counter-hypothesis, and the whole series may be conceived as originating ideally, in the perceptive constitution and experience of the conscious members of it. There is a marked distinction, however, between the idealism given by acosmic pantheism and the idealism given by the atheistic. The idealism of acosmic pantheism, grounded as it is in the consciousness of the Universal Substance, has naturally a universal and in so far an objective character. The idealism of atheistic pantheism, on the contrary, has no warrant except the thought in a particular consciousness, now this, now that, and no means of raising this warrant into a character even common to a class of conscious beings, much less into unrestricted universality; hence it is particular and subjective.
Pantheism, then, in both its forms, is not only a more comprehensive view of the world than either materialism or any one-sided idealism, inasmuch as it provides a chance for both of them, but it is also a deeper and more organic view, because it does bring in, at least in a symbolic fashion, the reality of a universal. This advantage, however, it does not secure with any fulness except in its acosmic form. Indeed, the atheistic form is so closely akin to the less organic theories of materialism and subjective idealism that we may almost say we do not come to pantheism proper until we pass out of the atheistic sort and get into the acosmic.
An additional gain afforded by pantheism, eminently by the acosmic sort, is the idea of an intimate union of the First Principle with the world of particular beings: the creative Cause is stated as spontaneously manifesting its own nature in its creation; it abides immanently in this, and is no longer conceived as separate and therefore itself limited in space and in time. This faulty conception of God as temporally and spatially conditioned, characteristic of the cruder dualistic view of things with which human efforts at theological theory begin, is overcome by pantheism, at least in part. But the pantheistic interpretation of immanence, as will appear farther on, is itself very gravely deficient: quite irreconcilable, in fact, with the conditions of a genuine theism, or with those of a genuine religion.
III
But the eminent merit of pantheism as contrasted with deism, we have now reached the position to see. By the name “deism” it has been generally, if tacitly, agreed to designate that falling short of theism which stands at the opposite pole from pantheism. If pantheism is defective by confounding God and the world in an anti-moral identity, deism comes short by setting God in an isolated and impassable separation from the world. Deism thus falls partly under the same condemnation of materiality that a rational judgment pronounces upon sensuous theism, with its zoomorphic[6] conceptions of a producing Creator, dwelling in his peculiar quarter of space called Heaven, and its mechanical theory of his communication with the world by way of “miracle” alone — by way, that is, independent or even subversive of the process from means to end in Nature.[7]
But while thus marred by mechanical limitations, deism must be allowed its relative merit too. This lies in the judgment it passes upon the mechanical method of sensuous theism. If in the interest of distinguishing the Creator from the creation, God is to be thought as capable of existing without a world, and as literally separated from the world in time and space, then deism says it is purely arbitrary to declare the separation overcome by means of miracle. Consistency, and in so far rationality, would rather require that the separation be kept up; and the folly of the zoomorphic dualism is made to display itself in the deistic inference, which such dualism cannot consistently refute, that divine revelation and providence, without which the practical religion indispensable to the reality of theism cannot have being, are by this literal separateness of the divine existence rendered impossible.
The comparative virtue of pantheism here, as against deism and sensuous theism alike, is that it transcends, in a certain sort at least, this mechanical rigidity in divine relations. However faulty its way of accomplishing this may be, — and we shall presently see this is indeed faulty, — it does us the service of calling attention to the religious need of cancelling this mechanical view; and it habituates our thoughts to an inseparable union and communion between God and the world. It teaches us the great and lasting lesson, that the relation between God and the world of souls is in no wise contingent or temporal, but is necessary, essential, eternal.
IV
Now we face the question, Why then is pantheism regarded by so many with instinctive inhibition — as if indeed a doctrine to avert? In coming to this after what we have just discerned, we must not neglect the fact that pantheism plays an indispensable part in the forming of a genuine theistic theory. It is the transitional thought by which we ascend out of the idolatrous anthropomorphism of sensuous theism into that rational and complete theism which has its central illumination in the comprehended truth of the Divine Omnipresence. In the morally interpreted immanence of God in the world, this completed theism finds the true basis, the pure rational theory, of the divine perpetual providence. In God’s dwelling with the society of spirits, as “the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,” it finds the rational basis for the universal and perpetual divine revelation. Even this higher, this ethically rational view of Divine Immanence, we must not forget, has come to us through the suggestion in the lower immanence taught in pantheism.
