We reach again the same conclusion, if we note, what Dr. Edward Caird has so well pointed out, “the imperfection of the subjective religion of the prophets and psalmists of Israel,”—who nevertheless already possessed a very advanced type of profoundly ethical religion,—“shown by its inability to overcome the legal and ceremonial system of worship to which it was opposed”; as, “in like manner, Protestantism … has never been able decisively to conquer the system of Rome.”[324] For this, as indeed the failure of Buddhism to absorb and supersede Hindooism, evidently implies that Religion cannot find its full development and equilibrium in an exclusive concentration upon Morality Proper, as alone essential; and hence that complete Religion embraces other things besides Morality.
Once more we find non-identity between the very Ethics directly postulated by Religion at its deepest, and the Ethics immediately required by the Family, Society, the State, Art, Science, and Philosophy. As Prof. Troeltsch admirably puts it, “the special characteristic of our modern consciousness resides in the insistence both upon the Religious, the That-world Ends, and upon the Cultural, This-World Ends, which latter are taken as Ends-in-themselves: it is precisely in this combination that this consciousness finds its richness, power, and freedom, but also its painful interior tension and its difficult problems.” “As in Christian Ethics we must recognize the predominance of an Objective Religious End,—for here certain relations of the soul to God are the chief commandments and the supreme good,—so in the Cultural Ends we should frankly recognize objective Moral Ends of an Immanental kind.” And in seeking after the right relations between the two, we shall have to conclude that “Ethics, for us, are not, at first, a unity but a multiplicity: man grows up amongst a number of moral ends, the unification of which is his life’s task and problem, and not its starting-point.” And this multiplicity “is” more precisely “a polarity in human nature, for it contains two poles—that of Religious and that of Humane Ethics, neither of which can be ignored without moral damage, but which, nevertheless, cannot be brought under a common formula.” “We can but keep a sufficient space open for the action of both forms, so that from their interaction there may ever result, with the least possible difficulty, the deepening of the Humane Ends by the Christian Ethics, and the humanizing of the Christian End by the Humane Ethics, so that life may become a service of God within the Cultural Ends, and that the service of God may transfigure the world.”[325]
We can perceive the difference between the two forces most clearly in Our Lord’s life and teaching—say, the Sermon on the Mount; in the intolerableness of every exegesis which attempts to reduce the ultimate meaning and worth of this world-renewing religious document to what it has of literal applicability in the field of morality proper. Schopenhauer expressed a profound intuition in the words: “It would be a most unworthy manner of speech to declare the sublime Founder of the Christian Religion, whose life is proposed to us as the model of all virtue, to have been the most reasonable of men, and that his maxims contained but the best instruction towards an entirely reasonable life.”[326]
(2) The fact is that Religion ever insists, even where it but seems to be teaching certain moral rules and motives as appropriate to this visible world of ours, upon presenting them in the setting of a fuller, deeper world than that immediately required as the field of action and as the justification of ordinary morality. Thus whilst, in Morality Proper, the concepts of Responsibility, Prudence, Merit, Reward, Irretrievableness, are necessarily primary; in Religious Ethics the ideas of Trust, Grace, Heroism, Love, Free Pardon, Spiritual Renovation are, as necessarily, supreme. And hence it is not accidental, although of course not necessary, that we often find men with a keen religious sense but with a defective moral practice or even conception, and men with a strong moral sense and a want of religious perception; that Mystics, with their keen sense for one element of religion, so often seem, and sometimes are, careless of morality proper; and that, in such recent cases (deeply instructive in their very aberrations) as that of Nietzsche, we get a fierce anti-Moralism combined with a thirst for a higher and deeper world than this visible one, which not all its fantastic form, nor even all Nietzsche’s later rant against concrete religion, can prevent from being essentially religious.[327]
(3) We have then, here, the deepest instance of the law and necessity which we have, so often, found at the shallower levels of the spirit’s life. For here, once more, there is one apprehension, force, life,—This-world Morality,—which requires penetration and development, in nowise destruction, by another, a deeper power, That-world Ethics and Religion. Let the one weaken or blunt the edge and impact of the other, and it has, at the same time, weakened itself. For here again we have, not a Thing which simply exists, by persistence in its dull unpenetratingness and dead impenetrability, but a Life, growing by the incorporation and organization, within its ampler range, of lesser lives, each with its own legitimate autonomy.
II. Mysticism and the Limits of Human Knowledge and Experience.
But have not even the most sober-minded of the Partial Mystics greatly exceeded the limits of human knowledge, more or less continuously, throughout their conclusions? Is Kant completely in the wrong? And are not the Positivists right in restricting all certain cognition to the experiences of the senses and to the Mathematico-Physical Sciences built upon those experiences? And, again, is there such a thing at all as specifically Mystical Experience or Knowledge? And, if so, what is its worth?—I must keep the elaboration of the (ultimately connected) question, as to the nature of the realities experienced or known—as to the human spirit and the Divine Spirit, and their inter-relations, hence as to Pantheism and Personality—for the next chapter, and can here but prepare the ground for it, by the elucidation of certain important points in general Epistemology, and of the more obvious characteristics of Mystical apprehension.
1. Positivist Epistemology an error.
As regards general Epistemology, we may well take up the following positions.