"
In his essay on Diderot,1 Carlyle shows that his mechanical materialism was the natural outcome of his barren logical in tellect, but that two consequences of some value have followed from it : First, that all speculations of the sort we call Natural Theology are unproductive, since of final causes nothing can be proved, they being known only by the higher light of intuition ; secondly, that the hypothesis of the universe being a machine, and of " an Architect who constructed sitting as
were apart, and guiding and seeing go, may turn out an inanity and nonentity"; that "that faint possible Theism,' which now forms our common English creed," which seeks God here and there, and not there where alone He to be found -- inwardly, in our own soul, -- that this Theism cannot be too soon swept out of the world.
In his essay on Diderot,1 Carlyle shows that his mechanical materialism was the natural outcome of his barren logical in tellect, but that two consequences of some value have followed from it : First, that all speculations of the sort we call Natural Theology are unproductive, since of final causes nothing can be proved, they being known only by the higher light of intuition ; secondly, that the hypothesis of the universe being a machine, and of " an Architect who constructed sitting as
were apart, and guiding and seeing go, may turn out an inanity and nonentity"; that "that faint possible Theism,' which now forms our common English creed," which seeks God here and there, and not there where alone He to be found -- inwardly, in our own soul, -- that this Theism cannot be too soon swept out of the world.
Pleiderer - Development of Theology in Germany since Kant
"
Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical side of
the empirical philosophy of the period, also played a pro minent part in orthodox belief; either on the ground of the tangible use of the doctrines of the Church in promoting social order, or with a view to the transcendental benefits implied in the divine reward of virtue. In contrast with this unemotional and rational faith of the upper classes, satis faction for the religious needs of the lower classes was sought for in a quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after the manner of Methodism. But in this " Evangelical party " quickened religious feeling and zealous philanthropic effort were so much cut off from any living relation to the thought of the age and to theological inquiry, that any influence from this quarter upon the theology of the Church was not more, in fact still less, possible than was the case with the older
German Pietism. To bring new life and movement into theology, a complete revolution in the minds of men was needed. This followed in England from causes similar to those which had produced a like result in Germany ; and in part the revolution was due to the direct influence of idealism as it had sprung from German Romanticism.
? ? ? ? 304 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Hit. IV.
The ultimate and profoundest source of this mental revolu
tion, which, at the beginning of the century, spread through all cultured nations, must be sought in the nature of man.
After the cold understanding had in the eighteenth century exercised despotic sway, starving the emotions and fettering the phantasy, these wronged sides of our nature once more claimed their rights, and rebelled against the despotism of the understanding with an imperious violence which was as tyrannical and exclusive as that of the understanding had been. " A return to nature and natural emotions," was now everywhere the watchword, and Rousseau became the prophet of the new age. The cry found its echo in the " storm and stress" spirits of belles lettres: Herder and Goethe were its heralds in Germany, Wordsworth and Shelley in
English poetry. Emotion, entering into loving sympathy with Nature, could no longer behold in her the dead mechan ism to which sensualistic philosophy had degraded her ; the machine, which had been robbed of its divinity, was once again transformed into the living garment of God. But
Nature owed her reanimation to the soul of man, which had taken possession of her. It was therefore impossible that men should go no further than external Nature : they turned
their gaze upon their own nature, and sought in the depths of the feeling heart, in its unconscious surmisings and un utterable sighs, the presence of a divine spirit, the witness of our kinship to God. Thus from the Gospel of Nature of
Rousseau sprang the philosophical idealism of Kant and of Fichte, and the religious pantheism of Herder and Novalis. In like manner, in the case of Wordsworth, the poetic love of Nature became a devoted self-surrender to the God whose rule we recognise within not less than around us. If the standpoint which was thus reached was still only the sub
jectivism of the eighteenth century, the events of history were, at the same time, bringing about an important advance.
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature had been marked by an anti-social and anti-historical tendency ; its aim had been the emancipation of the self-sufficient individual from the limita tions of an outlived order of society. At first it was every where taken up in this sense. In Germany the " schone Seelen " greeted with enthusiasm the French Revolution, and in his Robbers, Schiller depicted the Titanic endeavour of the individual, in the fresh consciousness of its strength,
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
305
to break up the old order of the world and to construct a new one to its own mind. In the same spirit the youthful Coleridge wrote poems breathing sympathy with revolutionary democracy, and, with Southey, planned a " grand scheme of Pantisocracy," a Utopian commonwealth of liberty and equality, to be established in America. Out of this intoxica tion of individualism the idealists of Europe were rudely awakened by the thunder of the cannon of Bonaparte. As the social system of Europe collapsed like a house of cards under the hand of the new Caesar, was made clear whither the principle of selfish individualism, which breaks up society into helpless atoms, inevitably conducts. When appeared that the separate nations were to be broken up and converted into the one empire of the Caesar, the national spirit every
where rose up against the foreign tyranny, patriotic feeling, which distinguishes in such a marked manner the nineteenth from the eighteenth century, was aroused from its slumbers. And as the nations became conscious of their own peculiar characteristics and rights, they once more called to remem brance their own past history. With admiring love they
? manhood, and discovered, precisely in those epochs which Rationalism
recurred to the period of their youth and early
in its ingratitude and want of insight had despised, stores of national strength, virtue, and honour, forming a humiliating contrast to the weakness and disgrace of their own time. Thus the enthusiasts of individual freedom were transformed into the patriotic champions of national liberty the anti- Napoleonic wars, and out of poetic Romanticism sprang the
Tiigendbund of young Germany, based upon an earnest sense of duty and patriotic devotion. The Kantian imperative of the subjective reason was enlarged and deepened, the philosophy of Hegel, into the consciousness of the dependence of the individual on the rationality of history as realised in the State. The true freedom, which alone worthy of man, was now seen to consist, not in opposition to the commonwealth, but in unselfish devotion to not in defiance of the State, but in subordination to as loyal citizens, and securing individual, by labouring for universal ends. Precisely the same transformation was effected in England. Whilst young men hailed enthusiastically the French Revolution, when seemed that "temple and tower were to fall to the ground"
before its trumpet-blast of " natural rights," Burke raised his g. t.
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? 306 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
voice, as " one crying in the wilderness," against the delusion of the individualistic idea of freedom, and pointed out the unreasonableness of the endeavour to separate the individual from the nation, to which he owes his existence, or from society and its historical arrangements, to which really all human culture is due. What Burke's eloquence failed to effect, the course of history brought about. Under the pressure of a " Continental System " and the wars of Napoleon, English national feeling was aroused, the poets of Nature and Free
dom became the heralds of patriotic love, of an admiring piety towards the history of the past, which Sir Walter Scott's genius restored to new life in the hearts of his contemporaries by poetic idealisation.
But in the history of Christian nations, the Church, with her institutions, customs, and doctrines, plays such an essential part, that their inner and outer life could not be at all understood without the consideration of this factor. It was natural, therefore, that the newly awakened interest in the history of the past generally should quicken also the appreciation of the history of the Church, and therewith of the positive and traditional elements in the faith and customs of the nations. In those things which had been an offence to the critical understanding of the eighteenth century, there was now discovered, by the new historical sense, suggestive symbolism, fine human feeling, natural poetry, and prophetic truth ; in short, so much nourishment for the famishing soul and the thirsty fancy, that the sons began to revere deeply what the fathers had thrown aside as worthless
Thus, from the same Romanticism which had begun with
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, sprang at last the revival 01 religious and ecclesiastical taste and feeling. Rousseau was
by
Newman and Pusey, in England.
In order to last, and to influence the life of a nation from
various sides, a new mode of feeling always requires a new mode of thought as its accompaniment, with new ideas and associations of ideas as its vehicle and support, In Germany this want was met in the idealistic philosophy founded by Kant, which in all its various developments had this in common, that it connected man with the higher world of
? followed by Chateaubriand and the Italian Manzoni ; Schleiermacher and Neander, and the Catholic convert Schlegel, in Germany ; and by Coleridge, and John Henry
superstition.
? ? ? Ch. I. ] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 307
and set before him conscious devotion to it as the
spirit,
object of his own perfection. In England, however, no such philosophy as this existed. For the philosophy of Locke was, in reality, in its popular form, the formal expression of that barren view of things which binds man to the world of the senses as the sole reality, makes the individual complete in himself, and prescribes as his highest end the pursuit of his own advantage ; which was therefore precisely that view of things which the new and more profound poetry and religious and historical Romanticism indignantly repudiated. Under
these circumstances it was very natural that the originators of this new mode of feeling in England should seek their weapons of defence and attack in German philosophy. We shall see as we proceed in what various ways this philosophy affected the most thoughtful minds in England. Yet it re mained, after all, but a foreign growth on English soil. So true is it that a philosophy is able to exercise a determining influence upon the ecclesiastical and theological thought of a nation only when it has penetrated it so profoundly as to determine the popular philosophy of the educated classes concerned. As regards the idealistic philosophy of Germany, no such reception of it was possible in England. On the other hand, the English philosophy of the past could no longer satisfy the requirements of the new poetic and religious feeling. The revived religious consciousness accordingly failed to find the indispensable intellectual basis and regulative principles, without which it could not develop into definite theological teaching, or guide the development of the mind of the Churches in harmony with the general thought of the nation and the age. It seems to me that we have here the
of the remarkable fact that the Church life of England, until within the last decade, has remained almost completely untouched by the vast progress of the scientific thought of the educated classes, and that wherever the two come into contact, such a violent collision is the consequence that popular feeling is shocked, and not a few despair of the possibility of any mutual understanding. It is true that latterly this tension has been somewhat relaxed, and just now signs are not wanting of the rise of a new philosophical view
of the world suited to the British genius, under the auspices
of which a reconciliation of the Church and the world, of \ theology and science, may be hoped for.
