It is difficult to speak of the living in these pages. Personal relations enforce reserve and brevity. Nevertheless, no one can think of Manchester College and Martineau without being reminded of Mansfield College and of Fairbairn, a Scotchman, but of the Independent Church. He also was both teacher and preacher all his days, leader of the movement which brought Mansfield College from Birmingham to Oxford, by the confession both of Anglicans and of Non-conformists the most learned man in his subjects in the Oxford of his time, an historian, touched by the social enthusiasm, but a religious philosopher, par excellence. His Religion and Modern Life, 1894, his Catholicism, Roman and Anglican, 1899, his Place of Christ in Modern Theology, 1893, his Philosophy of the Christian Religion, 1902, and his Studies in Religion and Theology, 1910, indicate the wideness of his sympathies and the scope of the application, of his powers. If imitation is homage, grateful acknowledgment is here made of rich spoil taken from his books.
Philosophy took a new turn in Britain after the middle of the decade of the sixties. It began to be conceded that Locke and Hume were dead. Had Mill really appreciated that fact he might have been a philosopher more fruitful and influential than he was. Sir William Hamilton was dead. Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism to conjure the most absurdly positivistic faith, had left thinking men more exposed to scepticism, if possible, than they had been before. When Hegel was thought in Germany to be obsolete, and everywhere the cry was 'back to Kant,' some Scotch and English scholars, the two Cairds and Seth Pringle-Pattison, with Thomas Hill Green, made a modified Hegelianism current in Great Britain. They led by this path in the introduction of their countrymen to later German idealism. By this introduction philosophy in both Britain and America has greatly gained. Despite these facts, John Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 1880, is still only a religious philosophy. It is not a philosophy of religion. His Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1896, hardly escapes the old antitheses among which theological discussion moved, say, thirty years ago. Edward Caird's Critical Philosophy of Kant, 1889, and especially his Evolution of Religion, 1892, marked the coming change more definitely than did any of the labours of his brother. Thomas Hill Green gave great promise in his Introduction to Hume, 1885, his Prolegomena to Ethics, 1883, and still more in essays and papers scattered through the volumes edited by Nettleship after Green's death. His contribution to religious discussion was such as to make his untimely end to be deeply deplored. Seth Pringle-Pattison's early work, The Development from Kant to Hegel, 1881, still has great worth. His Hegelianism and Personality, 1893, deals with one aspect of the topic which needs ever again to be explored, because of the psychological basis which in religious discussion is now assumed.
[JAMES]
The greatest contribution of America to religious discussion in recent years is surely William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. The book is unreservedly acknowledged in Britain, and in Germany as well, to be the best which we yet have upon the psychology of religion. Not only so, it gives a new intimation as to what psychology of religion means. It blazes a path along which investigators are eagerly following. Boyce, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in 1911, declared James to be the third representative philosopher whom America has produced. He had the form of philosophy as Emerson never had. He could realise whither he was going, as Emerson in his intuitiveness never did. He criticised the dominant monism in most pregnant way. He recurred to the problems which dualism owned but could not solve. We cannot call the new scheme dualism. The world does not go back. Yet James made an over-confident generation feel that the centuries to which dualism had seemed reasonable were not so completely without intelligence as has been supposed by some. No philosophy may claim completeness as an interpretation of the universe. No more conclusive proof of this judgment could be asked than is given quite unintentionally in Haeckel's Weltrãthsel.
At no point is this recall more earnest than in James's dealing with the antithesis of good and evil. The reaction of the mind of the race, and primarily of individuals, upon the fact of evil, men's consciousness of evil in themselves, their desire to be rid of it, their belief that there is a deliverance from it and that they have found that deliverance, is for James the point of departure for the study of the actual phenomena and the active principle of religion. The truest psychological and philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the experience of conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most men have, at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity for God which is unfulfilled, of a relation to God unrealised, which is broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that their own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the sense also that something without themselves empowers them to attempt this recovery and to persevere in the attempt. The psychology of religion is thus put in the forefront. The vast masses of material of this sort which the religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and obscured the facts. The experience is the fact. The best science the world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact. This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's book. James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began to lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in 1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He died in 1910.
When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true worthlessness. We know very little about primitive man. What we learn as to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living, thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students. Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always claimed. The modern man is not to be converted after the pattern which it is alleged that his grandfather followed. For, first, there is the question as to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern. And beyond that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience of the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious admixture of knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century, which would occasion characteristic differences. The modern saint is not asked to be a saint like Francis. In the first place, how do we know what Francis was like? In the second place, the experience of Francis may be most easily understood by the aid of modern experience of true revolt from worldliness and of consecration to self-sacrifice, as these exist among us, with, of course, the proper background furnished by the history of the thirteenth century. Souls are one. Our souls may be, at least in some measure, known to ourselves. Even the souls of some of our fellows may be measurably known to us. What are the facts of the religious experience? How do souls react in face of the eternal? The experience of religion, the experience of the fatherhood of God, of the sonship of man, of the moving of the spirit, is surely one experience. How did even Christ's great soul react, experience, work, will, and suffer? By what possible means can we ever know how he reacted, worked, willed, suffered? In the literature we learn only how men thought that he reacted. We must inquire of our own souls. To be sure, Christ belonged to the first century, and we live in the twentieth. It is possible for us to learn something of the first century and of the concrete outward conditions which caused his life to take the shape which it did. We learn this by strict historical research. Assuredly the supreme measure in which the spirit of all truth and goodness once took possession of the Nazarene, remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable. Dwelling in Jesus, that spirit made through him a revelation of the divine such as the world has never seen. Yet that mystery leads forth along the path of that which is intelligible. And, in another sense, even such religious experience as we ourselves may have, poor though it be and sadly limited, leads back into the same mystery.
It was with this contention that religion is a fact of the inner life of man, that it is to be understood through consciousness, that it is essentially and absolutely reasonable and yet belongs to the transcendental world, it was with this contention that, in the person of Immanuel Kant, the history of modern religious thought began. It is with this contention, in one of its newest and most far-reaching applications in the work of William James, that this history continues. For no one can think of the number of questions which recent years have raised, without realising that this history is by no means concluded. It is conceivable that the changes which the twentieth century will bring may be as noteworthy as those which the nineteenth century has seen. At least we may be grateful that so great and sure a foundation has been laid.