God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

CHAPTER V

THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (continued)

But though Materialism had to go, there was a time when it seemed to many by no means unlikely that Agnosticism might have to be accepted as its substitute. And if that had been so the case would have been scarcely less desperate. We might have been left with a philosophy of a kind, but we should have been deprived of any object which could evoke within our hearts the trust and affection that are needed to sustain a religion. However, as it proved, there was no great cause for fear. Agnosticism was subjected in its turn to the ordeal of criticism, and the result proved that it had not in it the substance and force that could give it any permanent hold upon the best intelligence of the age.

If Agnosticism could have been content to confine itself to positive assertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it. But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to assert that we can know what it is not. This above all else, they said, it is not: it is not personal. True, Herbert Spencer maintained that it is as far raised above personality as personality is raised above unconsciousness; but the stress was laid not upon the affirmation of super-personality, but upon the denial and rejection of anything like personality as we understand it.

The position was really untenable. Possibly, if we could detect no more in Nature than power, we might be content, intellectually, to stop at the affirmation of inscrutable force. But if there is also design, then we are bound to go a step further. Bishop Harvey Goodwin expressed this exactly when he said: "Purpose means person." No doubt personality in the Creator must be something far higher and fuller than personality in the creature. The German philosopher Lotze was speaking the truth when he declared that "to all finite minds there is allotted but a pale copy" of personality; "the finiteness of the finite," being "not a producing condition of personality," as has often been maintained, "but a limit and hindrance of its development." "Perfect personality," he said, "is in God alone."[[1]]

To most of us it may sound paradoxical to urge that the full Christian doctrine of the Three Persons in the Godhead is really less difficult intellectually than the doctrine that the Divine Being consists of an isolated unit.

This was the contention of the Greek Fathers of the Church, whose acute and subtle minds anticipated not a few of the objections which we have had to encounter in our days. We cannot elaborate the statement here,[[2]] but it is to the point to observe that the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity removes from the Christian believer that which to Spencer was one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the acceptance of the idea of a Divine Personality; for it relieves him from the necessity of imagining a subject without an object, since in the Christian view the highest life in the universe is a social life, in which thought is for ever communicated with unbroken harmony of feeling and will.

But the inadequacy of Agnosticism was to be seen not only on the intellectual side. Its practical effects were necessarily determined by its negations. Since we could know nothing of the ultimate power, it was plainly our wisdom to turn our attention elsewhere. It followed that, if morality was to be upheld, it must be based upon other than the familiar sanctions. For awhile it was enthusiastically promised that this could and should be done. But the event proved otherwise. Towards the end of his life, Herbert Spencer was constrained to admit this. "Now that ... I have succeeded in completing the second volume of The Principles of Ethics ... my satisfaction is somewhat dashed by the thought that these new parts fall short of expectation. The doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent that I had hoped."[[3]]

And this moral failure of the system pointed yet deeper to its essential weakness. It deliberately ignored the profoundest needs and capacities of our nature. The need is the need for God, and for One who, though greatly above us, is yet within our reach, and ready to give us His friendship. "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." That cry of St. Augustine has found its echo in unnumbered souls, and our humanity will never be satisfied while it is offered no more than an impalpable abstraction for the contentment of its craving.

Allusion has been made to the fact that Romanes in his latter days was led to abandon the negative attitude which he had taken in his earlier life. The story of the change is to be found as told by himself in the volume of Life and Letters edited by his widow, and in the Notes which he left behind him. These he had written in preparation for a book which was to have been entitled: A Candid Examination of Religion.[[4]] It is evident that no consideration weighed more with him than this witness of the deeper needs of the soul. We have seen with what sorrow he had accepted as a young man the conclusions to which he had found himself driven when Theism seemed no longer a possible belief. After his change he admitted that he had failed to recognise an important element in his treatment of the problem. "When I wrote the preceding treatise I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of human nature in any enquiry touching Theism. But since then I have seriously studied anthropology (including the science of comparative religions), psychology, and metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing that human nature is the most important part of nature as a whole whereby to investigate the theory of Theism."[[5]]

The outcome of his study was to convince him of two things. The first was that, "if the religious instincts of the human race point to no reality as their object, they are out of analogy with all other instinctive endowments. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom we never meet with such a thing as an instinct pointing aimlessly."[[6]] And this first conviction was only the preparation for a second. Speaking again of his Candid Examination of Theism, he says: "In that treatise I have since come to see that I was wrong touching what I constituted the basal argument for my negative conclusion ... Reason is not the only attribute of man, nor is it the only faculty which he habitually employs for the ascertainment of truth. Moral and spiritual faculties are of no less importance in their respective spheres, even of everyday life; faith, trust, taste, etc., are as needful in ascertaining truth as to character, beauty, etc., as is reason."[[7]]

He put the same thing with even more of the note of personal experience when he wrote to Dean Paget of Christ Church within three months of his death: "Strangely enough for my time of life, I have begun to discover the truth of what you once wrote about logical processes not being the only means of research in regions transcendental."[[8]] In all this he was following, as he knew, in the steps of Pascal, who had devoted the whole of the first part of his treatise to the argument from the condition of man's nature without God, and then had appealed to that nature for its positive testimony to the reality of the spiritual. "The heart has its reasons that the reason does not know."

Agnosticism appeared dressed in the garb of an exceeding reverence, but, on closer acquaintance, it became evident that its acceptance would mean the cheapening of life by banishing from it the Divine personality, and robbing the human of the qualities that give it its greatest worth. Happily the disaster has been averted, and there are not many now who would seriously undertake its defence.

[[1]] Microcosmus (E.T.), II., p. 688.

[[2]] Those who may desire to see the matter clearly and ably handled would do well to read the Essay on "The Being of God," in Lux Mundi, by Aubrey Moore.

[[3]] Preface, Vol. II. (1893).

[[4]] These notes were sent by Mr. Romanes' desire after his death, in 1894, to Bishop Gore, and have been published by him in a sixpenny volume under the title of Thoughts on Religion.

[[5]] P. 154.

[[6]] P. 82.

[[7]] Pp. 111, f.

[[8]] Life and Letters, p. 375.