? explanation
? ? ? 308 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1S25. [Bk. IV.
I propose, in the first instance, to offer a review of the various philosophical schools in their relation to religion and
This review must commence with the idealism of Coleridge and Carlyle, which was so greatly influenced by German philosophy. This idealism is met by the reaction of the empirical philosophy of Mill and the critical philosophy of Hamilton, connected with which is an agnosticism in vari ous forms. There follows then an evolutionary philosophy, with more of systematic completeness, and in two forms : first, realistic, with an agnostic basis, represented by Herbert
Spencer; second, idealistic, represented by the Neo-Hege lians, Caird and Green, with whom are connected, finally, the
living representatives of speculative theism.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a true representative of Romanticism with all its bright and dark sides. He was a man of wide culture, of fine sensibility, of vivid imagination, of ready intellect ; but as a thinker his efforts were spasmodic
and fragmentary, lacking steadiness, consistency, and thorough ness ; and he displayed a surprising want of moral strength. As a young man he was an enthusiastic worshipper of Nature and Freedom ; afterwards, when sobered down under the in
fluence of personal and historical experiences, he sought in German philosophy consolation for the shipwreck of the ideals of his youth. He studied Lessing and Kant, Jacobi and Schelling ; and by the aid of philosophical idealism he recon ciled himself to the faith of the Church, from which he had been totally estranged. Yet the reconciliation was in such a form that he no longer based his faith upon supernatural au thority, but upon the ideal constitution of the human mind itself, regarding Christianity as the perfection of human rea son. With Herder and Schleiermacher, Coleridge maintained that Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life and a living process, that the proof of it therefore must consist in the inner personal experience of that life. While he thus related himself to the supernaturalism of the orthodox party of that time by going over to the side of the Evangelicals (the Pietists
of England), on the other hand he departed from the latter
in that he regarded Christianity not as something absolutely supernatural in antithesis to the human, as the germs of it lie in the nature of man himself and are brought to their
perfection by Christianity ; for which reason the truth of Chris
theology.
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
309
tianity can never contradict reason when properly understood. Coleridge expounded these views in his Aids to Reflection (1825), not, true, in a systematic form, but in suggestive aphorisms and explanatory examples, which should serve to arouse independent reflection the direction indicated.
Coleridge attached the greatest importance to the distinc tion, taken from Kant's Critique, between the " understand ing," as " the faculty judging according to sense," and the " reason," as the faculty of " universal and necessary truths. "
He further distinguishes the speculative from the practical reason, the former as applied to formal or abstract truth, the latter as applied to actual or moral truth, as the fountain of ideas and the light of the conscience. While he thus far apparently quite in agreement with Kant, Coleridge ascribes nevertheless to the practical reason a meaning which passes beyond the moral sphere like Jacobi he describes as the feeling or instinct of supersensible truths, or, with Schelling, as an intellectual intuition of spiritual objects. Whilst the
? confined to the world of the senses, and can
understanding
accordingly pronounce only conditional judgments, the reason
the source of unconditional and necessary judgments, the intelligible spiritual nature of man, which one with the Divine Spirit. From overlooking this distinction and from the illegitimate application of the understanding to supersen sible objects, arises "unbelief or misbelief. " "Wherever the forms of reasoning appropriate only to the natural world are applied to spiritual realities, the more strictly logical the reasoning in all its parts, the more irrational as a whole" -- Propositions such as these, to which the parallels may be found here and there German Romanticism and speculative philosophy, have a certain meaning as a protest against a shallow and negative Rationalism, but they betray none the less a questionable inclination to suppress intelligent criticism religious questions. Nor did Coleridge altogether escape this danger, although he had the good sense to acknow ledge the logical understanding as a negative canon in re ligious questions, since absolutely inconceivable propositions cannot be true. only the positive proof of the truths of
faith which must not be derived from theoretical argumentation, but from the moral and spiritual nature of man.
as Coleridge well observes, the peculiarity of Chris tianity that, unlike philosophy, does not seek by workings
religious
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upon the intellect to elevate the character, but its first step is to cleanse the heart and afterwards to restore the intellect like wise to its natural clearness. If the effects were not propor tionate to the Divine wisdom of the method, it was because " the doctors of the Church forgot that the heart, the moral na ture, was the beginning and the end. " " This was the true and first apostasy, when in council and synod the Divine Humani ties of the Gospel gave way to speculative systems, and religion became a science of shadows under the name of theology, or at best a bare skeleton of truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. "
Coleridge illustrated his view of Christianity in its applica tion to selected doctrines --original sin, redemption, baptism,
inspiration. In doing this he everywhere seeks so far to rationalise the dogma as to surrender its scholastic husk while preserving its religious and moral kernel. The affinity of his theology with Schleiermacher's, especially as represented by the conservative wing of Schleiermacher's school, strikes the student at once. The dogma of " original sin " is made to mean that sin as spiritual evil is a condition of the will, which is the ground and cause of all sins, that it was not inherited from without, but is the act of the will itself, and so " self- originated. " This is certainly much more a Kantian than Biblical or ecclesiastical doctrine. I n complete agreement with Kant, Coleridge says "that in respect of original sin, every
man is the adequate representative of all men," and that the first man in time, the Adam of Genesis, is only the type of t he race. Hence all statements as to the perfection of man in Paradise must be cast aside as phantastic and valueless. With regard to the doctrine of redemption, according to Coleridge, the cause of redemption is not so much the death
of Christ as the incarnation of the Creative Word in the per son of Christ. This manifestation of the Divine in the human life, labours, and death of the Saviour produces, as its effect, our transformation from fleshly to spiritual men, and, as further consequences, our progressive sanctification by the Word and the Spirit. But the various forms of expression which are used by the apostles to set forth the actual consequences of the act of redemption show by their diversity that they ought to be taken as metaphors only, borrowed in part from Jewish theology and in part from the opinions prevalent amongst
the readers and opponents of the apostles.
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
Specially interesting and instructive Coleridge's essay, entitled, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, published after his death (1840), which he assails the dogmatic theory of the inspiration of the Scriptures with very rational arguments, while adhering tenaciously to his conviction of their incom parable religious and moral value. He shows admirably that the Biblical writers themselves lay no claim to the verbal in spiration of their writings, and that this doctrine, really bor rowed from the Jewish Rabbis, must therefore be regarded as an unscriptural superstition. He goes further, and asks, " How can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions," such as all human words and sen tences must be Moreover, we should gain nothing by such an unnatural supposition, but on the contrary be simply losers.
For all the heart-awakening utterances of human hearts, such as we find in the Bible, were nothing more than " a Divina Commedia of superhuman ventriloquist"; the
? sweet Psalmist of Israel were himself as mere an instrument of the inspiring Spirit as his harp, an automaton poet, all sym pathy and all example would be gone, and we could listen to his words only fear and perplexity. The Bible undeni ably " the appointed conservatory, an indispensable criterion, and continual source and support of true belief; but we must not confound this with the statements--that the Bible the sole source, and that not only contains but constitutes the Christian religion, that in short creed consisting wholly of articles of faith and that consequently we need no rule, help, or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what parts are and what are not articles of faith. " As the Church herself has admitted as a canon--that each part of Scrip ture must be interpreted by the spirit of the whole, has thereby practically granted " that the spirit of the Bible, and not the detached words and sentences, that infallible and absolute. " We see that the view of the Bible -- at once free and reverent -- of Lessing, Herder, and Schleier- macher, which Coleridge commends to his countrymen. We shall find in the next chapter, the case of the representa tives of the Broad Church party, that though this view has met with opposition in the English Church,
its way there to considerable extent. Thomas Carlyle spent his early youth
simplest conditions of country life, as the eldest son of
has gradually made
yr the midst of the
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? 312 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1 825. [Bk. IV.
Scotch mason, in a family in which a plain and serious Puri tanical piety held sway. These impressions of his childhood engraved themselves so deeply on his heart that they con tinued powerfully to influence him after he had given up the dogmas of the Church. From the bright inquisitive intellect of the youth, who sought for truth at any price, the defects of the traditional arguments in support of orthodox dogmas could not long remain concealed, and an eager study of the works of Gibbon and Hume, to which he devoted himself during his university course in Edinburgh, added all that was needed to make him a decided sceptic. But he could not rest satisfied in mere negation. He was profoundly unhappy when, under the influence of Hume's philosophy, the God of the orthodox faith could no longer be believed in, or had be come the unconcerned absentee spectator of a mechanically rotating universe, and when the idea of duty had also seemed to change from a Divine messenger and guide to a false earthly phantasm, made up of desire and fear. But his profound love of truth and sense of duty formed the rock on which the waves of doubt broke. Whilst his intellect, beclouded with sceptical and pessimistic horrors, pictured to him the world as the sport of chance and the work of the devil, his moral con sciousness attained to the certainty of the indestructible freedom of the soul as the lord of the world. With this the " Everlasting Yea " obtained the conquest over the "Ever
lasting No. " It was the repetition in an individual of the same process as had been passed through in German philo sophy a generation earlier ; when the world of orthodox be lief, destroyed by the criticism of the understanding, was reconstructed from the subjective resources of man as a moral and rational being ; when the moral self-consciousness ex panded into the ideal world of the great German thinkers and poets.
