No More Learning

Herbert SpenCer is regarded as at present the chief representative of agnosticism. But the agnosticism which Spencer adopted from Hamilton and Mansel forms but the one aspect of his philosophy, to a certain extent the con venient background into which all metaphysical problems can be relegated, so as to construct with fewer hindrances a system of natural evolution from the results of modern science. The significance of his philosophy lies in the bold ness with which it makes the idea of evolution, which has controlled natural science since Darwin, the dominant point of view in the formation of a connected and systematic theory of the world. In order to save his doctrine of natural de velopment from collision with the presuppositions of existing belief, he has placed the doctrine of the incognisability of the Absolute as a wall of separation between philosophy and religion, that an eternal peace may be concluded between them ; but, in reality, with the result that he has deprived
religion of its contents and his philosophical system of its prime principles. But, as in Spencer's system the idea of a harmonious and orderly world, or of a systematic unity among phenomena is so prominent, and this idea requires, or pre supposes necessarily, a connecting principle, or a basis of unity, he has not been able to consistently carry out his agnostic theory, but has surreptitiously converted the bare
? which Hamilton's Absolute amounted to, into a reality, which bears the relation of a positive cause to phenomena, only that nothing definite can be known as to its nature and its further relation to phenomena.
In his First Principles (1862), the ultimate principles of his philosophy, Spencer starts from the position, that as religion has always been of great importance in the history of mankind, and has been able to hold its ground in defiance of the attacks of science, it must contain an element of truth. But as there are various religions which claim to be true, and as science also can make the same claim, while yet truth is but one, the latter, Spencer holds, must be looked for in what the various
negative,
have in common with each other and with science. This common element cannot be a definite conception of the Absolute or the First Cause of the world, for it is precisely on
this point that opinions diverge, and in every one of the three main theories -- Atheism, Pantheism, and Theism -- is shown the impossibility of a satisfactory solution that is not self
religions
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
follows that God, the Absolute, the Uncon ditioned, not for us cognisable, but great mystery, as all religions to some extent acknowledge, and the higher their
rank, so much the more fully, only that the philosopher regards this mystery as not merely relative, as the religions regard but as absolute. Science and religion agree in this, for science knows nothing about the most universal ideas-- force and matter, space and time can know things only by comparing them with others that resemble them, and on that very account unable to know the Absolute, which cannot be compared with anything.
But although involved in the very nature of our con sciousness that can know only what finite and limited, Spencer declines to go with Hamilton in maintaining that the Absolute a purely negative concept. On the contrary, he holds that the reality of the Absolute the necessary correlative of the Relative. This both a necessity of thought and of the analysis of things. For every de finite state of consciousness has a limited content, the latter presupposes an unlimited and general content as the raw material of limiting thought. Our self-consciousness, as
the consciousness of the conditioned ego and non-ego, pre supposes an Unconditioned which neither the ego nor the non-ego this the Absolute, which accordingly the necessary correlative of our self-consciousness. And this a priori proof from consciousness confirmed by an a posteriori proof from the analysis of external things. The results of modern physics and chemistry reveal as the constant element in all phenomena Force, which manifests itself in various forms that change places with each other, while amid all their changes remains unaltered. If, accordingly, every specific force only relative changeable phenomenal form of one
contradictory.
337
? universal unchangeable force, this must be regarded as the absolute reality which must necessarily be presupposed as
the background and basis of all that relative and pheno
menal. The entire universe to be explained from the movement of this absolute Force, which takes place rhyth
mically as attraction and repulsion, integration and disinte
gration, evolution and dissolution the phenomena of nature
and of mental life come under the same general laws of
matter, motion, and force, which are however only symbols of
the absolute Reality or Force which in itself unknowable. S
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It is obvious that Spencer has thus very seriously modified the doctrine of Hamilton and Mansel as to the incognisability of the Absolute. The Absolute of Spencer, of which substan tiality, causality, eternity and immutability are predicated, is no longer the simple Unknown, which would be beyond all our conceptions. The only question which arises is whether Spencer's doctrine of the Absolute is adequate to account for the world of mental life, and whether it is adapted to serve as the basis of the reconciliation of science and religion. An affirmative answer can hardly be given to this question. For there is surely much force in the contention of Spencer's opponents, that his agnostic evolutionism is really only a disguised materialistic (hylozoistic) Pantheism ; for if the supreme principle is nothing but force manifesting itself in various motions, it does not land us beyond materialism. On the other hand, it must be allowed that Spencer's real intention is directed to something higher, the attainment of which has been frustrated by his entanglement in the principle of empiricism and the psychology of association, though in many of his statements he approaches very nearly a higher position. If the Absolute must be conceived as the neces sary correlative of our self-consciousness, can it be conceived simply as physical force, and not rather as universal self- consciousness, as a spiritual self? And if we get the idea of force from the experience of our own power of volition, its action and its resistance, is it not natural to think of mind- force as prior to physical, and accordingly of the absolute Force at the basis of all specific forces as Mind ? The doctrine of evolution would harmonise perfectly well with these inferences, only it would have to become idealistic instead of materialistic, and only after this transformation had been made would a practicable basis be supplied for the reconciliation of religion and science which Spencer has done well to attempt.
