There are two distinct values to be assigned to the researches of science. One of them consists in the practical improvement of the material condition of society; the lessening of physical evil, the increase of physical good; the advancement of our power over matter. In an age intensely devoted to this materialistic improvement, there will be a great accumulation of physical knowledge. At the same time there are accumulating in the same ratio new materials for philosophical speculation concerning the causes of the phenomena that are investigated. The specialists who carry on the investigations may not always be the best reasoners in the application of the new materials to the purpose of philosophical inquiry into the producing causes of the phenomena. But the other distinct value of their investigations consists in the accumulation of materials from which the philosopher can deduce the existence of an actor in the production of the phenomena. When, from these materials, constantly accumulating and constantly to be used in a uniform process of reasoning to which the human mind is both able and obliged to resort, the philosopher deduces the conception of a supreme, personal, intelligent being, he assigns to that being just those attributes which the phenomena of nature compel him to believe in, because if the attributes did not exist the phenomena of nature could not have become what they are. There can be no reason to suppose that as the materials increase, as the researches of science, for whatever purpose carried on, lead to greater and still greater accumulations of knowledge, the law of thought by which we deduce the idea of an actor in the production of phenomena will change, or that the logical necessity for conceiving, or the intellectual capacity to conceive of, the attributes of that actor will either diminish or fade away. An Omnipotent Power without attributes, or one to which no attributes can be assigned, is not likely to be the end of all philosophical speculation about the ultimate cause. Power without attributes, power without a determining will, power without guidance, or purposes, or objects, is not a conception to which a well-trained intellect is now likely to attain; and the greater the accumulation of physical knowledge becomes, the greater will be the necessity to such an intellect for recognizing attributes, and for assigning them to the power which is manifested by the phenomena.
According to Mr. Spencer, the process by which mankind are ultimately to lose the consciousness of a personal Deity is the following: Anthropomorphic attributes were at first ascribed to the single great supernatural agent of whom the primitive men conceived. But in our days, the idea of such a supreme supernatural agent has come to retain but a few of these attributes. These few will eventually be lost, and there will be nothing left but a consciousness of an Omnipotent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed. The probability of this result depends upon the necessity for ascribing what are called anthropomorphic attributes to the Supreme Being; or, in other words, it depends upon the inquiry whether, in order to ascribe to the Supreme Being any attributes at all, we are necessarily confined to those which are anthropomorphic.
"Anthropomorphism," a term compounded from the Greek ἄνθρωπος, man, and μορφή, form, has come to signify the representation of the Deity under a human form, or with human attributes and affections. It is therefore important to know what we in fact do, when reasoning on the phenomena of nature, we reach the conclusion that they must have had an author or producer, and then ascribe to him certain attributes. The fact that the ancient religious beliefs ascribed to the Supreme Being grossly anthropomorphic attributes, is unimportant. So is the fact that the anthropomorphic attributes have been slowly diminishing in the conceptions of the reasoning and cultivated part of mankind. The really important question is whether there can be no conception of a Supreme Being without ascribing to him attributes which liken him to man; or whether, when the anthropomorphic attributes are lost, the idea of a personal God will be lost.
The essential character of any anthropomorphic or human attribute—power for example, or wisdom, or goodness—is that it is limited, imperfect, and liable to error. But when we conceive of these qualities as existing in absolute perfection and boundless capacity, while we retain the idea that they are personal qualities, we in fact divest them of their anthropomorphic or human character. It is a contradiction in terms to say that an imperfect human capacity is the same attribute as a divine and unlimited capacity. The difficulty with the ancient religious beliefs, the whole error of anthropomorphism, was that the conceptions stopped short of the idea of unlimited power, wisdom, and benevolence. The attributes ascribed to the Deity likened him to man in form, character, powers, dispositions, passions. He was an exaggerated human being, with vastly more power, more skill, more wisdom, but still with the same kind of power, skill, and wisdom, actuated by like motives and governed by like passions. Now the truth is, that the difference between a limited and imperfect attribute of character and one that is boundless—power, for example—is more than a difference of degree. It is a difference in kind; for while in both cases we conceive of a personal capacity to act and a will to guide the act, in the one case we are thinking of that which is inferior, limited, and feeble, and in the other case we are thinking of that which knows no limitations and is absolutely inexhaustible. It is not true, therefore, that there can be no conception of a Supreme Being without ascribing to him human attributes. When we reason from phenomena to the conclusion that they must have had an author—when we reach the conviction that phenomena must have had a cause, that there must have been an actor, a process, and a product—we have to deal with two classes of phenomena. One is the class in which we know, from the observations of our senses and our experience, that the author and actor was man. It becomes verified to us with irresistible certainty that the phenomena of human society were produced by an actor, and that that actor was man; a personal agent with a limited and imperfect power. When we turn to the phenomena of nature which we know that man did not produce, we are led by the same irresistible logical sequence of thought to the conviction that these phenomena must have been caused to exist, for human reason revolts at the idea that the phenomena which exist were not caused to exist. We come immediately to perceive that the phenomena of nature are of such a character that the power which has produced them must not only have been superhuman, but it must have been absolutely boundless. At the moment we depart from the investigation of phenomena which belong in the department of human efforts, and come to the phenomena which belong in the department of nature alone, while the necessity for a personal actor continues, the character and capacities of the actor become entirely changed. We see that the phenomena of nature required for their production power without limitation, skill incapable of error, benevolence that was inexhaustible. We thus pass entirely away from anthropomorphic attributes, to the conception of attributes that are not human. We may go on to divest the idea of a Supreme Being of all the attributes that can appropriately be classed as anthropomorphic, and there will still remain the conception of a Supreme Being to whom we not only may but must ascribe attributes that are forced upon our convictions, not because some of them belong in an inferior degree to man, but because all of them are of such a character that if they did not exist in boundless perfection the phenomena of nature could not have existed.