And it was not in Carlyle's case merely a similar process
of development, but it took place in direct dependence on German thought. In the critical period of his life he occu pied himself closely with the writings of Goethe and Schiller,
Paul and Novalis ; translations from their works were
his earliest literary efforts. To Goethe especially he felt
himself under great obligations. From the many fine things
which he has written upon Goethe, the following passage, as especially characteristic of Carlyle himself, may be quoted
? Jean
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
here " He who would learn to reconcile reverence with clearness to deny and defy what false, yet believe and worship what true amid raging factions, bent on what either altogether empty or has substance in only for day, which stormfully convulse and tear hither and thither dis tracted expiring system of society, to adjust himself aright and working for the world and in the world, keep himself unspotted from the world -- let him look here. This man (Goethe), we may say, became morally great, by being his own age, what some other ages many might have been, a
what false, and yet to believe and worship what true " --this in fact an admirable summary of Carlyle's own character and labours. A believer, in the sense of orthodox theology, he never became, but always expressed most un reservedly his poor opinion of at times indeed with a vehe mence which might surprise one the case of an historian who showed on other occasions such loving sympathy with antiquity, did we not remember that the orthodox system does not yet belong to ancient history, but still power in the world, often making itself felt as retarding fetter to minds that are striving after truth and clearness for themselves and others. not any want of religion, not frivolous scepti cism, but rather good piece of old Scotch Puritanism, combined with modern ethical idealism, which makes him ruthlessly indignant at every form of religious cant, at all
genuine man. "
'? To reconcile reverence with clearness, to deny and defy
? ecclesiasticism that has become external form and convention. Yet what almost more repulsive and hateful to him than the latter are the empty and windy negations of frivolous scepticism, atheism, and materialism. In one of his masterly characterisations of the present age (to be compared with Fichte's discourses on the Grundziige des gegenwdrtigen Zeit-
alters) he says " The fever of scepticism must needs burn itself out, and burn out thereby the impurities that caused then again will there be clearness, health. The principle of life which now struggles painfully the outer, thin and barren domain of the Conscious or Mechanical, may then withdraw into its inner sanctuaries, its abysses of mystery and miracle
Miscellanies, vol. iv. p. 49 (Popular Edition, 1872).
Ibid. , vol. iv.
35.
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withdraw deeper than ever into that domain of the Uncon scious, by nature infinite and inexhaustible ; and creatively work there. From that mystic region, and from that alone, all wonders, all poesies, and religions and social systems have proceeded ; the like wonders, and greater and higher, lie slumbering there ; and, brooded on by the spirit of the waters, will evolve themselves, and rise like exhalations from the deep.
"
In his essay on Diderot,1 Carlyle shows that his mechanical materialism was the natural outcome of his barren logical in tellect, but that two consequences of some value have followed from it : First, that all speculations of the sort we call Natural Theology are unproductive, since of final causes nothing can be proved, they being known only by the higher light of intuition ; secondly, that the hypothesis of the universe being a machine, and of " an Architect who constructed sitting as
were apart, and guiding and seeing go, may turn out an inanity and nonentity"; that "that faint possible Theism,' which now forms our common English creed," which seeks God here and there, and not there where alone He to be found -- inwardly, in our own soul, -- that this Theism cannot be too soon swept out of the world. To the individual who with hysterical violence theoretically asserts a God who mere distant simulacrum, Carlyle exclaims, " Fool God not only there, but here, or nowhere, in that life-breath of thine, in that act and thought of thine,--and thou wert wise to look to it. "2 " Whosoever, in one way or another, recognises not that Divine Idea of the World, which lies at the bottom of appearances,' can rightly interpret no appearance and what soever spiritual thing he does, must do partially, do falsely. " With the theoretical perversities of the mere logical understanding, which makes of the universe a dead mechanism, go hand in hand the moral and spiritual perversities of selfish utilitarianism. This blind pursuit of pleasure, which will have God's infinite Universe altogether to itself, and therefore necessarily remains for ever deceived and dissatisfied, the root of all evil. For this reason sorrow so good and needful to man, that teaches him that happiness not his highest end and good, but rather, as Goethe maintains, life really be gins with self-renunciation. " Love not pleasure, but love God!
Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 49 sq. Ibid. , 51. Ibid. , 52.
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? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
315
This the Everlasting Yea,' wherein all contradiction solved wherein whoso walks and works, well with him. "
This brief the Weltanschauung of Carlyle, an ethical idealism after the manner of Fichte, Herder, and Goethe.
undoubtedly not " Theism " as commonly understood, but as little an abstract and systematic " Pantheism. " Carlyle hated all such formulae, and the endless controversies about them. With him the essential thing was to feel God in one's own soul as a living reality, to behold reverently his
rule in the world of nature and history, and from this feeling and vision to labour for the good and true in unselfish devo tion. For himself he did not require a more definite formu lation of his philosophic view of things, and declined as an impediment. But he was too good an historian not to know that the clothing of tangible symbols necessary to make ideal truth the faith of an historical community. The forms of ecclesiastical creeds and life are, like institutions of the State, the "clothes" of the idea without such clothes and historical vestures, Carlyle expressly maintains, society has never existed, and never can exist. 2 But, he forcibly remarks, that with these spiritual as with our bodily clothes --we always need them, but cannot always have the same. Time, which adds much to the sacredness of symbols, at length desecrates them again. Symbols also wax old, as everything in the world has its rise, its culmination, and its decline. As in the past new prophets
have always arisen at the right moment, who as God-inspired poets created new symbols, so will be in the future also. " Meanwhile, we account him Legislator and wise who can so much as tell when a symbol has grown old, and gently
remove it. "3
Carlyle has nowhere expounded connectedly his view of the
nature and development of religion (and we must remember
? that he was really not a philosopher, but an historian), but his ideas thereon may be gathered from various passages of his
writings, forming an inwardly connected whole. Religion-- we may thus summarise his opinion -- to be found in every man as part of his spiritual constitution, as a God-given faculty,
enabling him to apprehend intuitively the Divine in the world and in human life, and to worship reverent obedience. But the constitutional endowment becomes an actual living
Sartor Resartus, 133. Ibid. , 149. Ibid. , 155.
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? 3 16 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
power in historical society only ; and there only by the instru
mentality of those leading minds which as seers and prophets
apprehend in clear thought, and reveal in intelligible speech what slumbers unconsciously in the souls of all. Their word brings to consciousness the truth which was previously unper- ceived, although longed for and dimly surmised, which lay in the depths of the soul, and which is then incorporated in the symbols of religious societies. These symbols are the indis pensable means of presenting to men's minds in an intelligible and realisable form the Divine and Eternal, which is itself a nameless and unutterable mystery. For this reason they are the sacred bond binding souls together, tokens, signs, stand ards, and garments of the Eternal and Divine, acknowledged by multitudes in common. Yet they are not themselves the
Eternal and Divine, and, as having arisen in time, they have only limited duration. Waxing old with the progress of time,
they lose the intelligible meaning which they had at the begin ning, and then become empty masks, delusive simulacra, and hindrances of the truth and religion. It is then time to re move them cautiously, and to supply their place with new symbols from the perennial source of truth --the depths of the unconscious, intuitive spirit. But the time of transition, when the old is no more understood and received, and the new has
not yet been generally recognised and acknowledged, is a time of difficulty and trouble. Doubt and denial then prevail ; the cold understanding thrusts its barren logic into the place of creative genius ; science, history, the universe are made mechanical ; and only a few profounder minds perceive be neath the surface of chaos the signs of a new world of order, in which reverence shall be combined with clearness. Such a prophet of a nobler future Carlyle saw in Goethe, in the midst of this desert age of the barren understanding. And we may add that Carlyle was himself such a seer, who beheld prophetically, in the light of eternal ideas, not the past only, but also the future courses and destinations of human history,
and illuminated them with his inspiration.
It is well known and intelligible enough that Carlyle stood
very much alone with such views amongst his fellow-country men, --the Conservatives regarding him as a dangerous Radical, and the Liberals as a reactionary. It therefore, the more noteworthy that in the middle of the century few more men are found, who, like Carlyle, and to some extent influenced
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? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
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by him, sought to combine the severest criticism of the tradi tional belief of the Churches with genuine and profound piety and moral earnestness. 1 Chief amongst these was Franc1s W1ll1am Newman, younger brother of John Henry Newman, who will come under our notice in the next chapter, to whom he was in no degree inferior in point of delicacy and religious feeling, and far superior in depth and clearness of thought and moral courage, although English society has per sistently placed the daring heretic, whose free thought was inconvenient, below the socially distinguished and dignified ecclesiastic with his polished style. In the book, Phases of Faith (1850), Francis Newman, following his own religious development, --really typical case for our age, --describes the process by which a truth-loving mind compelled by the logic of facts to resign one position after another in the authoritative creeds. It not a priori presuppositions, not considerations of the undevout understanding, not speculative theories, that shake the foundations of his inherited belief;
simply the application of the intellect to the examination of the received authorities, resulting in the conviction of their insufficiency, and human and historical conditionality, and accordingly of their want of divine authority, and of their unfitness to serve as the firm ultimate bases of belief. Thus, in the first instance, the orthodox creed examined by the test to which itself appeals -- the Scriptures, and found not to accord with them, and to be therefore unsatisfactory. The examination then carried further the Bible itself sub mitted to the parallel narratives are compared (e. g. in the Gospels and the historical books of the Old
and are found not to agree then one doctrine compared with another (e. g. , predestination and eternal torments with the goodness and mercy of God), and here, again, irreconcil able contradictions are presented finally, notions of the Bible are compared with undoubted facts of science (e. g. of astro nomy, geology, human history), and once again the fallibility of Scripture has to be acknowledged. with the Unitarians of that generation, the attempt was made to fall back-from the teaching of the Bible as a whole upon the teaching of Jesus, as the final and sure authority, could not be made out his
One of these was William Rathbone Greg, the author of The Creed of
? Christendom,
1851.