Indeed, in this suggested omnipresence of God, — this indwelling of God in the world by the activity of his image in the soul, — pantheism lays a foundation for the rational conception of a Perpetual Incarnation, the doctrine of a Divine Humanity. So when theology sets the doctrine of the Triune God at the centre of practical religion, pantheism has prepared the way for vindicating it as in so far the genuine interpreter of rational theism. That the Eternal is eternally generated in our higher human nature; that this Son of Man is in practical truth the Son of God, and the Son only-begotten; that by the discipline of life in worlds of imperfection, men — and, following men, the whole world of conscious beings — ascend, through fealty to this Son, immortally toward the Father in the Holy Spirit, — this, the epitome of Christian theism, first gets apprehended, or at least suggested, in the insight which pantheism brings, that God is not separate from the world, but effectually present in it, and that the distinction between the soul and the God who recognises and redeems it can never be truly stated as a distinction in place and time, a separation in space and by a period, a contrast between efficient cause and produced effect. On the contrary, the distinction must be made in terms of pure thought, which is essentially timeless and spaceless, neither lasts nor extends, nor is dated nor placed, but simply is. It must be viewed as a contrast (and yet a relation) between different centres of consciousness, each thoroughly self-active; and further, as a distinction in the mode by which each conscious centre defines its individual being in terms of its Ideal. In short, it must be thought in terms of final cause alone. No mind can have an efficient relation to another mind; efficiency is the attribute of every mind toward its own acts and life, or toward the world of mere "things" which forms the theatre of its action; and the causal relation between minds must be that of ideality, simply and purely.
This is a religious truth so clearly fundamental that when once our attention is brought to it we cannot but give it assent. So far from denying it, we incline, rather, to say—and rightly—that we have in somewise always known it. Yet it is directly violated by our ordinary and sensuous theistic conceptions; and not until the pantheistic insight has been realised in our minds, whether by name or no it matters not,—realised even if transcended, and, indeed, only to be transcended,—do we clearly discover that this violation exists.[8]
V
But while this permanent insight of pantheism must be carried up into all genuine theistic thought, it is also true that in itself the insight falls fatally short of the conception demanded by the highest practical religion. For religion as a practical power in human experience — the very conception of theism as an operative life in the spirit — depends not merely on the omnipresent influence of God, but equally on the freedom and the immortality of the soul: on its freedom in the strictest sense; that is, its unqualified autonomy and self-activity. In fact, not only is it impossible for souls to be souls, apart from freedom, immortality, and God, but it is just as impossible for God to be God, apart from souls and their immortality and freedom. In other words, the self-existent perfection of deity itself freely demands for its own fulfilment the possession of a world that is in God’s own image, and such a control of it as is alone consistent with its being so: a divine creation must completely reflect the divine nature, and must therefore be a world of moral freedom, autonomous, and, in the last resort, self-active or eternal.
But this requirement of genuine and fulfilled theism, pantheism cannot meet. Its theory, whether atheistic or acosmic or agnostic or absolute-idealistic, is the radical contradiction of real freedom and significant immortality.[9] Indeed we may say, summarily, that the distinction between theism and pantheism lies just in this — that theism, in asserting God, asserts the freedom and the moral immortality of the soul; but that pantheism, while apparently asserting God to the extreme, denies his moral essence by cancelling all real freedom and therefore all immortality of worth — all that “life eternal” which means imperishable and continual progress in fulfilling freedom by universal growth in the image of God. The conclusive proof of this is, that, even in its highest form, pantheism necessarily represents what it calls God as the sole real agent in existence. Every other being exists but as part or mode of the eternal One.
VI
At length we see why pantheism is at war with the characteristic interests of human nature. Our abiding interests are wholly identified with the reality of freedom and immortal moral life; and this, not on the ground of any passion we may have for mere unconstraint or for permanence of mere existence — a ground of course not worthy of a rational being — but on the immovable foundation laid by reason as Conscience. For when this highest form of reason is thoroughly interpreted, we know that the value of freedom and immortality lies in their indispensableness to our discipline and growth in our ideal or divine life. To no theory of the world can man give a willing and a cordial adhesion, then, if it strikes at the heart of his personal reality and contradicts those hopes of ceaseless moral growth that alone make life worth living. Not in its statement of God as the All-in-all, taken by itself, but in its consequent denial of the reality of man — his freedom and immortal growth in goodness — is it that pantheism betrays its insufficiency to meet the needs of the human spirit.