Spencer would probably himself have taken this further step, if he had been able, on the decisive question as to the fundamental act of knowledge, to set himself free from the superficiality and confusions of the association-psychology. This he has failed to do, and defines consciousness as a suc cession of sensations or changes, which implies a relation of different states, and is brought about by different impressions of force. The question here arises, as in Mill's system, Can
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
339
succession of feelings or changes be consciously felt without
subject to recognise the change, without an active synthetic principle to combine the changing states of feeling into the unity of consciousness But Spencer has no place in his system for such a subject, as he holds that the ego consists simply of " faint " and the object of " vivid " series of sensations. He acknowledges therefore really nothing more than passive sensations, or impressions of force, and supposes he can explain consciousness from their changes alone, while undoubtedly wholly inexplicable without the active synthesis of the ego. Spencer can have ignored this prime factor only because, like all empiricists, he " confuses the succession of feelings with cognition of succession, changes of consciousness with consciousness of change. " When he speaks of change of states of consciousness as the result of changing impressions of force, he seeks to find the origin of consciousness in effects produced from without, which cannot, however, surely, be perceived as succession and changed save by reference to previously existing consciousness he really, therefore, presupposes consciousness as already wardly present, while he seeks to explain from external action. In fact, we must concur the searching criticism of Green,1 that Spencer has not grasped the fundamental pro blem of the source and nature of knowledge, as was pro posed by Hume and solved by Kant the synthetic function of the ego. Spencer supposes that Kant has been refuted
by the new discovery of the doctrine of natural evolution, namely, that the supposed a priori or innate ideas which are considered to precede experience, are in reality only the result: of the experience of the race which the individual inherits. 2 But Spencer here fails to perceive the real nature of the pro blem, which How experience imany form possible? A problem which remains unaltered whether the experience that of the individual or the race, and to the solution of which no historical " psychogenesis " of nature can contribute in the smallest degree. And while his evolutionary psycho
logy contributes nothing whatever towards solution of the problem as to the nature of knowledge, Spencer really makes
? Works Thomas Hill Green, vol.
See Martineau's critique of this doctrine, Types Ethical Theory, vol.
PP- 357 sqq.
pp. 383 sqq.
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a solution of it impossible by degrading the relation of sub ject and object, the ego and the non-ego, to a mere difference of degree in the strength or vividness of a series of sensa tions. An error so fundamental at the crucial point can do no other than produce a fatal effect upon the whole system built upon it. If a man fails to perceive in himself the active subject, the self-conscious mind, it cannot be expected of him that he should find it in the Absolute.
With reference to the religious import of the Spencerian doctrine of the Unknowable, the forcible criticisms of Mar- tineau and J. Caird may here find a place. The former1 says that " Spencer's testimony against the purely phenomenal doctrineis of high value " ; for " it betrays his appreciation of that outlook beyond the region of phenomena for the con ditions of religion which cannot eventually be content to gaze into an abyss without reply. " But his position, that we can know only that the absolute power but not what untenable, because self-contradictory. We can know the first fact by thought only, and " how can there be thought with nothing thinkable " " By calling this existence a
Power' Mr. Herbert Spencer surely removes by one mark from the unknown but, besides this, we are obliged,' he says, to regard that Power as omniscient,' as eternal, as one, as cause manifested in all phenomena list of predi
cates, scanty indeed when measured by the requisites of religion, but too copious for the plea of Nescience. " When we distinguish this Absolute from all that " related to
we know for to distinguish to know. This negative ontology which identifies the supreme reality with total vacuity, and makes the infinite in Being the zero in thought, cannot permanently poise itself in its precarious position must either repent of its concessions to realism and lapse into the scientific commonplace, 'all we know phenomena'; or
else advance, with what caution and reserve pleases, into ulterior conceptions of the invisible cause, sufficient to soften the total eclipse into the penumbra of sacred mystery. "
Martineau makes further the pertinent remark, that
but natural that the pretensions of men to more knowledge than they can substantiate should lead to this reaction into
? A Study Religion, vol.
pp. 131 sqq.