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torically, from the traditions, what the teaching of Jesus cer tainly was ; all such attempts show ever afresh that it is a self-destructive contradiction to seek to base an authoritative system upon free critical inquiry. When the great primary questions of religion are proposed, there are only two solutions possible : either we follow the inward law of the reason and conscience and disregard the external law of authority, or vice versa. The middle course of orthodox Protestantism, which requires on the one hand the submission of the proud reason to the infallible authority of the " Word of God," and on the other hand appeals from the authority of the Church to the right of the individual "conscience" (which must mean the reason), is illogical and contradictory ; and the sense of this sends many to Rome.
This position of Newman's is undoubtedly logically impreg nable, but in his statement of it he has overlooked an essential point. The education of reason and conscience, by which the individual is fitted to form true judgments, is the result of the historical development of humanity, and cannot therefore be separated therefrom, but must always seek from thence instruction and guidance. From this point of view the anti thesis of inward and outward authority becomes less absolute than Newman makes being the constant interaction of his torical universality and individual spontaneity. -- The closing remarks of Newman's are excellent Religion was created by the inward instinct of the soul, its longing for the sympathy of God with and for fellowship with him. But had after wards to be purified and chastened by the sceptical under standing the co-operation of these two powers essential for its perfection. While religious persons dread critical and searching thought, and critics despise instinctive religion, each side of man remains imperfect and curtailed. Surely the age ripe for a religion which shall combine the tenderness, humility, and disinterestedness that are the glory of the purest Chris tianity, with that activity of intellect, untiring pursuit of truth, and strict adherence to impartial principle which the schools of modern science embody.
Newman has sketched an ideal picture of Christianity thus chastened and combined with the knowledge of the present day, in the two short but valuable essays, The Soul, its Sorrows and its Aspirations an Essay towards the Natural History the Soul as the true Basis of Theology (18 49, 3rd ed. , 1852),
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? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
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and Theism, Doctrinal and Practical (1858). profound and genuine piety breathes through both of these books, combined with clear and sound thought, which places in bright light the fundamental religious problems, and seeks their solution
in the depths of personal consciousness, and also the wider region of the consciousness of humanity as reflected in history. As confessions of devout thinker (akin to St. Augustine's Confessions), they form a true book of devotion for thoughtful
religious readers. The comparison with Schleiermacher's Reden also obvious; but cannot be denied that Newman's idea of the nature of religion has this superiority over that of the Reden, that based upon a truer psychology, and the
mysticism involved in less aesthetical than ethical, and consequently the conception of God in Newman's essays more Christian than Spinozistic.
The empirical philosophy of the 18th century was handed on and attained to new significance in the two Mills, father and son. Following Hume and Hartley, James Mill, in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), had traced all our intellectual and moral judgments to the associa tion of ideas, which consequence of frequent occurrence together become constantly connected. This doctrine of the association of ideas forms also the basis of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, though does not there retain the logical
? which has the father's system. In re-edit ing his father's book, the son added notes in explanation and correction which amount to an abandonment of the funda mental principle of this philosophy. But as he sought nevertheless tenaciously to cling to remarkable inconsis tencies and uncertainties found their way into his doctrine, both on its theoretical and its practical side.
According to S. Mill we have knowledge of our sensa tions and ideas only, but neither of an object external to us nor of a subject as the basis of those feelings. Things are only the permanent possibilities of sensation, and mind only a series of feelings with a background of the possibility of feeling. Having had his attention called by Hamilton to the fact that an association of ideas possible only by comparison of similar sensations, that comparison involves remembrance, and remembrance possible only by virtue of the identity of the ego as existing throughout the series of different feelings,
Mill extended his definition of mind by the addition, that
thoroughness
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is "a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and
future. " That this is a paradox, an inexplicable puzzle, he himself admitted, without on that account, however, amending the erroneous idea of the mind with which he had set out, and to which alone the puzzle is to be ascribed. He likewise admitted that the phenomenon of memory is a puzzle which his psychology is unable to solve, as no explanation of it can be assigned which does not involve belief in the identity of the ego, which is the thing to be accounted for. Under the pres sure of this difficulty he wavers between such indefinite descriptions as"an inexplicable "link of sensations" or "thread of consciousness and the supposition of a real permanent element which is different from everything else, and can only be spoken of as the ego. But he is far from making any actual use of this as an original active principle. --Nor do our sensations reveal any more the reality of external objects than of the ego. Things, bodies, are simply groups of sensations, which arise
to the law of causality, which, however, is the law of subjective association. The theory gives no explanation of the source whence these groups come, or of how they can affect each other, of how it comes about that we associate with the perception of certain moving bodies the idea of persons external to ourselves. -- Cause is the name simply of the regu lar recurring connexion in experience of certain sensations ; when we speak of the " law of causality," we mean only the uniformity, observed in experience, of a series of occurrences --an abstraction which, according to Mill himself, is not reached until an advanced stage of observation has been attained, whilst really thought is subject to the category of causality from the beginning. Of course, with this explana tion of causality from the association of ideas, the element of
necessity is put out of court, and Mill accordingly regards it as by no means inconceivable, that in other worlds than this the connexion between cause and effect may not exist. Mathema tical truths, in like manner, possess nothing beyond the prob ability of inferences from uniform experience, and by no means unconditional certainty. The contrary opinion would lead to the metaphysics of innate principles, with which the doors would be opened to the unscientific method of intuition and all kinds of mysticism. In order, therefore, to protect science, em piricism is carried through to its extreme sceptical consequences by which the ground is cut from under the feet of all science !
? according
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
32
The final outcome of the philosophy of Mill no better on its ethical side. From the school of his father and of Bentham, he adopts the principle that happiness the one
desirable object, though not merely one's own happiness, but that also of others, yet the latter only for the sake of the former. No other reason can be assigned why the general happiness desirable, except that each person desires his own happiness. In his autobiography,1 Mill speaks, how ever, of an important crisis in his life, when he learnt that " the end of happiness was only to be attained by not making
the direct end. Those only are happy thought) who
have their minds fixed on some object other than their own
happiness on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. Once make the enjoyments of life a principal object, and they are immedi ately felt to be insufficient. " Beyond doubt, noble utterances, to which an almost verbal parallel to be found in the idealist Carlyle*; but Mill has not shown how we are to harmonise with them the fundamental principle of his ethical philosophy, according to which the idea of happiness, and in the last instance one's own happiness, the highest motive of action. Here also, as in the theoretical section of his philosophy, he has failed to carry through his psychological analysis to the final decisive point he has not made clear to himself that the question why we feel ourselves under moral obligation at all, quite distinct from the question as to the content, the what, of right moral conduct. undoubtedly true that in relation to the latter question the con sequences of an action to society and to the individual must be taken into consideration as an essential criterion. But this criterion of the specific action confounded with the motive of the moral will, the desire for happiness made
the chief motive, and put in the place of the sense of duty, the actual facts of the true moral consciousness are rendered as inexplicable as theoretical knowledge when the associa tion of ideas, which only means of logical thought, put in its place. The utilitarian principle of the empirical philo sophy has its proper place as an heuristic principle in
Page 142. See ante, 314.
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practical sociology, when the existence of the sense of duty is assumed as a matter of course ; but when it claims to be an explanation of the moral consciousness generally, and when the sense of duty is accordingly derived from calcula tions of utility, the true science of ethics is not served, but rendered impossible. 1
It is intelligible that with such premises the religious views of Mill could not rise far above sceptical negations. His father, who had lost all belief in a good God in consequence of his education in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism and of his
reflections on the evils of the world, brought up his son without any religious belief. As compared with the purely negative position of his early days, it marks, therefore, a certain advance when, in his essay on The Utility ofReligion (written between 1850 and 1858), he allows that in early times religious belief in the Divine sanctions of moral laws was an excellent means of introducing and establishing them, and that even now religion, like poetry, answers to a craving in men for higher and nobler ideas than actual life supplies. But it is doubtful whether " the idealism of our earthly life, the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made, is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings and still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief respecting the unseen powers. " " The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognised as of the highest excel lence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of
desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of Human ity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as -by the
? even in their best manifestations, and far more so than in any of the others," which, by their threats and promises, strengthen the selfish element of our
nature instead of weakening it. Besides, these religions suffer under so many contradictions and irrationalities that the simple and innocent faith which their acceptance involves can co-exist only with a torpid and inactive state of the speculative faculties, whilst persons of exercised intellect are able to
1 The folly of such a mode of procedure in ethical science, Carlyle has admirably satirised by setting the problem, " Given a world of knaves, to produce an honesty from their united action ? " {Misc. , iv. p. 36. )
supernatural religions
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
323
believe only by the sophistication and perversion either of the understanding or of the conscience. Finally, the Religion of Humanity leaves open an ample domain in the region of the
imagination, which may be planted with possibilities and hypotheses, of which neither the falsehood nor the truth can be ascertained.
In the later essay on Theism, written between 1868 and
had not received the final revisions which was his habit to make), likewise published after the author's death, Mill appears to have advanced beyond this purely critical standpoint. The inquiry not now merely with regard to the utility of religion, but as to the truth of religious ideas, and the result of leads to the acceptance of the pre ponderating probability of certain suppositions, although un doubtedly they are still far enough removed from orthodox belief. From the adaptations in nature, Mill now considers, there evidence which points, not to the creation of the universe, but of the present order of by an Intelligent
Mind though the imperfections in nature necessitate the sup position that its Author has but limited power over and that he has some regard to the happiness of his creatures prob ably, though we are not justified in supposing this his sole or chief motive of action. also possible that a Being thus limited in power may interfere occasionally in the im perfect machinery of the universe, though in none of the cases in which such interposition believed to have occurred
the evidence such as could possibly prove it. In the same way the possibility of life after death must be admitted,
1870 (which
? cannot be converted into a certainty.