It is no doubt true that this opposition between the doctrine of a Sole Reality and our natural longings for permanence, our natural bias in favour of freedom and responsibility, in itself settles nothing as to the truth or falsity of the doctrine. It might be that the system of Nature, it might be that its Ground, is not in sympathy or accord with “the bliss for which we sigh.” But so long as human nature is what it is, so long as we are by essence prepossessed in favour of our freedom and yearn for a life that may put death itself beneath our feet, and with death imperfection and wrong, so long will our nature reluctate, so long will it even revolt, at the prospect of having to accept the doctrine of pantheism; so long shall we instinctively draw back from that vast and shadowy Being which, be it con-scious or unconscious or simply the Unknowable, must for us and our highest hopes be verily the Shadow of Death. Yes, we must go still farther, and say that even should the science of Nature prove pantheism true, this would only array the interests of science against the interests of man — the interests that man can never displace from their supreme seat in his world, except by abdicating his inmost nature and putting his conscience to an open shame. A pantheistic edict of science would only proclaim a deadlock in the system and substance of truth itself, and herald an implacable conflict between the law of Nature and the law written indelibly in the human spirit. The heart on which the vision of a possible moral perfection has once arisen, and in whose recesses the still and solemn voice of Duty has once resounded with its majestic sweetness, can never be reconciled to the decree, though this issue never so authentically from Nature, that bids it count responsible freedom an illusion and surrender existence on that mere threshold of moral development which the bound of our present life affords.
Such a defeat of its most sacred hopes the conscience can neither acquiesce in nor tolerate. Nor can it be appeased or deluded by the pretext that annihilation may be accepted devoutly, as self-sacrifice in behalf of an infinite “fulness of life” for the universe — a life in which the individual conscience is to have no continued living share. The defence of this pantheistic piety by quoting the patriarch of many tribulations, in his impassioned cry, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him!” is as vain as it is profane. This is only to repeat in a new form the fallacious paradox of those grim and obsolete sectarians who held that the test of a state of grace was “willingness to be damned for the glory of God.” The spirit that truly desires righteousness longs with an unerring instinct for immortality as the indispensable condition of entire righteousness, and when invited to approve its own immolation for the pretended furtherance of the Divine glory will always answer as a noble matron applying for admission to the church once answered the inquisitorial session of her Calvinistic society, — “I certainly am not willing to be damned for the glory of God; were I so, I should not be here!”
This sense of our vocation to moral perfection, and of all it implies as to freedom and continuance, is what makes our main question of such thrilling concern. The question starts a ghastly fear, lest science may be the doom of our loftiest hopes. If so, it will quench the aspirations which have been the soul of man’s grandest as well as sublimest endeavours; for the beliefs it will destroy are the real foundation of all that has given majesty and glory to history. To present universal Nature as the deep in which each soul with its moral hopes is to be engulfed, is to transform existence into a system of radical and irremediable evil, and thus to make genuine religion impossible; and not only religion, but also all cordial political union and order, for this gets and keeps a footing amid the shifting affairs of this sense-world, only because it is the outward image of the religious vision. Belief in the sovereign goodness of the universe and its grounding Light is the life alike of religious faith and of political fealty. It is impossible that either faith or fealty can long endure after we have come to the realising conviction that the whole of which we form a part, and the central Principle of the whole, are hostile, or even indifferent, not simply to the permanent existence of the soul, but to its aspirations after completion in moral life. A nominal God, who either cannot or will not bring to fulfilment the longing after infinite moral growth that has once arisen in a spirit, is not, and cannot be, for such a spirit, true God at all: —
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have
The likest God within the soul?
*******
Man, the last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer —
Who trusted God was love indeed,
And love Creation’s final law,
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed —
Who loved, who suffered countless ills,
Who battled for the True, the Just —
Be blown about the desert dust,
Or sealed within the iron hills?
No more? — A monster, then, a dream,
A discord! Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music, matched with him!
The profound feeling which Tennyson has here so memorably expressed, gives your question of this year a significance as wide as all mankind, as deep as man’s unfathomable heart, and makes its interest surpass the interest of every other; for every other quickest question is involved in this. Let us not fail to realise that pantheism means, not simply the all-pervasive interblending and interpenetration of God and other life, but the sole causality of God, and so the obliteration of freedom, of moral life, and of any immortality worth the having; in a word, of the true being of God himself.
VII
It is urgent to ask, then, whether there is anything in the nature of modern science that really gives colour to a pantheistic philosophy. Obviously enough, there are not wanting philosophers, and schools of philosophy, who read pantheism in science, as science appears to them. But the question is, Is such a reading the authentic teaching of science itself? Here we must not mistake the utterances of men of science for the voice of science as such. For on this borderland of science and philosophy it need not be surprising if men only familiar with the method of investigation which science pursues, and not greatly at home in the varied and complex history of philosophical thought, should sometimes incline to a hasty inference when the borderland is reached, should overlook the fact that their science and its method have necessary limits, and in philosophy take the view which an illegitimate extension of their method would indicate. So, disregarding the opinions of certain cultivators of science, we are here to ask the more pertinent question, What is there — if indeed there be anything — in the nature of science itself, as science is now known, what is there in its results or in its method, that points to a pantheistic interpretation of the world?