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34
John Caird, his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion
(1880),1 has given a searching criticism of Spencer's agnos ticism, the chief points of which are as follows. The two propositions that our intelligence confined to the finite and relative, and that we have cognisance of an existence beyond the finite, are contradictory and cancel each other. Whoever maintains that human knowledge limited shows thereby that not limited merely by the relative, because in that case could have no knowledge of its own limits. The true conclusion from the principles of Spencer's theory of know ledge not the incognisability of the Absolute, but its non existence his " unknowable Absolute " simply the negation of thought and therewith of being, in every sense in which we can use the expression. In reality, the assertion of the unknowableness of the Absolute based upon an abstraction; a fictitious logical entity first created, and then conscious ness charged with imbecility because of its inability to think that fiction. Nothing can possess any reality for us save as
capable of forming part of our thought, or itself a thinkable reality. All science proceeds on the tacit assump tion that nature and the world of man are intelligible, of the presence of reason, thought in things, and of rational rela tions in the events of history. This general presupposition cannot leave us when we rise beyond nature and humanity to the ultimate basis of all phenomena. If reason irresistibly impelled (even according to Spencer) to seek, above and beyond the manifold and changeful phenomena, a permanent unity, an infinite and absolute reality, can at this stage, as little as at any previous one, fall into the suicidal contradic tion of seeking by thought an object which has no relation to thought, and of seeking the ultimate explanation of all rational relations in the irrational. The presupposition and the final goal of thought cannot be an Absolute which simply the negation of thought, but rather that which comprehends all finite things and thoughts only because itself the Unity of Thought and Being, and in which therefore our human
finds its fullest revelation. Lastly, Caird observes, Pages 10-38.
imaginary ignorance. " " The Gnosticism of theologians responsible for much of the Agnosticism of this century. "
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? 342 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
that Spencer's demand of religious worship of the Unknow able is an impossible one for the human heart to meet. It is true all religion contains an element of mystery, inasmuch as finite intelligence cannot be the measure of the infinite ; but a religion all mystery is an absurd and impossible notion, and would be nothing else than the apotheosis of ignorance. The homage which we render to the Being in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, all the inexhaustible
wealth of that boundless realm of truth in which thought finds ever increasing stimulus to aspiration, to wonder and delight, is totally different from the dumb wonder of ignorance or the grovelling awe of the supernatural, as it is exhibited in the fetish-worshipper, whose religion is the nearest approach to the religion of the Unknowable. True religion is not the blind fear of an" unknown Being, but trust, sympathy, and
love toward the God who is light, and in whom is no dark ness at all," and to know whom is eternal life for the human spirit.
As is evident from this critique of Spencer's position, and as he himself intimates in his "prefatory note," John Caird takes essentially the standpoint of Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. He founds his proof of the existence of God on the fundamental principle of Hegelian speculation, in which he finds the essence of the ontological argument, namely, that the correlation of thought and being in our consciousness
involves as its necessary presupposition the absolute unity of both in the divine consciousness. After the example of Hegel, he describes the forms of the religious consciousness as the representative, figurative form of knowledge, as the abstract, disintegrating logical understanding, and as synthe tic, reintegrating speculation, which discovers in the contradic tions, to the understanding insoluble, of finite and infinite, freedom and necessity, etc. , the inseparable moments or members of a concrete unity. Caird's idea of religion is also formed after Hegel's, though with a stronger accentuation of the ethical side, and in that respect related to Fichte's ethical mysticism. Religion is the realisation of the ideal, which
in morality is never more than approximately reached ; for religion is the surrender of the finite to the infinite will, the abnegation of all private individual volition, and complete identification of the personal will with God's. Hence en trance upon the religious life is the termination of the struggle
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
343
between " the false self and that higher self which at once mine and infinitely more than mine," the realisation of the divine self in the human. The last chapter in the book, which deals with the relation of the philosophy to the history of religion, offers excellent observations on false and correct applications of the idea of development to the history of religion. This idea according to Caird in no way incon sistent with the claim of Christianity to a divine origin, the
latter not understood in such sense as to sever Chris tianity from human history, which not the interest of the apologist to do. There reason to resist the application of the idea of evolution to Christianity in sense which would assert that there was nothing new and original in but only combination in new forms of pre-existing elements. The connection of Christianity with the past must be conceived as the transmuting of the past by new creative spiritual force. Thus, based upon Hegel, we have here an idealistic form of evolutionism in opposition to that of Herbert Spencer.