Utilitarian considerations, which formed the practical side of
the empirical philosophy of the period, also played a pro minent part in orthodox belief; either on the ground of the tangible use of the doctrines of the Church in promoting social order, or with a view to the transcendental benefits implied in the divine reward of virtue. In contrast with this unemotional and rational faith of the upper classes, satis faction for the religious needs of the lower classes was sought for in a quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after the manner of Methodism. But in this " Evangelical party " quickened religious feeling and zealous philanthropic effort were so much cut off from any living relation to the thought of the age and to theological inquiry, that any influence from this quarter upon the theology of the Church was not more, in fact still less, possible than was the case with the older
German Pietism. To bring new life and movement into theology, a complete revolution in the minds of men was needed. This followed in England from causes similar to those which had produced a like result in Germany ; and in part the revolution was due to the direct influence of idealism as it had sprung from German Romanticism.
? ? ? ? 304 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Hit. IV.
The ultimate and profoundest source of this mental revolu
tion, which, at the beginning of the century, spread through all cultured nations, must be sought in the nature of man.
After the cold understanding had in the eighteenth century exercised despotic sway, starving the emotions and fettering the phantasy, these wronged sides of our nature once more claimed their rights, and rebelled against the despotism of the understanding with an imperious violence which was as tyrannical and exclusive as that of the understanding had been. " A return to nature and natural emotions," was now everywhere the watchword, and Rousseau became the prophet of the new age. The cry found its echo in the " storm and stress" spirits of belles lettres: Herder and Goethe were its heralds in Germany, Wordsworth and Shelley in
English poetry. Emotion, entering into loving sympathy with Nature, could no longer behold in her the dead mechan ism to which sensualistic philosophy had degraded her ; the machine, which had been robbed of its divinity, was once again transformed into the living garment of God. But
Nature owed her reanimation to the soul of man, which had taken possession of her. It was therefore impossible that men should go no further than external Nature : they turned
their gaze upon their own nature, and sought in the depths of the feeling heart, in its unconscious surmisings and un utterable sighs, the presence of a divine spirit, the witness of our kinship to God. Thus from the Gospel of Nature of
Rousseau sprang the philosophical idealism of Kant and of Fichte, and the religious pantheism of Herder and Novalis. In like manner, in the case of Wordsworth, the poetic love of Nature became a devoted self-surrender to the God whose rule we recognise within not less than around us. If the standpoint which was thus reached was still only the sub
jectivism of the eighteenth century, the events of history were, at the same time, bringing about an important advance.
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature had been marked by an anti-social and anti-historical tendency ; its aim had been the emancipation of the self-sufficient individual from the limita tions of an outlived order of society. At first it was every where taken up in this sense. In Germany the " schone Seelen " greeted with enthusiasm the French Revolution, and in his Robbers, Schiller depicted the Titanic endeavour of the individual, in the fresh consciousness of its strength,
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
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to break up the old order of the world and to construct a new one to its own mind. In the same spirit the youthful Coleridge wrote poems breathing sympathy with revolutionary democracy, and, with Southey, planned a " grand scheme of Pantisocracy," a Utopian commonwealth of liberty and equality, to be established in America. Out of this intoxica tion of individualism the idealists of Europe were rudely awakened by the thunder of the cannon of Bonaparte. As the social system of Europe collapsed like a house of cards under the hand of the new Caesar, was made clear whither the principle of selfish individualism, which breaks up society into helpless atoms, inevitably conducts. When appeared that the separate nations were to be broken up and converted into the one empire of the Caesar, the national spirit every
where rose up against the foreign tyranny, patriotic feeling, which distinguishes in such a marked manner the nineteenth from the eighteenth century, was aroused from its slumbers. And as the nations became conscious of their own peculiar characteristics and rights, they once more called to remem brance their own past history. With admiring love they
? manhood, and discovered, precisely in those epochs which Rationalism
recurred to the period of their youth and early
in its ingratitude and want of insight had despised, stores of national strength, virtue, and honour, forming a humiliating contrast to the weakness and disgrace of their own time. Thus the enthusiasts of individual freedom were transformed into the patriotic champions of national liberty the anti- Napoleonic wars, and out of poetic Romanticism sprang the
Tiigendbund of young Germany, based upon an earnest sense of duty and patriotic devotion. The Kantian imperative of the subjective reason was enlarged and deepened, the philosophy of Hegel, into the consciousness of the dependence of the individual on the rationality of history as realised in the State. The true freedom, which alone worthy of man, was now seen to consist, not in opposition to the commonwealth, but in unselfish devotion to not in defiance of the State, but in subordination to as loyal citizens, and securing individual, by labouring for universal ends. Precisely the same transformation was effected in England. Whilst young men hailed enthusiastically the French Revolution, when seemed that "temple and tower were to fall to the ground"
before its trumpet-blast of " natural rights," Burke raised his g. t.
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? 306 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
voice, as " one crying in the wilderness," against the delusion of the individualistic idea of freedom, and pointed out the unreasonableness of the endeavour to separate the individual from the nation, to which he owes his existence, or from society and its historical arrangements, to which really all human culture is due. What Burke's eloquence failed to effect, the course of history brought about. Under the pressure of a " Continental System " and the wars of Napoleon, English national feeling was aroused, the poets of Nature and Free
dom became the heralds of patriotic love, of an admiring piety towards the history of the past, which Sir Walter Scott's genius restored to new life in the hearts of his contemporaries by poetic idealisation.
But in the history of Christian nations, the Church, with her institutions, customs, and doctrines, plays such an essential part, that their inner and outer life could not be at all understood without the consideration of this factor. It was natural, therefore, that the newly awakened interest in the history of the past generally should quicken also the appreciation of the history of the Church, and therewith of the positive and traditional elements in the faith and customs of the nations. In those things which had been an offence to the critical understanding of the eighteenth century, there was now discovered, by the new historical sense, suggestive symbolism, fine human feeling, natural poetry, and prophetic truth ; in short, so much nourishment for the famishing soul and the thirsty fancy, that the sons began to revere deeply what the fathers had thrown aside as worthless
Thus, from the same Romanticism which had begun with
Rousseau's Gospel of Nature, sprang at last the revival 01 religious and ecclesiastical taste and feeling. Rousseau was
by
Newman and Pusey, in England.
In order to last, and to influence the life of a nation from
various sides, a new mode of feeling always requires a new mode of thought as its accompaniment, with new ideas and associations of ideas as its vehicle and support, In Germany this want was met in the idealistic philosophy founded by Kant, which in all its various developments had this in common, that it connected man with the higher world of
? followed by Chateaubriand and the Italian Manzoni ; Schleiermacher and Neander, and the Catholic convert Schlegel, in Germany ; and by Coleridge, and John Henry
superstition.
? ? ? Ch. I. ] PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY. 307
and set before him conscious devotion to it as the
spirit,
object of his own perfection. In England, however, no such philosophy as this existed. For the philosophy of Locke was, in reality, in its popular form, the formal expression of that barren view of things which binds man to the world of the senses as the sole reality, makes the individual complete in himself, and prescribes as his highest end the pursuit of his own advantage ; which was therefore precisely that view of things which the new and more profound poetry and religious and historical Romanticism indignantly repudiated. Under
these circumstances it was very natural that the originators of this new mode of feeling in England should seek their weapons of defence and attack in German philosophy. We shall see as we proceed in what various ways this philosophy affected the most thoughtful minds in England. Yet it re mained, after all, but a foreign growth on English soil. So true is it that a philosophy is able to exercise a determining influence upon the ecclesiastical and theological thought of a nation only when it has penetrated it so profoundly as to determine the popular philosophy of the educated classes concerned. As regards the idealistic philosophy of Germany, no such reception of it was possible in England. On the other hand, the English philosophy of the past could no longer satisfy the requirements of the new poetic and religious feeling. The revived religious consciousness accordingly failed to find the indispensable intellectual basis and regulative principles, without which it could not develop into definite theological teaching, or guide the development of the mind of the Churches in harmony with the general thought of the nation and the age. It seems to me that we have here the
of the remarkable fact that the Church life of England, until within the last decade, has remained almost completely untouched by the vast progress of the scientific thought of the educated classes, and that wherever the two come into contact, such a violent collision is the consequence that popular feeling is shocked, and not a few despair of the possibility of any mutual understanding. It is true that latterly this tension has been somewhat relaxed, and just now signs are not wanting of the rise of a new philosophical view
of the world suited to the British genius, under the auspices
of which a reconciliation of the Church and the world, of \ theology and science, may be hoped for.
? explanation
? ? ? 308 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1S25. [Bk. IV.