To this question it must in all candour be answered, that both in the method of modern science, and in the two most commanding principles that have resulted from the method, there is that which unquestionably suggests the pantheistic view. Nothing less than the most cautious discrimination, founded on a precise knowledge of the history of philosophical inquiry, can detect the exact reach, the limits, and the real significance of this suggestion, or expose the illegitimacy of following it without reserve. The trait to which I am now referring in the method of science is its rigorously observational and experimental character; indeed, its strictly empirical or tentative character. The two commanding results, which now in turn play an organising part in the subsidiary methods of all the sciences, are (1) the principle of the Conservation of Energy, and (2) the principle of Evolution, manifesting itself in the concomitant phenomenon of “natural selection” — the “struggle for existence” between each species or individual and its environment, and the “survival of the fittest.” In these two principles, and also in the general method of science, there are certain implications that seem to point strongly in the pantheistic direction. These implications accordingly deserve, and must receive, our careful attention.
How, then, docs the experimental — or, more accurately, the empirical — method of science suggest the doctrine of pantheism? I answer: By limiting our serious belief to the evidence of experience, and chiefly to the evidence of the senses. The method of science demands that nothing shall receive the high credence accorded to science unless it is attested by unquestionable presence in sensible experience. All the refinements of scientific method — the precautions of repeated observation, the probing subtleties of experiment, the niceties in the use of instruments of precision, the principle of reduction to mean or average, the allowing for the “personal equation,” the final casting out of the largest mean of possible errors in experiment or observation, by such methods, for instance, as that of least squares — all these refinements are for the single purpose of making it certain that our basis of evidence shall be confined to what has actually been present in the world of sense. We are to know beyond question that such and such conjunctions of events have actually been present to the senses, and precisely what it is that thus remains indisputable fact after all possible additions or misconstructions of our mere thought or fancy have been cancelled out. Such conjunctions in unquestionable experience, isolated and then purified from foreign admixture by carefully contrived experiment, we are finally to raise by generalisation into a tentative expectation of their continued recurrence in the future; tentative expectation, we say, because the empirical method in its rigour warns us that the act of generalisation is a step beyond the strict evidence, and must not be reckoned any part of science except as it continues to be verified in subsequent experience of the event under examination. Thus natural science climbs its slow and cautious way along the path of what it calls the laws of Nature; but it only gives this name in the sense that there has been a constancy in the conjunctions of past experience, a verification of the tentative generalisation suggested by this, and a consequent continuance of the same tentative expectancy. This expectancy, however, waits for renewed verification, and refrains from committing itself unreservedly to the absolute invariability of the law to which it refers. Unconditional universality of its ascertained conjunctions, natural science, in its own sphere and function, neither claims nor admits; and a fortiori not their necessity.[10]
Now, to a science which accepts the testimony of experience with this undoubting and instinctive confidence that never stops to inquire what the real grounds of the possibility of experience itself may be, or whence experience can possibly derive this infallibility of evidence, but assumes, on the contrary, that the infallibility of the evidence, could this once be certainly got, is immediate and underived — to such a science it must seem that we can have no verifiable assurance of any existence but the Whole; that is, the aggregate of particulars hitherto actual or yet to become so. Thus the very method of natural science tends to obliterate the sense of the transcendent, of what lies beyond the bounds of possible experience, or at least to destroy its credit at the bar of disciplined judgment. In this way the method brings its too eager votaries to regard the Sum of Things as the only reality.
On this view, the outcome of the scientific method might seem to be restricted to that form of pantheism which I have named atheistic. Most obviously the inference would be directly to materialism, the lowest and most natural form of such pantheism; subtler reasoning, however, recognising that in the last resort experience must be consciousness, sees a truer fulfilment of the empirical method in the subjective idealism which states the Sum of Things as the aggregate of the perceptions of its conscious members. But beyond even this juster idealistic construction of atheistic pantheism — beyond either form of atheistic pantheism, in fact — the method of natural science would appear to involve consequences which render the Absolute, whether interpreted as the Unknowable or as God, the sole causal reality. That is, scientific method would in this way bring us to acosmic pantheism. For the empirical method, so far from vindicating either the freedom of the personal will or the immortality of the soul, withholds belief from both, as matters that can never come within the bounds of possible experience. The habit of regarding nothing but the empirically attested as part of science dismisses these two essential conditions of man’s reality beyond the assumed pale of true knowledge into the discredited limbo of naked and unsupported possibilities.