The Scottish philosophers, Edward Caird and Hutchison Stirling, and the Oxford Professor, Thomas Hill Green, have successfully endeavoured to introduce their countrymen to the philosophy of Hegel the two former by excellent mono graphs on Kant and Hegel, in which, while differing on many points, they concur in representing the Kantian philosophy as the fundamental basis of the speculation which reaches its climax in Hegel. This conception of the relation of the two great German philosophers appears to prevail pretty generally in England and Scotland, and without doubt much more correct than the view which prevails in Germany, in conse quence of the interpretation of Kant brought into vogue by the Neo-Kantians during the last decades. According to this interpretation, in order to remove him as far as possible from the tabooed Hegel, Kant to be explained in the sense of Hume and Locke, whereby the epoch-making
element of his philosophy totally ignored. really remarkable phenomenon in national psychology, that in the same years in which in Germany the younger generation dis covers the progress of philosophy in backward movement from Hegel to Kant, and from Kant to Hume and Locke, the younger generation in Great Britain has gone in the exactly opposite direction. In his elaborate Introductions to Hume's works (1874), by which he first obtained name as philo
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sophical thinker, Thomas Hill Green sought to show that the English philosophy of the last hundred years has remained stationary, because it has continued to build upon the founda tion of the empiricism of Locke, although Hume had shown its untenability, and that therefore the first condition of an advance is a serious reconsideration of the problem proposed by Hume, a problem the solution of which Green considers possible only in the direction of the speculative philosophy begun by Kant and carried further by Hegel. He had given expression to this conviction a few years earlier (1868), in the suggestive essay on Popular Philosophy in its Relation to
Life, at the close of which he says : 1 "
A peculiar charac
teristic of our times is the scepticism of the best men. Art,
religion, and political life have outgrown the nominalistic
logic and the psychology of individual introspection ; yet the
only recognised formulae by which the speculative man can
account for them to himself, are derived from that logic and
psychology. Thus the more fully he has appropriated the
results of the spiritual activity of his time, the more he is
baffled in his theory, and to him this means weakness, and
the misery of weakness. Meanwhile, pure motive and high
aspiration are going for nothing, or issuing only in those
wild and fruitless outbursts into action with which speculative
misery sometimes seeks to relieve itself. The prevalence of
such a state of mind might be expected at least to excite an
interest in a philosophy like that of Hegel, of which it was
the professed object to find formulae adequate to the action of
reason as exhibited in nature and human society, in art and
religion. "
As a tutor in Oxford, Green exercised, by the force of his
strong and sterling personality, directed always, both specu latively and practically, to the highest ideals, a powerful influence, which continues to work, upon the young minds
that gathered around him. His importance as a philosophical thinker became known to wider circles only after his death by his posthumous writings. For our purpose it is his Pro
legomena to Ethics, and his theological essays and addresses \ / (in the third volume of his collected works), that are of special importance. On these and the references of his
editor, in the memoir prefixed to the third volume of his 1 Works, vol. iii. p. 124.
? ? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
345
In a review of Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, Green complains that Caird does not "sit looser to the dialectical method " of Hegel, and identifies thought and
reality without sufficient explanation that the vital truth which Hegel had to teach must be presented in form which will
be more acceptable to serious and scientific men generally. Green thus summarises this "vital truth" of Hegelianism " that there one spiritual self-conscious being, of which all that real the activity or expression that we are related to this spiritual being, not merely as parts of the world which
its expression, but as partakers in some inchoate measure of the self-consciousness through which at once constitutes and distinguishes itself from the world that this participation
the source of morality and religion. " The exposition of these propositions constitutes the subject matter of Green's philosophy of religion. He finds the foundation of faith in God in the intellectual and moral nature of man. Our know ledge of the world, being the mind's active combination of various appearances into the unity of consciousness, becomes the ground of the knowledge of self-conscious Mind in the universe, which the necessary condition of the existence of
works, the following sketch of his religious philosophy based.
? a like activity in ourselves, and the source and bond of the ever growing synthesis called knowledge. But as the source of all knowledge God not knowable by us in the same sense as any other object, and can only be thought of under metaphors and practically experienced as the power by which our minds think and love. As our thought presupposes as the ground of its possibility an eternal thinking Mind, so our moral action presupposes an eternal Will employing man as the instrument of the realisation of its ends. For all moral action self-realisation, the development of our true nature, the endeavour to perfect our actual nature in the direction of a highest ideal. This effort after self-improvement the practical proof of an absolute perfection. For the possibili ties of our nature which wait for realisation
presuppose a superhuman self from which, in which, and for which they are actual there must be an eternal subject which all that the imperfect subject destined to become by the unfolding of
its powers. in this sense that Green uses the somewhat bold expression, " God our possible or ideal self. " But he
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does not mean by this that this self is an empty, merely
ideal ; on the contrary, it is the only realising principle, or cause, of our personal self, which is never more than a relative reality. As little may this be understood in the sense of a pantheistic identification of God with man, be cause our imperfect, perpetually developing being distinguishes us essentially from the eternally perfect being of God. But what the expression does mean is that the human mind is in principle one with the Divine, relatively participates in God, is a reproduction of the Divine under the conditions of the finite. According to Green, the inner essence of Christianity lies in its sense of this fact, that God is not an alien, far-off outward Power, but the Father, whose " word is nigh unto us," of whom we may say that we are reason of his reason, whose spirit lives in us, and for whom we live in living for the brethren ; and thereby we live freely, because in obedi ence to a spirit which is our self; and in communion with whom we have assurance of eternal life. A self which can think and will eternal ideas, can seek to realise eternal ends, is itself above time, shares in the nature of the eternal ; the perfect development of its capacities cannot be its annihila tion, although we can form no conception of the positive state of the realised ideal, because it lies beyond our experience.
The philosopher is accordingly conscious of being in essen tial accord with Christian faith when this is conceived in its religious sense, that as disposition of mind or character, consisting in the consciousness of potential unity with God, and issuing in the effort to realise this unity in life, self- denial, and in confiding love. This faith independent of historical proofs in every form, and carries the evidence of its own certainty along with As a religious faith cannot come into conflict with knowledge, as both alike have their source in reason or self-consciousness, which itself again a
revelation of the Divine reason.