I propose, in the first instance, to offer a review of the various philosophical schools in their relation to religion and
This review must commence with the idealism of Coleridge and Carlyle, which was so greatly influenced by German philosophy. This idealism is met by the reaction of the empirical philosophy of Mill and the critical philosophy of Hamilton, connected with which is an agnosticism in vari ous forms. There follows then an evolutionary philosophy, with more of systematic completeness, and in two forms : first, realistic, with an agnostic basis, represented by Herbert
Spencer; second, idealistic, represented by the Neo-Hege lians, Caird and Green, with whom are connected, finally, the
living representatives of speculative theism.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a true representative of Romanticism with all its bright and dark sides. He was a man of wide culture, of fine sensibility, of vivid imagination, of ready intellect ; but as a thinker his efforts were spasmodic
and fragmentary, lacking steadiness, consistency, and thorough ness ; and he displayed a surprising want of moral strength. As a young man he was an enthusiastic worshipper of Nature and Freedom ; afterwards, when sobered down under the in
fluence of personal and historical experiences, he sought in German philosophy consolation for the shipwreck of the ideals of his youth. He studied Lessing and Kant, Jacobi and Schelling ; and by the aid of philosophical idealism he recon ciled himself to the faith of the Church, from which he had been totally estranged. Yet the reconciliation was in such a form that he no longer based his faith upon supernatural au thority, but upon the ideal constitution of the human mind itself, regarding Christianity as the perfection of human rea son. With Herder and Schleiermacher, Coleridge maintained that Christianity is not a theory or speculation, but a life and a living process, that the proof of it therefore must consist in the inner personal experience of that life. While he thus related himself to the supernaturalism of the orthodox party of that time by going over to the side of the Evangelicals (the Pietists
of England), on the other hand he departed from the latter
in that he regarded Christianity not as something absolutely supernatural in antithesis to the human, as the germs of it lie in the nature of man himself and are brought to their
perfection by Christianity ; for which reason the truth of Chris
theology.
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
309
tianity can never contradict reason when properly understood. Coleridge expounded these views in his Aids to Reflection (1825), not, true, in a systematic form, but in suggestive aphorisms and explanatory examples, which should serve to arouse independent reflection the direction indicated.
Coleridge attached the greatest importance to the distinc tion, taken from Kant's Critique, between the " understand ing," as " the faculty judging according to sense," and the " reason," as the faculty of " universal and necessary truths. "
He further distinguishes the speculative from the practical reason, the former as applied to formal or abstract truth, the latter as applied to actual or moral truth, as the fountain of ideas and the light of the conscience. While he thus far apparently quite in agreement with Kant, Coleridge ascribes nevertheless to the practical reason a meaning which passes beyond the moral sphere like Jacobi he describes as the feeling or instinct of supersensible truths, or, with Schelling, as an intellectual intuition of spiritual objects. Whilst the
? confined to the world of the senses, and can
understanding
accordingly pronounce only conditional judgments, the reason
the source of unconditional and necessary judgments, the intelligible spiritual nature of man, which one with the Divine Spirit. From overlooking this distinction and from the illegitimate application of the understanding to supersen sible objects, arises "unbelief or misbelief. " "Wherever the forms of reasoning appropriate only to the natural world are applied to spiritual realities, the more strictly logical the reasoning in all its parts, the more irrational as a whole" -- Propositions such as these, to which the parallels may be found here and there German Romanticism and speculative philosophy, have a certain meaning as a protest against a shallow and negative Rationalism, but they betray none the less a questionable inclination to suppress intelligent criticism religious questions. Nor did Coleridge altogether escape this danger, although he had the good sense to acknow ledge the logical understanding as a negative canon in re ligious questions, since absolutely inconceivable propositions cannot be true. only the positive proof of the truths of
faith which must not be derived from theoretical argumentation, but from the moral and spiritual nature of man.
as Coleridge well observes, the peculiarity of Chris tianity that, unlike philosophy, does not seek by workings
religious
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upon the intellect to elevate the character, but its first step is to cleanse the heart and afterwards to restore the intellect like wise to its natural clearness. If the effects were not propor tionate to the Divine wisdom of the method, it was because " the doctors of the Church forgot that the heart, the moral na ture, was the beginning and the end. " " This was the true and first apostasy, when in council and synod the Divine Humani ties of the Gospel gave way to speculative systems, and religion became a science of shadows under the name of theology, or at best a bare skeleton of truth, without life or interest, alike inaccessible and unintelligible to the majority of Christians. "
Coleridge illustrated his view of Christianity in its applica tion to selected doctrines --original sin, redemption, baptism,
inspiration. In doing this he everywhere seeks so far to rationalise the dogma as to surrender its scholastic husk while preserving its religious and moral kernel. The affinity of his theology with Schleiermacher's, especially as represented by the conservative wing of Schleiermacher's school, strikes the student at once. The dogma of " original sin " is made to mean that sin as spiritual evil is a condition of the will, which is the ground and cause of all sins, that it was not inherited from without, but is the act of the will itself, and so " self- originated. " This is certainly much more a Kantian than Biblical or ecclesiastical doctrine. I n complete agreement with Kant, Coleridge says "that in respect of original sin, every
man is the adequate representative of all men," and that the first man in time, the Adam of Genesis, is only the type of t he race. Hence all statements as to the perfection of man in Paradise must be cast aside as phantastic and valueless. With regard to the doctrine of redemption, according to Coleridge, the cause of redemption is not so much the death
of Christ as the incarnation of the Creative Word in the per son of Christ. This manifestation of the Divine in the human life, labours, and death of the Saviour produces, as its effect, our transformation from fleshly to spiritual men, and, as further consequences, our progressive sanctification by the Word and the Spirit. But the various forms of expression which are used by the apostles to set forth the actual consequences of the act of redemption show by their diversity that they ought to be taken as metaphors only, borrowed in part from Jewish theology and in part from the opinions prevalent amongst
the readers and opponents of the apostles.
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
Specially interesting and instructive Coleridge's essay, entitled, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, published after his death (1840), which he assails the dogmatic theory of the inspiration of the Scriptures with very rational arguments, while adhering tenaciously to his conviction of their incom parable religious and moral value. He shows admirably that the Biblical writers themselves lay no claim to the verbal in spiration of their writings, and that this doctrine, really bor rowed from the Jewish Rabbis, must therefore be regarded as an unscriptural superstition. He goes further, and asks, " How can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expressions," such as all human words and sen tences must be Moreover, we should gain nothing by such an unnatural supposition, but on the contrary be simply losers.
For all the heart-awakening utterances of human hearts, such as we find in the Bible, were nothing more than " a Divina Commedia of superhuman ventriloquist"; the
? sweet Psalmist of Israel were himself as mere an instrument of the inspiring Spirit as his harp, an automaton poet, all sym pathy and all example would be gone, and we could listen to his words only fear and perplexity. The Bible undeni ably " the appointed conservatory, an indispensable criterion, and continual source and support of true belief; but we must not confound this with the statements--that the Bible the sole source, and that not only contains but constitutes the Christian religion, that in short creed consisting wholly of articles of faith and that consequently we need no rule, help, or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what parts are and what are not articles of faith. " As the Church herself has admitted as a canon--that each part of Scrip ture must be interpreted by the spirit of the whole, has thereby practically granted " that the spirit of the Bible, and not the detached words and sentences, that infallible and absolute. " We see that the view of the Bible -- at once free and reverent -- of Lessing, Herder, and Schleier- macher, which Coleridge commends to his countrymen. We shall find in the next chapter, the case of the representa tives of the Broad Church party, that though this view has met with opposition in the English Church,
its way there to considerable extent. Thomas Carlyle spent his early youth
simplest conditions of country life, as the eldest son of
has gradually made
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Scotch mason, in a family in which a plain and serious Puri tanical piety held sway. These impressions of his childhood engraved themselves so deeply on his heart that they con tinued powerfully to influence him after he had given up the dogmas of the Church. From the bright inquisitive intellect of the youth, who sought for truth at any price, the defects of the traditional arguments in support of orthodox dogmas could not long remain concealed, and an eager study of the works of Gibbon and Hume, to which he devoted himself during his university course in Edinburgh, added all that was needed to make him a decided sceptic. But he could not rest satisfied in mere negation. He was profoundly unhappy when, under the influence of Hume's philosophy, the God of the orthodox faith could no longer be believed in, or had be come the unconcerned absentee spectator of a mechanically rotating universe, and when the idea of duty had also seemed to change from a Divine messenger and guide to a false earthly phantasm, made up of desire and fear. But his profound love of truth and sense of duty formed the rock on which the waves of doubt broke. Whilst his intellect, beclouded with sceptical and pessimistic horrors, pictured to him the world as the sport of chance and the work of the devil, his moral con sciousness attained to the certainty of the indestructible freedom of the soul as the lord of the world. With this the " Everlasting Yea " obtained the conquest over the "Ever
lasting No. " It was the repetition in an individual of the same process as had been passed through in German philo sophy a generation earlier ; when the world of orthodox be lief, destroyed by the criticism of the understanding, was reconstructed from the subjective resources of man as a moral and rational being ; when the moral self-consciousness ex panded into the ideal world of the great German thinkers and poets.
