II
But when all explanations have been given, and all excuses made, I am well aware that in the actual presentation of my case I have introduced so much illustrative material, and of this material so much is disputable, that some of my hearers may feel themselves distracted rather than enlightened by the number of seemingly subsidiary points of which they are asked to take account. I trust such persons are in a minority; and that, on the whole, my main contention will seem enriched and strengthened, not embarrassed or confused, by the manner of its exposition. Nevertheless, it may not be amiss, before I bring the course to an end, to restate the most important points in the general case I have endeavoured to present.
The root principle which, by its constant recurrence in slightly different forms, binds together, like an operatic leit-motif, the most diverse material, is that if we would maintain the value of our highest beliefs and emotions, we must find for them a congruous origin. Beauty must be more than an accident. The source of morality must be moral. The source of knowledge must be rational. If this be granted, you rule out Mechanism, you rule out Naturalism, you rule out Agnosticism; and a lofty form of Theism becomes, as I think, inevitable.
It is, I imagine, the application of this method to knowledge which will be most generally resented by those who refuse to acknowledge its validity. In the case of beauty, for example, the point will seem of small importance to those for whom art means little. It may not greatly impress many of those for whom art means much. For it proclaims no new canons of taste. It belittles no æsthetic school. It asks no critic to revise his judgments. It touches the interests neither of artist nor author. It may well be ignored.
With ethics the case is somewhat different. There are, no doubt, sceptics in religion who treat scepticism as a luxury which can be safely enjoyed only by the few. Religion they think good for morals; morals they think good for society; society they think good for themselves. Such persons may well treat the opinions expressed in the lecture on ethics with benevolent disagreement. But there are more robust thinkers who will not be so lenient. They will reject as intolerable the idea that the morality they desire to preserve depends on a religion they desire to destroy; and any doctrine which, like the present, binds the two more closely together will encounter their uncompromising hostility.
Nevertheless, it is the lectures dealing with intellectual values that will rouse, as I suppose, the most serious opposition. The endeavour to treat our beliefs about the world and our beliefs about God as interdependent will seem to many extravagant, even unnatural. It will be urged that, for all reasonable beings, reason must be the supreme judge in matters of belief. It can neither resign its office nor delegate its authority. Let it then endorse Science, as it must; and establish Theism, if it can; but do not require it to commit the folly of treating truths about which opinions are agreed as dependent on conjectures about which opinions are divided.
This may be excellent advice; but it is hardly to the point. I ask for nothing better than the supremacy of reason: not one of its prerogatives do I desire to curtail. Indeed (as I have already complained) it is the agnostic empiricists who most obstinately shrink from following it to conclusions they dislike, who mutiny, like some old-time mariners, whenever they are required to navigate unfamiliar seas.
I have no sympathy with the singular combination of intellectual arrogance and intellectual timidity so often presented by this particular school of thought. I like it no better than I like the attitude of those who declare that, since reason is bankrupt, authority should take over its liabilities, however small be the prospect of discharging them in full. My point of view is utterly different. And if I urge that the criticism of common knowledge brings us ultimately to Theism, this involves no intolerable paradox, nor indeed anything very new or strange.
Descartes, for example, thought that all knowledge was based on clear and distinct ideas, and that clear and distinct ideas could be trusted because, being due to God, they were guaranteed by His truthfulness. That there is a God possessing every perfection was independently established by an a priori argument into which I need not enter. But the point of interest is that, though Descartes conceived himself to have found a refuge from scepticism in the famous “I think, therefore I am,” he could only get from this narrow assurance to general knowledge by the use of “clear and distinct ideas” certified by divine veracity. If, therefore, belief in one’s self was the first of truths, belief in God was the second; and on this second truth all subordinate beliefs, mathematical, physical, and metaphysical, were, in his opinion, ultimately founded. In one sense, and from one point of view, this is no doubt an exact inversion of the argument developed in these lectures. Descartes rests the belief in science on a belief in God. I rest the belief in God on a belief in science. Nevertheless, beneath this contrast there is deep-lying agreement. Both views reject the notion that we possess in the general body of common-sense assumptions and scientific truths a creed self-sufficing and independent, to which we may add at our pleasure Theism in such doses as suit our intellectual palate. Both views, therefore, are profoundly divided, not merely from all that calls itself agnostic, but from much that calls itself religious.
I must not, however, press the parallel too far. Descartes did not, and could not, regard our beliefs as a developing system, which is not merely increasing by external accretion, like a crystal in its mother-liquid, but is growing and changing through and through like a living organism. Such conceptions were not of his age or country, nor, if they had been, could they have been easily accommodated to his peculiar genius. His was the mathematical temperament, always striving for precise definitions and rigorous proof; always tolerant of any simplification of the concrete complexities of reality, which would make them amenable to deductive treatment. Of this, as a method, we need make no complaint. Within due limits it is invaluable. But Descartes, so to speak, “objectified” it. He assumed that any judgment which could properly be described as “clear and distinct” was not only convenient in form, but true in substance. The world, alas! is not so made. The things which are clear and distinct are usually things of our own creation. Definitions, abstractions, diagrams, syllogisms, machines—such and such like are, or may be, “clear and distinct.” But the great facts which we have not made—these, at our present level of knowledge, are never clear and never distinct. Life, the organism, the self, the state, the world, freedom, causality, the flow of time, the relation between mind and body, between perceiver and perceived, between consciousness and sub-consciousness, between person and person (I say nothing of beauty, of virtue, or of God)—who is there will dare to say that he either finds in these notions, or can put into them without injury, the qualities which Descartes deemed the inevitable marks of real and certain knowledge? Truth, for us, is a plant of a different and of a slower growth. How much indeed of that growth consists in discovering that what we thought was clear is in fact obscure; what we thought was simple is in fact complex; what we thought was distinct is in fact confused; and how helpful are such discoveries to the augmentation of learning!