But religious faith its empirical ecclesiastical form has another side, by which necessarily comes into conflict with knowledge. The one spiritual truth clothed in the forms of the imagination, which can never adequately represent the idea. The pro gressive revelation of God in the spirit of man and in the whole course of human history narrowed to an event of the past, occurring but once or occasionally, and of an exceptiona and absolutely miraculous nature. Events of this kind are
imaginary
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then made to constitute the immediate object of faith, and this faith in miracle the indispensable condition of Christian piety and morality. But in this view it is forgotten that as sent to historical traditions, be they well or attested, true or untrue, can never be more than an act of the intellect, which would make no difference to the moral value of man, to his religious and moral character. From this faith, still required in the churches, in the miraculous as the specific form of divine revelation, the moral feeling and the intellectual culture of our day have revolted. For when once the idea of
" nature " conceived as continuous, uniform system of laws, " supernatural event " would be breach of the con tinuity of the order of which was supposed to be an ele ment, that would contradict the conditions under which alone a thing can be an event. " As long as the truth of religion supposed to depend on supernatural events, science
? right in pronouncing fiction and in identifying faith with unreason. " The business of apologetics can be no other
than to distinguish faith its spiritual and religious essence from the inadequate forms of the imagination, and to learn to
understand historically the rise and growth of the latter.
was not within the scope of Green's vocation as a philo
sopher to deal with the critical history of Christian faith, but he everywhere shows close acquaintance with the results of recent historical criticism, as far as they could serve to confirm
his philosophical speculations. " The glory of Christianity," he says,1 " not that excludes, but that comprehends
not that came of a sudden into the world, or that
complete in particular institution, or can be stated complete in particular form of words but that the expression of a common spirit which gathering together all things in one. We cannot say of Lo, here or Lo, there now, but was not then. We go backward, but we cannot reach its source we look forward, but we cannot foresee its final power. We do wrong in making depend on a past event, and in identifying with the creed of certain age, or with visible society established at particular time. What we thus seem to gain in definiteness, we lose in permanence of conviction for importunate inquiry will show us that the event can only be approached through series of fluctuating
The Witness of God, Works, iii. pp. 240 sqq.
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interpretations of behind which its original nature cannot be clearly ascertained that the visible Church of one age
never essentially the same as that of the next that
only in word, or to the intellectually dead, that the creed of the present the same as the creed of the past. " But
doubtless true that the roots of the system of practical ideas which we call Christianity are as old as mankind, the ideas would never have been developed save through definite historical events and personal influences, among which some outweigh all others in importance. The Son of Man came, who was conscious, in the meanness of human life and death, of the communication of God to himself, and through him to mankind. Then came Paul, who found his idea of the " heavenly man," borrowed from the philosophy of his day, realised in Jesus, and made the death and resurrection of
the symbol of the fundamental principle, that man comes to his true self only by the passing out of his old nar row self into the true divine self. But while Paul had placed this moral and spiritual element above the miraculous, sub
the relation was reversed the miraculous over powered the moral and the spiritual. Yet two generations after Paul followed the author of the Fourth Gospel, " who gave that final spiritual interpretation to the person of Christ which has for ever taken out of the region of history and of the doubts that surround all past events, to fix in the puri fied conscience as the immanent God. " By combining faith the spiritual with the moral, God with man, "this Gospel has filled the special function of presenting the highest thought about God in language of the imagination, and has thus become the source of the highest religion. " But while according to Paul and John Christ dwells and works as spirit in believers, the Church he has been step by step " ex ternalised and mystified. " Thus arose dogma with its mys teries, from which knowledge and the purest moral culture are estranged. But trustful, child-like love, set before us by the Biblical presentation of Christ, and made an inward part of our life and character, sufficient to meet and overcome all the blows of criticism and the problems as to historical events. And as must be allowed, no longer possible for the modern thinking Christian to retain the communion
'Works, iii.
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349
and fellowship of the confessions and creeds of the ancient Church, he must, nevertheless, continue to feel bound to his fellow-Christians by the ties of practical love. Green's own life was an example of this, and he combined in an uncommon degree practical social labours with philosophical pursuits.