And it was not in Carlyle's case merely a similar process
of development, but it took place in direct dependence on German thought. In the critical period of his life he occu pied himself closely with the writings of Goethe and Schiller,
Paul and Novalis ; translations from their works were
his earliest literary efforts. To Goethe especially he felt
himself under great obligations. From the many fine things
which he has written upon Goethe, the following passage, as especially characteristic of Carlyle himself, may be quoted
? Jean
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
here " He who would learn to reconcile reverence with clearness to deny and defy what false, yet believe and worship what true amid raging factions, bent on what either altogether empty or has substance in only for day, which stormfully convulse and tear hither and thither dis tracted expiring system of society, to adjust himself aright and working for the world and in the world, keep himself unspotted from the world -- let him look here. This man (Goethe), we may say, became morally great, by being his own age, what some other ages many might have been, a
what false, and yet to believe and worship what true " --this in fact an admirable summary of Carlyle's own character and labours. A believer, in the sense of orthodox theology, he never became, but always expressed most un reservedly his poor opinion of at times indeed with a vehe mence which might surprise one the case of an historian who showed on other occasions such loving sympathy with antiquity, did we not remember that the orthodox system does not yet belong to ancient history, but still power in the world, often making itself felt as retarding fetter to minds that are striving after truth and clearness for themselves and others. not any want of religion, not frivolous scepti cism, but rather good piece of old Scotch Puritanism, combined with modern ethical idealism, which makes him ruthlessly indignant at every form of religious cant, at all
genuine man. "
'? To reconcile reverence with clearness, to deny and defy
? ecclesiasticism that has become external form and convention. Yet what almost more repulsive and hateful to him than the latter are the empty and windy negations of frivolous scepticism, atheism, and materialism. In one of his masterly characterisations of the present age (to be compared with Fichte's discourses on the Grundziige des gegenwdrtigen Zeit-
alters) he says " The fever of scepticism must needs burn itself out, and burn out thereby the impurities that caused then again will there be clearness, health. The principle of life which now struggles painfully the outer, thin and barren domain of the Conscious or Mechanical, may then withdraw into its inner sanctuaries, its abysses of mystery and miracle
Miscellanies, vol. iv. p. 49 (Popular Edition, 1872).
Ibid. , vol. iv.
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withdraw deeper than ever into that domain of the Uncon scious, by nature infinite and inexhaustible ; and creatively work there. From that mystic region, and from that alone, all wonders, all poesies, and religions and social systems have proceeded ; the like wonders, and greater and higher, lie slumbering there ; and, brooded on by the spirit of the waters, will evolve themselves, and rise like exhalations from the deep.
"
In his essay on Diderot,1 Carlyle shows that his mechanical materialism was the natural outcome of his barren logical in tellect, but that two consequences of some value have followed from it : First, that all speculations of the sort we call Natural Theology are unproductive, since of final causes nothing can be proved, they being known only by the higher light of intuition ; secondly, that the hypothesis of the universe being a machine, and of " an Architect who constructed sitting as
were apart, and guiding and seeing go, may turn out an inanity and nonentity"; that "that faint possible Theism,' which now forms our common English creed," which seeks God here and there, and not there where alone He to be found -- inwardly, in our own soul, -- that this Theism cannot be too soon swept out of the world. To the individual who with hysterical violence theoretically asserts a God who mere distant simulacrum, Carlyle exclaims, " Fool God not only there, but here, or nowhere, in that life-breath of thine, in that act and thought of thine,--and thou wert wise to look to it. "2 " Whosoever, in one way or another, recognises not that Divine Idea of the World, which lies at the bottom of appearances,' can rightly interpret no appearance and what soever spiritual thing he does, must do partially, do falsely. " With the theoretical perversities of the mere logical understanding, which makes of the universe a dead mechanism, go hand in hand the moral and spiritual perversities of selfish utilitarianism. This blind pursuit of pleasure, which will have God's infinite Universe altogether to itself, and therefore necessarily remains for ever deceived and dissatisfied, the root of all evil. For this reason sorrow so good and needful to man, that teaches him that happiness not his highest end and good, but rather, as Goethe maintains, life really be gins with self-renunciation. " Love not pleasure, but love God!
Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 49 sq. Ibid. , 51. Ibid. , 52.
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This the Everlasting Yea,' wherein all contradiction solved wherein whoso walks and works, well with him. "
This brief the Weltanschauung of Carlyle, an ethical idealism after the manner of Fichte, Herder, and Goethe.
undoubtedly not " Theism " as commonly understood, but as little an abstract and systematic " Pantheism. " Carlyle hated all such formulae, and the endless controversies about them. With him the essential thing was to feel God in one's own soul as a living reality, to behold reverently his
rule in the world of nature and history, and from this feeling and vision to labour for the good and true in unselfish devo tion. For himself he did not require a more definite formu lation of his philosophic view of things, and declined as an impediment. But he was too good an historian not to know that the clothing of tangible symbols necessary to make ideal truth the faith of an historical community. The forms of ecclesiastical creeds and life are, like institutions of the State, the "clothes" of the idea without such clothes and historical vestures, Carlyle expressly maintains, society has never existed, and never can exist. 2 But, he forcibly remarks, that with these spiritual as with our bodily clothes --we always need them, but cannot always have the same. Time, which adds much to the sacredness of symbols, at length desecrates them again. Symbols also wax old, as everything in the world has its rise, its culmination, and its decline. As in the past new prophets
have always arisen at the right moment, who as God-inspired poets created new symbols, so will be in the future also. " Meanwhile, we account him Legislator and wise who can so much as tell when a symbol has grown old, and gently
remove it. "3
Carlyle has nowhere expounded connectedly his view of the
nature and development of religion (and we must remember
? that he was really not a philosopher, but an historian), but his ideas thereon may be gathered from various passages of his
writings, forming an inwardly connected whole. Religion-- we may thus summarise his opinion -- to be found in every man as part of his spiritual constitution, as a God-given faculty,
enabling him to apprehend intuitively the Divine in the world and in human life, and to worship reverent obedience. But the constitutional endowment becomes an actual living
Sartor Resartus, 133. Ibid. , 149. Ibid. , 155.
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power in historical society only ; and there only by the instru
mentality of those leading minds which as seers and prophets
apprehend in clear thought, and reveal in intelligible speech what slumbers unconsciously in the souls of all. Their word brings to consciousness the truth which was previously unper- ceived, although longed for and dimly surmised, which lay in the depths of the soul, and which is then incorporated in the symbols of religious societies. These symbols are the indis pensable means of presenting to men's minds in an intelligible and realisable form the Divine and Eternal, which is itself a nameless and unutterable mystery. For this reason they are the sacred bond binding souls together, tokens, signs, stand ards, and garments of the Eternal and Divine, acknowledged by multitudes in common. Yet they are not themselves the
Eternal and Divine, and, as having arisen in time, they have only limited duration. Waxing old with the progress of time,
they lose the intelligible meaning which they had at the begin ning, and then become empty masks, delusive simulacra, and hindrances of the truth and religion. It is then time to re move them cautiously, and to supply their place with new symbols from the perennial source of truth --the depths of the unconscious, intuitive spirit. But the time of transition, when the old is no more understood and received, and the new has
not yet been generally recognised and acknowledged, is a time of difficulty and trouble. Doubt and denial then prevail ; the cold understanding thrusts its barren logic into the place of creative genius ; science, history, the universe are made mechanical ; and only a few profounder minds perceive be neath the surface of chaos the signs of a new world of order, in which reverence shall be combined with clearness. Such a prophet of a nobler future Carlyle saw in Goethe, in the midst of this desert age of the barren understanding. And we may add that Carlyle was himself such a seer, who beheld prophetically, in the light of eternal ideas, not the past only, but also the future courses and destinations of human history,
and illuminated them with his inspiration.
It is well known and intelligible enough that Carlyle stood
very much alone with such views amongst his fellow-country men, --the Conservatives regarding him as a dangerous Radical, and the Liberals as a reactionary. It therefore, the more noteworthy that in the middle of the century few more men are found, who, like Carlyle, and to some extent influenced
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? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
317
by him, sought to combine the severest criticism of the tradi tional belief of the Churches with genuine and profound piety and moral earnestness. 1 Chief amongst these was Franc1s W1ll1am Newman, younger brother of John Henry Newman, who will come under our notice in the next chapter, to whom he was in no degree inferior in point of delicacy and religious feeling, and far superior in depth and clearness of thought and moral courage, although English society has per sistently placed the daring heretic, whose free thought was inconvenient, below the socially distinguished and dignified ecclesiastic with his polished style. In the book, Phases of Faith (1850), Francis Newman, following his own religious development, --really typical case for our age, --describes the process by which a truth-loving mind compelled by the logic of facts to resign one position after another in the authoritative creeds. It not a priori presuppositions, not considerations of the undevout understanding, not speculative theories, that shake the foundations of his inherited belief;
simply the application of the intellect to the examination of the received authorities, resulting in the conviction of their insufficiency, and human and historical conditionality, and accordingly of their want of divine authority, and of their unfitness to serve as the firm ultimate bases of belief. Thus, in the first instance, the orthodox creed examined by the test to which itself appeals -- the Scriptures, and found not to accord with them, and to be therefore unsatisfactory. The examination then carried further the Bible itself sub mitted to the parallel narratives are compared (e. g. in the Gospels and the historical books of the Old
and are found not to agree then one doctrine compared with another (e. g. , predestination and eternal torments with the goodness and mercy of God), and here, again, irreconcil able contradictions are presented finally, notions of the Bible are compared with undoubted facts of science (e. g. of astro nomy, geology, human history), and once again the fallibility of Scripture has to be acknowledged. with the Unitarians of that generation, the attempt was made to fall back-from the teaching of the Bible as a whole upon the teaching of Jesus, as the final and sure authority, could not be made out his
One of these was William Rathbone Greg, the author of The Creed of
? Christendom,
1851.
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torically, from the traditions, what the teaching of Jesus cer tainly was ; all such attempts show ever afresh that it is a self-destructive contradiction to seek to base an authoritative system upon free critical inquiry. When the great primary questions of religion are proposed, there are only two solutions possible : either we follow the inward law of the reason and conscience and disregard the external law of authority, or vice versa. The middle course of orthodox Protestantism, which requires on the one hand the submission of the proud reason to the infallible authority of the " Word of God," and on the other hand appeals from the authority of the Church to the right of the individual "conscience" (which must mean the reason), is illogical and contradictory ; and the sense of this sends many to Rome.