But it is not till we pass from the method of natural science to its two chief modern results, and take in their revolutionary effect as subsidiaries of method in every field of natural inquiry,—it is not till then that we feel the full force of the pantheistic strain which pulls with such tension in many modern minds. Only in the principle of the Conservation of Energy, and in that of Evolution, particularly as evolution is viewed in its aspect of natural selection, do we get the full force of the pantheistic drift. This drift, at the first encounter, seems almost irresistible. That all the changes in the universe of physical experience are resolvable into motions, either molar or molecular; that in spite of the incalculable variety of these motions, the sum-total of movement and the average direction of the motions is constant and unchangeable;[11] that an unvarying correlation of all the various modes of motion exists, so that each mode is convertible into its correlates at a constant numerical rate, and so that each, having passed the entire circuit of correlated forms, returns again into its own form undiminished in amount: all this seems to point unmistakably to a primal energy — aground-form of moving activity — in itself one and unchangeable, immanent in its sum of correlated forms, but not transcending them, while each instance of each form is only a transient and evanescent mode of this single Reality.
Nor is this inference weakened by the later scholium upon the principle of conservation, known as the principle of the Dissipation of Energy. On the contrary, the pantheistic significance of the principle of conservation seems to be greatly deepened by this. Instead of a constant whole of moving activity, exhibited in a system of correlated modes of motion, we now have a vaster correlation between the sum of actual energies and a vague but prodigious mass of potential energy — the “waste-heap,” as the physicist Balfour Stewart has well named it, of the power of the universe. Into this “waste-heap” all the active energies in the world of sense seem to be continually vanishing, and to be destined at last to vanish utterly. Under the light of this principle of dissipation, we shift from a primal energy immanent but not transcendent to one immanent in the sum of the correlated actual motions and also transcendent of them. Very impressive is the view that here arises of a dread Source of Being that engulfs all beings. It is Brahm again, issuing forth through its triad, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, — creation, preservation, annihilation, — to return at last into its own void, gathering with it the sum of all its transitory modes. And let us not forget that the conceptions out of which this image of the One-and-All is spontaneously generated are the ascertained and settled results of the science of Nature in its exactest empirical form.
When to this powerful impression from the principle of conservation, as modified by that of dissipation, we now add the proper effect of the principle of evolution, the pantheistic inference appears to gather an overpowering weight, in no way to be evaded. As registered in terms of a rigorous empirical method, evolution presents the picture of a cosmic Whole, constituted of varying members descended from its own primitive form by differentiations so slight and gradual as not to suggest difference of origin or distinction in kind, but, on the contrary, to indicate clearly their kinship and community of origin. Still, these differentiations among the members, and the consequent differences in their adaptation to the Whole, involve a difference in their power to persist amid the mutual competition which their common presence in the Whole implies. In this silent and unconscious competition of tendencies to persist, which is called, in a somewhat exaggerated metaphor, the “struggle for existence,” the members of the least adaptation to the Whole must perish earliest, and only those of the highest adaptation will finally survive. Accordingly, by an exaggeration akin to that of the former metaphor, we may, in another, name the resulting persistence of the members most suited to the Whole the “survival of the fittest”; and as it is the Whole that determines the standard of adaptation, we may also, by figuratively personifying the Whole, call the process of antagonistic interaction through which the survivors persist, a process of “natural selection.” Here, now, the points of determining import for inference are these: (1) That the “survival” is only of the fittest to the Whole; (2) that it is the Whole alone that “selects”; (3) that no “survival,” as verifiable by the strictly empirical method, can be taken as permanent, but that even the latest must be reckoned as certified only to date, with a reservation, at best, of “tentative expectancy” for hope of continuance; (4) that “natural selection,” as empirically verified, is a process of cancellation, in the end a selection only to death; and (5) that the Whole alone has the possibility of final survival. The “tentative expectation” founded on the entire sweep of the observed facts, and not extended beyond it, would be that the latest observed survivor — man — is destined like his predecessors to pass away, supplanted by some new variation of the Whole, of a higher fitness to it. And so on, endlessly.
This clear pointing toward the One-and-All that devours all, seems but to gain still further clearness when the principles of conservation and of evolution are considered, as they must be, in their inseparable connexion and interaction. They work in and through each other. Conservation and correlation of energy, and their “rider” of dissipation, are the secret of the mechanism in the process of natural selection, with its deaths and its survivals. Evolution is the field, and its resulting forms of existence, more and more complex, are the outcome, of the operations of the correlated, conserved, and dissipated energies. Evolution, in its turn, by its principle of struggle and survival, works in the very process of the correlation, dissipation, and conservation of energy. It therefore seems but natural to identify the potential energy of correlation — the “waste-heap” of power — with the Whole of natural selection. And thus we appear to reach, by a cumulative argument, the One-and-All in which all must be absorbed.