There are not wanting various indications that, as in Ger
many the original Hegelianism, so England Neo-Hege- lianism, so far from being the final end of philosophy, that even those thinkers who are intimately conversant with the latter, and ungrudgingly acknowledge its noble and massive idealism, have nevertheless not been able to convince them selves of the tenability of the system, and so find themselves compelled to advance in the direction of speculative theism (which also predominates the post- Hegelian speculation of Germany). We must mention, as written on these lines, the able book of Andrew Seth, Hegelianism and Personality
(1887), which appears to have been occasioned by the writ ings of Green for begins with critical observations on the crucial doctrine of Green's system, that a universal or divine self present in every individual as the efficient principle of its theoretical and practical knowledge. In order to under stand and fairly judge this doctrine, Seth holds necessary to go back to its genesis in the philosophy of Kant and his successors, especially of Hegel. An acute analysis and cri tique of these systems leads to the result that the fundamental error of Hegelianism and the allied English doctrine the identification of the human and the divine self-consciousness, and that this identification depends throughout on the ten dency to take mere form of consciousness, which the same in all individuals, and so universal, as a real being, to hypostatise and call the self common to God and men. This contrary, Seth maintains, to the characteristic nature of the self, which, although in knowledge principle of unity,
in existence, or metaphysically, principle of isolation (? ). For the most certain testimony of consciousness that have a centre of my own -- will of my own. Nor does the
? consciousness lend any countenance to the represen tation of the human soul as a mere mode or efflux of the divine. On the contrary, religious self-surrender of the will
to the divine will presupposes the active self of the man. What Hegel calls "spirit," "absolute spirit," at bottom
religious
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? 350 THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
nothing more than the abstract scheme of intelligence, which Fichte constructs in his VVissenschaftslehre. But this ab stract form has neither reality nor real value. The attempt of the Hegelian schools to unify the divine and the human subject is ultimately destructive of both. We cannot rightly conceive either the divine or the human self in this impossible union ; nor is this wonderful, seeing they are merely two in separable aspects of our own conscious life isolated and hypo- statised. If we are to ascribe real existence to God, Seth declares with truth, there must be a divine centre of thought, activity, and enjoyment, which can no more be lost in its manifestations in the universe than human personality in its life for others. The admission of a real self-consciousness in God moreover, demanded by the fundamental principle of the theory of knowledge --interpretation by means of the highest category within our reach the self-conscious life the highest in us, we cannot deny to God he may, indeed must, be infinitely more than we know ourselves to be, but he cannot be less. The Hegelian system, continues Seth, as ambiguous on the question of man's immortality as on that of the personality of God, and for precisely the same reason-- that the self of which assertions are made not a real but a logical self. The two positions are two complementary sides of the same view of existence. If we can believe, with the Hegelians of the Left, that there no permanent Intelligence
and Will at the heart of things, then the self-conscious life degraded from its central position, and becomes merely an accident in the universe but, on the other hand, to a philo sophy founded upon self-consciousness, and especially upon the moral consciousness, must seem incredible that the suc cessive generations should be used up and cast aside -- as character were not the only lasting product and the only valu able result of time. Seth summarises his critique of Hegel and Neo-Hegelianism the sentences, " Hegel the pro tagonist of idealism, and champions the best interests of hu manity but in its execution the system breaks down, and ultimately sacrifices these very interests to a logical abstrac tion styled the Idea, in which both God and man disappear. "
The speculative theism towards which Seth seeks to bring
Hegelian speculation represented also in the writings of Robert Fl1nt, Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh, Antitheistic Theories (1877) and Theism (1876),
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35
and in his brief but very instructive article on Theism in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In the first- named book Flint has passed under review the naturalistic,
and pantheistic theories, and shown their untenability he does not in this work deal with agnosti
positivist, pessimistic,
cism, but has reserved for a separate work, which has not yet appeared. This will be looked for with the greater in terest, as the article on Theism in the Encyclopaedia offers some excellent observations upon the
agnostic position. Flint maintains that agnosticism so far from being the
necessary corollary of Kantian criticism, that, on the contrary, contradicts its true principles. For the categories
which make experience possible, their validity cannot be re stricted to sense experience, but extends as truly to the realm of moral and religious experience. And the objective validity of the categories, or the necessary forms of thought, generally called in question, not merely theology which
thereby deprived of all foundation, but equally all other sciences, which are then all resolved into castles in the air. But against such scepticism human consciousness testifies, for cannot think the mere subjectivity of true category. As
against Hamilton and Mansel, Flint observes that the idea of the Absolute so far from being, as they alleged, an empty ne gation, abstraction, and fiction, because out of all relation to the knowable, contains the foundation of all relations, the basis not less of existence than of thought, and therefore far from being unknowable, the richest and highest idea, to which all other knowledge conducts as its necessary com pletion. In all the metaphysical categories are included, for God the absolute Being all the physical categories, for he absolute Force and Life all the mental categories, for he absolute Spirit all the moral categories, for he the absolutely Good. Thus the idea of God brings all ideas which are the conditions of human reason and the basis of a know ledge of things into an organic system the whole truth of the world, unfolded in the various sciences, as well as the truth of the mind, included the idea of God. A philo sophy of the Absolute, such as Hegel's, may in its contro versy with Agnosticism fall into some extravagances of Gnos ticism but a theist may nevertheless sympathise with its general aim and appropriate many of its results. Undoubt edly this philosophy needs correction, so far as fails to do
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to the personality and transcendence of the Divine.