This position of Newman's is undoubtedly logically impreg nable, but in his statement of it he has overlooked an essential point. The education of reason and conscience, by which the individual is fitted to form true judgments, is the result of the historical development of humanity, and cannot therefore be separated therefrom, but must always seek from thence instruction and guidance. From this point of view the anti thesis of inward and outward authority becomes less absolute than Newman makes being the constant interaction of his torical universality and individual spontaneity. -- The closing remarks of Newman's are excellent Religion was created by the inward instinct of the soul, its longing for the sympathy of God with and for fellowship with him. But had after wards to be purified and chastened by the sceptical under standing the co-operation of these two powers essential for its perfection. While religious persons dread critical and searching thought, and critics despise instinctive religion, each side of man remains imperfect and curtailed. Surely the age ripe for a religion which shall combine the tenderness, humility, and disinterestedness that are the glory of the purest Chris tianity, with that activity of intellect, untiring pursuit of truth, and strict adherence to impartial principle which the schools of modern science embody.
Newman has sketched an ideal picture of Christianity thus chastened and combined with the knowledge of the present day, in the two short but valuable essays, The Soul, its Sorrows and its Aspirations an Essay towards the Natural History the Soul as the true Basis of Theology (18 49, 3rd ed. , 1852),
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and Theism, Doctrinal and Practical (1858). profound and genuine piety breathes through both of these books, combined with clear and sound thought, which places in bright light the fundamental religious problems, and seeks their solution
in the depths of personal consciousness, and also the wider region of the consciousness of humanity as reflected in history. As confessions of devout thinker (akin to St. Augustine's Confessions), they form a true book of devotion for thoughtful
religious readers. The comparison with Schleiermacher's Reden also obvious; but cannot be denied that Newman's idea of the nature of religion has this superiority over that of the Reden, that based upon a truer psychology, and the
mysticism involved in less aesthetical than ethical, and consequently the conception of God in Newman's essays more Christian than Spinozistic.
The empirical philosophy of the 18th century was handed on and attained to new significance in the two Mills, father and son. Following Hume and Hartley, James Mill, in his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1829), had traced all our intellectual and moral judgments to the associa tion of ideas, which consequence of frequent occurrence together become constantly connected. This doctrine of the association of ideas forms also the basis of the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, though does not there retain the logical
? which has the father's system. In re-edit ing his father's book, the son added notes in explanation and correction which amount to an abandonment of the funda mental principle of this philosophy. But as he sought nevertheless tenaciously to cling to remarkable inconsis tencies and uncertainties found their way into his doctrine, both on its theoretical and its practical side.
According to S. Mill we have knowledge of our sensa tions and ideas only, but neither of an object external to us nor of a subject as the basis of those feelings. Things are only the permanent possibilities of sensation, and mind only a series of feelings with a background of the possibility of feeling. Having had his attention called by Hamilton to the fact that an association of ideas possible only by comparison of similar sensations, that comparison involves remembrance, and remembrance possible only by virtue of the identity of the ego as existing throughout the series of different feelings,
Mill extended his definition of mind by the addition, that
thoroughness
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is "a series of feelings which is aware of itself as past and
future. " That this is a paradox, an inexplicable puzzle, he himself admitted, without on that account, however, amending the erroneous idea of the mind with which he had set out, and to which alone the puzzle is to be ascribed. He likewise admitted that the phenomenon of memory is a puzzle which his psychology is unable to solve, as no explanation of it can be assigned which does not involve belief in the identity of the ego, which is the thing to be accounted for. Under the pres sure of this difficulty he wavers between such indefinite descriptions as"an inexplicable "link of sensations" or "thread of consciousness and the supposition of a real permanent element which is different from everything else, and can only be spoken of as the ego. But he is far from making any actual use of this as an original active principle. --Nor do our sensations reveal any more the reality of external objects than of the ego. Things, bodies, are simply groups of sensations, which arise
to the law of causality, which, however, is the law of subjective association. The theory gives no explanation of the source whence these groups come, or of how they can affect each other, of how it comes about that we associate with the perception of certain moving bodies the idea of persons external to ourselves. -- Cause is the name simply of the regu lar recurring connexion in experience of certain sensations ; when we speak of the " law of causality," we mean only the uniformity, observed in experience, of a series of occurrences --an abstraction which, according to Mill himself, is not reached until an advanced stage of observation has been attained, whilst really thought is subject to the category of causality from the beginning. Of course, with this explana tion of causality from the association of ideas, the element of
necessity is put out of court, and Mill accordingly regards it as by no means inconceivable, that in other worlds than this the connexion between cause and effect may not exist. Mathema tical truths, in like manner, possess nothing beyond the prob ability of inferences from uniform experience, and by no means unconditional certainty. The contrary opinion would lead to the metaphysics of innate principles, with which the doors would be opened to the unscientific method of intuition and all kinds of mysticism. In order, therefore, to protect science, em piricism is carried through to its extreme sceptical consequences by which the ground is cut from under the feet of all science !
? according
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
32
The final outcome of the philosophy of Mill no better on its ethical side. From the school of his father and of Bentham, he adopts the principle that happiness the one
desirable object, though not merely one's own happiness, but that also of others, yet the latter only for the sake of the former. No other reason can be assigned why the general happiness desirable, except that each person desires his own happiness. In his autobiography,1 Mill speaks, how ever, of an important crisis in his life, when he learnt that " the end of happiness was only to be attained by not making
the direct end. Those only are happy thought) who
have their minds fixed on some object other than their own
happiness on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. Once make the enjoyments of life a principal object, and they are immedi ately felt to be insufficient. " Beyond doubt, noble utterances, to which an almost verbal parallel to be found in the idealist Carlyle*; but Mill has not shown how we are to harmonise with them the fundamental principle of his ethical philosophy, according to which the idea of happiness, and in the last instance one's own happiness, the highest motive of action. Here also, as in the theoretical section of his philosophy, he has failed to carry through his psychological analysis to the final decisive point he has not made clear to himself that the question why we feel ourselves under moral obligation at all, quite distinct from the question as to the content, the what, of right moral conduct. undoubtedly true that in relation to the latter question the con sequences of an action to society and to the individual must be taken into consideration as an essential criterion. But this criterion of the specific action confounded with the motive of the moral will, the desire for happiness made
the chief motive, and put in the place of the sense of duty, the actual facts of the true moral consciousness are rendered as inexplicable as theoretical knowledge when the associa tion of ideas, which only means of logical thought, put in its place. The utilitarian principle of the empirical philo sophy has its proper place as an heuristic principle in
Page 142. See ante, 314.
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practical sociology, when the existence of the sense of duty is assumed as a matter of course ; but when it claims to be an explanation of the moral consciousness generally, and when the sense of duty is accordingly derived from calcula tions of utility, the true science of ethics is not served, but rendered impossible. 1
It is intelligible that with such premises the religious views of Mill could not rise far above sceptical negations. His father, who had lost all belief in a good God in consequence of his education in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism and of his
reflections on the evils of the world, brought up his son without any religious belief. As compared with the purely negative position of his early days, it marks, therefore, a certain advance when, in his essay on The Utility ofReligion (written between 1850 and 1858), he allows that in early times religious belief in the Divine sanctions of moral laws was an excellent means of introducing and establishing them, and that even now religion, like poetry, answers to a craving in men for higher and nobler ideas than actual life supplies. But it is doubtful whether " the idealism of our earthly life, the cultivation of a high conception of what it may be made, is not capable of supplying a poetry, and, in the best sense of the word, a religion, equally fitted to exalt the feelings and still better calculated to ennoble the conduct, than any belief respecting the unseen powers. " " The essence of religion is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object, recognised as of the highest excel lence, and as rightfully paramount over all selfish objects of
desire. This condition is fulfilled by the Religion of Human ity in as eminent a degree, and in as high a sense, as -by the
? even in their best manifestations, and far more so than in any of the others," which, by their threats and promises, strengthen the selfish element of our
nature instead of weakening it. Besides, these religions suffer under so many contradictions and irrationalities that the simple and innocent faith which their acceptance involves can co-exist only with a torpid and inactive state of the speculative faculties, whilst persons of exercised intellect are able to
1 The folly of such a mode of procedure in ethical science, Carlyle has admirably satirised by setting the problem, " Given a world of knaves, to produce an honesty from their united action ? " {Misc. , iv. p. 36. )
supernatural religions
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
323
believe only by the sophistication and perversion either of the understanding or of the conscience. Finally, the Religion of Humanity leaves open an ample domain in the region of the
imagination, which may be planted with possibilities and hypotheses, of which neither the falsehood nor the truth can be ascertained.
In the later essay on Theism, written between 1868 and
had not received the final revisions which was his habit to make), likewise published after the author's death, Mill appears to have advanced beyond this purely critical standpoint. The inquiry not now merely with regard to the utility of religion, but as to the truth of religious ideas, and the result of leads to the acceptance of the pre ponderating probability of certain suppositions, although un doubtedly they are still far enough removed from orthodox belief. From the adaptations in nature, Mill now considers, there evidence which points, not to the creation of the universe, but of the present order of by an Intelligent
Mind though the imperfections in nature necessitate the sup position that its Author has but limited power over and that he has some regard to the happiness of his creatures prob ably, though we are not justified in supposing this his sole or chief motive of action. also possible that a Being thus limited in power may interfere occasionally in the im perfect machinery of the universe, though in none of the cases in which such interposition believed to have occurred
the evidence such as could possibly prove it. In the same way the possibility of life after death must be admitted,
1870 (which
? cannot be converted into a certainty.
