God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

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.