And this error is due to its having obtained the idea of God
too exclusively by the method of formal logical thought, and
to its neglect of the other sides of the mind, the moral and
justice
The idea of God cannot be laid hold of solely by the scientific organising intellect, but only by the combined theoretical and practical powers of the mind. It is a truth ever more clearly perceived, that the
divine glory has its centre in moral perfection, in holy love. On the other hand, the general movement of theism tends to a mediation between the extremes of pantheism and deism,
religious experience particularly.
to a harmonious combination of the personal
self-equality
and the universal agency of God. Positive science has
powerfully co-operated with speculative philosophy in pro
moting this movement. The modern scientific view of the world has not as its result pantheism, but it gives sanction to the relative claims of pantheism, and demands a theism which
God's immanence in the world while holding fast to his personality. The theory of evolution as applied to nature and history does not lead to Agnosticism, but to a more vivid knowledge of God, from whom and through whom and to whom are all things, who is the eternal source of all forces in nature, and also the power in history working for truth and righteousness. These excellent views of Professor Flint seem to me to contain, in fact, the quintessence of the best thoughts of modern speculative philosophy and the pro gramme of its further development.
Lastly, as tending in a similar direction, must be mentioned the works on the philosophy of religion of James Mart1neau, the revered and venerable theologian who has spent his life outside the Established Church as a preacher and theological tutor amongst the Unitarians. By his Essays Philosophical
and Theological (2 vols. , 1869), which appeared originally chiefly in the National Review, and his college addresses, he was known as one of the ablest antagonists of agnostic and materialistic philosophy ; and his two larger works, Types of Ethical Theory (2 vols. , 1885), and A Study of Religion (2 vols. , 1888) have more than sustained his reputation. In his " Introductory chapter on recent developments," prefixed to the re-issue of the second edition of John James Tayler's
? acknowledges
of the Religious Life of England (1876), Martineau could speak of the emendation of the idea of God which had
Retrospect
? ? ? Ch. PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO THEOLOGY.
353
been effected since the days of the older Natural Theology, " an emendation which had taken place long ago among the Unitarians," that "God no longer conceived as the First Cause prefixed to the scheme of things, but as the Indwelling Cause pervading not excluded by Second Causes, but coinciding with them while transcending them as the One everliving Objective Agency, the modes of which must be classified and interpreted by science in the outer field, by con science in the inner. " And he considers that " this change of conception due to the lessened prominence of mechanical ideas and the advance of physiology to dominant position, substituting the thought of life working from within for that of transitive impulse starting from without. " Modern science, with its doctrine of evolution, leaves theism, he maintains, undisturbed and unharmed, as no physical knowledge can prevent from conceiving the unity of the Causal Power, which evolution presupposes, as mind, a thesis implied in the very idea of causality. This thought Martineau has worked out in his Study of Religion. After valuable introductory book on the limits of human intelligence, from which we quoted above,1 the idea of causality reduced to that of operative power, and this again to that of voluntary activity whence the conclusion drawn, that all that takes place in nature has one kind of cause, which we can only conceive as a will analogous to our own that therefore the universe of originated things the product of a supreme Mind. To the charge of anthropomorphism, Martineau replies, that what ever idea we form of the ultimate principle of the universe,
must be taken from the analogies of human experience, and the one thing that makes the difference whether be drawn from the lower or the higher aspects of our human nature. The notion, too, that God as designer must be separated from the world and left outside of unfounded, for " the ism at liberty to regard all the cosmical forces as varieties of method assumed by God's conscious causality, and the whole of Nature as the evolution of his thought. " Yet the immanency of God must not be so conceived as to leave no room for the personality of created minds, or to make the actual cosmos the boundary of the possibilities of the divine activity. To get the more definite contents of the idea of
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God, the inference from our own moral nature to God as the perfect Ideal is made, since that Ideal cannot be merely sub
jective fancy, but the objective authority, in whose legislation our conscience finds its origin and its explanation. Martineau had previously maintained in his essay on Ideal Substitutes
for God, in opposition to the ethical idealism without God, of such writers as Matthew Arnold and F. A. Lange, that the truth of our religious and moral consciousness stands or falls with the reality of the divine ideal.
Martineau's Study of Religion is a most instructive and suggestive work ; what it seems to lack is a closer analysis of the psychological nature of religion, and particularly a more thorough examination of the historical development of the religious consciousness of mankind. But it is not only this work, but the English philosophy of religion generally which seems to me to require supplementing and developing in this direction. It would thereby exert greater influence upon the theology of the Church, which appears to have remained hitherto too much out of touch with the progress of philosophical thought. 1
1 During the translation of the manuscript of this book has appeared Martineau's work, The Seat ofAuthority in Religion (London, 1890), which supplements his Study of Religion in a desirable way. For it follows up the philosophical examination of the ultimate ground of religious certainty, and of the relation of the divine and the human factor in all revelation with an historical analysis of the traditional authorities (the Church, the Bible), and with a review of the historical process by which the religion of Jesus was transformed into a religion about him, and the kernel of moral and religious truth was covered by a husk of " Christian mythology. " Even those who may think Martineau's critique of the early Christian traditions here and there too radical, must be compelled to admit that it is the result of a thorough examination of the facts, and of a penetrating and discerning judgment. And every unprejudiced reader can convince himself by a careful study of the fine concluding chapter, that this bold critique is quite consistent with a fervent reverence for the religious personality of Jesus, and accordingly does not detract from the essence of Christian faith. The work with which Dr. Martineau has crowned the labours of his long life will be a lasting monument of a mind not less free than devout. May it find many grateful readers at home and abroad ! --O. P.