Among the origins which have been assigned to religious beliefs, there is one remarkable hypothesis which may be contrasted with the ghost-theory, and which, so far as the beliefs of cultivated men at the present day are concerned, is about as important as the origin of the belief in ghosts, or as fetichism. It seems that some of the Greek philosophers and historians, entirely regardless of the ghost-theory as the origin of beliefs in supernatural beings, considered that they were fictions invented by the first lawgivers, and promulgated by them for useful purposes. Belief in the gods was thus imposed by the authority of those who organized society and dictated what men were to believe in order to exercise a useful restraint. Plato himself regarded this as the origin of what the communities around him believed respecting the attributes and acts of the gods; the matters believed being fictions prescribed by the lawgivers. In his "Republic," in which he sketches the entire political, social, ethical, and religious constitution of an ideal city, assuming it to be planned and put in operation by an absolute and unlimited authority, he laid it down as essential for the lawgiver to determine what the fictions were to be in which his own community were to be required to believe. Some fictions there must be; for in the community there would be originally nothing but a vague emotional tendency to belief in supernatural beings, and this tendency must be availed of by some positive mythical inventions which it was for the lawgiver to produce and the citizens to accept. Such fictions were the accredited stories about the gods and heroes, which formed the religious beliefs among Plato's contemporaries, and were everywhere embodied in the works of poets, painters, and sculptors, and in the religious ceremonies. But the ancient fictions were, in Plato's opinion, bad, inasmuch as they gave wrong ethical ideas of the characters of the gods. They did not rest upon traditionary evidence, or divine inspiration, being merely pious frauds, constructed by authority and for an orthodox purpose. But they did not fulfill the purpose as well as they should have done. Accordingly, Plato directs in his "Republic" the coinage of a new body of legends, for which he claims no character of veracity, but which will be more in harmony with what he conceives to be the true characters of the gods, and will produce a more salutary ethical effect upon those who are to be the efficient rulers of the commonwealth after it is founded. As the founder of his ideal city, he claims and exercises an exclusive monopoly of coining and circulating such fictions, and they are to be absolutely accepted by those who are to constitute its rulers, and who are to promulgate and teach them to the community, as the physician administers wholesome remedies. To prevent the circulation of dissenting narratives, he establishes a peremptory censorship. There is thus no question of absolute truth or absolute falsehood. That is true which is stamped at the mint of the lawgiver, and that is false which he interdicts.[103]
Nowhere has orthodoxy been rested more distinctly upon the basis of absolute human authority—authority acting upon the highest motives of the public good, for the most salutary purposes, but without claiming anything in the nature of divine inspiration, or even pretending to any other truth than conformity to preconceived ideas of the characters of the gods. As evidence of what Plato regarded as the origin of the religious beliefs which were held by his contemporaries, his "Republic" is an important testimony; for he assigns almost nothing to mankind in general, but an emotional tendency to believe in invisible quasi-human agents, of whom they had no definite conceptions, and at the same time they were entirely ignorant of recorded history, past and present. They needed distinct legendary fictions and invented narratives; these were furnished to them by those who could coin them, and were accepted upon the authority of those who promulgated them. Those who first embodied the fictions as narratives were the oldest poets; in progress of time the authority which dictated belief in them came to be the state. Plato rejected the fictions of the state, and in his "Republic" proposed to substitute fictions of his own. The testimony of Plato, therefore, in respect to the origin of religious beliefs in the early ages of Greece is decidedly against the ghost-theory, whatever support may be found for that theory in the beliefs of the uncivilized races of our own day, or in the beliefs of other nations of antiquity. But neither the ghost-theory, as the origin of beliefs in supernatural beings, nor the origin of such beliefs in the will of the lawgiver, which Plato clearly held in his "Republic" to be the foundation of orthodoxy, is any test or measure of what philosophy may attain to as a rational conception at the present day.[104]
I propose, therefore, to imagine a man of mature years, without any religious prepossessions whatever, a perfectly independent thinker, furnished with the knowledge that is now within the easy reach of human acquisition, capable of correct reasoning, and with no bias to any kind of belief. It is only necessary to personify in one individual the intellectual capacity of the cultivated and educated part of mankind, but without the religious ideas instilled into them by education, in order to have a valuable witness to the mental processes and results which can be followed and attained by a right employment of our faculties. And, the better to exhibit the processes and results, I propose to let this imaginary person discuss in the form of dialogue, in which another imaginary interlocutor shall be a modern disciple of the evolution school, whatever topics would be likely to come into debate between such persons.