If we now add to these several indications, given by the method and the two chief results of modern science, the discredit that the principles of conservation and evolution appear to cast directly upon the belief in freedom and immortality, the pantheistic note in modern science will sound out to the full. In the case of free-agency, this discredit comes (1) from the closer nexus that the correlation of forces seems plainly to establish between every possible conscious action and the antecedent or environing chain of events out of which the web of its motives must be woven, and (2) from the pitch and proclivity that, according to the principle of evolution, must be transmitted by the heredity inseparable from the process of descent. In the case of immortality, the discredit comes first by way of the principle of evolution, through its indication of the transitoriness of all survivals, and its irremediable failure to supply any evidence of even a possible survival beyond the sensible world, with which empirical evolution has alone to do. But it comes also by way of the principle of the conservation and dissipation of energy. because of the doom that seems manifestly to await all forms of actual energy. Besides, both immortality and freedom must share in that general discredit of everything unattested by experience which the persistent and exclusive culture of empiricism begets.
In effect, while the empirical method ignores, and must ignore, any supersensible Principle of existence whatever, thus tending to a loose and careless identification of the Absolute with the Sum of Things, evolution and the principle of conservation have familiarised the modern mind with the continuity, the uniformity, and the unity of Nature in an overwhelming degree. In the absence of a conviction upon independent grounds that the Principle of existence is rational and personal, the sciences of Nature can hardly fail, even upon a somewhat considerate and scrutinising view, to convey the impression that the Ground of Things is a vast and shadowy Whole, which moves towards some unknown destination; sweeping forward, as one of the leaders of modern science has said, “regardless of consequences,” unconcerned as to the fate of man’s world of effort and hope, which looks so circumscribed and insignificant when viewed from the outlook of sense only — from the vanishing shore of Time, giving upon the boundless expanses of Space.
VIII
But now we come to the last and closest question: Is this impression of pantheism really warranted? And here we stand in need of sharp discrimination: there is a way of looking at the course of science, the way we have just been examining, that seems to find the warrant asked for; and there is an exacter way which will show that the supposed warrant is only an illusion. With the right discrimination, and using the exacter way, we shall find that the inference to pantheism from the method and principles of science, decided as it seems to be, is after all illegitimate.
Our first precaution in this home-stretch of our inquiry must be to remember that it is not science — not exact and rigorous knowledge — in its entire compass that is involved in our question. It is only “modern science,” popularly so called; that is, science taken to mean only the science of Nature. Not only so, but science is in the new context further restricted to signify only what may rightly be described as the natural science of Nature — so much of the possible knowledge of Nature as can be reached through the channel of the senses critically used; so much, in short, as will yield itself to a method strictly empirical. Hence the real question is. Whether empirical science, confined to Nature as its proper object, can legitimately assert the theory of pantheism?
With regard now, first, to the argument drawn with such apparent force purely from the method of natural science, it will be plain to a more scrutinising reflexion, that shifting from the legitimate disregard of a supersensible Principle — a disregard in which the empirical method is entirely within its right — to the denial or the doubt of it because there is and can be no scientific evidence for it, is in fact an abuse of the scientific method, an unwarrantable extension of it to decisions lying by its own terms beyond its reach. The shift is made upon the assumption that there can be no science — no exact and conclusive knowledge — founded on any but empirical evidence. Now, that there is no science deserving of the name except such as follows the empirical method of natural science is a claim which experts in natural science are rather prone to make; but the profoundest thinkers the world has known — such as Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel — have certainly pronounced the claim unfounded; indeed, a sheer assumption, contradicted by evidence the clearest, if oftentimes abstruse. When instead of blindly following experience we raise the question of the nature and the sources of experience, and push it in earnest, it then appears that the experience which seems so rigorously to exclude supersensible principles, and particularly the personality of the First Principle, is itself dependent for its existence on a personal Principle and on supersensible principles; that, in fact, these enter into the very constitution of experience. But in any case this question of the nature of experience and the limits of knowledge — the question whether the limits of knowledge are identical with the limits of experience — is a question which if we take up, we abandon the field of natural science, and enter instead the field of the theory of cognition. In this, the expert at natural science, as such, has not a word to say. Here his method is altogether unavailing. If the problem can be solved at all, the solution will be by methods that transcend the bounds of empirical evidence. The scientific expert may be competent to the solution in his capacity of man, but in his capacity of man of science he certainly is not.
So again, with regard to the inferences to pantheism from the conservation of energy and the principle of evolution. Strong as the evidence seems, it arises in both cases from violating the strict principles of the scientific method. All inferences to a Whole of potential energy, or to a Whole determinant of the survivals in a struggle for existence, are real inferences — cases of passing beyond the region of sensible and experimental facts into the empirically unknown, empirically unattested, empirically unwarranted region of supersensible principles. The exact scientific truth about all such inferences, and the supposed realities which they establish or displace, is simply that they are not warranted by natural science; and that this withholding of warrant is only the expression by natural science of its incompetency to enter upon such questions.