? ? ? ? CHAPTER II.
PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THE THEOLOGY OF GREAT BRITAIN.
It was remarked at the beginning of the previous chapter that that general revolution of thought and feeling, commonly known as " Romanticism," which took place at the com mencement of this century, produced good fruit in the revival and reanimation of the religion of the Church. The first
and most influential representative of this new tendency in England was Coleridge, in whose Aids to Reflection (1825), German idealistic philosophy was transplanted to English soil, and employed in the revivification of theological thought. We have seen that in Coleridge, as in Schleiermacher, his
German predecessor, intellect and feeling, faith and know ledge, entered into such a close alliance with each other, that he appeared on the one hand as the apologist of the faith of the Church, in opposition to anti-religious rationalism ; and,
on the other, as at the same time the champion of a more liberal view of traditional doctrines, in opposition to a literal
orthodoxy. These two aspects of Coleridge's thought, while combined in his own person, separated into two distinct parties or tendencies in the Church, their common origin, in the set of feeling in Romanticism, betraying itself outwardly in the fact that both parties proceeded from the same circle of Oxford students, and were represented by men who were personal friends in their university days, far as their courses
? In this also we meet with a striking similarity to the early days of modern German theology. The relation of J. H. Newman, the originator and early
leader of the Anglo-Catholic movement, to his liberal teacher and mentor, Whately, may be compared with Neander's relation to his teacher Planck ; and the parallel between the friendship of Thomas Arnold with Keble, the friend of
Hurrell Froude and Newman, and the friendship of the youthful Schleiermacher with Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel,
subsequently diverged.
? ? ? 35^ THEOLOGY IN GREAT BRITAIN SINCE 1825. [Bk. IV.
is still more obvious. We must begin with the movement of the High Church, or Tractarian, or Puseyite party, and then take up that of the Broad Church, led by Thomas Arnold and F. D. Maurice, which, from the first, existed by the side of the Tractarian movement, but did not obtain general influence until the latter had passed the zenith of its power. This movement of the Broad Church party has been more recently followed by a liberalism of a more decided type, which has been represented during this generation in the rise of Biblical criticism in Great Britain.
The Tractarian movement dates from the summer of 1833, though its roots extend a few years further back. In the
Year, a collection of religious lyrics on the principal festivals of the ecclesiastical
year 1827 appeared Keble's Christian
? year ; the poems clothe a tender and deep piety in the symbolic garb suggested by the seasons of the natural and Christian year, and are the production of a true poet. We might call Keble the English Novalis, the poet of religious idealism, to whose vision " two worlds " lie always open, the visible being but a type of the invisible, which always lay nearest his heart. Only Keble did not possess the philo sophical culture and learning of Novalis, and lacked con sequently his largeness of view : in Keble's mind, profound personal piety was so exclusively associated with the forms
of Anglican doctrines and ceremonies, that he could not con ceive Christianity or religion at all, apart from the Anglican system ; his religious intolerance went so far, that when the Queen selected a Lutheran prince to be godfather to one of her sons, he set on foot a protest against it from English
clergymen. The religious poems of the Christian Year gave such perfect and admirable expression to a wide-spread state of feeling amongst English people, that the little volume found everywhere the warmest reception, and probably ob tained more friends than all the subsequent theological tracts and learned books for the new movement in the Church. It produced a still deeper effect on the convictions and the subsequent life of John Henry Newman, who had hitherto
passed amongst Oxford men as a disciple of Whately's, though as early as 1826 his mind began to take another turn, chiefly through intercourse with his friend Hurrell Froude. This young man seems to have played a similar part amongst the allies of English Romanticism to that
? ? ? Ch. II] PARTIES AND MOVEMENTS IN THEOLOGY.
357
played by Friedrich Schlegel in the same movement in Germany. From Froude's Remains, which were published (1836-9) after his death by Newman and Keble, one gets the impression of a man not of great natural capacity, but of loose and neglected mind, which was greatly lacking both in moral strength and solid learning ; a man who loved to indulge in paradoxes, which aimed at being clear and pro found, but were often meaningless, and who, from his limited
aristocratic Anglican standpoint, passed sentence upon every thing outside and beyond it with the greater arrogance in proportion to his ignorance. " He hated the Reformation and the Reformers, especially Luther, Melanchthon and Co.