Natural science must therefore, in truth, be declared silent on this question of pantheism; as indeed it is, and from the nature of the case must be, upon all theories of the supersensible alike — theistic, deistic, atheistic, pantheistic. Natural science has no proper concern with such theories. Science may well enough be said to be non-pantheistic, but so also is it non-theistic, non-deistic, non-atheistic. Its position, however, is not for that reason anti-pantheistic, any more than it is anti-theistic, or anti-deistic, or anti-atheistic. Rather, it is merely agnostic; not in the sense of the dogmatic philosophies of agnosticism, but simply in the sense of declining to affect knowledge in the premises, seeing they are beyond its method and its province. In short, its agnosticism is simply its neutrality, and doesn’t in the least imply that agnosticism is the final view of things. The investigation of the final view, the research concerning the First Principle, science leaves to methods quite other than its own of docile experience and patient reflexion upon experience — methods that philosophy is now prepared to vindicate as higher and still more trustworthy. For the primacy of mind over Nature, the legislative relation of mind to the world, has been found to be the real presupposition of science itself, and the tacit recognition of this truth to be the clue to the first sudden advance of modern science, and to its unparalleled subsequent progress.[12]
Hence, when once the personality of the First Principle is reached in some other way — the way of philosophy as distinguished from that of science — science will then furnish the most abundant confirmations, the strongest corroborations; the more abundant and the stronger, in proportion as the First Principle reached by philosophy ascends continuously from materialism through deism and pantheism to personal theism. For the traits in Nature and in natural science that seem to point to a lower Principle, especially those that look so plausibly toward pantheism, are better explicable by the theistic Principle, when once true theism is reached; and science accords best with this purified theism, though in itself quite unable to attain to the view.
But the theism that science will corroborate, or that thorough philosophy can approve and establish, must be a theism that assumes into its conceptions of God and man all the irrefutable insights of materialism or of deism, and of pantheism most of all. These insights reached on the planes of lower philosophies have an unquestionable reality and pertinence, if also they are marked by undeniable insufficiency. Their insufficiency, when they are seen in the higher light of genuine theism, is indeed so great that they seem by themselves to have hardly any religious import at all. By themselves, they afford the soul neither outward hope nor inward peace. Still, the religious conviction that does make hope and peace secure is not to be attained without their aid. The mind that has never discerned the meaning in these lower levels of thought upon religious problems has not yet entered into the inner meaning of theism, nor seen it in the light where its proofs become transparent.
Notes edit
- ↑ The essay was read at the Concord School of Philosophy, July, 1885. Under the title “Is Modern Science Pantheistic?” it was printed in the Overland Monthly, December, 1885, and reprinted, with some slight changes, in the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. xix, No. 4, nominally for October, 1885, but not issued till the spring of 1886. It formed a member in a “symposium” to which the other contributors were Mr. John Fiske, Dr. F. E. Abbot, Dr. A. P. Peabody, Dr. Edmund Montgomery, and Dr. W. T. Harris. Mr. Fiske has published his contribution in his well-known work, The Idea of God as affected by Modern Knowledge; and Dr. Abbot his, in his volume called Scientific Theism.
- ↑ This apparent assent, en passant, to the expression of theism in terms of immanence is liable to great misinterpretation; but I think it best to leave the statement standing as originally written and printed, and to guard the reader by a warning not to take the word “immanence” literally. Most theories of the divine immanence are unquestionably pantheistic, and all that is meant in the text above is to indicate there may be a way of conceiving immanence which would not be so. But of this further, when we reach the point of settling the distinction between genuine theism and pantheism. See the foot-note on p. 74, below, and the text corresponding. Cf. also pp. 61, 69, and 72.
- ↑ The names of Plato and Aristotle, among the ancients, and of Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel, among the moderns, are omitted from this list because the question of their pantheism is with many still in dispute. As to Plato and Aristotle, of course the dispute is well founded, their position being more or less ambiguous, presenting a struggle between pantheism and individualism; though my own conviction now is that the drift of both is unquestionably pantheistic. At the time of writing the essay (18S5), I still held the opinion that an idealistic monism such as Hegel’s was compatible with moral freedom; the persuasion that theism involves such an immanence of God in souls, more or less pervades the paper in its original form. This explains still more pertinently why I then omitted the names of Spinoza and Fichte from the list. I regarded Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Fichte, and Hegel as forming a single growing but clear tradition of genuine rational theism. I hardly need add, that in getting convinced of the inconsistency of this whole tradition with moral freedom, I have changed my view both of theism and of the relation borne to it by these noted thinkers. I should now list all of the modern names among them as pantheists.
- ↑ “Der pantheistischen Mystik ist wirklich Gott Alles, dem gemeinen Pantheismus ist alles Gott,” — quotes Dr. Martineau from Rothe, very significantly, in the title-page of his Spinoza.
- ↑ There might be added here, in connexion with acosmic pantheism, a third hypothesis — that, namely, of the simple “parallelism” or concomitance of the two attributes, extension and thought. This third hypothesis would land us either (1) in agnosticism, as with Spencer, or (2) in “absolute” idealism, as with Hegel, — in the Idee as the transcending synthesis of objective and subjective idealism. We should thus get two additional species of non-atheistic pantheism. [The real effect of the preceding note is doubtless a criticism of the twofold division in the text. The fact is, this division is a relic of the Hegelian monism by which the original paper was in one side pervaded; but let it remain standing, — in part as a piacular memorial! The exclusion of “absolute” idealism from the list of pantheisms meant the tacit assumption that it had transcended pantheism. But see foot-note to p. 74 below.]
- ↑ Falsely called “anthropomorphic,” since the properly human form of being is the rational, not the physiological, and the faulty “anthropomorphism” of which nowadays we hear so much complaint, consists exactly in construing the nature and action of God in terms of our sensuous life and its conditions.
- ↑ I must be understood here as reflecting only upon the popular thaumaturgical conceptions of the supernatural. The genuine doctrine of miracle has a speculative truth at its basis, profound and irrefragable: namely, that the causal organisation of Nature — the system of evolution, ever ascending from cause to differing effect — can never be accounted for in terms of the sensible antecedents alone, but requires the omnipresent activity of a transcendingly immanent personal cause; and that the system of Nature is therefore in this sense a Perpetual Miracle. But the natural order flowing from this Intelligible Miracle is immutable, and irreconcilable with “miracle” in the usual sense. [I would now add (1899) that this immanent personal cause is, at closest hand to Nature, human nature; or, more generally, the intelligences other than God, in coöperation with the remoter and quite indirect causality of God as their Type and Ideal. The operation of the non-divine causation in Nature is alone direct and efficient; the divine causation is indirect and final only. But see, for the fuller account of this, the essays on “The Limits of Evolution” and “The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom.”]
- ↑ The preceding paragraphs have been much rewritten from the form in which they were (1885-6) originally printed, in order to remove the risk of misinterpretation in regard to the doctrine of "immanence." Cf. the foot-note to p. 60. See also The Conception of God, pp. 97-100, 114-132, especially 131-132.
- ↑ For some detailed illustrations of this, especially with reference to “absolute” idealism and evolutional idealism, see The Conception of God, pp. 89-127.
- ↑ The account here given of scientific method may appear to some readers different from that presented in the essay on “The Limits of Evolution” (see pp. 33-36). There is no real inconsistency between the two, however. Here, I am stating the method of science strictly as such — stating it as the scientific expert uses it and states it to himself. In the former place, I was stating the philosophy of the method — bringing out its real presuppositions. I was representing the method, not simply with reference to its practical objects, not purely as a means to a result in science, but as a step in the theory of knowledge, a link in the chain not of science but of philosophy. Nor does the above-mentioned holding-back of science from necessity in its judgments mean anything but its just recognition of the unavoidable insecurity of its basis of fact.
- ↑ The principle of conservation is very commonly stated as the invariability of the sum-total of vis viva in the world, and is expressed in the formula ½mv2 = constant. But the statement in the text, which returns to the formula of Leibnitz, is more comprehensive as well as more philosophic, and is for these reasons preferred by some of the latest physicists.
- ↑ The epochal sentences of Kant, in his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, have been more than verified by the century of science and philosophy that has passed since they first saw the day: “When Galilei made his balls roll down the inclined plane with a gravitation selected by himself, or Torricelli had the air support a weight which he had previously taken equal to a known column of water, or Stahl later converted metals into lime, and this into metal again, by withdrawing something and then putting it back, a light dawned on all investigators of Nature. They comprehended that Reason only sees into what she herself produces after her own design; that with her principles of judgment according to invariable laws, she must take the lead, and compel Nature to answer her questions, not let herself be merely taught by Nature to walk, as if in leading-strings; for otherwise she would be left to observations only casual, and these, made on no plan designed beforehand, do not at all connect in a necessary law, which yet is what Reason seeks and must have. With her principles in one hand, solely by accord with which can agreements among phenomena get the value of laws, and with experiment in the other, which she has devised according to them. Reason must approach Nature, to learn from her, indeed, but not in the quality of a pupil, who submits to be prompted as the teacher pleases; on the contrary, in the quality of an invested judge, who compels the witnesses to reply to questions which he puts to them himself,” — The Critique of Pure Reason, edition of 1787, pp. xii, xiii.